End of October Update

Been incredibly busy the last few weeks.

I have been heads-down working on two personal pet projects, ai-cli, and doing artwork for an unannounced project.

Thanks for all the fish

Henry Rollins said he will be "putting up an announcement late next week, having to do with our show.", that statement combined with the fact that the show has been unavailable for download on KCRW for a few weeks, makes me think something is up. Hate to say it, but I am not optimistic about this one personally.

Let’s hope I am wrong about this one.

Either way my streak is dead. That makes 275 shows in a row or just over 5 years since I have missed a show. I had started listening again on #587 which aired on 2020-06-28.

The show was unavailable for download or streaming from 2025-10-11 through 2025-10-28 so I missed listening to #863, and #864. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I am sure I will attempt to listen to the shows I missed at some point, but this is not that point. I am officially off the wagon.

Huge thanks to another fan who runs rollins-archive.com as I was at least able to find some old shows to listen to, I listened to an oldie last week, from 2019-10-27 and this week I listened to a REALLY OLD show from 2004-10-25 which was quite a throwback. What a difference 21 years makes. The more things change…

The show from 2019 actually featured Segs Jennings of Ruts and Ruts D.C. and was a really good listen. It also featured a disco rendition of Woolly Bully - Hit & Run which I had never heard before and some great interviews and it was a really great show. I was also digging the Fantastical Fascists - Thin Lizzy version which felt timely if nothing else.

Got me through my day one more time.

The Future

I have a huge backlog of work items on my ai-cli project so I plan to continue working on that.

I also have a totally new project I have been working on that goes in another direction, basically the opposite of what I have been doing for 20 years.

The job market is not what it once was and remote work also seems to have fallen off a cliff.

I also don’t want to go back to delivering food as I can’t help but feel like I am not fully using my skills in that role.

Remote Work

I have a lot of mixed feelings about remote work.

I think it can be great when a company embraces it and does it well, and I think it can also be terrible when companies do it badly.

Most video conferences and meetings don’t scale well and do not actually re-create the experience of being in-person with people in a room, where side conversations can happen and chatter can happen without disturbing the main meeting etc.

Additionally when done badly there can be very little time to actually get to know co-workers and have non-work related chat which needs to happen for people to actually be part of a team.

Having chat like slack and discord go a long way to having open communication but it needs to be backed by company attitude and policy that allows for time spent in those apps that is NOT related to work. I feel like management has a tendency at companies to look at slack chat and chatter as being a distraction from work, and it is, but that is also normally happening in the room when everyone is in the room together. That chatter is also good though as that is part of what helps make a team of people.

The flip side of this is companies that have too much of startup mentality and no work-life separation. I feel like this is the other side of that coin in a way. Working from home is great but you also need to stop working at some point.

I am a person that has never had an issue with working more, my problem is always putting it down.

Office Hell

Going in to the office can also be just as bad. Having to commute every day to a place where everyone is wearing headphones can feel pointless.

Or those days when you are the only person in the office anyway around the holidays because you have no PTO left. Being in office alone on a Saturday morning for maintenance is another memory I have.

One of the good things about going to an office though can be having a hard cut off to stop working, but as an engineer the amount of times I just packed up my laptop only to go home and open it back up and keep working is impossible to count.

Development Death

I love software development and I would like to think I am at least marginally good at it, but it seems like there is no intersection I can find between the things I actually want to build and people with money who want those things built.

For the record I think this is a mistake for the industry but part of a larger trend of hiring, not all software engineers are created equal. Some are better than others and that is mostly because it’s a boring job sometimes that some people are just not cut out for.

I have quite a few projects going at the moment and I intend to push forward with them but at this point I don’t know that professional software development is in the cards for me.

I think there is a huge excess of software engineers with degrees and I don’t really see any company suddenly wanting to hire me up. That is based purely on my experience of the job market over the last 3 years. So to anyone trying to land a job in software development, good luck.

I certainly have not found any.

New Shit

I am working on some new shit. Down the road I hope there might be some deeper overlap with my software development experience, but currently it is something different.

It feels good though, it’s a job where I can let the small amount of hair I have left down and relax a bit.

There is something to be said for jobs where you are not responsible for critical infrastructure all the time you can actually relax once in a while.

That’s all I really have for now, here’s to the new.