Roundup - 3 Stooges Syndrome
A good friend rightly pointed out that I’ve been neglecting this blog. So I’m checking in. While I haven’t set any explicit goals I had in my head that I’d try to get about two posts a month out, ideally something personal like this and something more researched and academic like the C2PA post. I’ve been working on another one of those, this time expanding on how I see the possible outcomes of AI adoption on the path we seem to be on. It’s maybe half done and hasn’t moved forward in a couple weeks. I’m feeling the finite nature of time really strongly recently. I’m doing too much at once and so everything goes slow.
Todd at the old job was into formalized knowledge and decision frameworks. He turned me and others onto tools and methods for managing and acting on information like zettelkastens, PARA, and OODA loops. Sara at the old job was a mountain mover and introduced me to the closely related Getting Things Done method. All of which is to say that for years now I’ve been using these tools in an attempt to organize what I know and what I’m doing more effectively. It’s been a little surprising that these tools feel more useful to me now than they were when I was working for the man.
Back then it was so easy to spend the days just reacting to things. The work ebbed and flowed. At high tide people would fill my calendar with meetings. They’d bring me information and I’d share opinions and recommendations. At low-tide I often found myself having trouble moving the things I was interested in forward but then the tide would flow in again. My personal non-work projects moved slowly but I accepted the 40hr a week job as an excuse for that.
Now I don’t have that excuse and I have a bunch of time to execute on whatever I feel like and it’s so easy to mindlessly wander around not doing anything. So I make much more use of my GTD app (I like OmniFocus). I keep a long list of projects I’ve thought about doing. When I find myself not doing much of anything I go in and prioritize the stuff on the backlog. I use recurring tasks to keep track of all the regular chores I’m responsible for. I use due dates and the forecast calendar to plan out how I’ll spend each day. Of course these plans get shredded when the days actually arrive but that’s okay, I’m doing a lot better at actually checking them off than I used to be.
Without the excuse of a career it’s really obvious how much usable time gets eaten by being addicted to scrolling and how little I get back from that.
New Friends
Some kinds of screwing around are a lot higher quality than the scrolling. I impulse purchased this guitar a few weeks ago (hi res photo of the actual guitar courtesy of Sweetwater). It’s a Squier Classic Vibe 50’s Telecaster. I’ve spent a lot of hours playing it in recent weeks and also thinking about and researching modifications (all guitars need at least a few bits of personalization). I replaced the string tree on the headstock with this one one that also pulls the G string down and that improved how that string rings out somewhat. I also put these intonated brass saddles on it. They were too big by 1/64” (I used it as an excuse to buy new calipers) so I had to file them down to get them to fit right. I later ended up putting the stock straight steel ones back on. The new saddles were good and I think they made the guitar produce less strident and more useful sounds but I felt like they killed the magic a little. I simply found myself playing it less. So I put the stock saddles back on and now it’s got this weird, brash unruliness back. I’m still learning this guitar’s paces. It’s a whole other beast than my number 1 with the fast neck and the loud ass humbuckers. Even when I get similar tones out of the new guitar I arrive at them via very different methods than with the other one. Like I said I’m playing a lot and I find myself playing a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have on the other guitar so mission accomplished. Here is some noodling to illustrate the kinds of sounds that come out of this thing.
The other stooges
New music continues to come together slowly. I put a couple days into pushing progress on a track called Aenea, got the bass and guitars almost completely done. All I have to do now is record final vocals and one guitar flourish and then it’s onto mixing. Another track called Betrayer is waiting for the same treatment, it’s all demoed just needs final versions of the guitars and vocals to be tracked. Somewhere along the way I decided to go ahead and make a single release with these two tracks rather than starting to build demos of other tracks with a bigger release in mind. As much as I like listening to a longer chunk of music I just don’t think I have it in me to invest that much energy in a single release right now. Continuous music deployment feels more sustainable emotionally.
Another big chunk of time got eaten up by a coding project I came up with. As detailed in an earlier post, I do a lot of driving during the week along the same routes every day. I don’t use navigation for these because it’s always the same route. Which means if there’s traffic or roadwork causing delays and I should have gone a different way I don’t know about it until I run into the traffic. So I think it’d be helpful to get notified when there’s an issue on my usual route and I need to check for alternates. I made a fair amount of progress, here’s a little demo that shows off the logic and backend infrastructure. The configured route is the one I usually drive, the app tells me the current time for that and the time for the fastest route it can calculate. Next steps will either involve creating a much fancier webapp or making my first mobile app. Maybe I’ll do the latter just for the learning. I think there’s something here that has the possibility to be real useful for me and maybe others. If nothing else it at least fills gaps in the resume and pads it out with new skills. The next time I interview for engineering jobs it’s probably best if I can report that I did something other than fish and play the guitar during my break.
Other Stuff
It’s weird putting family life and parenthood all the way down here because so much of my energy goes into it. There’s just very little I want to say about it in this forum. But I wanted to say it once for the record in case it ever sounds like it’s all projects and books and fish over here.
Something that was completely predictable was that not working has been pretty isolating. Working full remote for 12 years was pretty isolating but at least I spent a bunch of that time talking to people on phones and video calls. As a deeply introverted person I’m probably better equipped to spend a lot of time by myself than most but I have my limits. I’ve also found that being comfortable in social settings is a skill that atrophies if I don’t exercise it. So I went out and starting doing a little volunteering at the SPCA. I’ve done a couple things but of them laundry feels perfect to me. It’s got a bunch of technical details to remember, and it keeps your hands busy, but it’s mechanical enough to let your mind wander. And it’s a 1-person job so while I get to chat with people who come through the laundry room or who need specific things, I don’t have to coordinate with anyone or pass the time with small talk. The ultimate purpose behind starting at the SPCA was to make it possible for my youngest to volunteer there since she’s not old enough to do it on her own. So we’re also going to start taking dog handling opportunities together after we get the training completed.
Last thing I’ll mention since a few people have relayed to me that they’ve considered taking pauses in their careers is money. Taking this time off has helped me understand our finances and how they’ll work in the time after our careers in a way that I never could before. It’s one of those things where you’ll never see the unknown unknowns until you dive in for at least a while. Our monthly net cash flows are a lot different then I expected and really a lot less bad than I expected. I also didn’t appreciate the amount of income generated by our investments and the tax and healthcare implications. In hindsight I could have worked all that out but the way my brain works I have to change variables (like having a job) and see how the system reacts to understand how everything fits together. So I can recommend gaming out being FIRE because you might be surprised at how money works. I saw the suggestion online to try putting all your income in an account you don’t touch and that seems like a smart way to do it if you don’t want to literally quit working to gain this knowledge.
Speaking of healthcare, for anyone who wants actual numbers on the much discussed ACA changes: The premiums for our ACA plan are going up 20% in 2026, up to ~$1700/month. We’re going to start receiving advanced tax credits that help reduce the bite somewhat. Our total income is low enough that we’re not impacted by the subsidies expiring. Assuming I take a new job next year and the extended subsidies are allowed to lapse we will almost certainly have to pay those credits back which will suck but that would be eclipsed by the additional income. We continue to be pretty impacted by losing the coverage for out of network care that our old employer plan provided despite getting a plan from a big well known company with a relatively large network. In 2026 our market doesn’t include a single PPO, only EPOs, the E is for exclusive and it means no co-insurance for out of network care. Relative to our old plan we pay more out of pocket on copays and prescriptions.
I did a little math this morning and for a family of 4 with an annual income just getting them over the line where they lose the extended subsidies the premiums on our plan would end up being something like 16% of their adjusted gross income, nearly double what they paid in 2025 with the extended subsidies (capped at 8.5%). I just looked at the premiums I paid this year for my old employer plan. $571 pretax. About 5% of AGI for our hypothetical just over 4x FPL family. For much better benefits. That’s a system pretty wildly biased against financial independence no?