As the owner of an ADHD brain, one of the biggest challenges I face is balancing the need to build routines in order to be productive with the need for new and novel mental stimulation. You see, I know that I need to build routines. I also know that maintaining routines in the face of constant distraction is hard. And, to be honest, I find that conflict somewhat interesting. How it All Began Back well before I realized that I may have ADHD and before I sought out validation of that suspicion I recognized that about once a year, usually around February, I would become highly dissatisfied with my work environment and end up changing jobs. I initially attributed this to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). SAD, of course, is the seasonal depression that supposedly comes from the lack of sunshine during the winter months. Given that during January and February of each year I usually went to work in the dark, worked inside a building with no natural light, and then drove home in the dark, that certainly seemed a reasonable conclusion. That conclusion was further supported when I took a job that had me driving around town all day, going in and out of buildings, to service computers. During that time I didn’t seem to be affected by the depression in the same way. ...

I write every day. Most days I need to lookup information so that I am providing support for my writing. To assure the reader that I’m not just making stuff up, I like to provide references for my comments. I am, after all, an academic and, as such, it is incumbent on me to provide accurate, valid information. References provide evidence of validity. Way back in the day doing a digital search required some fairly advanced skills in building a search query that would give you the results you needed. Today, thanks to advanced search engines like Google, even a sloppy, half defined search prompt will give you the results you’re looking for. The challenge, though, is determining whether the results are truly valid. That is, the search engine delivers links to websites and other resources that answer the question, but it is often not clear whether those resources are trustworthy. They could be bullshit. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a lot of that online. ...

There have been a lot of discussions recently about how tipping the US has gotten out of control. Everyone, it seems, wants to be tipped for doing their jobs. Go to the local doughnut shop, walk up to the counter, order two donuts and a cup of coffee and there is a) a tip jar on the counter and b) a tip line on the credit card reader. Sorry? You want a tip for literally putting two donuts in a bag and filling a cup with coffee? I think not! The same is true at many fast food joints. ...

A question I have to ask myself sometimes is why I write if I know no one is reading my work. And that’s a valid question, I think. The answer is actually pretty simple: I write for myself. I write to clarify my thinking. I write with the notion that something I write might find its way to a reader who needs the information or perspective I’m providing. I write to document my thinking at this moment in time, knowing that at some future date my thinking will evolve in new directions, just as my current thinking evolved from, and in some cases diverged from, my earlier thinking. I write because I want to and, to some extent, need to. ...

Where Do I Get My Writing Ideas? About a year ago I set out to start a Youtube channel. One of the challenges I faced then was conjuring up ideas to present on the channel. At first it seemed fairly simple but the more I started thinking about it, the more challenging it became and very soon I felt like I had no more ideas to address. Well, that’s not quite true. I had ideas but they weren’t fully formed and often didn’t fit into what I perceived to be my ’niche’. You see, I started out wanting to write about my experiences in retirement, but I realized a few months in that I didn’t do anything that seemed worthy of sharing. ...

The Downside of Homelabbing and Home Automation I love learning about home labbing and home automation. I’ve been homelabbing now for about 10 years. My fascination with home automation goes back even further to the late 1990s when I first ran across the X-10 technologies. Today you read and hear almost nothing about X-10, even though it is apparently still around.1 I didn’t do well with X-10 and at the time didn’t really have a lot of opportunities or money to play with the technology. More recently, though, I’ve gotten more into the home automation space. I’m by no means an expert: I just like to tinker. But as I’ve automated more and more of my home – lights, HVAC, garage door, etc – I’ve also begun to see a downside with all of this. I’ll get to that in a moment. ...

The Importance of Soft Skills and the Ignorance of Legislators There is a fairly significant body of research that shows that people who have strong “soft skills” are more likely to be successful in the workplace. Despite this evidence, too many lawmakers think that by doing away with the courses that actually teach soft skills (or create the conditions in which they can be developed) better prepares the student for success. That’s just plain hogwash and shows, in my mind, how poorly educated and simple minded these people are. Perhaps if they had paid attention in those courses they’d have a better understanding of the value of those courses. ...

My OpenBSD Experiment is Over Well, this is a day that I really wasn’t quite expecting. I had high hopes that I would be able to use OpenBSD for quite a while before moving on to another OS but, alas, that was not to be. I am writing this on Linux Mint, having returned to that after my experiment. To say that I’m a bit sad about this state of affairs is an understatement. ...

Book Review: Explaining AuDHD by Kurram Sadiq As I mentioned in an earlier post (/posts/am-i-on-the-spectrum/) there are some hints that I may have some degree of autism. This is centered mostly around social skills and a preference to avoid meeting people. At the same time I have been diagnosed with ADHD though I supposedly have developed appropriate compensatory mechanisms (though I’m not so sure!) Anyway, When I saw this book that discusses the co-incidence of autism with ADHD I was intrigued. I had not seen any other discussion of this combination before. That said, once I started looking, I discovered several books on the topic. ...

Ah the Fun of Growing Older Note, first, that I did NOT say “growing old”, I said “growing older”. I draw that distinction because I do not feel old. I’m in my mid 60s and feel physically and mentally much younger. I’m not sure who that old man in the mirror is (though he looks a bit too much like my grandfather!) But growing older is just part of living and is something that we all do, no matter what age we are. What prompted this short post, though, is that I recently found a growth on my left shoulder that turned out to be basal cell carcinoma. The “good” part of that is that basal cell is usually not a big issue. It does not pose any particular threat as it rarely, if ever, metastasizes to other areas and doesn’t generally lead to death. It’s easily treated by removal. And, once removed, is unlikely to recur – at least in that area. ...