I’m rounding out a stint of travel to Serbia, Germany, the UK and am now back in the states. It has been a wonderful experience, even if I am ready for a bit of quiet at home for a while.

One thing that strikes me as I travel to these foreign destinations and meet new people and experience new things: work stays the same.

This is the effect of spending a large percentage of time in front of a screen. No matter what the surrounding environment, with a wifi connection, a laptop and possibly a VPN, I can access the exact same setup as anywhere else. No surprise to most people, why should work ever change for an internet worker?

Despite my love of words, I have never actually picked up another language. I have “studied” both French and Japanese in school for multiple years, but neither of those stuck past a few phrases and vague recognition. While the courses are often emphasized in education, actual long term proficiency (or really long term practice) is never a priority. Thus, American kids don’t normally speak two languages unless a second one is learned at home.

I have been working on a new mode of connecting with others in the engineering community. It’s been a slog to get people to try it out and use it regularly, but I totally get it. I have so many modes of communication these days:

• Email (multiple email addresses)
• Text (multiple phone numbers)
• gChat (tied to multiple email addresses)
• Slack (multiple “rooms”)
• Twitter DM (multiple Twitter accounts)
• Facebook messenger
• Skype
• LinkedIn messages
• IRC
• Forums (I run one of my own, though I hardly have time to visit it)
• SupplyFX (the new site I’m working on)

It really feels like a popularity contest. Any platform is only as good as the one with all the important people on it. This is called a “network effect“. Getting to that point is the hard part. Convincing enough people that it is worthwhile to spend time in one platform vs another.

I’ve been playing drums since I was 8 years old; sooner than that if you count pots and pans. But if I look at reality, I haven’t been playing drums for a couple years now and finally decided it’s time to pass them on to another person. Well. Sell them.

The drumset itself was nice enough and I played the hell out of it many times. I even used it to record a few songs with my college band and played some fun gigs. I’m not really sad about getting rid of this set of drums. It’s that I know I’m not going to buy another set for a long time. Maybe ever. So it ultimately feels like an identity issue. I used to be a drummer. Now I’m a former drummer. It’s interesting to think about when that transition actually happens.

Logolepsy

One thing that I always loved on The Amp Hour was coming up with alliterative titles for the episodes (my favorite word is still “ostrobogulous“, used for episode 162). After roughly 150 occasions of naming shows like this and realizing the increasing amount of time it takes to come up with each one, I decided to move away from the practice and simplify. However, this instilled a fascination with odd words (see also: Logolepsy). There are even a few words that I “invented”, usually by combining latin bases I could figure out, smashing together entire words or by changing the case of a word.

One large change in my transition from a desk-based engineer to a “product manager helping desk-based engineers” (and part time basement-based engineer) is the sharp increase in travel. I am writing this post from a hotel room, as I likely will others in the future.

Travel has been a blessing. I get to meet more people in person, make deeper connections with those I have met online and see parts of the world that are drastically different than my basement.

I thought the thing I wanted more than anything else was to work alone. By myself. With myself. For myself.

Quit my job. Strike out on my own.

Sure, no job actually exists in a vacuum. The basis of commerce is one entity paying another, which sets up a power structure. So I assumed I would be working for my customers. That continues to be a very rewarding part of Contextual Electronics (CE). Hearing about the problems they’re having and working to solve those problems tickles my teaching nerve and my engineering nerve (the one the rewards me when I solve problems).

Part of this site used to be public, but is now hidden; it’s a list of goals that I have for myself over the long term.

I went and looked at it recently and realized I have achieved 3 out of 5 in one manner or another, but probably not to the extent that I initially imagined achieving the goal. For example, one goal was “have a music studio in my house”. Recording equipment is super easy and cheap these days and I have it for all my music instruments…does that count? I dunno. I say yes.

What is it about books? They still hold a place of magic in our society and to me.

I have had a few opportunities to write a book or two now, at least the offer to begin writing one or talk about writing one. I have passed on all of them so far. Not because I don’t want to. I actually would quite enjoy it. However, talking to all the people I know who have written (technical) books have told me two things:

This is a cross-post from the Contextual Electronics blog, as it affects readers here and there

TL; DR: I am releasing all of the KiCad videos that were part of Contextual Electronics to the public and have started a new site/forum to support them. See below for announcement video.

I officially finished the first two sessions (1A & 1B) of Contextual Electronics in early June. It was a great experience, especially for a first time course, especially one where there was money involved and I was the IT guy on the project. It wasn’t a super smooth build, but that kind of added to the project; we were all “in it together”. At the very least, I can very confidently say I don’t regret quitting my job to teach electronics; it has been rewarding and an eye opening experience.