grumpy old man

I've just taken the longest break from writing in well over a year. It wasn't a planned break. We've been traveling quite a bit over the past month. Preparing for and recovering from the trips takes time, not to mention actually being away from home. I've also been consumed with a couple of interesting projects that can be real time sucks. It's been nice to give myself a break. No one creates pressure for me the pressure I put on myself. The minute a hobby starts to feel like work, it's time to reevaluate.

I operate well when I'm consistent. I'm capable of long, long streaks in all kinds of circumstances. I went nearly two years of getting 10K steps a day, which required me to go for long walks in the midst of a couple of hurricanes. So, yeah, I'm not always the brightest when it comes to these arbitrary goals. Consistency in writing caused me to literally lose sleep on the days when I put off posting until late in the day. Tapping out blog posts on road trips with Wonder Woman doesn't make me the best traveling companion either. I decided to evaluate my dopamine addiction, the one that's fed every time I hit the "publish" button on my blog. Writing is stil a priority, but I'm giving myself some space for other things.

One of the projects I'm working on is the consolidation of a lifetime of photographs. I started using a digital camera in 1995 when I worked for Westinghouse as a technical writer. It was a hefty model made by Kodak that used a small disk to record images. I think it cost about $5K at the time. The company paid for it, but I would occasionally use it to take personal photos. I've been using an iPhone since 2009, which is when the production of digital photography really accelerated. I'm sorting my pictures by the year and month they were taken. When possible, I add geotags to any images that don't have one. Using face recognition software, I'm tagging all the photos of my friends and family. In as many cases as I can, I'm also tagging the photos by subject.

I'm removing all the residue from work, which means random images of IP addresses, error messages, blinking lights from switches, routers, and wireless access points and the like. I'm also moving the thousands of memes I've collected to a separate library to that all my anti-Republican vitriol doesn't get mixed up with the images of my grandkids when i set my computers to play slide shows.

My second project is the self-hosted server I've been working on. I've repurposed old hard drives and other pieces of hardware to create versions of my music, photos, books and video collections from the Internet and on my home network on various devices. Every day I try new ways to avoid using the resources of the big tech companies, a big goal of mine this year.

The only other issue I'm facing is a wacky disturbance in my sleep schedule. It's been months since I got eight continuous hours of shut-eye. I've gotten into a pattern of getting up around 2:00 AM every day to work on my projects and then napping throughout the rest of the day. It's not a productive pattern, but I'm having a hard time breaking it.

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