2020-07-09 // a happy return to the zaibatsu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello again, port 70!

It's been a hot minute, but I'm back in the Zaibatsu and SUPER glad
to be back. I've had a nice break from all things social media,
phlogosphere included. We are, I think, innately social creatures and
I've missed the community around the small Internet a LOT.

Gemini has been making the rounds on Hacker News and Lobste.rs! That's
really cool. I'm happy to see people appreciating the DIY as a viable
alternative to the advertising-driven attention economy at large.

The world's been pretty crazy this year. Reading the news is often a
guaranteed path to a dour mood. Things are not okay, but I'm hopeful
that we'll return to some sort of normalcy in the next few years. Many
won't be okay and my heart aches for them. Normal will look a lot
different, too. I saw a picture of a band playing at a concert with the
singer high-fiving the audience and someone commented, "oh, this picture
must be from the before times." I think about that a lot.

I lost a good bit of weight last summer doing the intermittent fasting
thing, running, and bicycling, but now that I'm back in the office
I'm really not keen on going to the gym for risk of adding even more
exposure. So, a few more pounds have come back on but I'm still in
better shape than before.

I finally got to see my friend J. again yesterday after work! That was
really cool. We walked 4 miles on a local trail and caught up since we
haven't seen each other for like a year (she was working elsewhere but
is back in town). No hugs, wearing masks, and a respectable distance to
keep from turning catching up into catching germs. Oh, that reminds me
of this article I saw on NPR about "social bubbles" taking a cue from
communicating about safe sex and BDSM boundaries:

  https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/08/886541838/

One neat thing that's come out of my brief time working from home is
that I've started watercolor painting. One of our local artists taught a
few classes on Zoom (yes, ew-- I've since deleted the app from my phone)
and it was a really great experience. I'm not great at it or anything,
but it's really relaxing and I feel pretty good when I'm done making
something with my own two hands!

Work is a little nutty these days. I'm gonna have to put in a little
overtime this month, but the work is fulfilling and I'm thankful to be
employed! I'm doing some low-level assembly and C programming, which I'm
enjoying a lot. It's not something I've had a lot of opportunity to do
and it's been a fun learning experience. Not gonna lie, it kinda makes
me want to slap together my own operating system like TempleOS [0].

Oh, speaking of operating systems: I finally installed OpenBSD on my
laptop! Last time I tried (before installing Ubuntu Server w/ XFCE), I
had trouble getting WiFi working. But I stuck with it a little longer
this time and it turns out that my Intel WiFi chip has a non-free driver
available and I was just one "fw_update" [1] away from getting wireless
working.

So now I'm doing my computing on OpenBSD! It reminds me of my first time
installing Linux some 15-odd years ago, before Ubuntu made installation
ridiculously straightforward. Not quite as "you must edit the config
files" as Gentoo (one of the few distros that would run on my PowerPC
iBook), but still takes a bit of tweaking. The OpenBSD man pages and
FAQs *are* nice, just as advertised.

Ahh! I have so much stuff kicking around in my head I want to share with
you, but I'm gonna save some of that for future phlog entries. It's good
to see you again! How've you been?

[0]: gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/TempleOS
[1]: https://man.openbsd.org/fw_update