Young Hands Club

– Saltmines [8 hours]
– Social call [1.5 hours]
– Assorted chores (cooking, tidying) [30 mins]

Saltmines are heating up this week, and will remain hot until the 12th give or take. Still I ought to spend some hours before the weekend to hash out my topic for penance article #3.

-Saltmines [7 hours]
-Worked out [30 mins]
-Cleaning and going out for errands [45 mins]

-Paid bills [20 mins]
-Read logs, wrote review on Shinjiru and Host One [1 hour]
-Called a family member [1.5 hour]
-General house cleaning / cooking [30 mins]

Today was slow to start. I had roughly 4.5 hours of productive time spent:

-Mowed lawn (my landscaper from last season fell off the earth, so I bought a ride-on mower and called it a day. I won’t lie, it is kind of fun to mow now.) [1 hour]
-Blogs, logs, answering comments, responded to billymg’s mp-wp survey) [1 hour]
-Social call [1 hour]
-General house cleaning / cooking [1 hour]
-Worked out [30 mins]

I’ll start off by responding to my master’s query in #o:

lobbes – I guess I’ll read all about it in the review & plan; otherwise from here so far it seems rather as initially predicted that dropping the shorter-term plans & reviews just works as it always “worked” – to not get anywhere.

Yeah, I’m convinced that I should probably go back to daily reporting. I appreciate you letting me test it out, but I can see that the daily reporting serves a crucial role of keeping me anchored to time. Especially now when I have virtually no walls to ram into.

I have a quiet, empty home in which to concentrate in, and I no longer need to commute to the saltmine. Not only that, but about 75% of the work I currently do for this saltmine has me in a position where I have little day-to-day oversight so I pretty much manage myself. Back before I had all this time I was actually much more productive with the time I had (I’m reminded of the “lottery winner bankruptcy syndrome” that Jacob pointed out to me back in 2019).

So I’ll resume the daily reporting starting tomorrow (Saturday). I’m going to copy Nicole’s format; just a quick recap of whatever I did that day and time spent. The review and plan I still want to do monthly, but the daily reports will serve as stand-in walls for myself to keep me from wandering too far off course.

Speaking of not wandering off course, I need to close some other threads.:

The above is pretty much why I say that leaving doors open is a good strategy but not that great of a goal – if you make it a goal in itself, then you won’t be able to make much choice even when/if you do find something you really want to choose. Because at that point, the choice might come with closing some doors and even burning some bridges – and if you refuse to do it at that point, the meaning of it is that you also refuse to fully choose what you finally found to really want. Like a lot of other things, it’s useful up to a point and it’s downright in the way in unusual circumstances.

This makes sense, and I’ll reclassify it in my head as a strategy as opposed to a goal. As I think back I can definitely see some instances where I should have burned a bridge or two, but didn’t.

Anyways, also contained in the above comment thread was me stating that I had some plans I wanted to get out:

With regards to immediate plans and longer term plans, I have some things on my mind that I want to get out in these here comments, but I should probably both think on them a bit more and also get to bed for now. I’ll write more later this week.

Now, I definitely didn’t get them out later that week, nor the week after. So, I can review April with one word: bupkis. As for my immediate plan for May, I’ll keep it simple and doable. I want to get my two articles out: penance #3 and my review of those two hosting companies (while I was too slow to be of use to Diana Coman, there’s still use to me in recording my experiences on my blog). I also want to respond to billymg’s survey on mp-wp usage since he is doing a lot of work on something I use quite a bit and I want to help him out.

Aside from that I really need to focus more at my saltmine job as well. I got lucky for the time-being in a lot of ways I won’t go into, but if I don’t get back up off my ass soon I could be in turd soup in short order.

If I somehow go from 0 to 80 units-of-distance/time during May and knock all of the above goals out, then I’ll gladly add more to my plate. But I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it.

Now, it is time to think longer term. First off, I need to be realistic with myself. In the years past I got swept up in a butt-load of very apparently rational goals for myself that I would somehow achieve in mere months, despite my inadequacy for achieving any of those goals.

I’m talking about things like me running off to a different country, or me following a step-by-step guide to “learn how to be a master of my own harem of womens just like MP”.

Yes, it’d be great if I could sprout wings tomorrow and poop out diamonds, but I’m a long ways away from any of that. Decades, realistically speaking, if that. But it doesn’t mean all is lost. I think this ties back into most of the above: the choosing of the right doors/opportunities when they come my way, and *knowing* my own limitations on *which options I can actually take* at any given time. I fucked up with that mp-wp-bot delivery for MP because I a) didn’t bother to understand what the job required, and b) didn’t understand my own limitations on meeting that requirement even if I did know what it required! (Require!)

My point is that I need more realistic goals that fit what I can actually do. These will obviously change as things tend to do, but to start off, here is my 10-year plan for myself (so, by the time I’m 42):

– Eliminate all monetary debt

I have indeed read that Trilema where MP presents the option of just saying ‘fuck it’ and ignoring any existing debt. But I have to face the fact that I am not of that caliber; at least not now. No, I’m the type that will slowly but surely pay off all of his loans the slow way. There are also reasons why (specifically within the next 10 years or so) I do not want to leave the U.S. permanently (as in, burn bridges for my return if I so chose). I’m not saying I plan to die here, but I doubt I’ll be leaving for good any time soon. Some of these reasons I will not reveal into the public record because they are, well, private. Very boring reasons, I may add, but operational security and all that.

Nevertheless, within the last few months I have already paid off a few of my smaller lingering student loans. These days I can at least say I no longer consume more then I bring in, which I have to say is a great feeling. I simply plan to keep on cutting costs and eliminating debt, and increase my monthly intake of dubaloos, and converting bits and pieces into BTC when the opportunity strikes (I can say, that over the last 7 years I have never once said “aw I wish I *didn’t* convert that small amount fiat into BTC”).

It is a slow and bite-sized strategy, but it fits me.

– (Re)Build the House of Benevides

Right now this is a blank slate. My great grandfather (I only heard him called “vovô”) from my father’s side came over to the U.S. from São Miguel Island back in… idk probably the early 1900’s I think. Anyways he apparently was great at fixing shit- televisions and radios and such, and he ended up doing pretty well for himself. I guess he owned several local hardware shops or something. Eventually, the USG decided that they’d put in a highway in the zone where his shops were, and well that was that.

A few generations later and it is just me. I’m the last surviving male that carries my name in the family I believe; everyone else is dead. I remember my mom would always tell me this story of this one time when I was an infant and he was still alive. At this point he was quite old, and half of his face was paralyzed due to a stroke I think- in any case he couldn’t speak words, just noises. I was always told that when he saw me for the first time he held me up above his head and was crying tears of joy. I was a baby so I just freaked out, but still, whether exaggerated or not the image stayed with my whole life. He died well before I could ever converse with him, so that’s the only thing I know of him and I.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve always felt a drive to build a powerful and strong family. This is more of a general goal, but over the next decade I want to keep this in my sights. It is really my name to spread as I may, and I’d like to make some mark with it before I also leave this world.

In order to do this, though, I need to make sure I am healthy n’ wealthy first. First step would be the elimination of debt I mentioned earlier, then I work on building wealth and resources.

A family also needs family members, but I can’t be a proper patriarch if I can’t even rule myself. So I’m mainly focusing on the wealth building for the next 10 years, and with trying to do things that will put me in a position to do more things later.

Deadlines
– billymg’s survey (done)
– Hosting company review (done)
– Have a topic for Penance article #3 and a few paragraphs written (Sunday, May 10th)

I am moving to a monthly review frequency, though I will need to heed my master’s warning to avoid slipping into old habits. Still, I would like to test myself to see if I can still produce what I say I will within a monthly review frequency. So here we go.

As for March, well, it was not the greatest in terms of productivity. We had the closure of the Republic, which, I was not terribly shocked by. What I always appreciated about MP was that he always said what he meant. Always. This is rare, you feel me? And he had always said (in various forms and often outright) that he was not married to the crew, but to performance. This is an instance of separating of usage from confidence, I’ve come to understand. And in reading his words for the last 6 years and watching him interact with various people this is something he does indeed employ in his day-to-day business; just read any portion of the log or Trilema and you can’t not see examples. Republican production was in a steady decline in the final years and so he made the call to close up shop.

In other words, everybody could have predicted this. In any case, the natural laws of this world remain the same: there will always exist individuals who can move mountains, and other individuals who cannot. Maybe the ones who cannot are able to make themselves useful to the ones who can, maybe they fail. In this case, everyone failed to produce on the level Mircea Popescu wanted. Still, just because he disbanded the Republic doesn’t mean he has ceased to exist you know. And I do believe that those who can do things and actually learn to leverage their environment will float to the top (there’s a log thread somewhere on this but I stop myself at 5 minutes now if I can’t find a logline). In other words, while I do believe a great opportunity has been lost in general with the failure of TMSR, the best thing to do *now* is to learn from failure and continue to improve. There’s really no other option in any case on an individual level.

Moving on to my individual performance in March: it also was not the greatest in terms of productivity. I’m actually just going to call it a wash, with the small exception that I did deliver the historical logs to MP at least. The MP-WP bot is also finished. However, during the final week of March I checked out for a spell. I mean, I didn’t even do any saltmine work either. While I do believe impromptu breaks are healthy if all of your affairs are in order, in my case they were most certainly not in order. This has left me in a precarious position in general.

Still, I’m confident I can dig myself out of this small pit here. For April, I’m just going to focus on saltmines for the first half. Specifically until April 15th. By this time I’d like to turn my productivity deficit for the headless masters of the saltmines to a surplus (the structure of my work atm is such that this is possible). Now that I am 100% wfh I believe I can do this.

Now, that leaves me with the second half of April (the 15th onward) to first get my review of the Brasil hoster out for Diana Coman. Before then, however, I may as well start discussing the future mp-wp bot plan with my master. I honestly am not sure what the next steps should be at this point; need to think on it.

There’s also things like waking up early and house cleaning, which, I’ve let slip in March. Re: the house I will be honest in that I’m not sure I’ll be selling this house in 2020. I’m expecting the current virus hullabaloo will make it a bit more a difficult to sell now than perhaps in 2021 when everyone is distracted by something else. Nevertheless, I still aim to completely clean this thing out by mid-summer.

As more things pop into my head during April I will put them here.

Mp-wp bot delivery

Well, I delivered the log history dump at least, but MP has confirmed that since he has left IRC behind him he has little need for a irc-to-blog interface. I mean, it makes sense.

Still, I put a lot of work into this thing and it does do some cool stuff you know? I’d like it to live. Fortunately, my Master has indeed expressed that she would like it for #ossasepia/Ossa Sepia as long as it is demonstrated to be a reliable process. Time still needs to tell on this, however, but hopefully it can turn into something.

Saltmines

I’m in the 2nd half of the month now so things are a bit quieter, which is good. Still, while I got off to a good start with my daily-sending-of-job-applications I eventually petered off. Need to pick this back up starting tomorrow.

And thanks to this month’s hysteria, I may be getting some upcoming reprieve on this front in the form of mandatory work-from-home time for two weeks. I’ll see if the hype lasts long enough for this to happen though..

House clean-up

This has been going quite well. The next thing I really need to face now, though, is the mailing of my ex’s old stuff. I’m gonna see about actually mailing some shit next week or at least assessing the cost.

Blog

I did not get much work done on my penance article last week, which means I’ll be tending to my neglected blog as a first priority this week. I also would like to write something touching on the dissolution of the world’s only sovereign, but there’s a lot of thoughts there obviously. I almost want to try combining the two but I’ll see how that works out. There’s also the Shinjiru write-up and the HostOne write-up, but those aren’t pressing really, so I’ll let them slide for now.

Mp-wp bot delivery

This is priority # 1 until Tuesday. Testing this weekend revealed bugs carrying unicode across boundaries that I thought I had killed already, but after some toiling I was able to get that taken care of. I have a little manual test script now that shoves all kinds of offensive characters (some > 3 bytes) into all kinds of input, and by the end I was unable to break it at least.

Most everything else appears to be functioning: blog selection echoing, log line echoing, log line numbering, etc. The only thing that still is haunting me is trackbacks; sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. However, I think this may just be a general mp-wp issue (with the “xmlrpc.php” file) since I get this intermittent failure sending the trackbacks via ‘curl’. In other words, I believe it is outside the scope of my bot atm so I’ll just let the trackbacks be for now.

So, I’m almost ready for delivery I think, however I still need to review the sql dump process. The only day I have left to do this is Monday (tomorrow so let’s see if I can use what time I have to my advantage for a change. I don’t have much choice in any case.

Saltmines

I gave the majority of my time to these guys last week, nor did I send any applications out. I need to keep those things going out; I’m just going to try sending one per day to get into the habit at least.

House clean-up

I did some cleaning before bed a few nights last week at least; just need to keep this up.

General life organization

I need to take more ownership over my time. If I’m spending time working for stupid then that’s what I’m doing, and I can’t fall into that ‘victim’ mindset like it was an unavoidable pit I fell into.

Blog

My blog queue is still backed up: final penance article, Shinjiru write-up / HostOne write-up complete. Let’s see how this bot delivery goes this week. If it goes well then I’ll hit my blog hard next week.

I’m going to try a tweaked format for this week. I partitioned my review/plan by areas I’m currently focusing on in my life, and I’m going to review-by-partition and include plans for improvement in each chunk. Let’s see how this goes..

Mp-wp bot delivery

I have the production server set-up and my test plan complete but I still need to… actually test! This weekend was not very productive for me; I slept in way too much both days and just didn’t get as much done as I wanted. Still I think I’m fairly close to ready with this bot at least. Definitely will be able to give it a shot next week and it looks like MP is back in CR so it should time out fine.

Still, this is a problem with me. I fought hard to escape what was a nice excuse for not being productive (my ex) but I’m still the main cause. My primary problem I think is I still am not waking up to TMSR work like I keep saying I will each day. It is too easy to get swept away in the 101 other things throughout the day. As for the solution I’m going to touch on that in the “General life organization” section below.

Saltmines

While speaking up did help ease my pain a bit at this mine, I definitely need to keep applying to other places. I hit my 5-applications-sent quota for this week, yet aside from automated responses I’ve yet to hear back from the others (from my past job hunting experience, this does seem par the course). Other than continuing to churn the sea of want ads I’m not sure what else I can do here for the time-being.

House clean-up

Going smoothly. Next up is the living room which I’m gonna aim to knock out by end of next week. It should only take a couple of hours anyway if the other room was any guide.

Note to self: need to hire a cheap landscaper before mid-March.

General life organization

Here’s where I haven’t been doing well; namely with waking up on time and sticking to my plans, etc. In terms of waking up / not sleeping in, my problem is going to bed at a decent hour. Now, I really hate going to sleep when I’m not tired / waking up when I am. Ultimately if I had a remote gig than this problem would be less pronounced so this has been good fuel for my new-saltmine search.

Nevertheless, I still have to live in the meanwhile and I haven’t been consistent with improving my sleep schedule so I need to make some changes. First off, I drink too much coffee late in the day so that needs to stop. Second, I set up this alarm clock in one of my rooms to go off at 11pm each night. I figure even if I ignore it I’ll still get that reminder often enough that maybe it’ll sink in. Finally, I need to “dial in” to thinking about my Republican work (aka actual work) before saltmine stuff. The quickest and most rational way I think I can ease myself into this is by doing at least one simple thing every single day: wake up with enough time to eat / have coffee while reading the logs / blogs. I used to do this back in the day but have recently fallen out of this habit.

Blog

My blog queue is getting backed up. I need to get my final penance article out, and I’d also like to get a Shinjiru write-up / HostOne write-up complete. I’m going to commit to at least 2 hours writing something for my final penance article next week.

Today I was able to get everything installed on the test server, save the bot itself. But the LAMP is up and running, mp-wp installed, firewall configured, and I already tested and can confirm that I can connect to freenode.net from this server via port 6667. I made a point to look at what I could improve to make it faster for next time, and that turned out to be refining my notes to be more of a “manual script” that I can follow.

As for last week in review, with the exception of Friday I hit my goal of daily updates. I got my applications out as well and the server is pretty much ready for testing once I prop the bot up (this bot-propping shouldn’t take long; I’m just overdue for bed tonight and had to call it a night).

This new workload at the saltmine has me with new ~weekly deadlines (in addition now to the monthly stuff in the first two weeks of each month), and this week I need to get this certain thing done by Wed. It’s the type of thing that I just need to sit down and study for a few hours and I’m way behind, so I want to get that out of the way Monday. Then Tuesday I can get back to bot prep. On that front I need to get the bot up and running and then (finally) I’ll be ready for testing. Besides sending out 5 more applications that’s all I’m focused on for next week because once March comes I don’t want to be scrambling with this thing.