03/22/2025

Hello again

It's been quite some time, I'm not even really sure if I'm doing this
correctly. Looking through my phlog, I doubt I have been doing it correctly
so far, as none of my entries seem to commit to limiting at 80 characters
per line. In fact, as I'm googling this, some say that it should be limited
to 70, or even 40 characters per line. Perhaps some people are still
connecting via devices more ancient than I can imagine. Whatever, I'm a
stubborn dick, so you get 80 (respectfully).

I recalled my last entries being all about whatever health issue I was having
at the time, which to be fair, was quite frightening, but didn't make for a
very good phlog. At that time in my life, I was scattered, scrambled, and not
particularly focused. Today, I am all of these traits and worse, but still I
intend to take another jab at it. I continue to be enamoured by the needless
simplicity that is gopher. Even as I write that, it's not true - while the
plaintext protocol is simple by implementation, I can't deny that I had to do
some digging to even learn about gopher conceptually, then set up the phlog
in a space of the internet that is unfamiliar to me. While not complicated,
I think it would certainly be less complex (given my own experience) to google
"blog website", create a new account at the expense of my personal info,
and begin typing away. If I was particularly worried about my information, I
could have just as easily created a group text on Signal and just sent an
update to my close friends every few days. That said, Gopher has this kind of
romantic simplicity to it - harder to translate to modern practice, but once
you start using it you can't deny its charm. Like film photography or vinyl
records, even cassettes. I apologize if I am making anyone feel old by the
way I talk about these mediums - they were mostly before my time.

Anyway, I should give some kind of update. What is new in my life? I will dive
in with the basics. I am living again in New England. I believe last time I
posted I was in Tennessee. It was alright living there, but we had a short 
lease and I was far from work, additionally we found pretty much immediately
that we missed too many things from up north.

(side note - I'm reading back my entry so far, and it's amazing how much my
voice changes even just in these few paragraphs. I imagine that consistency
will be key to smoothing that out, so I apologize if my tone seems to jump
around)

Anyway, Tennessee - not a bad place, but it made me miss things here. We spent
some good time out in nature, but here the drives are always closer - less 
time in the car, more time in the woods. Also, it helps that everyone we know
lives up here, and our time down there was mostly spent during covid. Once
restrictions had started easing back up, we went out a single night and 
immediately caught covid, and were forced to miss Christmas with out families
as a result. That bit was more poor timing than anything, but was nonetheless
pretty disappointing.

Other news includes a change of employment - I was floundering for a bit there
after college trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Honestly, the
curriculum for computer science at my college was fine, but nothing special -
it had a heavy focus on the theoretical applications, with less modern
application. Frankly, I much preferred the theoretical side of things, but
looking for a job after school was hard. I could talk the interviewers ear off
about lambda calculus, but when it came to explaining containerization or
modern web frameworks I was pretty much lost. Sure, there are a lot of avenues
you can go with computer science (it is a very broad degree) but what I found
is that I fit in best with the IT crowd, and so here I am 4 years later
working comfortably as a middle tier IT specialist for a medium sized company.
To some, it may be bland, but I'm more than happy with my position so far.
The folks I work with are good, the work is technical to a degree that suits
me, and I have autonomy to make changes where they need to be made. 

Anyway, this entry is getting a bit long, and perhaps a little devoid of
substance. I will project my own todo item to anyone who stuck around to read
this far, spend some time tidying up your space and then thank yourself for
the effort. I will have to see if this post works or not, and then I will have
to see if I can make a habit of updating this. In this moment, I'm finding it
very satisfying to have an outlet for my thoughts.

I hope you have a nice day today. 
Song recommendation, Reports by Swimming