Tag Archives: Minneapolis

Hiatus / Status Report

Apologies to all for being remiss in updates to my blog. Over the last 3 months we sold our house of 17 years, and I took a job in downtown Minneapolis (formerly Spectrum Design Services). We should be closing on a house soon, but for the time being we are homeless (but not indigent) and imposing on relatives.

This presents a number of challenges to the available time to do projects / investigations and document said projects / investigations. First the demands of starting a new job, cleaning / fixing a house to sell and tortured commutes (with each of us spending the weeks living in different states) leaves me little spare time. Second, the limitations imposed by being homeless provide limited maintainable workspace for projects.  Thirdly, the cumulative stress of changing so much of your life is exhausting.  Lastly, when our house closes and we move in there will be a whole new set of things that will necessarily consume said spare time.

But it is all good. The job provides complexity and challenges and opportunities to really build the mental muscles. Boredom can kill you just as effectively as a heart attack – it just takes a lot longer (and it is a lot more tortured). The house is new, with a backyard over a wooded ravine with a creek running through it, and it is in River Falls – a really nice country/college town just beyond the sprawling metropolis of the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area.

So to re-iterate, it has been a while since I posted something interesting to the blog. I also anticipate that it will be a while (going forward) before I have additional posts. However I have been considering some different topics when I get back. Perhaps something on some hardware hacking – Arduino, Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard Black – the challenge there is to find an interesting topic that hasn’t been done a multitude of times. If I can find a topic that I find interesting and has not been beaten to death, that will be on the list. Another topic is to look at some other programming development options on the Chromebook. Part of me is really curious if/how well PyCharm CE runs under Crouton. I also never got around to doing a Dart test project. Then I think i need to get back and refresh my Android Systems Engineering work – which are getting very stale.

In any case – this blog has not be abandoned, just neglected. I will be back.