I’ve entered a sort of semi-retired state of living, in which I focus heavily on gardening to grow food and herbs, attending community and county level gatherings (e.g. city council meetings, local library meetups), and improving my carpentry skills by way of renovating closets and cabinets. I’m also hiking regularly and working on daily mobility exercises (this is important!) in support of my 2025 goal to “live a healthy, balanced lifestyle.”

This affords me a fair amount of free time that I spend reading. I’m going back through The Expanse (currently on book 7, Persepolis Rising) for fun, Paddle Your Own Canoe for self reflection, and Nine Lies About Work to stay connected with the grind. I refuse to pickup a subscription to Netflix or any other streaming platforms because I view them as brain rot.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a few shows that I miss. However, I can just pick those up on physical media (such as books). Inspiration for the Subscriptions Gone Wild and The Meteoric Rise of Online Platforms episodes of Thoughtfully Critical stemmed from these decisions.

Chasing Inspiration

All of this summates into a new brain state, one that has taken months to comfortably adopt. I refuse to turn to digital pacifiers the way I used to. I strive to feel inspiration again, a feeling that is easy to drown out via doom scrolling, constant digital inputs, or anything in between.

A close friend of mine told me:

Boredom leads to amazing things like self reflection and imagination, but also sometimes scary things like regrets; sort of like your tongue probing at a loose tooth. I realize now that boredom is a delicious luxury. If I complained about boredom as a child – “I’m bored! I have nothing to do!” – I was either assigned chores to do or told to go outside and play, which meant finding my friends to ride bikes and imagine our nearby woods to be an alien planet. As an adult, I realize the wisdom of this direction and am again leveraging it.

Storytelling Sparks

For most of the 2010’s, I told stories at events and conferences. I’d come up with an idea, typically based on problems I encountered and then solved, put the details into a slide deck, and then shop around to see what speaking opportunities were around. This model served me well! My success was predicated on this model and it afforded me many fantastic opportunities.

The difference today is that I don’t really want to travel and I dislike virtual events. Plus, modern in-person events tend to make me want to 🤢 puke from all the marketing drivel and swag seekers. I don’t want to be awash in a sea of thousands of people, I don’t want to be contacted about products, and I don’t want your t-shirt. But I do absolutely love public speaking to an audience – there is nothing on Earth like it.

I’m channeling this into the podcast with episodes like DevOps in the Modern Era, Building Better, Stronger Systems, and The Strategic Imperative of CI/CD (releases on June 8th). I spend weeks researching, coming up with slides (I make them by hand!), recording, editing, and self-publishing. It’s a good way to channel boredom into sparks of curiosity, answer questions that I myself have, and tell tales from the past.

Interesting Links

The fun stuff.

For those curious about just How Much Money Has Rick Astley Made From Rickrolling?

I’m certainly seeing a lot of boomerang hiring, and apparently ADP is, too. Interesting that so much boomerang-ing is happening in tech.

My friend Ethan shared a fantastic blog post from Thomas Ptacek titled My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. “Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time.” hit me hard. I’m strongly of the opinion that AI is going to blow away a large swath of existing job roles across every industry that exists. As a former consultant I could see the writing on the wall and I decided to exit on my own terms – there’s lot of buggy whip makers and users out there, folks, and the horse is once again going away.

One of the most evil companies on the planet says they will sell you ads that you can then pay them to place on their ad platform. No thanks, not now, not ever!

Rational Animations released a video titled When will AI automate all mental work, and how fast? The answer: pretty darn fast. As quoted by the infamous Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts!“

For my IT help desk folks.

More AI dooming, Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath. This is obviously a biased article, but I don’t think he’s entirely wrong, either.

One of the best farming videos I’ve seen to date, with an actual farmer and actual farm equipment. If you aren’t supporting your agricultural sectors, wake the f–k up; food is kinda an important thing we all need, like, every day.

For those with frienemies at work, Atlassian offers some ideas on how to diffuse the situation or, if that doesn’t work, build stronger walls.

Code Bullet is hit or miss, but his Minesweeper video tickled an itch that I had since childhood. I also find it hilarious that he never builds a kill switch into his code and often has to reboot his PC. 🤣

People are increasingly using the Internet to learn how to mop a floor or hang a picture. Shame on their parents? Shame on our society? Both? I can’t help but feel future generations are cooked.

Windows 95 is dead, long live Windows 95.

✌️ & 💙