FIVE YEARS RIDING THE GOPHER

Hello Gopherites. I missed pointing this milestone out to you 
yesterday - too busy repainting my bathtub (oh yes, an old cast 
iron one, to be mounted on the roof of course) and measuring the 
length of filter paper inside many different brands of old engine 
oil filters I've used on the Jag (some have less than half of the 
filter material in other brands! Shame I bought a big box of those 
:( ). 2019-10-19whoisTFT.txt marks my first phlog post here, and 
the offline escape of my free thoughts somewhere in the direction 
of Gopher, although I didn't actually get around to putting the 
phlog online until the last day of 2019. I thought I'd hold off on 
setting it up right away because so many phlogs seem to pop up for 
a few weeks then die away (I'm surprised how many then-active 
phlogs have gone offline or extremely quiet now actually). Even my 
host here at Aussies.space was inspired for the last time to post 
in his phlog when I asked for an account.

Perhaps the foresight that I should prove my own commitment to 
posting before wasting time on setting up a platform for myself 
already put me in a different category to the come-and-go Gopher 
sorts? Or maybe I'm just dead lonely and most other people know 
real humans to talk to about this sort of stuff instead? OK those 
are obviously both true.

Anyway after five years it's time for a short break in my 
relentless self reflection because this it a perfect opportunity to 
indulge in statistics! Let's break out 'wc' and smash it on my 
phlog directory, a task that actually takes a noticable time on 
this Pentium 1 with its near 30yo HDD:

256,219 words! Instead of this bullshit I could have finished 
writing Moby Dick (206,052 words), about three 1984s (88,942 
words), and five The Great Gatsbys (47,094 words), although 
unsurprisingly I'm still not half way towards matching War and 
Peace (587,287 words) but closer than I am to getting around to 
reading it. By the way if you've actually been reading all my posts 
that means you've effectively given up time you could've spent 
reading one of those books yourself! So if one such a person 
exists, then I can claim to have beaten the world's most famous 
authors, yeah!

But instead of a book, those words make up 261 phlog posts, and 
don't include 28 finished ideas posts, or the things I've rambled 
elsewhere in my Gopher hole (although I posted my Australian 
political party reviews to the phlog as well). About a thousand 
words a post on average, blasted out into the Gopherverse at an 
average of about one phlog a week (mainly because I write/start 
them on weekends, like this post, although I always still have more 
important things I should do instead).

Data-wise they all add up to 1,501,672 bytes. So you can have five 
years of writing, or one blurry photo of a disinterested pet cat in 
excessively high resolution needlessly heading up a Webpage or list 
of Gophermap selectors. That's the choice the internet gives you 
today.

A part of me still wants to broadcast this off the internet 
somehow. A modulated light source preferably, to avoid licencing 
needs. But nobody would build a receiver/modem for it who lives 
within sight of such an optical transmitter here in the middle of 
nowhere, unless I built one for them and then I wouldn't be able to 
talk about them here freely, and I'd want to because if they were 
actually interested enough to try that it would make them a best 
friend or something. Jeeze this is sounding pathetic, OK onto the 
future...

Well computer stuff is getting more and more overcomplicated and 
just damn hard. But electronics has become inseparable from 
computers now, and not just microcontroller programming but people 
expect everything to talk to their smartphone now, implying a full 
Web server process, WiFi, apps, Javascript, encryption. My 
nonexistant God I'm not going to dive into all of that just because 
I want to make money from a skill I started at by playing with 555 
timers and op-amps. It's also just too many layers of work for one 
guy to do everything himself anyway, especially with needing to 
keep supporting new smartphones, browsers, etc., on products 
already released. You know once you could design an electronics 
device and the same design would still work in fifty years? I know, 
I've built some fifty years later.

So, I tried the laptop refurbishment/reselling thing and gave up on 
the basis of no convenient supply and uncertain future demand (I 
was going to try to solve the former with some highly engineered 
local collection/purchase programme for old/broken laptops, but the 
latter made me rethink that level of time/money investment - it's a 
shame everyone want to run Windows). That just leaves that "big 
website idea" I've been mentioning vaguely every so often for these 
five years. It's been around in my head much longer, evolving since 
I was in my teens. It always required an AI element, so with the 
current AI tech advancements now might be a good time for it. It's 
a stupidly big thing to try and create all myself though. I might 
try to create it all myself, but it _will_ be stupid to do so.

At the same time maybe I should try to get more farm work or 
similar. That way I can preempt becoming a burnt-out tech 
entrepreneur before I've even become a tech entrepreneur. Or like I 
suggested in my last post I could bow out of 'real' work and try to 
go the starving artist route, but I really doubt I could pull that 
off with my limited social skills.

At heart I don't really want to change my life much, these 
alternative paths are nice enough just as dreams in my head. But to 
earn money somehow I've really got to know when it's time to make 
the jump in a different direction while that direction is still 
under my control. Unless I'm just taking it all too seriously, like 
my oil filters...

An oil filter analysis service?...

 - The Free Thinker