muse

Halfway to the plot of Eagle Eye

If you can mail packages, sell unwanted things on auction or marketplace sites. That can give experience with marketing, sales, packaging, shipping, customer service, inventory, bookkeeping, and estimating the value of items.

If you can’t ship anything, then you’re limited to something digital (software, books), or to be fulfilled elsewhere (t-shirt prints).

Someone that has always inspired me is Paul Alexander. He was paralyzed from polio at age six and spent most of his life in an iron lung to breathe. He went on to become a lawyer and wrote his memoirs by holding a stick in his mouth and tapping on a keyboard.

Go anywhere someone is pushing a narrative and compliment them. Bonus points if they have a following.

Is it worth it? Maybe if you want PTSD and a custody battle. In those relationships, there can be only one victor.

I read books on algorithms and data structures and typed out the examples. The work computer was locked down for installers but I could download open source programs and compile Java. One of the more interesting chapters I remember was parsing basic math operations for a calculator into a tree structure, evaluating it, and converting it between infix and postfix notation.

My boss probably noticed I had automated things because sometimes they would send new data requiring an urgent redo of everything, and I would send results back in a minute instead of the 8 hours it used to take. He didn’t seem upset, more like pleasantly surprised that a temp-to-hire pulled it off. I even got a compliment at one point, which never happened before.

One day I applied for another job that was a lot of what I already did and some of what I wanted to do more of. I called in sick to do the interview and got the position. It was good timing because the place I was at got acquired, and that never goes well if you’re in a group that overlaps what the parent company already has.

Noita has some nice psychadelic cave music

There was an Outer Limits episode with this plot - “Identity Crisis” with Lou Diamond Phillips