Nate Dickson Thinks...

My wife said the other day that she's figured out part of why we're all so stressed these days, and it has to do with how we fill our free moments. In the past, she said, we always had those moments to ourselves. We had time with our thoughts when we were walking from place to place, or waiting for something. But now we have phones that are instantly and endlessly full of distractions, things that very effectively keep us from having the introspective thoughts we used to have.

So we discussed this idea for a while (after both of us turning our phones off and setting them aside). It seems that we're more fragile, because we never get the processing time we need to come to grips with things going on around us. When life gets too real we hide in our devices and their endless diversions instead of dealing with what's actually bothering us. We allow ourselves to be distracted with small, vapid social media things, and hope those fears, stresses, and complications from which we are hiding will disperse without our ever having to deal with them. I mentioned that, on some level, I'm trusting my subconscious to work through those things, hoping that when I'm done being distracted the problems will be fixed.

But they aren't. We keep carrying them, still present if slightly sublimated.

Since this conversation we've both been declaring certain parts of the day processing time. For me this has been times like the walk between the office and the train, or other little moments where I used to dive into podcasts or other distractions. I've also started asking, before I pull out my phone or tablet if I have something I need to do, or if I'm just using the device to hide from what's actually bothering me.

CJ Eller wrote about writing down what you're doing and it really resonated with me. I try to keep a faithful journal of my life, multiple journals in fact. But why aren't I recording all incidents of behaviors I want to quit? Why am I sanitizing my life for imaginary biographers?

So I'm going to try and keep a more honest, more human journal of my life. I have to keep reminding myself that what I write in my notebooks or in my journal isn't for anyone else to read later, it's for me to reflect on who I am now.

There are a few mantras that I'm clinging to right now.

Just because this is hard doesn't mean it's bad.

This too shall pass

Last week of these classes! Then you get a break!

But honestly it feels like an endurance race right now. Will I survive to cross the finish line? Or is a fortnight of going to bed at 2am going to kill me? (I'm not British, I just like the word “fortnight”. Never played the game.)

And I still think it'll be worth it. I have learned a lot in my degree program and it would be a shame to throw all of that away just because this week is bad.

The irony is that these classes were supposed to be the easy ones. I'm taking IS classes, and I've been a programmer for 14 years. And the actual coding is easy. What's making them hard is the bane of all education: TEAMS.

I'm a team lead at work. I love working with real software teams. But a team you are with for one semester is nothing like a real software development team. You're not working together daily, you're hurredly assigning tasks on a project that fits into none of your schedules, trying to make sense of one another's working styles.

In my six-ish years of higher education, four undergrad and two graduate, I've had one good team. And we only became a good team because we had worked together on various bad teams in previous classes. So when we got to choose a team and all chose each other it was magic. We got things done.

There's probably a lesson in there, but I'm too tired to learn it. Here's hoping I make it to next week.

Rainy days lift my mood. I realize that's the opposite of how it often works, but I love the peace and coolness of rain. This might be because I've lived most of my life in high mountain deserts, so rain is an occasional repreive from the hard hot blue skies of summer.

But I also loved rain during the two years I spent in the Philippines, when the hot downpours just made it somehow even more humid.

And I loved rain when I lived in Alaska, where the rain soaked you to the skin and was dangerous if you didn't know how to manage your body temperature. (Repeat after me: “Cotton is cold. Cotton kills...”)

So let it rain, I guess? I don't really have a huge conclusion to this one.

Two years ago I bought a 64GB MicroSD card for $40 and considered it a good deal.

Last year I upgraded to a 128GB MicroSD card for the same device, for $30.

This year I upgraded that device's storage again, this time to 256GB, for $40.

So, given this pattern, I look forward to buying a 1TB MicroSD card in 2021 for $40.

I've always loved the concept of the Raspberry Pi, and have tried for years to find a way to actually use one in my house. The first Raspberry Pi I ever purchased was a Model 2 B+, and I ended up spending almost a hundred dollars kitting it out with a case and power supply and SD card and a fancy little Pimoroni light thing to go on top. And I got a web server up and running on it, got some other software going...but I never really used it.

Over the years I've collected others. I've got a model 3 in an incredibly awesome case that looks like a Super Nintendo. Ostensibly to run RetroPie, but in reality, it sits in a box in my desk. I have three Raspberry Pi Zeroes, none of which have ever done much.

Until this week. Somehow it's all started coming together.

It started when I finally decided to put one of my model 3's to work as a Pi-hole, and realized that I don't need to make a project perfect to just get it done. From there I started using my Keybow (another Pimoroni joint) even though I didn't have a perfect lua script to make all the lights dance every time I press a button. I also helped my son figure out how to hook up a model 3 to a touch screen he bought, and he's got a portable programming station.

I think the main thing here is I'm less scared of “wasting” one of these little boards. A Raspberry Pi Zero is $10, it's okay if I let it be a single-purpose board instead of making it do ten different things. In other words, I'm getting less frightened of tinkering, and that's a good feeling.

About a year ago I read about the Pi-hole project. For those of you who haven't heard of it, the gist is that you install it on a Raspberry Pi (hence the name) and then use that Raspberry Pi as your network's DNS server. It's a very specialized DNS server that blocks some 130,000 known advertising servers (and counting). And your home network becomes much more advertising-free. The project is designed to be easy. You run one script, adjust a few values, and it's up and running. I didn't put one together until three days ago.

Why not? Because I fell into what I call The Adafruit Trap. I adore Adafruit.com. I love all the tricks, tools, and toys they make available. I love the tutorials they publish; I love the bundles they sell, I love the enthusiasm for tinkering that radiates off the site. I want to make it clear here: the problem isn't Adafruit, it's me. I never want Adafruit to change what they're doing. I'm writing this to help change what I do. Okay. Let's move on.

So, here's how the Adafruit Trap works:

• Step One: I find a project I'd like to try. In this case, it's setting up a Pi-hole server. In my initial research, the task looks accomplishable, and fun, and useful.
• Step Two: I look for guidance on how to make it happen. Because they write such excellent tutorials, Adafruit comes up high in the search rankings.
• Step Three: I read of all the really cool ways I could make my simple project So much fancier. In this case, by adding a sweet little OLED display to a Raspberry Pi Zero that has the stats on how many ads are blocked right on the device. This is a legitimately cool idea, and I want to do it! But I don't have the money to buy the OLED display right now, so I postpone for a while.

And a while longer.

And then get distracted by something else.

Until the next time someone mentions the Pi-hole project around me.

So here's the thing. I had a Raspberry Pi 3 sitting around, unused because it was part of another project for which I could never quite afford all the parts. It's already in a case, with SD card and power supply all set up. True, it doesn't have a sweet little OLED screen displaying how many ads it's blocked, but...what if...

What if I got a Pi-hole server working instead of waiting until I could do it “perfectly”?

One of my friends calls this the “Pinterest Trap,” where you look for inspiration on Pinterest, and everything is so perfect that it scares you off of even trying. In other words, the exact opposite of what tutorial sites are trying to do.

So how do you get over it? Good question! I don't know. So far my answer has been what I said above. I just forced myself to do what I can with what I had where I was instead of waiting for everything to be perfect.

I'm in the final week of my last accounting class ever. I'm pleased with this. In two weeks I will have mostly forgotten everything I've ever known about managerial accounting. I'm less happy about that, but that's the nature of the game. At least I have my notes.

But here's what I'm not going to forget:

My professor in this class is an excellent teacher. I've been thinking about his teaching style all session, trying to identify the things that make his style so impressive, and here are some things I've identified.

Passion

He loves this topic, and that enthusiasm comes through in his teaching. One of the most common phrases in his lectures is “now this is interesting...” and you know what? He's right! When he points out something that interests him I get interested. I start thinking about how full absorption moves costs compared to variable costing. He is telling stories using numbers.

On the other side of the coin, he's fully aware that there are people in his class who don't love variance analysis on static budgets vs. actuals. So he works to “motivate” us (his word) to want to learn the topics with stories, concrete examples, and, when the situation demands, MegaBlocks to demonstrate how costs move through a system. It works. I don't love cost accounting, but I understand it far better than anyone would have any right to expect.

Compassion

Our professor knows what it's like to be a student in his class. He knows this because he listens to feedback. He monitors his emails and answers incredibly quickly. He has moved deadlines, changed assignments, and given extra tutoring sessions because people asked for help. He listened and worked to do what is best for the person asking, and the class in general. He treats us with respect, and it's effortless to respond in kind.

Reflection

I've never had a professor in any of my classes who is so open about how much he's learning. Our professor asks for feedback and asks to follow up questions about the input. He tells us what he's trying to do and why he thinks it is the right choice, then asks for our opinions.

Which isn't to say he's a pushover. I spent three hours studying for Part I of a four-part take-home final last night. I expect to spend another three hours for part II tonight. The class is hard. But no matter how hard it is I know it's fair. I know that my professor has thought through what he's asking of us.

I'm never going to be a college professor. (Probably.) But there will always be opportunities to teach others, and when they come up, I hope I can be as dedicated and competent in my teaching as this professor is in his.

#MBA #teaching

I've made no secret that I'm getting a (GASP) business degree and therefore leaving my life as a full-time developer behind. My manager asked me “what are your long-term plans?” and my response was “well, I'm not getting an MBA to keep being a developer.”

But as much as I want to move into a role where I can lead developers, I still love the joy of technology, the thrill of learning new things and making these machines do what I want them to do.

For example:

So much fun stuff is going on there — a customized status bar with emoji-enabled weather report in the bottom of the tmux window. Ranger and iTerm2 are working together to give me a full-color image preview in a terminal. Things like this highlight the joy of computers: With some time, patience, and a lot of third-party apps, you can make these things do what you want.

#tmux #ranger #cli #commandLine #iTerm2

It was foggy at the train station the other day. On a whim, I pulled out my camera and opened the BitCam app. Something about approaching a train in the fog felt like an early 90's noir adventure game to me. So I took a series of snaps going from low-res to high to color to full camera resolution, just for fun. I kind of like them.

#photography #technology #time