JF.org Blog

10/9/2026 - Astronautics

2026-10-09T00:00:00Z

As I write this, I'm watching NASA's coverage of the Crew Dragon 12 splashdown. Like with every one of these, they're basically going back over things like the reentry-plasma-caused comms blackout, G-forces, and so on.

Like a lot of kids, I wanted to be an astronaut. (Let's be honest here: I still do.) Except now that I'm pushing 50 it's well out of reach for me at this point, unless I win the lottery and blow a good chunk of change on space tourism. But even that wouldn't be a good idea thanks to the fact that I ain't put together quite right. I've noticed over the years that on roller coasters where I get a good bit of negative Gs at the top of a hill, I get the occasional fire-burp. Spending any amount of time in microgravity would definitely have me hurting on a regular basis.

So every once in a while I get to live vicariously through the people who are physically able to spend time on orbit, and are also quite a bit smarter than me. It's a shame that the things we thought we'd be getting Any Time Now as far back as the mid-60s, like a spin-gravity space-station-slash-hotel with regular trips to and from the surface, never materialized and probably won't in the remainder of my lifetime. Guess I'll have to make do with Youtube and remembering to look up from time to time.

9/25/2026 - Dredging up a memory

2026-09-25T00:00:00Z

This one came up for some reason while I was shooting the breeze with some of my Pokemon-player friends over the weekend, and I don't appear to have written about it at the time. So here we go: Something new from... *checks notes*... 2002 or so.

At the time I still had the Civic. It was a nice enough car. Manual transmission, red line at something like 6500 rpm, and it had a large engine... by motorcycle standards. Just shy of 1500 cc if I remember right.

One of my college friends lived in Little Washington -- Washington, PA, about where I-70 crosses I-79. I'd drive out that way every few weeks for poker night. Sure, I stunk at poker, but it was really just an excuse to hang out and have a few beers anyway.

To get from where I lived in Pittsburgh out to Washington, I'd find my way downtown and get on the Fort Pitt Bridge heading toward Mt. Washington. (Coming the other direction, this is the shot they use on Monday Night Football, where you exit the Ft. Pitt Tunnel and the Pittsburgh skyline opens up in front of you. Heading out of town you're on the bottom deck of the bridge, and you're just staring at the tunnel entrance anyway.) Once you're through the tunnel you make a right bend and head up the hill toward Greentree.

Now, with the tiny engine and the manual transmission, there was really only one good way to drive the Civic: By flooring it. And since this drive to poker night was on the expressway there was no reason not to do just that. So I'd pop out of the tunnel already in the left lane, make the curve, and head up the hill at about 70.

Those suburbs south and west of town were where a lot of doctors with UPMC, Allegheny and one or two more I'm probably forgetting, tended to live. So while I was zipping out to the boonies to drink beer and play cards in my little wind-up car, I'd be passing BMWs and Mercedes that were just tooling along up the hill.

I knew then that cars were status symbols but every time I'd blow past a car that cost so much for a supposedly-superior driving experience, with a motor that had more torque than a cordless drill, I couldn't help but think: Why would you pay that much for a car and not drive it? Sure, buy your expensive car to show off but at least use it for what it was meant to do. It always felt to me like buying a racehorse and then taking it for a leisurely walk every now and again.

I still feel the same nowadays, although now my car sounds like a golf cart when I spool it up instead of a weedwhacker with roid rage. And I drive a hatchback that nobody expects anything from.

So I guess the moral of the story is... if you're going to be boring on the road, drive a boring car? Sure, why not.

9/2/2026 - Just crumbling into dust

2026-09-02T00:00:00Z

I took some psychic damage the other day, and decided to share it. As you do.

Shannon (■■■-■■■-■■■■)

August 18, 2026

Got a song stuck in my head and came to a horrible realization.

Rockstar came out in 2006.

Nickelback is classic rock.

Pardon me while I jump off a cliff

(insert Michael Scott noooooo gif)

You're welcome.

Edit, Sep 2, 8:33 PM: Had to fix the year. I had to check, but I did get it right in the original text message.

8/10/2026 - 996 à faire

2026-08-10T00:00:00Z

« Apparemment, je suis masochiste. »

7/15/2026 - Changing things up

2026-07-15T00:00:00Z

The last couple years at Transcor, I became what they referred to as a Project Engineer. Basically, I was still slinging code, but also doing all the project management stuff with the exception of client relations -- the client care team still took care of that.

I thought I wouldn't like that, but I was wrong. I'm sure it was at least partially because I was able to make decisions that affected my work directly instead of waiting for marching orders, but it all worked out pretty smoothly. And now that I'm thinking I'm kind of done with coding for money, the project management aspects are what I'm looking to do with my career going forward.

There are actually a lot of remote jobs out there that are available for that, but I'm not always a great fit for them. Mostly a matter of not having a PMP certificate, so hopefully I can lean on my newfound experience there instead.

There are also people doing interesting things that I let myself waste a few brain cycles on from time to time. A friend of mine is really into a genre called LitRPG, which is a nice blend of fantasy, sci-fi, and computer nerdery. One of their favorite series is called Primal Hunter, by a guy using the pen name Zogarth. His Patreon brings in something like $80,000 per month. Yeah, yeah, that's before taxes, but at a conservative estimate he's netting close to half a million a year, just from that source. Factor in book, ebook and audiobook sales, and dude is definitely doing all right for himself.

Every time I hear or see that stat there's a brief moment where I think, damn I am in the wrong line of work. Then I remember my one attempt many years ago at writing science fiction, and about how often I can put finger to keyboard here. And it may be true that I'm in the wrong line of work, but I don't think LitRPG Author is the right one.

Back to the job boards, I guess.

6/1/2026 - 999 to go

2026-06-01T00:00:00Z

"Welp."

5/11/2026 - Making plans

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

I checked out a few of my programming toys the other day, to see how I feel about them.

The COVID-19 widget strikes me as unnecessary: It does the same thing as the Eternal September widget, it just starts adding on March 1, 2020 instead of September 1, 1993. So it's really just a lesser copy. I think I'll get rid of it.

Another calendar idea I've had in my head is converting to Japanese regnal eras. For example as I'm writing this it's Reiwa 8, the era having started on May 1, 2019. Which means that 2019 was Heisei 31 for four months, then Reiwa 1 for the remaining eight. A relatively simple system, but I'll need to set up and maintain a lookup to tell which years associate to which eras. Which granted won't be a lot of work.

I might knock it out some weekend when I'm bored. Or maybe not. Who knows.

4/27/2026 - I hate my brain

2026-04-27T00:00:00Z

For the last week or so, I've been having an errand to run pop into my head at random times. No worries, I'd say to myself, I'll take care of it on Saturday between breakfast and going to the store. Probably at least half a dozen times over the course of the week.

I woke up Saturday morning and knew I was going to run an errand. Also, I had no idea what the fuck that errand was supposed to be. I still went through my weekend-morning things, and went and got breakfast. Still had no clue what it was I wanted to do. Maybe it was up Sudley Road somewhere? But other than restaurants the only thing on Sudley is a Lowe's, and I didn't need anything from there.

So I went to the store a little earlier than usual and came home. Sat on the couch for a bit, still trying to remember. Went to a Pokemon Go event at 2:00, trying to cause myself to come up with something while I wandered around looking for shinies.

Came home again, sat around a bit more, went to dinner. At this point I'd given up on trying to remember; I knew it would come up on its own and be too late for me to do anything about.

After dinner I fired up Youtube, and watched a video that had come out on Friday. It was from one of the channels I watch regularly, and they were doing their usual bit and cleaning up someone's overgrown yard for free. They used a flat-bladed shovel to remove some weeds that had come up through the seams in the concrete, and I thought that they were just going to come right back.

They should use Roundup, I thought for a second. But then I remembered hearing about how Roundup is also dangerous to humans and that you probably shouldn't use it any more. Which led me to thinking that I should take the bottle I have in the garage to the hazardous-materials dropoff at the dump.

Whoops, that was last week. This week is... the shredding event over by the police station. That I wanted to take the last couple years' worth of credit card statements to. That ran from like 11 to 4. Shit.

I knew I'd remember eventually. I was even right about it being too late to do anything about. Silver lining, I guess.

3/16/2026 - It's that time again

2026-03-16T00:00:00Z

We started daylight saving time in the US (and Canada) last week. So everybody was understandably grumpy about the sun coming up an hour later.

When I tried to maintain permanent daylight time a few years ago, I felt that it was kind of a wash -- evenings were better but mornings sucked. Everything else was benefits of me being an hour ahead of everybody else around.

Since then I've learned that during the Oil Crisis in the 70s we tried moving to permanent daylight time, and everybody hated it. I get it, those mornings really sucked, and I worked from home. Having to drive to work in the dark probably would have tipped the scales for me.

On the other hand, I absolutely don't want to do permanent standard time. The sun coming up at 4 in the morning would be an absolute waste, and I'd be annoyed at having to buy blackout curtains just to be able to get a good night's sleep.

Which means that the current situation, modulo some nibbling at the edges, is probably the best option. We hate changing the clocks, but we'd hate not changing them more. So I guess we're stuck with out semi-annual jet lag session for the long haul.

2/23/2026 - It's got zippy-zaps

2026-02-23T00:00:00Z

I can't remember if it came up in the home inspection, or if I discovered it shortly after moving in, but the outlets in the master bathroom have been bad since I moved in. No big deal, really; I need the clippers every few months to cut my hair and that's it for my bathroom electricity needs. And there's an outlet in the bedroom right next to the doorway so I just did that for several years.

After a decade or so, I got sick of that. I went to Home Depot and bought myself a new GFCI outlet. And... it didn't work. I double-checked the instructions, made sure there was a load on the outlet, and still: nothing.

Maybe I got line and load reversed? I made sure I was using the conductors from each piece of romex and not crossing them, and swapped line and load. Nope.

Well, at that point I was out of ideas. More importantly, I was also out of fucks. So I just left it as it was for a few more years.

And then I got sick of staring at it again, and I was long-overdue to get the "annual" electrical checkup that I was paying for. Guy comes in, I explain the problem, and he pops the faceplate off the breaker box.

It's kinda bad, y'all. At some point the bathroom outlet breaker failed in rather spectacular fashion, and did some damage to the bus bar it was on. A breaker on the other side apparently needed to be moved, which explains the blanking plate across from the bad breaker. The real solution to this is to replace the breaker box, which as of recent local code changes requires a total of about $14,000 worth of electrical fuckery. On top of the windows and trim that I'm paying for for the next *mumble*.

So, that's getting put off for a bit. The electrical system in the house is fine as far as I can tell; the place has failed to burn down in the 16 years I've been here, which means I'm not too worried about it. Once we're back on daylight time I'm going to go buy myself a new 20-amp breaker and see if that's my only problem; there's a non-zero chance I'll need to move that breaker like the previous owners moved the one that had been across from it. But at least that way I'll have a functional bathroom outlet instead of running the clippers in from the bedroom. And it's something I can afford, which is always a plus.

Fuckin' A, man. By the time I fix all the shit that should have been caught the first time I'll have gone a long way toward buying this place a second time. And that's before we get to all the stuff I've been wanting to do but keeps getting put off for the stuff I have to do.