Ugh, February is here. Draft pile still growing, but I’m behind on my publishing commitment. Today I’m writing about me doing computer repairs.

Background Doing Repairs

I’ve told the story a few times, but when I was in grade school we had a computer class (as most schools do). One day in third grade I saw a system open and was interested in how it worked, so the teacher demonstrated it and invited me to work on some of the systems. My school was a small private one, and the equipment they had was hand-me-downs from local businesses, so we were around 5 years behind public and components broke a lot. To give you an idea, we were running Windows 3.11 on a Tokenring network (a predecessor to Ethernet) in 1997.

Before long, anytime a printer didn’t work or a system crashed and needed a new drive (and clone), I could work on it. The computer department gave me a hall pass I could use...

I’m still catching up on posts. This is nonconsecutive and I wrote it on the 20th, but I’m going to publish this as it was on the 2nd, because future posts will add context.

Now that I’m in 2019, it feels like I’m looking for something different. I am not a salaryman, even though I draw a salary. Instead I’ve chosen to run a small company and for most of the decade that’s been fine. Looking back at the past two years I feel like I should begin offering different things and trying something new.

2017

This was the year that changed things.

I ended up losing two friends in unrelated accidents. The first was my salesman Tristan. He passed away after having an accident doing lawn work. He was just beginning to branch out and was also interested in selling houses (he studied and received a realtor’s license). He was also active in government. I believe he was a week or two off from...

I set a bar for myself this year. Most years I pick difficult New Year’s Resolutions that I can at least follow in spirit, if not precisely. The goal this year is to publish a piece of writing per day. It’s just past two weeks in and this will be the first post I publish. I’m going to publish it as a New Year’s blog as it’s my blog and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.

The goal here is not to obsess over quality, I expect there to be crap. This is an exercise for me to improve on per-topic posts and begin the discipline of regular posting. I do not intend for all of these posts to be published on my personal blog. A good number will go up on my company blog, and some may be released to other blogs/media. The point is to release it public.

Normally I wouldn’t make excuses for why I didn’t get this started within a few days of the New Year, but I had a good reason this year...

I really needed a vacation. Like really, really needed a major one. The past couple years I hadn’t really been able to step away from work for a week and it’s not been optimal for my health or productivity. I had a good work/life balance until last year when I began to change up the sorts of services I offer and a bunch of major changes and tragedies happened.

A few major things happened last year. I got rid of the office space for my company and our salesman Tristan passed away in an accident. I couldn’t really focus behind a computer screen as well as I had prior, so I took up part time taxi driving to meet new people, make some extra cash, and clear my head. We stopped pushing into as many different businesses as we had been in before and worked to service our referral and word of mouth clients.

Four years ago I did a pretty epic month long road trip to Newfoundland and since then...

In the past couple months a router has become a favorite on Amazon and deal aggregator sites as a low-cost workhorse router. The router in question is the Asus T-Mobile Personal CellSpot Wi-Fi Cellspot Router (TM-AC1900). As of the time of this writing, these are selling for $60, sometimes lower.

What were these routers for

I like T-Mobile quite a bit. Unfortunately their network wasn’t always so decent. One of T-Mo’s former drawbacks was that their network lacked low-band spectrum until 2016. The effect of lacking low-band spectrum is that their network had difficulty penetrating the walls in people’s houses: Especially if they were located in a rural setting with towers further apart. They had to fix the gap of making calls work at home, while indoors.

Building new towers closer is a bitch due to zoning, getting fiber and power run, and overcoming old people’s complaints of...

Today I was called a wastrel. Didn’t appreciate that.

One of the more difficult things I find is organizing my thoughts onto a single cohesive topic or post. Things come in flashes and cognitively it’s incredibly difficult for me to convey a full post on topic. I carried a phone with a physical keyboard to catch those times when it occurred.

I feel like today’s technology has changed things; the mind and how it works. Constant stream of stimuli, data… knowledge and nothing. A culture of consumption, devices are not being used for creation by the masses. The aristocratic few control production. Channels (and when I mean channels, I mean social media, the media, the spigot) get controlled by algorithms built by the largest accumulation of wealth the world has ever amassed.

Point being, humans are not meant to be hooked into this stream as they are. The brain’s structures adapt...

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor or a medical practitioner. Do not take my advice and experiences as one size fits all. Though unlikely, I am not responsible if you try any of this and get sick or die as a result. I recommend dialogue and coordination with a professional medical practitioner.

Sat on this post for a long enough time. I have some strong positions on diet protocol. Anyone who knows me, knows it’s a little peculiar how I eat. This is a result of a lot of research, along with personal trial and error over the course of the past 7+ years. Fortunately, the present is kind to alternative lifestyles and it’s not too awkward to make unusual requests at restaurants and such. I will format this post to provide a background and then my approach to different topics.

Background

Some details about me. When I was little, I was fairly skinny up until early grade school. After this point...

It’s become about daily now that I get people on the street asking me about bitcoin, or telling me how they just bought in. I’m frankly kind of annoyed with the coin lately, so I wanted to write down some of my thoughts. Before reading, get this through your head: Don’t invest money you can’t afford to lose.

Some background on me. I bought my first bitcoin at $2/coin, back in April of 2010. I think it was 15BTC for $30. There used to be a seller called Coinpal and you could just send PayPal. Services like that are long gone now due to PayPal’s ease of abuse. It was curiosity back then, I bought it to use it not to speculate. Nobody but a few visionaries thought in our community of a few hundred people that things would catch like they have. It’s been almost 8 years now and in the past few weeks I can truly sense the death of the original chain. I have been there for the crashes...

Chances are that if you run into me and ask how I’m doing I’ll respond with “I’m keeping busy”. This is usually accurate. Lately I’ve been setting up in cafes while I work. I have rented a new place for myself outside of town, though I do miss it sometimes. Andrew had been working remotely on design work. I think that will wind down.

Speaking of design work: I am not a designer. I just happen to own a company that historically marketed itself as a design company at some points in time. I primarily research and find solutions for a diverse number of clients involving such things as: finding someone to support a legacy UNIX application, building a cost-saving SMS marketing application, data forensics, attack mitigation, technical ghostwriting, and systems maintenance. I typically won’t say no to a job if it’s profitable and I know I can find the solution. However, I do say no a good...