POSTS
The Happening - How are you?
In short, life is good. Am I worried? No.
Summary
If you’re part of my life, and are curious how I am and what I’ve been up to, here you go. I’m so thoughtful in my private life among friends, less so in my digital one because honestly that benefits me the most. It’s easy to be inconsiderate with your passions online, after all. I also dislike sharing everything on Facebook or Twitter for so many reasons. Since many of us are remote during the pandemic, this is a good time to update my personal blog and share with whoever’s interested. My life centers around areas of focus involving one of three main Ikigais - computer science and engineering, wellness, and teaching.
I’ve spent most of my time the past several months pursuing new clients and business in Lakesite.Net, and DI. I’ve split the focus for these two companies between engineering and creative agency work with my business partner, Kim. I’m hopeful that some of both of the former two Ikigais can be combined and used by a doctor that has decades of experience developing an educational lifestyle management system. More on that topic later, either through work with this client or on my own.
Business
I’m presently in the situation where my skills are valuable enough that I’m bringing in some money, which is good, because the opportunity for grants (EIDL), loans (PPP), and unemployment for the chronically self-employed are dubious at best. Help probably isn’t coming anytime soon, if at all. You have to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit, adapt, and take care of yourself. I’m grateful for what I do have. I’m looking to pursue every good opportunity that comes up which I can reasonably handle. If you’ve been paying attention, you know how bad things are, and how you must also cultivate a positive attitude and be decisive in pursuing good opportunities.
At Lakesite.Net, I’ve written a lot of open source tooling in Go that I’m using to build up to something I can’t talk about yet but hope to soon. Most of my time there has been spent networking with clients, showing competency on projects, and working on internal projects. I’d love to eventually take the open source tooling I maintain and have it in production for millions of users (and, hopefully, actually get paid!) I’m also spending more time documenting my processes and writing technical articles, for marketing. If you need software engineering done right, please feel free to engage me here.
With di, I’ve maintained a lot of client software and am working on marketing and promoting what we do, and can do, to prospects. If you need creative agency work, digital strategy, web site design, and general marketing feel free to engage me here.
Wellness
I prepared before the pandemic and obtained most of the gym equipment I needed to maintain my training regimen at home. I train every day, and take time to work outside around the house. I make time to stay in contact with my friends. I’m used to being isolated from working from my home office, so a lockdown doesn’t bother me as much as it does others. I miss being around people at the gym every day, networking with people, going to workshops and seeing friends, but this will eventually pass.
Since my last fitness post so very long ago, I found the cause for my deadlift injury was almost certainly due to overworking my hip flexors every day. It took me several months to fully recover from a soft tissue tear, and I was reluctant to engage in the same kind of training I was doing. I’ve tweaked my regimine quite a bit, and now I’m more thoughtful to give my hip flexors a break! I don’t do the same martial arts stretching and routines I was doing every day. I try to do them the same two days I normally do deadlifts, and then on Saturday. This has been working for me and I’ll continue to pursue more weight loss and strength training this year. I got a really nice olympic barbell and plates for doing deadlifts, back squats and bench presses at home and have been getting back to the same level of strength I had.
As I get more comfortable with the new routine, I may go back to Xing yi and sword form with a group in town, or go back to doing drills. That mind-body connection is important to me and I’ve been digging it off and on for well over a decade now.
Teaching
Outside of sharing my own interests in particular fitness topics, I haven’t done much mentoring in the past several months. So I’ve been working on my own education, in particular with lower level hardware and embedded systems. There are always new topics to pursue in computer science and engineering, but I can easily get burned out on them. I try to split my time here between helping people online with technical problems and sharing fitness related articles with my own opinions. Occasionally, someone will ask a question or look for more detail in my opinion, and it forces me to learn more. I’m constantly going through this process with clients to find the best solution with the constraints they have while educating them on a particular strategy.
Staying Focused
I’ve tried my best to remain detached from being conscripted into America’s ongoing culture war. My positions are typically pragmatic, and reasonable compromises between maximizing the authority and responsibility of the individual over their own life and servicing our social contract. That said, I’ve never felt a stronger divide between people due to identity politics, media, bad (short term, opportunistic, artificial risk/reward) business models, and tribalism. For the most part, I try to share things I’m actually passionate about and can focus on instead of having my identity defined by someone else’s narrative. That involves sharing my Ikigais in engineering, wellness, and teaching, developing my personal world, and defending it from anything working against my long term goals.
I enjoy interacting with people who are passionate about their own mission, so it’s easy for me to get a little distracted learning about their particular cause and approach, but I try to look for commonality in my life and shift the focus back where it matters, to the extent that it’s mutually beneficial. We all have many commonalities and shared experiences, which brings me to the last topic in my brief life update.
The Happening
Is it a nothingburger? Should we boogaloo?
Back in December I decided to pull my stock out of the market because 2020 was going to be an election year. This was my primary reason for exiting. Near the end of December, I saw some videos online coming out of Wuhan, China and started speculating with friends about how the virus might impact the rest of the world. I’ve historically and due to my profession considered worst case scenarios in life. So I plan for the worst and hope for the best. Peak oil and the petrodollar were fascinating and frightening concepts to me when I was a young man, and I spent a lot of time reading about and trying to understand risks related to these things during each boom-bust cycle in the economy. I could write an entire book on these subjects and how they constrain our political and ideological perspectives, but I digress. I’ve seen 9⁄11, the global financial crisis in 2008, and I’ve learned to keep in mind that bad times don’t last forever and people adapt. They also don’t get as bad as I think they will. That said, people love to take advantage and no opportunity goes to waste. See page 22 of this document for example.
The actual happening is not, in fact, the pandemic - although it’s a good scapegoat. It’s not the systemic weaknesses exposed by the pandemic in the global supply chain and subsequent economic collapse. It’s not the artificial market where risk isn’t there for some. It’s not the sheer amount of debt most people carry, or how much debt exists in the banking system. It’s not misandry, feminism, wokeness, cancel culture, actual inequalities and disparities all coming to a fever pitch of irrelevance as people focus on paying rent and buying food. It’s not the numerous foreign intelligence agencies, bad actors and enemies within trying to weaken and subvert our culture to secure their own competing interests.
It’s also not the presidential election.
Guess what? If there were a Happening, it’d be from all of these things. It would be from how people react or respond to them as they try to create order from chaos. I care about what I have authority over - which isn’t much. I also care about my friends and family. Beyond that? I’m not a soldier for anyone else’s narrative or interests. I’m focused on my own problems, my business, and my Ikigais. Maybe this happening will, out of necessity, change how our society works, and with that, my focus. I’m not holding my breath.
Also my cats are doing great.