2023-10-17 Never Gonna Give, It, Up

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

FRONT-END:

Not much to report, since my editor/partner/cohabitant/friend/wife/co-parent is taking much-needed time off for personal growth:

The situation, as it stands, means I won’t be pushing out and “publishing” essays for a little bit.

BACK-END:

The situation from the previous post was worse than I thought, so I had to fix it.

I also finished a rough run-through of most of my Trendless Tech essays. Most of them are now near-complete-enough-to-publish.

What I Learned

A: FROM HOSTING MIGRATION

Things always take more work than you’d expect, and there are always things we can lose to teach us how to be grateful for them.

In my personal life, I’ve developed several new tech-based axioms:

  • CardDAV servers are a nice luxury. They let you synchronize your contacts, and are part of the suite of protocols that make up a standard email system. Many hosting providers don’t automatically host them. It’s not good to take that sort of thing for granted.
  • Emails at one time could send through a WordPress plugin. Unless you want to pay money for another plugin to do it, you won’t be able to send emails as a digest. It’s not good to take that sort of thing for granted.
  • It’s possible to disable “download all” as an option, which can creates a dark pattern that makes more work for users to migrate out of your system, such as email. It’s good to assume someone may do that to you someday, for any software.

Except for migrating emails for my wife and children, I’m almost free of my old hosting provider’s influence, but this entire experience hasn’t left me unscathed:

  • I no longer can synchronize my contacts with my phone. I now need to dial in the numbers and back them up manually, like some sort of mid-2000’s caveman.
  • No more email list for this site. Apologies if you were following it, and you’ll have to get an RSS reader from now on.
  • Thankfully, I haven’t trusted email systems as much as manually saving .eml or PDF files to my cloud storage, but still have some work to do for my family’s emails.

I’ll probably go about fixing those things someday, but not right now.

B: FROM ESSAY-WRITING

When it comes to good management, “doing” isn’t as important as “finishing”.

However, as someone who creates, there is more meaning found within “doing” than “finishing”.

If we always focus on the end, it may leave us tremendously discouraged when we see how far we have to go. However, if we simply focus on the day-by-day, we’ll find much more meaning in it.

I’ve done more constructive work toward my essays and toolbox in the past few days than probably the previous month. All I had to do was turn my brain off to my imagination about the completion of the project.

I could blame the wilder emotional experience from the healing derived from my uniquely diverse past, mixed with my high-functioning autism, but I’ll save excuses for where they’re most useful.

What I’m Doing

WHAT I MUST DO:

  • Working in an insurance office right now.
  • Keeping a home together with a woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix.
  • Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

MY HOBBY:

Haphazardly bouncing through the easiest pickings of my Grandiose Essay Project, which spans most of my Trendless Tech essays, some remaining NotaGenius essays, and my toolbox:

  1. Toolbox piles:
    • Sifting through about 1,034 files scraped from an obsessive hoarder’s scraping of others’ scrapings for anything of use.
    • Cross-referencing those tools with any stored tools that may have relevance to my essays, then writing on the essays as I go.
  2. AL/GIS/NAG/ST/TT technical debt:
    • Articles where I thought, “oh boy I need to write on that!” about an existing essay, but never got to it.
  3. TT easy pages:
  4. TT pages I can visualize:
  5. TT pages that are hard for me to conceive the final product:
  6. TT pages which are very large hairballs of many things, or where I have very limited knowledge:
  7. NAG Management pages have several independent-but-related mechanisms:
    • Management summarized, in general
    • NAG+TT – Specific management necessary for working with tech.
    • NAG+TLS – Specific management necessary for running a church, which may diverge into quite a bit of Christian history.
  8. NAG Entrepreneurship pages are less elaborate:
    • Entrepreneurship summarized, in general.
    • NAG+TT – Specific entrepreneurship for the tech industry.
    • NAG+TLS – What it takes to plant a church or start a ministry.
  9. Beyond that, trying to learn math in a way my formal education has failed me:
    • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is.
    • The trek is along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education.
      1. Basic arithmetic
      2. Algebra
      3. Geometry/trigonometry
      4. Statistics
      5. Calculus
      6. Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.