Brandon Sanderson just published an FAQ in part addressing why he used Kickstarter for his new books. A very large portion of his FAQ addresses his problems with traditional publishing and with Amazon as an “indie publisher”. I have several friends and considerable second-order acquaintances who are authors. My brother is very close friends with many. Years ago, when I was still working with my dad in our IT company, he came to me with this idea to build a publishing platform for indie authors that competed with Amazon.

At work, I often use a lot of different computers. At least once a week I sign onto a computer I’ve never used before. Since the computers use Windows 10, the default browser is Microsoft Edge. I don’t like Edge, but that ship has sailed and it’s the default. This might be a recent update, but when Edge opens for the first time it has a start window with the option to sync my browser data or not.

I was just adding some music to my Plex server and thought about my experiment with using Jellyfin. Plex is a commercial media server that used to be open source. Jellyfin is a fork of early Plex code before it became closed proprietary software. I decided to try Jellyfin because of a few annoying features of Plex around music and audiobooks. At this point I don’t even remember what they were.

I’ve been managing servers for probably two decades now. The first server I remember working on was a surplus server my dad brought home from work. It was our first domain controller at home and also operated as a file server. I’ve been working on servers ever since. My current server is a surplus server from a previous job running an IT company with my dad. It used to be our file server and is a full size Intel tower server with enterprise hardware like redundant power supplies and a hardware RAID module.

My wife was talking with someone today and mentioned how she’s still crazy about me. The other person responded along the lines “really? Even after 10 years?” Is this weird? I mean, I know some marriages are rough. But is it not normal to be crazy (good crazy) about your spouse after 8 years? Is it not normal to put significant consistent effort into your relationship? Is it not normal to want your interactions with the person you spend the most time with to be the best you have?

My dad likes to quote one of my nephews as saying “that not work”. It’s a pretty adorable toddler thing to say and also kind of funny as an inside joke quote. Now it’s my turn. I tried doing blogging when I got home from work, but when I get home tired at 11pm to a wife that hasn’t seen me all day and wants to talk, it’s really not easy to focus on writing something.

One of the most notable aspects of a military uniform is the rack of ribbons on the chest. From the lowly boot camp graduate to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everyone in the military has ribbons. They look prestigious and dignified. I think they’re pretentious and find every opportunity to not wear mine. They’re not all bad, they have one definite use. There is a trope that an old general will recount what heroic deeds earned him each award, and that’s not far off.

When I was working on TinyHatchet, I initially did not have any stylesheets. None. The web application used all the default browser styles. Part of my reasoning was selfish - I don’t like frontend work. And to a point this is justified. If I am not excited about working on it, especially when it is essentially a hobby project, I am not going to work on it. If I get frustrated before the application actually does anything, I’m going to throw it away like week-old fish.

Part of the application process to become an Air Force officer when you already have a college degree (via Officer Training School) is an interview with a senior officer. The Air Force flew me out to Las Vegas to meet with I think it was a colonel. I could be wrong, but it’s irrelevant anyway. While we were waiting around for the interviewer to show up, the recruiter was looking over the list of candidates there for interviews.

My wife shared with me an article talking about painting and photography and perspective. It was something along the lines of how people take photography as “correct” in comparison to a painting, that whatever you see in a photograph is a true representation of the world. That idea baffled me. I took a film class in middle school and one of the things we learned early on what how to do the “world crashing in on the subject” effect.