Welcome to Gynergy Notebook
My forties (and the tail end of my thirties) are for practical things, for building core memories with family and friends, and for building a sense of home. Let creativity be a small part of it.
To Do
When you don’t have a realistic plan, you end up working inefficiently, which means you end up overworking.
What are all the ways I am overworking?
Daily:
- Wake up, walk downtown and back, breakfast
- 2h Sophos, lunch, nap
- Up, 1h non-work work
- Free for social stuff and contemplating life
This Week:
- Return exercise bike
- Gently address realistic discomfort at work
- Slowly enjoy and digest Built From Broken
- Skim and enjoy How To Listen So Kids Will Talk
Current Priorities:
- Work: Assert myself, be physically ready for 2h focused work every day
- Health: Circadian Rhythm, Biomechanics, Better Blood
- Family & Kids: Create opportunities for listening and bonding
- Finance: Organize checking accounts, make unemployment plan (LOC)
Health
Inner Wellness
Summary of Jay Earley’s Book Self-Therapy
Contains a step-by-step guide to self-contained IFS.
Integral Guide
https://integralguide.com/About
“ The Integral Guide is a choose-your-own-adventure field guide that I began writing to aid my personal trauma recovery and self-development and to feel empowered and better-equipped to lead an enriched life.”
Loving Awakening
https://lovingawakening.net/ A Practical Guide to Embodied Spirituality and Healing with Metta, IFS, the Imaginal and Community
Two free books. Author says in the FAQ that she offers services if you contact her; I assume these are paid services. I have not read the books and can't vouch for them.
Food
List of foods to remind me of variety
Adaptive Devices
Home Environment
Misc
Better Blood
FinOps
Once I am at the next level in my career and highly employable, explore routes to land jobs at places that satisfy the political do-gooder side of myself, and that offers me the same pay, benefits, and career security as private industry. This is a moonshot: the one that makes sense for me to do.
Life is short and hard even for the most fortunate of us. And that’s why, whatever you have chosen to work on, it has to be worthy of your time here. Because if you have any success at all, it will take up at least a decade of your life. And if you’re really lucky, you get to work on it for multiple decades.
I stopped by Austin for the FinOpsX conference, an amazing little thing put on by … maybe the Linux Foundation through some other community community, idk.
Anyway, it was really amazing. Open source is just so much fun, I’m really glad that I found it all those years ago. This conference was smallish, like 400 people, but had all the open source vibes that the Drupal scene had back in the day, or the Python scene had the only time I dipped my toes in a few years back.
John Grubb
Whatever you need to help you feel successful is helpful to get you to the place of being successful, as long as you don’t confuse it with success itself.
https://www.ignoredbydinosaurs.com/posts/success
I work with a guy. He’s incredibly smart. He’s the seniormost developer here, and if you need to learn something new and get something large done, he’s the guy to do it. We basically dropped him off in the AWS jungle and told him to learn Hadoop and the entire Hadoop ecosystem for a data warehouse project and he did it.
I work with another guy. He’s also incredibly smart. But he asks me for the answer before attempting to find it on his own more often than not. He’s got a point when he says “it’s a lot faster for me to just ask you rather than spend time trying to find it on my own”, because he’s here to do a job after all. I get that. But the best analogy I can come up with is a spin on the old adage -
You can give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.
There’s a third kind of person, though - the person who goes out and finds out about fishing on their own and then teaches themselves how to fish. This person will be your boss, and will always be employed.
Finance
Sparkle House
Style & Grooming
Friends
Writing
Interview w JK Rowling: https://web.archive.org/web/20080623145514/www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/author/interview2.htm