私がやりたいことが多くて気が遠くなるよね。日本語の勉強や自分のビジネスの構築や作りたいアップリなど。むかしからそういう状態で何も始められないと感じられる。一方ずつ迎えへしています。

今日もずっとアップをやってました。全然進まない感じですが。

Finally got around to renewing my cert, changing my domain name and fixing some other DNS related stuff. I am bored with this blog; it's time to move it to drupal 8 or flask or wp or wix. I might be kidding about some of those. I really do have things to say, it's a shame I also enjoy monkeying with the site just as much.

It's never a dull day.

I am obsessed with the Byzantine Empire. I want to go to Ravenna to see the mosaics of Justinian. To see the Hagia Sophia. To visit the palace of Diocletian in Croatia. Even more, knowing and understanding the daily life and drama of the Eastern Roman Empire is even more interesting. They fought wars with Persia, Arabs, Barbarians, destroyed the Vandals, ruined the Goths. While the dark ages reverted Western Europe to the barter system, the Byzantines flourished. I'm not sure why, but I feel a kinship with them. When I have a rough day, I think of the trials of Belisarius, and feel better. What?!?

My refrigerator is full of mustard greens, cabbage, lettuce, salad turnips. I'm becoming a true San Franciscan. Now my goal is to eat this stuff as fast as possible, lest it go bad. I had to throw out a few things, but I will say, I cooked more vegetables than I ever have last box.

It's the first meetup of the year; I am going big (think dance party) and the crowd looks to be large. If the typical rate of 50% rsvps actually attending shows up, it will be the biggest yet. I have organized this year fairly well, and have some great companies to host. I need to keep the speaker train rolling, and it looks to be a good year. Running a meetup. Me. Bizarro.

I am going to my first regular vinyasa class tonight, after sticking to the more basic classes. Well, to be honest, I ended up in the wrong classes a few times and got my ass handed to me. I am no longer the worst in my gender group, and sometimes no longer the worst in the coed category (neither really exist, except in my head). It's fun, hard, and I feel good afterwards.

Timeboxing sometimes seems the enemy of Getting Shit Done, especially when unknowns and risk is high. Somethings take as long as they take. Another compounding problem is that highly exploratory tasks expend much more mental energy. Put both together and you have what I have currently with this website. A desire to take a meager week-long stab at updating it, that got derailed when I broke the shit out of it changing the domain name. I have a goal (update daily with a thoughtful but short blog entry) that was replace by digging around for a solution, being frustrated by my inability to resolve it, generating these wondrous fireworks of feelings of inadequacy, anger, and pressure to manage all of my tasks, goals, and obligations. I forgot what I intended to write about, instead we have this play-by-play of my morning chaos. To make things really interesting, let's also start thinking of my week's workload on this holiday that I am spending "resting and recovering."

In 1999, I largely quit being a musician. I had a few brief stints playing bass in Chicago, but I was no longer self-assessing as a bassist; I became a bookkeeper, a finance associate, an IT specialist, and several other semi-invented titles as I stumbled around my early thirties. Breaking up with music wasn't easy; for a long time I was too uncomfortable to see music live, and over time, I started listening to podcasts instead of music. Until I started learning Japanese, I felt at sea, without some kind of passion. But learning Japanese is a different muscle and it fulfills me in a different way.

My goal is to bring back music into my life, as much as possible. The way I felt listening to music is what pushed me to play. Music can make my heart explode. It was a jarring realization that aside from iTunes, I had no real way of listening to music in my apartment, so I remedied that. I still don't know what to listen to in terms of new music, but I am exploring. WFMU is my new favorite station.

I have a guitar and keyboard now, and bought some monitors that are way too big for my apartment, so I almost have a music studio. It's 8:30 on Sunday morning. I am drinking hot coffee. I am listening to "Nothing But a Child" by Steve Earle. Thinking about San Francisco, Chicago, North Carolina, Japan.

I have many secret internet idols. People I have seen as an inspiration over the years, for various reasons. I would suspect they would be surprised to know this, not only do they not know me, they are most likely going about their daily lives, and just happen to expose some of that to the internet. Well, enough with the secrets, it's time to open the books to the world. The commonality here is that all of these guys I found around 2006.

David Chart: Has been blogging pretty much daily since 2006. You can see his Japanese improve as time passes, and I am impressed at the diligence and discipline. Such focus is something I don't know if I possess, but hope to gain, even still. I have made several attempts at these long term daily practices, but few I can say I have stuck with for years. 

Rich Pav: Another nice fellow in Japan I discovered when I started learning Japanese. His podcast was pretty well known then, and he has since reappeared sporadically. I was excited to hear his voice lo, these 9 years later, as having matured, but even more succinct and dryly funny. I admire how he has stuck it out as a gaijin, made career changes similar to those I have often wrestled with, and has been open and self-aware about the struggles of living and working in Japan, although some are the same struggles I feel anywhere I go.

Techzing podcast guys: They began their podcast as a talk show about bootstrapping, with interviews or just the two discussing different Hacker News stories. Over the years, they have taken and left jobs, started and closed start-ups, invested, advised, and sold other businesses. Watching the incremental changes and showing how something like a blog post or a podcast has taken their lives in a different direction has been interesting. Some of the appeal is simply they are about my age, one has spent time in Chicago, and they are in tech like me.

Jonathan: I remember to check in on his blog every year or so. About the time I was moving to Tokyo to learn Japanese, he had also made the decision to pack up and move to Aichi, Japan with the same goal. He came back around the same time I did, and unlike me, has since moved back to Nagoya. As with David, his dedication to Japanese is inspiring, and not quite as dauntingly prolific.