I have been writing in a blog for some fifteen years; nine years on a Blogger blog which is still out there, but static, and six years on this blog. I’ve touched on a lot of subjects over that period of time, some of the subjects being quite controversial. The most controversial occurred back when The SCO Group where desperately trying to sue IBM over Linux. I was wasting considerable time posting on TSG’s stock forum over on Yahoo. I’d never seen any of the other posters IRL, but I wrote a critical post on the Blogger blog about some of them and the way they were behaving. Needless to say that stirred up another shit storm on the forum, with one of the posters demanding I take my post down. I never did, and after all this time I’ve forgotten the name of the post and everyone involved. All that remains is the realization of how truly pointless the whole exercise was.

A reason for writing a blog in those early days was all the “fame and glory” I accrued with my postings about Open Suse Linux. Back in those days I ran Suse on everything I had, and even on a number of my work machines. Back when I worked for SPARTA (a now defunct aerospace consulting company) I had SPART purchase me a Gateway notebook, and I installed Suse on it, and did all of my development work on it. Everything was good, until one day it wasn’t. I then started to dabble in Ubuntu, and then tried Fedora, but eventually wound up on Ubuntu pretty much (and now Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi). At one point I even wound up being tracked by Alexa, and what an endorphin rush that was. But it didn’t last long, and I got bored looking at my numbers, especially as they got worse and worse.

Another reason for writing is because you have Something Important To Say. So you write it, post it, and then – crickets. Again, that didn’t last long.

Another reason is for catharsis. I went through a lot of that when Trump was elected, and if you go searching you’ll see a lot of posts from around the 2016 election and then the 2017 swearing in of the current president. I tried to be funny, and I wasn’t. I tried to be clever, and again I wasn’t. I was just mad and depressed and when I realized my posting on the subject wasn’t doing a damn bit of good, I gave that up. I then went into a shell and pretended the orange buffoon in the White House didn’t exist.

I publish now because I’ve lost all fear of writing and because of the subject line in the title: I like to talk about computers, cats, and cameras, though not necessarily in that order, and not just limited to those three subjects. I try to stay away from editorializing since I suck so bad at it, but sooner or later I wind up doing it in spite of the harsh lessons learned in the past. So I do it to get it out of my system, and then leave it here. Who important is going to read it?

And sometimes I publish because the ideas build up until they come rushing out in a flood of words. Look at my blog and you’ll see long stretches of nothing, punctuated with many postings in a single day. Today for example this is my fourth post. The first two were about the Raspberry Pi, the next about my comfortable broken-in moccasins, and now this little piece. The ideas seem to just lie inside my head, fermenting, until they’r ready to be sampled like some cheap wine. And then they come out, the literary equivalent of one of my Ginger’s hairballs.

I am going to be publishing more about the Raspberry Pi. Really, I am. Yes, you’ve read that here before, but trust me, this time I mean it. I may considered the latest Raspberry Pi 4 flawed, perhaps fatally so, but it’s a new machine with some interesting possibilities, and well, I’ve got some skin in the game as it were with my purchase of the 1GB version and now some new cases to help keep the operating temperature down. I’m getting back into my older Adafruit hardware, and the micro:bit has somehow stimulated some interesting ideas as well. There is something magical about programming a microprocessor directly in MicroPython (or Circuit Python if you’ve got some of the Adafruit boards).

I’m going to write a book. There, I said it. And it’s going to be a first person account of working with the Raspberry Pi, with real use cases as they say in engineering and what happens when designs incorporating the Raspberry Pi make contact with the real world. This is Florida, with its high heat and high humidity, where running cool is a real asset, and the Raspberry Pi 4 is nowhere near to running cool. Getting that little guy out into the real world is going to be interesting.

Finally, I really do need to step up and start writing about the horror in the White House. And can barely stand to say or write his name, but his actions are causing great harm, to America and the world. I’m heading into retirement Real Soon Now. Many try to leave the world behind, with all its problems, but today’s problems refuse to be left behind. So I see my blog and my writing as a tool to do something positive in this world besides moving to a retirement community (otherwise known as a waiting room for Death), snug in my little retirement home, doing little retirement activities, as my neighbors slowly die off, one by one, to be replaced by new strangers.

No, I won’t go gentle into that good night. I’m going to do my best to fight every step of the way, and I’m going to write about those adventures here as well as about cameras, computers, and cats.

For those who follow me, I hope to make it worth your while.

You’re looking at a pair of Hideaway moccasins that were purchased somewhere in the dim mists of time, at least five years ago. My wife purchased them for me through one of her on-line sale sites (not Amazon). As soon as I put them on I immediately wanted to wear them just about everywhere. When they were in better, newer, shape I would use them to take the girls out for short walks. As they got older I kept them indoors, preferring to slip into them at night before I finally went to bed.

It was thus with great annoyance when the seam on the left shoe unraveled and the right top half lifted away from the shoe proper. I wore it that way, curling my left foot, toes down, to keep from losing the shoe as I walked around the house. I finally asked my wife, who’s quite an accomplished seamstress[1], if she could somehow find a way to sew it back together. Within 30 minutes she’d found the right needle (some big, curved, dangerous looking needle like you’d use to fish for Great Whites) and the right type of thread to sew it all back up. When I put it up it fit perfectly, which is to say, just like it had before the original threading broke.

I have to take a moment and say just how good my wife is at tailoring interesting and very well-made clothing. She has multiple machines, from the simplest to a complex behemoth called a Viking, and a weird little machine with four spindles called a serger. She owns multiple sewing machines the way I own multiple cameras. But she’s not afraid to work directly with her hands. When the machines won’t quite do what she wants, she finishes the work by hand; there’s no way I can tell the difference, it’s all excellent. Granted, it didn’t take much to stitch the shoes back together. But still, I stand in awe of my wife’s creative sewing abilities. What’s more significant, and saddening, is my wife is practicing both skills and a high level of competency that is disappearing from this society. Her clothing that she makes for herself (and lately for me) is better quality by far than anything I can get at any of the big box stores or on-line.

Which brings me to my final thought. I could have easily just thrown those shoes away and bought new ones. But I didn’t. There’s nothing wrong with them that a little time and materials couldn’t fix. And there’s the little bit more I would have added to humanity’s near-infinite garbage dump, which buying new shoes that have their own carbon footprint in manufacturing and shipping. My desire to fix rather than replace has been growing over time. I’ll fix it if I can, and if I can’t, I’ll take it to someone who can. Even my Apple hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth. And we know how notorious Apple is about building devices that are nearly impossible to repair. And yet, if the screen gets cracked or the battery eventually dies, I’ll take it in and have it replaced rather than buy a new iDevice.

You could say that my desire to fix rather than replace is part of my heading into retirement, and you’d be right. I won’t be able to afford to just drop wads of cash when the mood strikes. But there is something even more fundamental going on. I feel responsible (I am responsible) for adding to, and to continue to add to, the carbon and plastic and other junk that is slowly choking the life out of all life on Earth. You have to start somewhere to cut that back, and this is one of the many ways I’m trying to make up for the oblivious destruction of the Earth I’ve participated in over my many decades of life.

[1] Except now they call that person a sewest. Whatever.

[2] Why didn’t somebody tell me that moccasins is only spelt with one ‘s’?