2023-12-26 A Boxing Day Miracle

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

Merry Holiday! I hope you’re all celebrating with festive beanstalks or candied carbon-fiber or whatever it is you normal people do during the annual Solstice Event.

And to think, we wouldn’t be here without Pope Gregory XIII’s attempt to reconcile the Hebrew calendar with the Julian calendar to make Easter easier to calculate. Really brings something to my eye.

FRONT-END:

Wife blew my socks off and was able to edit a lot of content. I now have a backlog just to keep up with her. Here’s a sensible part of it:

Plus, more stuff in my toolbox.

BACK-END:

More Things I Learned, see below.

What I Learned

Welp, I went on vacation, for the first time in a long while. I mentioned this last time, but the volatility of my past has usually made unemployment a type of vacation for me. So, the experience of being responsible to come back to a familiar office and do something I’ve done before has been a bit jarring.

But, I persevered. I was sufficiently able to relax. I spent a great near-week in San Antonio, and was able to at least partly reconnect with the biological breeders of my essence.

In the unproductive spirit of the holidays, I’ve had a lot of time to ponderously ruminate and pretentiously prevaricate. Driving through flyover country gives that affordance: you save on money, but burn it on time.

More to the point I’m actually thinking, notwithstanding the fact that I have people I’m related to, I’ve revamped my mega-meta-monstro-mondo-project into something else entirely.

Butt first, I must explain how I got here:

  1. I have a hobby that consists of stockpiling many things that I may potentially need in the future. It’s not hoarding because I think I might need it sometime, and I sometimes delete some of that stockpiled information on occasion. Not hoarding.
  2. To know whether I need to keep the not-hoarded things in my stash, I try to organize them. That organization, in writing form, has been boiled down to an artsy science.
  3. Some of those things are more practical, and more temporal, and they’ll probably become obsolete someday, so I don’t like to merge them with my writing. I stuffed those things in a not-hoarded stockpile of tools.
  4. I presently have about 2,913 files stocked up, mostly markdown, and many of them partly sorted.

As it stands, it’s a nasty pile of mess. It consists of quite a few problems aglutenated together and congealed into a sticky pile of unsweetened hobbies and tangy distractions:

  • Many guides on how to do things such as C++, Python, machine learning, CPU design, graphics programming with Blender, game design, algorithms, and how to make a fully-functional load-tested redundant Amazon clone with a Raspberry Pi and some scrap wire inside a Docker container.
  • Many Hacker News articles about lots of that stuff.
  • Informational guides about that stuff that just describe things and don’t tell you to do stuff.
  • Tools that could be useful that are related to that stuff.

And, this has created a problem that hoarders often have, of which my situation has absolutely nothing to do with:

  • I don’t have the means to do all the things I’m thinking of doing, and I therefore have too much stuff.

And, naturally, this has led to much stress and much misery. There’s nothing quite like being buried under the intellectual pressure of Too Much To Do to ruin your ability to do anything. Hoarders have it easy: they can see how big their pile is.

With the newfound relaxation that made me realize that it’s not as big a deal as how I’ve been stirring myself up to feeling it was, I’ve decided to take an alternate approach:

  1. The tools need to get dumped out. They either go where they belong in my toolbox, or they’re gone. None of this “ohwaitIcoulduseitlatergeezcan’tthrowitaway” thinking.
  2. The guides need to get dumped into a “later” bin. I am not going to learn everything there is to learn about CPUs to make my CPU essay shine perfectly. It just has to be describing the thing adequately, and I can update it with my fanciful experience with the thing later.
  3. The in-depth guides for ish I’m not that jazzed about need to be dumped into a “never” domain (I’m looking at you, graphics development and sound engineering).

And, with that, I’ve now created a new system to manage this, inspired heavily by Johnny.Decimal:

  1. Group everything into its corresponding approximate stages of effort required, number them 100, 200, etc.
  2. If I find something particularly nasty and time-intensive, make a middle stage of it (e.g., 150).
  3. Work through the projects, and make further divisions as needed.
  4. If the phases get out of order, rearrange that order.

This system seems to work well, so that’s what I’m sticking with. It’s a true coincidence that it happened on Boxing Day, a celebration in which my lack of British heritage lends heavily to my non-participation of it.

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. 50 an inbox of stuff to sort everywhere else
  2. 60 cleanup:
    • sift for duplicates within my existing toolbox cross-referenced against my piles
    • search and remove instances of redundant text
  3. 90 completely unsorted piles – sift for duplicates
  4. 100 near-completely unsorted piles – sift for duplicates
  5. 150 Office documents that need parsing
  6. 205 content to update in my essays, has already been made
  7. 210 TT easy pages – 3 pages:
  8. 220 TT pages I can visualize – 15 pages:
  9. 230 TT pages that are hard for me to conceive the final product – 20 pages:
  10. 240 TT pages which are very large hairballs of many things, or where I have very limited knowledge – 10 pages?:
  11. 250 a few misc one-off pages I wanted to write
  12. 260 NAG Management pages have several independent-but-related mechanisms – 13-30+ pages?:
    • 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.
  13. 270 NAG Entrepreneurship pages are less elaborate – 11-21+ pages?:
    • 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.
  14. 280 trying to learn math in a way my formal education has failed me 8-16+ pages?:
    • 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.
  15. 300 toolbox-based things that don’t exist elsewhere and are completely unsorted
  16. 350 toolbox-based things that don’t exist elsewhere and are near-completely unsorted
  17. 400 open directories that may have stuff