Photography. For a long time I wasn't really progressing with it, I even had a long period where I carried a mirrorless everywhere I went but didn't really take any pictures.

About two years back I was feeling with bored looked out the window of my office and looked at the sports complex and thought that would be an answer, it turned out to be a real adventure getting good at that, last summer I also discovered a brandable approach to landscape and architectural photography.

A year ago I went to an indoor track meet and got 1000 images but none usable mainly because a collegiate track meet is like a three ring circus but rather it's the other way around, I couldn't find good locations.

I volunteered for a local organization that put on a really intimate meet where I could find good locations, I was warned that I probably wouldn't be able to "get pictures of people running" because of poor light conditions but I wasn't intimidated at all because... I shoot basketball. Faced with the need to cull and process 2000 images I figured out how to use a game controller so I could sit back and scan through photos quickly in Lightroom. I got this

https://www.yogile.com/february-flash-dash-2025#21t

I did another shoot for them last weekend which will turn out quite different, not least that I discovered a few places that have really meaningful backgrounds, not just piles of unused track equipment or trash can arrays. It was gratifying that some of the people pictured there told me they were happy with how they came out.

And an important thing I did was make a list of things I would not do, as I tend to get distracted trying to do too many activities and I do not want to fall down rabbit holes.

Helping the homeless. One night a week is a multi-church organization featuring clothing, blankets, etc downtown. The other night is a secular support group, similar activity.

We also have a former homeless person take care of our property, and he is quite amazing and we actually trust him way more than random people with jobs. We gave him our old van, and fund his Starbucks gift card. He does amazing work. Helping him to improve his living situation always gives us a nice feeling. But the connection of talking to him, helping him, it is very rewarding.

Developing a youth chess team in the city.

Trying to get to a master-level chess rating.

I’d like to find a local person to teach math/calculus/physics to but want to avoid the schools as they have a higher level of required paperwork that I do not want to put up with.

Making pizzas, trying to perfect artesian pizzas for personal consumption. I also started making Salsa, and that is really fun.

R/Julia programming, right now writing financial analysis software for fun.

I’m retired but am getting back into reading technical papers on machine learning.

Re-did the electrical outlets in two houses with more modern Leviton Decora plates. (That is a lot of work)

Became a patron ($25/mo) for a local Makerspace and may get involved with 3-D printing.

Visiting the gym, trying to get below a target weight threshold.

I've been trying to get a more foundational knowledge in areas that interest me, namely spaceflight and paleontology. For a long time now I've been casually interested in both, keeping an eye on major new developments and watching YouTube videos from time to time, but I never felt like I could really put the things I was learning into context.

It's been a while since school so progress is slow as I'm having to relearn how to actively learn, but it's already been super rewarding. I've been making my way through a couple textbooks and have signed up for a course online. Even just memorizing the geologic time scale has made pop paleontology videos feel less like disconnected factoids, like I'm actually building a knowledge base.

I've also decided to condense various web-related projects into one big full stack project with its own protocol, client, server, dns and so on. Basically my idea of what the world wide web should be. I get easily distracted and have multiple web servers, templating engines and so on littered in my wake from when I run into something I don't like and want to do it better.

I know I'll probably never finish it, and even if I do it probably won't be very good. But it makes it a lot easier to stay focused on other projects when they hit a roadblock, since instead of being tempted to remake whatever is causing the problem from scratch I can just make a note for how I think it should be done in my little stack when I get to it.

Plus, yknow, it's fun.

Dancing. Roughly once a month I go to some small festival nearby, mostly live music - either oldschool swing, or blues and dance my hear out. These are not too big, like between 200 and 500 people? And I am mostly recognizing the core 100 by their faces, and more and more of them are genuine friends.

Took me around a year or two of several hours a week in courses to become comfortably intermediate in my dancing skills, and from that point onwards, it is mostly just fun!

Travel for vacations - my wife and I heavily downsized our fixed expenses between 2020-2022 and my youngest (step)son graduated high school. I started working remotely and I was able to “retire my wife” when she was 44 and I was 46 in 2020. We are knocking places off our bucket list 8-12 trips a year (nothing fancy or extravagant, extended weekend trips mostly)

Travel to see and with friends and family - my friends and family are mostly in the city where I grew up or the city where I moved to after I graduated and lived until a couple of years ago. I spend a fair amount of time in both cuties

Exercise - I wouldn’t call it “fun”. But it is necessary to stay in shape at 50.

Learn Spanish - we are thinking about establishing residency in either Costa Rica or Panama eventually.

Balance - I shut my computer down and don’t think about work or anything else computer related when it’s time to clock out. It’s “fun” not to worry about keeping up or getting ahead outside of office hours.

We moved to the “tourist capital of the US” and we will eventually start doing things locally.

I somehow keep falling into rabbit-hole projects that are deeply heretical in nature.

I've attempted a video game reverse-engineering/decompilation project and somehow ended up with a Ghidra extension that can export relocatable object files from a program selection. In other words, I can tear out pieces of a program and reuse them inside new programs willy-nilly, like how a mechanic can rip out parts from a car scrapyard and build Mad Max-style contraptions out of them. I've documented some of my achievements with that stuff on my blog, like making a native port of a proprietary Linux program to Windows without decompiling it or having access to its source code. These acts seem to give the vast majority of software developers a huge migraine, probably because they are impossible according to CS 101.

As a side-note, I've also managed to successfully perform a version tracking session with Ghidra from a source binary that doesn't exist, but that's a lesser sin in my opinion.

Lately, I wanted to get rid of a vintage network card in an old APC UPS and that somehow resulted in me attempting to stick a competitor's card in there. Not only that, but to do it in the most roundabout way possible: write a USB HID stack so that I can create a virtual power device, then write acquisitors that can get data from a UPS and puppeteer the virtual one and then write projectors to whatever communication protocol the card uses. It's a project that is still very early in development so I currently have nothing to show for it but a work-in-progress homegrown USB HID library.

It even seeps through in my professional work, because I'm the person that is air-dropped across teams onto a problem when everything else has failed. The magic words usually include "we need your dark magic" or "we're out of options" or "there's no one else to escalate to". Most of the time it's for debugging an elusive issue, but I've also built in a hurry contraptions that defy conventional software engineering but are somehow perfectly fit for purpose.

family: (wife and dog)

networking: I created a community/newsletter of 7600+ dev/tech people and I'm going to conferences around Italy meeting friends I made thru it

lego: because it's lego (and I was not able to afford it when I was a kid)

Child rearing! Nothing better than to slowly introduce a new witness to the miracle of existence all around us.

Playing Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Podcasts