I probably shouldn’t make fun of them for this, given the half-dozen or more unfinished projects that I have on my own property, but I have been thoroughly entertained by what is possibly the slowest fence construction project in history down the street. This new fence has been under construction for at least a month, with the neighbors adding a post or a board a couple of times a day.
When my father died a couple of years ago, I spent some time trying to archive his digital life. He had email accounts, iTunes, Facebook — all of the typical things that a computer-literate person would probably possess. They were a fairly complete record of his life for the past decade-plus, so it seemed like an important task. I had never sat down with him prior to his death to sort it all out — I guess I refused to accept that he was really dying, so why even bother helping to plan for it? So in the weeks after he died, I wasn’t quite sure how I would go about it.
I’m still plowing through the basics of Python. It’s all making my head spin as new concepts get introduced at a furiious rate. I have taken a bit of a shotgun approach to learning the material, using a bunch of different training tools all at once.
My career path usually leaves me with extended periods of unemployment. What to do with all of this “free” time, while I wait for the next big thing to happen to my resume? Well first of all, that time isn’t so free. Job hunting, cooking, yard work, kids, grocery shopping — all of these things subtract major hours from the day. I have been out of work for five months, but a lot of days I think I am busier than I was when I was working.
Let me tell you a bit about one of my favorite possessions, my [Tom Bihn Super Ego Messenger Bag][1]. In 2007, I was in need of a better bag to carry my stuff around. In my regular profession, I am a political operative. I work for political campaigns and parties, which requires a lot of travel and moving around. My bag tends to be my mobile office, a veritable dumping ground of everything that might normally be in a desk. For example, my bag currently contains:
Server infrastructure has come a long ways since I originally took this site offline back in 2006. When I first launched Tomopia (circa 2001? I think?) I was using one of the early shared-hosting services. It was fine at the time. It was a relatively modern Linux server, which I was probably sharing with 20-30 other subscribers.
Writing is one of my very favorite forms of expression, though I have always been self-conscious about sharing my works with other people. Twitter comes pretty easily to me; it’s hard to bring too much shame upon your family with only 140 characters. But long-form writing, on the other hand, is more of a challenge. I know that I’m not a very good writer, but I still enjoy doing it. I just don’t really enjoy sharing it.
After a long, and badly needed, sabbatical, Tomopia.com is back online and ready to wow you with stupid. Mostly, it’ll just be an easy link for family members to find photos of my kids. But occasionally I will post something here that isn’t worth reading.
Powered by Dropplets