Who woulda thunk breaks are good?

Thanks to the many people who continue to support this newsletter with a subscription. Especially the folks who got that "1 whole year free trial" from a year ago and didn't cancel. I wasn't expecting that!

The past couple of weeks, in addition to job hunting, I've been re-learning what it's like to take a semi-vacation and catch up on a lot of random little projects around the house. On top of that, if all goes well with the current conversations I'm having right now, I might even be done with the job hunting part soon. So I might be going into full vacation/funemployment mode.

Ever since switching to full time working from home since the height COVID some 4-5 years ago now, aside from the occasional week-long family outing, I've never actually taken a "shut all the computers down" kind of vacation in a very very long time and I've honestly forgotten what it's like to not be terminally online.

People who know me would be skeptical that I can be home and not have multiple computers on at the same time, but it does help that my current desktop is crashing every couple of hours for mysterious reasons and parts/RAM are so expensive right now I hesitate to build a new machine. So I'm offline... uh, slightly more often than I'm used to, by an hour or three a day. Just a bit. It's a big change for me. The cat is helping with that.

So that also means my brain has taken a bit of rest from thinking tooooo much about data-as-work. Fun side projects like the ADS-B thing from two weeks ago are different. Same goes for doing server maintenance for this blog and other home infrastructure.

I've unpacked most of the remaining boxes from our giant move a year ago, and thus found more of my tools! Which, if you happened to be following my shenanigans on Bluesky, will explain why there's been a parade of increasingly shiny pink rock photos being posted the past few days.

I'll probably do a fuller post about shiny rocks over the holidays for fun. For now I'm just enjoying the rather meditative time it takes to slowly grind a piece of rock into something pretty while pondering the next thing to write that's not job market related.

If anyone has any questions or topics I'm totally listening!

Breaks are cool.

As are shiny rocks.

And gloves (another story for another day).