CHANGE-LOG OF LIFE [parts 1 - 9 were written on 2023-07-26, then I ran out of time and continued intermittently over the following weeks] I'm still messing about with revising GophHub occasionally, mostly during the day while I should be working on something profitable to be honest. Presumably some people out there can make money off writing code that isn't so complicated that working on GophHub is relaxing in comparison. I do often challenge myself, but I'm increasingly thinking that I'm not the sort of person who actually likes being challenged, at least once the process is begun. I guess the endless challenge is to create something that provides a continuous source of money for the rest of my life, after which other new challenges are entirely optional. Looks like that's a challenge where I'm just stuck in the unhappy challenged state forever, but such is life. As you can tell I'm in one of my self-reflective moods again, which by my nature end up also being little depressed. Anyway, inspired a bit by the hand-written GophHub change-log next to me (yes it obviously should be on computer, but I prefer hand-writing dot-point type notes in spite of the organisational chaos that it eventually causes), I've decided to jot down a change-log for my own life over the last roughly ten years since I moved out from (one, then the other of) my parent's house. Especially the personal sorts of things that aren't obvious. 1) Well I'm not sure when my annual day trips to Melbourne started, but they must have spanned many of those years. They stopped due to the pandemic and I've decided not to get back into them again this year. I've seen a lot of the most interesting places that are simple/quick to get to via public transport now. Maybe I should start again in seven years and see how things have changed? 2) My Dam tours are a bit of a replacement day-trip theme, and altogether more relaxing than the Melbourne trips. Of course I'm running out of these to see too, but there are still a few more on my list. My most recent dam adventure was visiting the Painkalac Reservoir which supplied the coastal towns of Aireys Inlet and Fairhaven until 2016, making it the first officially disused reservoir that I've visited. Ironically it's also the newest that I've seen, built in the late 70s. 3) I'm pretty sure that I've become more afraid of driving in city traffic over the years. I started off pretty nervous of driving in cities, but instead of getting used to it I've just been getting increasingly committed to avoiding it. Then in turn the less of it I do, the more surprises are encountered, which make me more afraid of it. On the other hand country driving has been one of my joys in life, albeit still without an answer to whether I'd prefer company on my day-trips or not, because lack of a girlfriend has been another constant. 4) Biscuit baking has become a fortnightly routine since I first talked about it here in 2022-04-25.1Brown_Paint_and_Black_Biscuits.txt. It didn't awake any love of cooking in me, it's still a chore and I'm not really interested in trying different recipes (I even had to check how to spell that word). But I like the product, and the cost saving (possibly - electricity cost of the oven is hard to calculate) compared to buying name-brand shortbread. 5) Oh, this phlog and Gopher hole obviously. It's taken focus off my (non-anonymous) website pretty significantly, although I'm not sure that I'd have put any of the content here up over there. Probably not as freely, if I had. 6) I've stuck to the same computers all this time, except with the addition of that Atomic Pi board as my remotely-accessed 'Internet Client' - a necessity to keep working at these 20+ year old PCs while running an online business. I did intend to upgrade from the Pentium III Thinkpad that I've been using, and on occasions I do use the Thinkpad T60 that I ended up with after some false starts as my 'new' laptop. But I still like my old one and the Internet Client system that I set up about the same time just made it too easy to stick. 7) House and car repairs have happened, more significant sometimes than others, but overall they've basically been a constant. The new thing has probably been my recent spurt of construction activity trying to build my elevated garage, and turn an old insulated shipping container into a darkroom. Progress is still gradual on those, but I made a lot of progress on the weekend. 8) The pandemic got me set into the routine of ordering my shopping in advance by email and then picking it up from the supermarket. They deliver to people in town, but I'm too far out for that so I still have to pick it up. It saves time and avoids hassle running around the supermarket though, so I've stuck to it even though I think I'm the only one still picking up pre-orders there. They just mark the box with my first name now :). The only trouble has been with my emails (allegedly) not going through to their Gmail account, for which I've tried all variations of accounts and mail servers (although from providers I like, so not Gmail, which would presumably work), yet still haven't found one that works every time. 9) For internet access I think I actually started out here with 2G for a few months because the adapter I was using didn't support the 3G frequencies used by the telco I used. The web was still managable at low speeds in those days - I don't think complicated Javascripty websites like PayPal's account pages would even load at 2G speeds these days, things would just time-out. Then it's mainly been 3G and recently attempting 4G. Actually I tried one of my spare modems recently and it seemed to work much more steadily on 4G. Then I tested the old one and, contrary to past experience, it found 4G signal in 4G-only mode, yet switched back to 3G in 3G/4G mode. Very strange. But I tried a firmware update (to the latest firmware, released in 2013) a couple of days ago and after that it seems to find 4G in 3G/4G mode too. Yet the other one, that I switched to, is running the same firmware that it used to have (from 2011), so it doesn't make much sense. Anyway it looks like I don't need to build an antenna for it after all. [Update: It seems to be slipping back to 3G again now, I need to investigate again. Possibly indirectly associated with checking my remaining monthly internet data using USSD, which seems to force it back to 3G for a moment] 10) Possibly due to the pandemic, I've become a little obsessed about germs. It's not an emotive thing like a phobia. Away from home I don't think about it at all because contact with things other people touch is inevitable. But I now always wash my hands once I get home and then consciously keep track of touching anything that I've brought in recently from the outside world where those horrible infectious other humans have been touching them. Then I try to remember to wash my hands before eating or poking digits around my mouth. I suppose it only makes sense because nobody except me ever comes into my house, barring the very few times where people have picked things up from me (not germ "things"/infections, physical things they've bought from me online or otherwise had cause to collect). 11) I like to be naked whenever practical now, and increasingly inpracticably too. Winter doesn't suit it much, but this year even with the early, and fairly unrelenting, onset of cold winter weather I've been consistently taking all my clothes off early in the evening and huddling under blankets on the couch (which is wearing its ten years of my use rather poorly, with lots of patches made from pieces of my worn-out clothing). Then I fource myself out of the heated lounge room and out to the unheated bathroom and bedroom, performing my pre-bed push up routine which has proven very effective at warming myself up again before climbing under the mountain of double-bed-sized blankets folded in half above me on my bed. Then I wake up and have my much anticipated morning wank which warms me up to brace the icy climate of the bathroom and my daily shower and then eventually getting dressed. Same routine in summer, but then it's warm enough that I don't need to get dressed unless I'm going somewhere, so I can stay naked for days. I'm thinking lately about visiting a nudist beach when the weather warms up a bit - taking a first barefoot step into public nudity. Naturism seems to be well out of fashion now though, so I wonder if I'll find that I'm the only person there anyway? 12) I've been swinging in and out of reading as a pass-time. I switch from books to old electronics magazines and sometimes things printed out from the internet (I don't like reading long-form texts on a computer). Often nothing at all. I can read quickly, but recreationally I'm a very slow reader*. I'll re-read a paragraph as many times as it takes until I'm confident that I've understood it. Maybe even go back a page if I'm still not quite onboard. This can make progress through a book frustratingly slow. Less so with fiction, but I prefer non-fiction because it seems like it's a better use of all the time it takes me to read a book, which is indeed a bit of a catch-22. What I have done is accumulate far too much reading material that I've failed to get around to reading. I'm still pretty much working through books that I got ten years ago, and I've picked up _lots_ more since, as usual many from the estates of deceased relatives. At this point I'm forbidding myself from buying any more, although exceptions are still likely for rare electronics (etc.) engineering textbooks and useful programming manuals. 13) On the other hand with movies, documentaries, and TV, I've been consistent in both watching and obtaining them. I've been on the edge of running out of places to build more scrap-timber VHS/DVD shelves for years now. Curently I'm filling up the space above head height in the hallway, which conveniently has a high ceiling due to the design of the roof. Until recently pretty much all the old docos that I fished out of the passing interwaves came via YouTube or the Internet Archive. Pretty much all uploaded illegally and intermittently taken down. But unlike most other TV content, documentaties aren't popular enough for publishers to really care, or for them to offer legal ways to view them in Australia after their initial release, so I let myself break the law with them. I also consider ABC and BBC documentaries to be completely fair game because they were made with public money in the first place. Lately I have taken the jump from YouTube to eDonkey for P2P doco grabbing, perhaps because I was exhausting the supply on YouTube and also YouTube searching without Javascript became more clunky since it's no longer possible on the main website. Free-to-air TV content has been getting increasingly hopeless. I could rant a lot about it, but basically they've cut down on making/broadcasting a the sort of content that I used to like most. The ABC seem determined to waste all their money on making rubbish dramas and lightweight general-interest documentaries. Perhaps people like me are _supposed_ to watch deeper docos on the internet now? But then I'm watching stuff they made 20+ years ago, so I'll run out of that soon enough. Videos made _for_ YouTube aren't up to the same standard - too much clickbait short-attention-span stuff to wade through. I do like watching one YouTube channel ("The Proper People") with long videos exploring abandoned buildings in the USA though. 14) Music listening habits have also been pretty static. Classical music on the radio. Tracker modules and SID tunes collected from the internet over the years, additions made less and less frequently, but still with the odd excited discovery of a good long-forgotten artist from the 90s or early 2000s in the vaults of ftp.modland.com. On and off watching Rage (late-night, ad-free, sometimes quirky, music video programme on TV), which is the only time I actively listen to mainstream music, but still usually not the charts. Recently I've become a fan of Shortwave Australia, a shortwave radio station broadcast by a ham radio hobbiest in the evenings from northern Victoria. It's been going for about a year now, but I've only started listening this year. He broadcasts an odd collection of old radio programmes with music from different styles and eras. Lots of copyrighted stuff, so presumably highly illegal, but I doubt many lawyers SWL. The first time I tuned in it was a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, which is a pretty weird thing to discover amongst the foreign-language news, Chinese jamming stations, and shipping forecasts, of the shortwave bands. Another time there was a very well-spoken announcer introducing a song "from that famous rag-time band" - from the days when a rag-time band could be famous! Later that evening time had moved forward and they were playing a disco version of the Star Wars theme music. So pretty much perfect for someone like myself who loves getting stuck in time warps. Plus there's the occasional: "SCREECH, POP, BZZT, We are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by... BZZZZZT, [faint music], POP... Please stand by... [silence]... POP, [music]". There's a little info here, but it doesn't have much of a web presence: https://www.bclnews.it/2022/07/31/shortwave-australia-replies/ 15) My music creating habits have gone their own way. I once hoped that I'd have got into really making music by now. I've always been vaguely musical, but never really wanted to put the time into it. At the risk of creating a term that even I think sounds a bit icky, I've become 'inwardly musical'. Music is in the mind. Instruments are for communicating music to others, but what good does that do me? If I want to make a living off it, I've got a one in a million chance of that working out decently. If I want to impress friends, well I don't have any to play to in the first place. So why _should_ I waste time learning instruments? But I think I have become much better at making music for myself, with myself. Some of this is vocal. I can sit in the evening playing around with my voice, composing tunes, sometimes in symphony with other sounds just imagined in my mind. Trying to improvise lyrics. Picturing things in my mind, physical or abstract, and expressing the emotion of the image as sound, or the emotion of sound as an image. It puts me into a unique sort of mood, somewhat drunk on my own emotion. I laugh a lot to myself, sometimes cry. Eventually my voice is sore, but by then I can often hear my music so well just in my head that it doesn't matter. A symphony even, not as sound but as a concept, true in feeling if not in composition. Somehow it also works to focus me when stuck on a programming or electronics problem and push past the mental barrier of confusion. But only for a little while until I just get focused on the music and then the next half hour or more is lost singing to myself and I can't re-focus at all. So it's not that great. OK these are turning into some very long paragraphs, and probably things I could just post individually. I've been at this long enough now so I guess I'll finally post it. I wonder if I'll write another change-log in another ten years time? I'll probably forget all about it, or get fed up finding working Gopher hosts for hosting them anonymously. Or die, but that hasn't happened yet. In theory I've got a chance at writing at least another five of these damn things. Now who the hell would bother reading all that? Probably me, I suppose. - The Free Thinker * I just read this post from tfurrows: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2023-08-09_theIdiot.txt "I read Starship Troopers on Saturday." Reading a _book_ in one day - just unfathomable for me. I'm near the end of my current one after a couple of weeks and I'm thinking that I've been rocketing through. Mind you, it is about the development of nuclear fusion reactors for electricity generation, and I only do about an hour of reading a session (and not today because I'm writing this nonsense instead).