Les Orchard @lmorchard@hackers.town

Someday, I'm going to have to beg some folks to read this story I'm writing and tell me whether I'm high on bullshit

Just wrote the phrase "fulsome fretting" in my journal and it doesn't get any better than that. (It probably should though)

Like, I've been a lifer & a booster of most things Mozilla for an existentially significant span. And very soon... I'll be out. Not a ragequit as such, more a need for change.

Which is funny because a past version of me was befuddled whenever someone said they were leaving because they needed a change, but now I get it.

I don't know why, but I feel kind of cagey tooting or tweeting much about this. But also I feel like I should write a mclargehuge blog post about how & where I spent like 1/2 my professional career

Well, it's drifting toward less & less of a secret, especially as I filled in my team at standup today:

I'm leaving Mozilla at the end of next week after 13 years and 9 months.

Then a few weeks of attempting not to think too hard about computers before the next thing.

I have anxiety about a lot of topics and doings. Sometimes my adaptive strategy is to position a bunch of pieces ahead of time and set them to inevitably spring on me all trap-like such that I can't not take care of the thing at some near-future point - but not right now.

(I guess that's why I like things like mastodon and birdsite, because I can barf something out and then run away into the woods and just come back and check what the response was later)

I feel like a social weirdo, but there's a message I want to send to some folks in slack but I noticed you can schedule the delivery and I kind of want to delay it until tomorrow yet still have taken care of sending it. Sending a message and scuttling into a hidey hole seems like as much socialization as I'm capable of sometimes

Just came across someone DJ'ing on Twitch with two handcranked gramophones. Sometimes I love the internet

https://twitch.tv/windowstosky

FWIW, these folks are pretty keen so far

https://www.twitch.tv/djstarrnoir

Dang it. I just fell down a rabbit hole of live DJs on twitch playing goth & synthpop & witch house and I really need to go to bed

So I've been working on a scifi story for a few weeks now and I wrote this bit on my phone while exercising. It might be too much, but it made me giggle

When someone says "keep in touch", I never quite know how to do that.

Rain? In Portland? Huh. Kind of a low effort forecast there google

Survived the first workday of 2022

I was just congratulated by my new-ish-to-me boss for having survived nearly all of the first day back from holiday PTO, which was surprisingly nice to hear

The thing to know - and this is partly why I love Tempest - is that a vector monitor paints in random / arbitrary lines and directions. This, as opposed to a more common raster CRT that builds up a pixelated frame line by line marching down the tube.

Atari Tempest and it's Quadrascan Vector CRT Monitor filmed at 50,000 FPS. If you've never seen how the electron gun in a vector monitor works, this explains it. This is so, so extremely my kind of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVpYL44jUQ

Like, I've always had Some Project going, whether I eventually finished it or not. Probably going all the way back to when I was 8 years old and first started programming around Christmas 1983.

This is the second span of extended PTO where I've found that I haven't written any code. Had a 2 week break in the summer where I didn't program anything either.

Almost every other span of time off in my life, I've coded. This year's been different. Not sure how I feel about it