January 20, 2025 4:25 PM
One week in
In the first week of my sabbatical, I made sure to squeeze in as much as I possibly could. I only had two months, and I wanted to make the most of it. But this is different. I have as much time as I want, so I'm taking things more slowly.
So how does it feel to be retired?
It's a little weird to hear it out loud. When I first decided that I wanted to retire early, I told lots of people. It seemed like such a cool thing to do, but it also seemed so far away. I had big dreams! It's easy to tell people that you have big dreams. Even if they don't understand, they just shrug it off and figure your plans will change over time.
Now that it's real, I just tell people that I'm taking a break from working. It's still true! I just don't know how long the break will be. A year? A few years? Forever? I don't know, and that's okay.
So to answer the question, I don't think it's fully sunk in. I still feel anxious about money. I am very diligently tracking all of my spending. I think I will keep doing that at least through the end of the year.
But there's also a new sense of calm. I still think about the next seven meals that I'm going to have, but I'm no longer so worried about it. I have time to cook. I don't have to worry about making sure that I have something that's easy for me to heat up for lunch the next day because I need to wedge it into my busy workday.
Dan and I went to a DDR tournament this past weekend, and it was snowing quite a lot on Sunday. In the past, the snow would have been something that would probably make me anxious. What if we got stranded at Penn State?
Well, I suppose that wouldn't be so bad. I took Dan's hand and we walked in the snow to get some lunch and it was nice to just enjoy the scenery and the people around us.
January 16, 2025 8:18 PM
Thoughts on my Framework laptop
I wasn't planning on making this blog post today. I was actually in the middle of writing a different blog post when my laptop froze on me. It's been doing this a lot lately. The screen will freeze and the only way I can get it to un-freeze is if I put the computer to sleep by closing the lid. Now this would tend to happen when I was viewing a really intensive website, like a food blog. Or LinkedIn. I also started seeing a lot issues when I had Steam running. Yesterday, I had Steam open and it was completely unresponsive to any mouse clicks. I couldn't even hit the X in the corner to close the window. But for the most part working on my blogs was fine!
Until it wasn't. At this point, the only thing that hasn't caused my computer to freeze is Stardew Valley.
So I got this computer in spring of 2022. My old chromebook (which was still running perfectly) no longer had supported updates, so I figured it was time to find a new laptop. I guess I chose a Framework because it seemed like a good company, and it looked cool to put together, and I liked that I could easily replace parts of it (I haven't replaced a single part yet).
I ended up getting a
- Framework 13
- with an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor
- with 16 gigs of RAM
- and 500 gigs of space
- and I installed Ubuntu on it
People have asked me if I like the laptop. Before I hit all the screen freezing issues, it was fine. I feel like I don't use it to its full potential. The battery life is not great. I can't ever put this laptop to sleep for extended periods of time with it unplugged. I always have to fully power off. The lid opens to a much larger angle than any other laptop I've ever used, and I don't know of any reason why that's useful.
Sometimes I think, why did I choose this laptop? Why did I choose Linux? I don't understand how any of this works! I had to google how to update Discord so many times before it stuck in my memory.
But here I was, with this laptop that was freezing a lot. And I know enough that if your electronic thing is having issues, you should see if it's up to date. It turns out that I was on version 3.07 of the BIOS, and the latest is 3.20. That's so old that I can't even update it to the latest version at once. And before I could even do that, I had to be cautious and back up all the important things on this laptop, so I ended up putting this off for several months.
And I probably would have kept putting it off even longer, but if I can't even reliably write a blog post, then things are pretty dire. So today was the day. I made sure to back up whatever important things I thought I had on this computer, and then I went through the process of finding a flash drive, reformatting it, getting version 3.17 on it, booting it up, then downloading version 3.20 on it, and booting that up. And once I was done that, I figured I would upgrade to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu. This all took a few hours or so, but it was actually really easy!
So after I finally got my stuff up to date, I went to start up a sandbox for my blog, and then I got this error
ListUtil.c: loadable library and perl binaries are mismatched (got handshake key 0xdb00080, needed 0xdb80080)
😱
I did a bunch of googling and trying things from Stack Overflow, but nothing seemed to be working. One person suggested using a certain perl module to copy over existing installed perl modules to a new folder. I was sitting on the couch trying that out, and I was watching the text scroll by as it re-installed a bunch of modules, and then next thing you know, I'm asleep with my laptop on my lap.
I woke up in a very confused state, and when I woke up the laptop, I saw all the perl module installation output and I decided that I needed to shut down the laptop and deal with this another time. I walked over to a local meetup space and talked to some people for a couple of hours, which was nice. I think that little break was good for my brain, because when I got home, I realized that I just needed to clear out the local/ folder in my repos and re-install all the perl modules using carton.
So here I am, writing this blog post, and so far, the screen has not frozen yet. But it's only been hours, so 🤞
January 11, 2025 8:52 PM
The Day the Crayons Quit
Lately I've found that most books written for adults are just not that interesting to me. Picture books are where it's at. Because there are fewer words on each page, I feel like every word is so carefully crafted. Even the placement of the words is important. And the pictures matter. With a novel, you often have one place to potentially add an illustration and most of them have the most uninspired covers. So I wanted to make a blog post with a list of my favorite picture books, but I think that each book deserves its own post, so this will be the first of a new series of posts.
And because I quit my job yesterday, I thought it would be fitting to re-read one of my favorite books, The Day the Crayons Quit. I instantly loved this book when I first read it, and I love it every single time I re-read it. The words are hand written, and each crayon has a different personality.
\__/ __/ \__ \__/ / \ /\ /\ /\ /\ |==| |==| |==| |==| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | /\ | | | | | | | | |--| | | | | | | | | | | | | |AA| |AA| |AA| |AA| |AA| '--' '--' '--' '--' '--' Blue is stubby because he gets used a lot
I think my favorite characters are the orange and yellow crayons. They both think they're the color of the sun, but I personally like to include both colors in my sun.
And don't worry, the colors do come back in the sequel. I highly recommend that as well!
January 5, 2025 3:07 PM
Baba Is You
I played Baba Is You for the first time a few years ago with Dan. He's really into The Witness and some people had recommended Baba Is You to him because it's also a fun puzzle game. I think I like puzzle games well enough. Unlike The Witness, I liked that the Baba Is You puzzles were just presented to you. I didn't have to go looking for them. The first several puzzles were easy enough and it was a nice, fun game, but it quickly got pretty hard. At some point, I think it was too much for Dan and he wanted to stop. But I didn't. I started a puzzle and I wanted to solve it.
I ended up buying Baba Is You for my own laptop, and then later I bought it again so I had something to play on my phone during plane rides.
_ _ | \ | \ __,....' \_' \_ .' _`. / _ (_) \ | (_) | ' ; \ / '. _ _____ _ .' / / | | | | \ \ ,,,,,,'_',,'_',,,,,'_',,'_',,,,,
Just a warning that this is incredibly long (well, not as long as the last entry) and there are potential spoilers ahead, but please continue if you want to read about my journey
December 23, 2024 4:20 AM
to make my cup a little emptier
It's 4 a.m., and I'm wide awake. No, I'm not playing Scrabble. I'm just unable to sleep. I just have a lot of thoughts swimming in my head, and I've had a lot of thoughts swimming in my head all year. This would probably be a good time to write in my diary, but let's be honest, these days I can write maybe three sentences on paper before my hand starts to hurt.
<< More Recent Older >>