CHANGE-LOG OF LIFE
[parts 1 - 9 were written on 2023-07-26, then I ran out of time and
continued intermittently over the following weeks]
I'm still messing about with revising GophHub occasionally, mostly
during the day while I should be working on something profitable to
be honest. Presumably some people out there can make money off
writing code that isn't so complicated that working on GophHub is
relaxing in comparison. I do often challenge myself, but I'm
increasingly thinking that I'm not the sort of person who actually
likes being challenged, at least once the process is begun. I guess
the endless challenge is to create something that provides a
continuous source of money for the rest of my life, after which
other new challenges are entirely optional. Looks like that's a
challenge where I'm just stuck in the unhappy challenged state
forever, but such is life.
As you can tell I'm in one of my self-reflective moods again, which
by my nature end up also being little depressed. Anyway, inspired a
bit by the hand-written GophHub change-log next to me (yes it
obviously should be on computer, but I prefer hand-writing
dot-point type notes in spite of the organisational chaos that it
eventually causes), I've decided to jot down a change-log for my
own life over the last roughly ten years since I moved out from
(one, then the other of) my parent's house. Especially the personal
sorts of things that aren't obvious.
1) Well I'm not sure when my annual day trips to Melbourne started,
but they must have spanned many of those years. They stopped due to
the pandemic and I've decided not to get back into them again this
year. I've seen a lot of the most interesting places that are
simple/quick to get to via public transport now. Maybe I should
start again in seven years and see how things have changed?
2) My Dam tours are a bit of a replacement day-trip theme, and
altogether more relaxing than the Melbourne trips. Of course I'm
running out of these to see too, but there are still a few more on
my list. My most recent dam adventure was visiting the Painkalac
Reservoir which supplied the coastal towns of Aireys Inlet and
Fairhaven until 2016, making it the first officially disused
reservoir that I've visited. Ironically it's also the newest that
I've seen, built in the late 70s.
3) I'm pretty sure that I've become more afraid of driving in city
traffic over the years. I started off pretty nervous of driving in
cities, but instead of getting used to it I've just been getting
increasingly committed to avoiding it. Then in turn the less of it
I do, the more surprises are encountered, which make me more afraid
of it. On the other hand country driving has been one of my joys in
life, albeit still without an answer to whether I'd prefer company
on my day-trips or not, because lack of a girlfriend has been
another constant.
4) Biscuit baking has become a fortnightly routine since I first
talked about it here in
2022-04-25.1Brown_Paint_and_Black_Biscuits.txt. It didn't awake any
love of cooking in me, it's still a chore and I'm not really
interested in trying different recipes (I even had to check how to
spell that word). But I like the product, and the cost saving
(possibly - electricity cost of the oven is hard to calculate)
compared to buying name-brand shortbread.
5) Oh, this phlog and Gopher hole obviously. It's taken focus off
my (non-anonymous) website pretty significantly, although I'm not
sure that I'd have put any of the content here up over there.
Probably not as freely, if I had.
6) I've stuck to the same computers all this time, except with the
addition of that Atomic Pi board as my remotely-accessed 'Internet
Client' - a necessity to keep working at these 20+ year old PCs
while running an online business. I did intend to upgrade from the
Pentium III Thinkpad that I've been using, and on occasions I do
use the Thinkpad T60 that I ended up with after some false starts
as my 'new' laptop. But I still like my old one and the Internet
Client system that I set up about the same time just made it too
easy to stick.
7) House and car repairs have happened, more significant sometimes
than others, but overall they've basically been a constant. The new
thing has probably been my recent spurt of construction activity
trying to build my elevated garage, and turn an old insulated
shipping container into a darkroom. Progress is still gradual on
those, but I made a lot of progress on the weekend.
8) The pandemic got me set into the routine of ordering my shopping
in advance by email and then picking it up from the supermarket.
They deliver to people in town, but I'm too far out for that so I
still have to pick it up. It saves time and avoids hassle running
around the supermarket though, so I've stuck to it even though I
think I'm the only one still picking up pre-orders there. They just
mark the box with my first name now :). The only trouble has been
with my emails (allegedly) not going through to their Gmail
account, for which I've tried all variations of accounts and mail
servers (although from providers I like, so not Gmail, which would
presumably work), yet still haven't found one that works every time.
9) For internet access I think I actually started out here with 2G
for a few months because the adapter I was using didn't support the
3G frequencies used by the telco I used. The web was still
managable at low speeds in those days - I don't think complicated
Javascripty websites like PayPal's account pages would even load at
2G speeds these days, things would just time-out. Then it's mainly
been 3G and recently attempting 4G. Actually I tried one of my
spare modems recently and it seemed to work much more steadily on
4G. Then I tested the old one and, contrary to past experience, it
found 4G signal in 4G-only mode, yet switched back to 3G in 3G/4G
mode. Very strange. But I tried a firmware update (to the latest
firmware, released in 2013) a couple of days ago and after that it
seems to find 4G in 3G/4G mode too. Yet the other one, that I
switched to, is running the same firmware that it used to have
(from 2011), so it doesn't make much sense. Anyway it looks like I
don't need to build an antenna for it after all. [Update: It seems
to be slipping back to 3G again now, I need to investigate again.
Possibly indirectly associated with checking my remaining monthly
internet data using USSD, which seems to force it back to 3G for a
moment]
10) Possibly due to the pandemic, I've become a little obsessed
about germs. It's not an emotive thing like a phobia. Away from
home I don't think about it at all because contact with things
other people touch is inevitable. But I now always wash my hands
once I get home and then consciously keep track of touching
anything that I've brought in recently from the outside world where
those horrible infectious other humans have been touching them.
Then I try to remember to wash my hands before eating or poking
digits around my mouth. I suppose it only makes sense because
nobody except me ever comes into my house, barring the very few
times where people have picked things up from me (not germ
"things"/infections, physical things they've bought from me online
or otherwise had cause to collect).
11) I like to be naked whenever practical now, and increasingly
inpracticably too. Winter doesn't suit it much, but this year even
with the early, and fairly unrelenting, onset of cold winter
weather I've been consistently taking all my clothes off early in
the evening and huddling under blankets on the couch (which is
wearing its ten years of my use rather poorly, with lots of patches
made from pieces of my worn-out clothing). Then I fource myself out
of the heated lounge room and out to the unheated bathroom and
bedroom, performing my pre-bed push up routine which has proven very
effective at warming myself up again before climbing under the
mountain of double-bed-sized blankets folded in half above me on my
bed. Then I wake up and have my much anticipated morning wank which
warms me up to brace the icy climate of the bathroom and my daily
shower and then eventually getting dressed. Same routine in summer,
but then it's warm enough that I don't need to get dressed unless
I'm going somewhere, so I can stay naked for days. I'm thinking
lately about visiting a nudist beach when the weather warms up a bit
- taking a first barefoot step into public nudity. Naturism seems to
be well out of fashion now though, so I wonder if I'll find that I'm
the only person there anyway?
12) I've been swinging in and out of reading as a pass-time. I
switch from books to old electronics magazines and sometimes things
printed out from the internet (I don't like reading long-form texts
on a computer). Often nothing at all. I can read quickly, but
recreationally I'm a very slow reader*. I'll re-read a paragraph as
many times as it takes until I'm confident that I've understood it.
Maybe even go back a page if I'm still not quite onboard. This can
make progress through a book frustratingly slow. Less so with
fiction, but I prefer non-fiction because it seems like it's a
better use of all the time it takes me to read a book, which is
indeed a bit of a catch-22. What I have done is accumulate far too
much reading material that I've failed to get around to reading.
I'm still pretty much working through books that I got ten years
ago, and I've picked up _lots_ more since, as usual many from the
estates of deceased relatives. At this point I'm forbidding myself
from buying any more, although exceptions are still likely for rare
electronics (etc.) engineering textbooks and useful programming
manuals.
13) On the other hand with movies, documentaries, and TV, I've been
consistent in both watching and obtaining them. I've been on the
edge of running out of places to build more scrap-timber VHS/DVD
shelves for years now. Curently I'm filling up the space above head
height in the hallway, which conveniently has a high ceiling due to
the design of the roof. Until recently pretty much all the old
docos that I fished out of the passing interwaves came via YouTube
or the Internet Archive. Pretty much all uploaded illegally and
intermittently taken down. But unlike most other TV content,
documentaties aren't popular enough for publishers to really care,
or for them to offer legal ways to view them in Australia after
their initial release, so I let myself break the law with them. I
also consider ABC and BBC documentaries to be completely fair game
because they were made with public money in the first place. Lately
I have taken the jump from YouTube to eDonkey for P2P doco
grabbing, perhaps because I was exhausting the supply on YouTube
and also YouTube searching without Javascript became more clunky
since it's no longer possible on the main website. Free-to-air TV
content has been getting increasingly hopeless. I could rant a lot
about it, but basically they've cut down on making/broadcasting a
the sort of content that I used to like most. The ABC seem
determined to waste all their money on making rubbish dramas and
lightweight general-interest documentaries. Perhaps people like me
are _supposed_ to watch deeper docos on the internet now? But then
I'm watching stuff they made 20+ years ago, so I'll run out of that
soon enough. Videos made _for_ YouTube aren't up to the same
standard - too much clickbait short-attention-span stuff to wade
through. I do like watching one YouTube channel ("The Proper
People") with long videos exploring abandoned buildings in the USA
though.
14) Music listening habits have also been pretty static. Classical
music on the radio. Tracker modules and SID tunes collected from
the internet over the years, additions made less and less
frequently, but still with the odd excited discovery of a good
long-forgotten artist from the 90s or early 2000s in the vaults of
ftp.modland.com. On and off watching Rage (late-night, ad-free,
sometimes quirky, music video programme on TV), which is the only
time I actively listen to mainstream music, but still usually not
the charts. Recently I've become a fan of Shortwave Australia, a
shortwave radio station broadcast by a ham radio hobbiest in the
evenings from northern Victoria. It's been going for about a year
now, but I've only started listening this year. He broadcasts an
odd collection of old radio programmes with music from different
styles and eras. Lots of copyrighted stuff, so presumably highly
illegal, but I doubt many lawyers SWL. The first time I tuned in it
was a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, which is a pretty weird thing to
discover amongst the foreign-language news, Chinese jamming
stations, and shipping forecasts, of the shortwave bands. Another
time there was a very well-spoken announcer introducing a song
"from that famous rag-time band" - from the days when a rag-time
band could be famous! Later that evening time had moved forward and
they were playing a disco version of the Star Wars theme music. So
pretty much perfect for someone like myself who loves getting stuck
in time warps. Plus there's the occasional: "SCREECH, POP, BZZT,
We are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by...
BZZZZZT, [faint music], POP... Please stand by... [silence]... POP,
[music]". There's a little info here, but it doesn't have much of a
web presence:
https://www.bclnews.it/2022/07/31/shortwave-australia-replies/
15) My music creating habits have gone their own way. I once hoped
that I'd have got into really making music by now. I've always been
vaguely musical, but never really wanted to put the time into it.
At the risk of creating a term that even I think sounds a bit icky,
I've become 'inwardly musical'. Music is in the mind. Instruments
are for communicating music to others, but what good does that do
me? If I want to make a living off it, I've got a one in a million
chance of that working out decently. If I want to impress friends,
well I don't have any to play to in the first place. So why
_should_ I waste time learning instruments? But I think I have
become much better at making music for myself, with myself. Some of
this is vocal. I can sit in the evening playing around with my
voice, composing tunes, sometimes in symphony with other sounds
just imagined in my mind. Trying to improvise lyrics. Picturing
things in my mind, physical or abstract, and expressing the emotion
of the image as sound, or the emotion of sound as an image. It puts
me into a unique sort of mood, somewhat drunk on my own emotion. I
laugh a lot to myself, sometimes cry. Eventually my voice is sore,
but by then I can often hear my music so well just in my head that
it doesn't matter. A symphony even, not as sound but as a concept,
true in feeling if not in composition. Somehow it also works to
focus me when stuck on a programming or electronics problem and
push past the mental barrier of confusion. But only for a little
while until I just get focused on the music and then the next half
hour or more is lost singing to myself and I can't re-focus at all.
So it's not that great.
OK these are turning into some very long paragraphs, and probably
things I could just post individually. I've been at this long
enough now so I guess I'll finally post it. I wonder if I'll write
another change-log in another ten years time? I'll probably forget
all about it, or get fed up finding working Gopher hosts for
hosting them anonymously. Or die, but that hasn't happened yet. In
theory I've got a chance at writing at least another five of these
damn things. Now who the hell would bother reading all that?
Probably me, I suppose.
- The Free Thinker
* I just read this post from tfurrows:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2023-08-09_theIdiot.txt
"I read Starship Troopers on Saturday."
Reading a _book_ in one day - just unfathomable for me. I'm near
the end of my current one after a couple of weeks and I'm
thinking that I've been rocketing through. Mind you, it is about
the development of nuclear fusion reactors for electricity
generation, and I only do about an hour of reading a session (and
not today because I'm writing this nonsense instead).
