My wife and I were chatting about The Past last night, and remembering what things were like in the late 1980's and early 1990's. (We both graduated high school in the late 80's.)

Money. You had cash or checks. That was it. Banks were not open in the evenings or weekends, so you had to figure out what you were going to do/eat/drink all weekend, budget for it, go to the bank, get out that much money before they closed, and ... that was it. If you ran out of cash you didn't buy anything. (A grocery store would take a check, but a bar would not let you pay your tab with a check.)

There were no ATMs. There were no credit cards. (Well, your parents may have had ONE credit card that they used for very specific things. But nobody I knew could get a credit card. You had to have excellent credit - like be a homeowner - to get a CC.)

Communications. There were no cell phones amongst normal everyday people. You had an answering machine at home, and had to go home to check your messages to see where/when people were meeting up.

There's no GPS. Just a post-it note with turns noted, stuck to the rear view mirror. "I5 N -> Olive St -> R onto Olive -> R on 12th -> L on Ramona -> 4th house on right, blue truck"

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There's parts of that I miss. I do wish there was some sort of hybrid Google Maps that didn't literally show me a map, but showed a list of turns in order, and as I come up to the turn it enlarges the map view so I can see the road map clearly. Then, after turning, the text list of turns zooms up again until I approach the next turn...

And prior to COVID I did almost all of my buying in cash. I didn't like the idea of "being tracked" by my purchases. And now? I like it when my bank calls and says, "hey this purchase didn't follow your pattern... is this legit or was your card/ID stolen?"

There's no point to this post. Just reminiscing.

I realized yesterday that it's been a good eighteen months since anyone helped me with a problem, and the help I ended up getting was so wrong that I had to develop a proprietary technique using materials and chemicals unknown to the industry at large with the help of my Ph.D biochemist father-in-law.

On the other hand, my day-to-day has essentially become hopping from one intractable problem to another across three or four different industries, roughly half or two thirds of which are for the direct benefit of someone else.

Makes a person tired.

I have decided to take the plunge and will be rebuilding the rig as an Atmos studio. Buddy of mine does Atmos for Dolby; they built me a helpful list of parts to do this that only runs about $25k. I'm cobbling mine up out of garage bits and abandoned eBay and OfferUp components and will be out of pocket maybe $1600. That's for a full 7.1.4 calibrated mess with Jellyfish and Genelecs. The computer will be more of course because Dolby Surround Tools only runs on Mac but the Mac Mini is from 2011 so it was going to need to be upgraded anyway but it means I'm going back to Pro Tools on Mac for the first time in, like, twelve years.

Got a crappy low-budg zombie movie to mix and I said "let's do it Atmos 'cuz we did the last one 5.1 and it actually allowed us to sell it for a profit." Not two weeks later and I'm doing corporate nonsense for One Of Those Companies You've Heard Of and their smell-our-own-farts celebratory Earth Day corporate video is being mixed in Atmos. So there's reason to do it. I know for a fact my pathetic little rig already kicks the tar out of Bungie's.

Gonna be hilarious, tho, until it sucks balls, because once again, there's no one to ask for advice.

I've finally got my summer plans figured out! I'll be interning at a nursing home assisting with infection prevention. The place is in absolute bumfuck. It's a town of 2000, in a county of 5700. It's going to be a huge change from all of my past experiences. I'm really excited to be working on-location instead of over the phone with my entire previous role. It's also going to be a great, rural, low resource setting. But I've never been somewhere that remote for any length of time and even though it's only like 7 weeks or so, it's going to be a huge adjustment.

I think I know what my thesis will be. I'm waiting on some confirmation but it looks like it'll be working with CMS and the CDC's nursing home team to review nursing home citations to review common places there are problems and ways to improve and have the greatest impact with the least resources.

I've got my first final of this semester in 45 minutes. I'll be done with the semester by May. This semester was disturbingly fast. Also supposed to be the worst. I'm signed up for 12 credits next semester and will likely do the minimum the semester after. I'll have the credits to graduate after next, but I'm not sure I'll be done with my thesis and I'll need to take some more required classes. I reached out to the school to ask about graduating early since it's something I might possibly be able to do, but they said I had a "financial obligation." So I'm meeting with a representative to talk about that sentence, and I will be recording the conversation because that feels slimy as all hell. They're in the business to educate, not make money. And if I need to get my lawyer aunt to listen to it, I will.

Grad school is pretty okay overall. Not happy I have to do it, glad I waited a few years to do it, annoyed at the lack of support from the school, and annoyed that the school claimed it required 2 years of professional work experience but I am one of the older people in the program at the ripe old age of 25. They clearly ignore the professional experience requirement and that's a shame because it would make the classes much better in my opinion. The amount of people complaining about the volume of work they need to complete is absurd. It's graduate school. It should be a lot of work. It should be challenging. But I'm about halfway through at this point. So I'm just hoping for the end to hurry up so I can get back to regular work hours, a steady paycheck, and free time to pursue hobbies.

Update: final completed. It was poorly written and more difficult than the first one, but I went into it with a great grade so I'm not concerned.

PSA:

April 20th is one week away.

This is your warning, in case you need to either start a tolerance break or acquire some cannabis in order to celebrate next Wednesday properly lifted.

Cheers.

Inner ear infections suck, or constant vertigo: the musical. For the first ten days, I didn't, and couldn't, do much beyond catching up on reading and sleeping. It did allow for some neat discoveries, though. Case in point: there's a service in Poland that gives free access to texts and audiobooks of school canon and beyond, and (so far) their renditions kick all kinds of ass. Very unlike Polish corners on LibriVox in that regard, or at least compared to the last time checked.

All but our original three guests got to Germany safely, but we're staying in touch. I spent some sick time helping with admin, and we found a way to hire two refugees, refit a company delivery van for people transport, and take turns running supplies and driving. We have a lot of trusted names and put them to good use, and it's arguably more sustainable and productive than doing it in my spare time.

Got IELTS results (general and academic) and positive thesis reviews. Now, defense details are in the hands of bureaucracy.

Looks like Sweden will be applying for NATO membership in June. No referendum and no party convention to let the grassroots have a say, the socdems once again insisting to be the ones in charge of implementing the right’s politics. I hate it.

My friend Jerome that got me into my first burn event reached out the other day saying he wanted to build his first fire poofer project with me. It's gonna be the perfect occasion to use my welding skills and learn the basics of poofing. We've been on a little workshop a few years ago, but we'll need a little research to build it out. He graduated as an electrical engineer and is an amazing researcher/planner so I feel it will go well. We're meeting this weekend to brainstorm an idea. He's also a world traveling minimalist nomad so I'm pretty sure I'll get to keep the piece when we're done. And we'll get it mostly financed with an art grant, i'm certain. Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!

Excited by this project, I've been trying to think of cool ideas. Maybe a motorcyle with the poofer out the exhaust activated by the throttle? Or a sunflower (ukraine's national flower) - with the yellow petals being the flames? I wonder what ideas Jerome has got, he's pretty creative too.

Have you every bombed three fairly big things at work... in a row... on the same day?

I have. I'll go crawl under a rock for the afternoon.