Hello Gopherites. I missed pointing this milestone out to you
yesterday - too busy repainting my bathtub (oh yes, an old cast
iron one, to be mounted on the roof of course) and measuring the
length of filter paper inside many different brands of old engine
oil filters I've used on the Jag (some have less than half of the
filter material in other brands! Shame I bought a big box of those
:( ). 2019-10-19whoisTFT.txt marks my first phlog post here, and
the offline escape of my free thoughts somewhere in the direction
of Gopher, although I didn't actually get around to putting the
phlog online until the last day of 2019. I thought I'd hold off on
setting it up right away because so many phlogs seem to pop up for
a few weeks then die away (I'm surprised how many then-active
phlogs have gone offline or extremely quiet now actually). Even my
host here at Aussies.space was inspired for the last time to post
in his phlog when I asked for an account.
Perhaps the foresight that I should prove my own commitment to
posting before wasting time on setting up a platform for myself
already put me in a different category to the come-and-go Gopher
sorts? Or maybe I'm just dead lonely and most other people know
real humans to talk to about this sort of stuff instead? OK those
are obviously both true.
Anyway after five years it's time for a short break in my
relentless self reflection because this it a perfect opportunity to
indulge in statistics! Let's break out 'wc' and smash it on my
phlog directory, a task that actually takes a noticable time on
this Pentium 1 with its near 30yo HDD:
256,219 words! Instead of this bullshit I could have finished
writing Moby Dick (206,052 words), about three 1984s (88,942
words), and five The Great Gatsbys (47,094 words), although
unsurprisingly I'm still not half way towards matching War and
Peace (587,287 words) but closer than I am to getting around to
reading it. By the way if you've actually been reading all my posts
that means you've effectively given up time you could've spent
reading one of those books yourself! So if one such a person
exists, then I can claim to have beaten the world's most famous
authors, yeah!
But instead of a book, those words make up 261 phlog posts, and
don't include 28 finished ideas posts, or the things I've rambled
elsewhere in my Gopher hole (although I posted my Australian
political party reviews to the phlog as well). About a thousand
words a post on average, blasted out into the Gopherverse at an
average of about one phlog a week (mainly because I write/start
them on weekends, like this post, although I always still have more
important things I should do instead).
Data-wise they all add up to 1,501,672 bytes. So you can have five
years of writing, or one blurry photo of a disinterested pet cat in
excessively high resolution needlessly heading up a Webpage or list
of Gophermap selectors. That's the choice the internet gives you
today.
A part of me still wants to broadcast this off the internet
somehow. A modulated light source preferably, to avoid licencing
needs. But nobody would build a receiver/modem for it who lives
within sight of such an optical transmitter here in the middle of
nowhere, unless I built one for them and then I wouldn't be able to
talk about them here freely, and I'd want to because if they were
actually interested enough to try that it would make them a best
friend or something. Jeeze this is sounding pathetic, OK onto the
future...
Well computer stuff is getting more and more overcomplicated and
just damn hard. But electronics has become inseparable from
computers now, and not just microcontroller programming but people
expect everything to talk to their smartphone now, implying a full
Web server process, WiFi, apps, Javascript, encryption. My
nonexistant God I'm not going to dive into all of that just because
I want to make money from a skill I started at by playing with 555
timers and op-amps. It's also just too many layers of work for one
guy to do everything himself anyway, especially with needing to
keep supporting new smartphones, browsers, etc., on products
already released. You know once you could design an electronics
device and the same design would still work in fifty years? I know,
I've built some fifty years later.
So, I tried the laptop refurbishment/reselling thing and gave up on
the basis of no convenient supply and uncertain future demand (I
was going to try to solve the former with some highly engineered
local collection/purchase programme for old/broken laptops, but the
latter made me rethink that level of time/money investment - it's a
shame everyone want to run Windows). That just leaves that "big
website idea" I've been mentioning vaguely every so often for these
five years. It's been around in my head much longer, evolving since
I was in my teens. It always required an AI element, so with the
current AI tech advancements now might be a good time for it. It's
a stupidly big thing to try and create all myself though. I might
try to create it all myself, but it _will_ be stupid to do so.
At the same time maybe I should try to get more farm work or
similar. That way I can preempt becoming a burnt-out tech
entrepreneur before I've even become a tech entrepreneur. Or like I
suggested in my last post I could bow out of 'real' work and try to
go the starving artist route, but I really doubt I could pull that
off with my limited social skills.
At heart I don't really want to change my life much, these
alternative paths are nice enough just as dreams in my head. But to
earn money somehow I've really got to know when it's time to make
the jump in a different direction while that direction is still
under my control. Unless I'm just taking it all too seriously, like
my oil filters...
