I don’t like registering, paying taxes for, maintaining, or driving cars. Quite honestly they’re trash. They’ve become un-repairable and un-bearably necessary for modern life. I’m unfortunate enough to live in the middle of nowhere and with a fiance who needs a car to work, so I don’t get a choice, I’m going to have to figure out getting another one but we’ve already been without for at least 3 months and I’m starting to lose the sense of pain it causes to have to rethink your life without a car.

I don’t like python. I’ve been working on a web crawler for nearly a month. I made the decision to use Python as a compromise between using one of the best supported browser driving libraries, playwright, and not using Javascript. I have basic gripes that others have had: significant whitespace, weird operators like and and or instead of && and ||. I also abhore the state of dependencies in python and I regularly recite to people that we don’t need docker, it was announced at PyCon in 2013 because go was so much more portable and even then before go.

Been reading a really long, dry book about the fundamentals of software architecture. In the book, the authors suggest there are 2 laws of Software Architecture: a. Every decision is a trade-off. b. If you haven’t found the trade-off, skill issue; keep looking. It’s about why, not how. I’m starting to think that they only re-discovered what economists consider opportunity cost and why repair costs factor into GDP but aren’t true economic advance.

So I’ve been on a kick to sort out how I might come close to self-reliant when it comes to: Purifying water for drinking Maintain communications Keep useful information around Exist without MDs or DMDs and the first three of those are hard enough without the fourth, which I have no solution for; at least nothing to speak of. I know ways to handle water, for biological threats, iodine. For chemical or mineral threats things get trickier, like maybe gathering materials and activating charcoal for a filter, using detergent or stockpiling filters, etc.

Here’s a proposal: once you make some absurd factor of income like the value of the average human’s weight in gold or platinum or diamond or have some significant fraction of earth’s wealth we change the use of your tax dollars. If you’re a mogul or just one of their children you’re assigned a delegate king. They are given a more than decent salary and provisions are kept for their family, to put their security in life somewhere near on par with those whose negative effects they combat.

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a long time and the other day I looked for the phrase and couldn’t find it elucidated in a satisfying way. I want to declare a law (a useless truism but a law kinda): Mandatory-use software (i.e. CRM, ERP, etc.) is always as poor as it can be maintained; however optional use software is always the very best. Maybe not useless, this could be a guide when deciding where to work.

I remember watching my father type away at WordPerfect on his ‘95 vintage HP machine back when I was about 5 years old, same as it. I wondered how this machine could be controlled by so many small buttons, and how he could know what to type. I watched closely enough that it would become an anecdote he re-told throughout my childhood. I worked out how to print because when he pressed Ctrl+P and clicked around a bit the printer would start producing things.

And here I thought if she were Catholic she’d be sainted. My grandfather’s brother is no longer with us, but he lived just up the street while I was in his and grandma’s care, and I can’t overstate the importance of a single piece of advice he, my grand uncle, gifted me: Think for yourself Why it took til the age of 14 for life to yield this advice is beyond me, it would seem this is something that many people should be encouraged to do from the very start, but the rest of my family never came close.

Thanksgiving last year one of my cousins held a dinner. Right before we went home, her brother gifted me a fountain pen. A Pilot Japan Metropolitan Fountain Pen, in “Retro Pop Gray” I found out much later that this is the pen, a Pilot Metropolitan in “Retro Pop Gray”. It accepts ink cartridges and has what I would consider an almost-extra fine tip nib. I ran out of ink in a little over a month.

A few years ago now and again recently I was introduced to the effects of CO2 on cognitive abilities by a couple of youtubers and as a software engineer I found this especially worrying and interesting because I spend very long stretches of time in my home (previously school, work) in a single spot. I rely entirely on the central air systems in buildings or fans of all types to make sure I’m not actually losing the ability to do my job by just concentrating for long periods of time.