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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • So many things!

    We moved to a new house a couple of years ago and I mapped out the whole property, put it into LibreCAD, designed the space, and have been planting/building it since then. I now have thousands of plants, over 1000 unique types, and a vegetable garden in our 1/3 acre lot. I’m very proud of it, but don’t really know how to best share it with the world (or if anyone cares).

    I also have a web site that I’ve been building forever, lots of little programs, things like my irrigation system built from a Raspberry Pi, my homelab, all of the plants that I start from seed in the spring for the garden (thousands under grow lights with heated mats), the hydroponic system… I’m sure there’s more.


  • I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

    First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

    Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

    I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.







  • When I went to college I had saved every penny that I made. I went to a community college for two years under an earned scholarship and worked during that time; then I transferred into a four-year institution that required three years of classes. I paid for the first two years with my savings and part of the third year with a loan. I continued on to grad school and took research/teaching assistantships to provide a salary that covered housing, but received free tuition as part of the deal.

    My first semester at the four-year school was way harder than anything I was used to. At community college I had coasted along, but this required effort. Paying for it myself out my bank account made it so much more real, and I decided then that I was going to do better because I sure as heck didn’t work so hard all those years just to throw it away.

    We paid for most of our millenial child’s college. He ended up dropping out of college a couple of times and always spent too much money. He’s now married with a wife and child, and together they make more money than my wife and I did combined up until a few years ago. They’re still living paycheck-to-paycheck but have to buy every new gadget.

    Our two Gen-Z daughters just went off to college. They will probably graduate, but they also don’t understand the value of money. They didn’t want to work, didn’t want to save… They get a scholarship that pays a monthly stipend, and they burn through that as it comes in. Their college decisions were based on things like “is that campus pretty?” “is their cafeteria food really good?” regardless of the cost. They refused to do community college.

    What’s my take? These three kids have a sense of entitlement and a need for immediate gratification that I didn’t really see in my generation. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the result of bad parenting (we adopted the two younger ones as teens), and I see it with co-workers’ children as well.

    Does that mean that every Millenial or Gen-Z is like this? No. It just means these three definitely are. But they don’t get much pity from me when they complain and it was the result of bad choices. I chose my college path based on value: scholastic and economic. They chose their path based on social and sensory reasons.







  • I was a manager, and another guy was a more senior manager in another division. We both did IT. For some reason he didn’t like me and/or was trying to get our services moved to him, so he went to our director every week for over a year to tell him made-up stories about me.

    He eventually left after a lot of people realized he was a highly manipulative, but I still hear things that he told people as part of an explanation about why I was passed up “for this” or why I wasn’t right “for that.” It cost me a lot of raises, especially in cases where things were gossiped to other people and the source was lost. Now I’m only a manager in title, but my management responsibilities were taken away.

    Unfortunately, I’m caught in a ticking trap – another 1.5 years and I retire with a full pension for the rest of my life. Losing that by leaving isn’t worth it (assuming I live long enough afterwards).


  • I had this too, but mine went further. Eventually became burning, terrible pain down my arm – worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I spent six weeks on steroids, oxycodone, and gabapentin until I could finally get steroid injections directly into my spine.

    Be careful, and get checked out for cervical spinal stenosis. You might be able to do some proactive stuff at this point.

    Now my neck always hurts, I can’t feel my fingertips (especially on the right hand), and my right forearm sometimes feels like it’s on fire.