Last Thursday, February 6th, I concluded my internship. I was originally going take a moment to analyze what I have learned, but I realize I've pretty much covered everything in "The State of the Blogger", and I don't see anything I ought to add from there. Indeed, of the three options I had, I had come to the point where I accepted this as the "best" option -- I may have been able to continue working as a part-time Intern (which would have been the "second best" option), although it would have been a recipe for perpetual burnout -- but I am very glad I wasn't asked to join work full-time, which I considered the worst option for me.
When my internship had come up for review, I was given the option to continue working for two weeks after the internship lapsed. At the time, I accepted this, wondering "Am I just doing this for the money? Why don't I cut my losses immediately, and move on to my next adventure?" but as I was completing these two weeks, I came to appreciate the opportunity to wrap things up -- to finish one more project (albeit with dangling bits I didn't have time to fix), and to appreciate the environment I was working in.
Aye, that's the rub: no matter how ill-fitting I am in an organization, I almost always appreciate the people I'm working with, and I almost always appreciate their missions. In particular, I have come to realize that functional businesses that successfully provide goods and services are just as noble -- if not more so -- than even the best non-profit organizations, because those goods and services provide value to the customers! The only problem I've always had with this, though, was that I never really got to work on things that interest me -- the problems I worked on were almost always dictated by the needs of the organization, and often I would be relegated to work on the "mundane" aspects of those problems -- and this, in turn, would lead to burnout, which would cause a drop in performance, which, more often than not, would lead to unemployment ... which would then lead to lousy attempts at networking and eventual job search burnout until I found the next position ... which always started out exciting, but that's merely the start of the cycle!
What's more, I have come to realize that the standard formula for financial success (which can mean anything from having a comfortable home and paying off the bills to becoming a billionaire and starting your own space program), regardless of becoming a full-time employee, or becoming an entrepreneur, or going the hybrid route and becoming a freelancer, is simple -- network like mad, figure out what people need, and specialize (ie, do it over and over again) to provide that which people need -- but this formula is out of reach of my abilities . I cannot network when I cannot initiate conversations with strangers, and I get burned out when I do the same thing over and over again! (Granted, the first time I do something, it's interesting, but it gets old after a while.)
So, what should I do instead? As of right now, I'm trying to stabilize my routine: sleep from midnight to 8 or 9, wake up, study Scriptures, "brain dump" onto this blog, and then work on a personal project. And I have a lot of projects to work on! Just a few things, in no particular order, as a sample:
- Explorations of Common Lisp syntax called Sweet Expressions, to take advantage of whitespace similar to Python,
- A 3D GPU-accelerated graphics environment, based on dual quaternions instead of matrices, that would hopefully grow into a CAD environment that can be used to design a liquid-salt thorium space station,
- A command for Bash that will view any type of file, so I don't have to "context switch" between "ls", "cat", "okular", and perhaps even "diff", among other things,
- A simple operating system for a Propeller processor-based electronic conference badge,
- An eight-bit stream binary format for generic complex yet structured data,
- An app to edit a "syzygy" of file formats that combine text, audio, photos, video, location data, and changes (among other things) in a single digitally-notorizabe format,
- A "computer easel" that combines my favorite keyboard, mouse, 2-in-1 laptop, and portable monitor into a single portable environment,
- An "armadillo" trailer that can expand from a simple box into something that can resemble a camping space or workshop,
- A table-top role playing system using playing cards (and card-counting!) instead of (or, more likely, in addition to) dice to generate randomness,
- Airplanes and helicopters of all sorts,
- A custom keyboard and mouse (designing mice is particularly hard, since it's not nearly as obvious on how to collect the parts).
I plan on sharing what I work on, including design notes, as blog entries, often with photos and video; since I don't want to run any businesses (although I'd be more than happy to start them! perhaps on a short-term part-time contractual basis), I hope I can sustain myself on donations, and in particular, I hope that someone who wishes to try to bring one of these things to market would be willing to offer monthly donations.
To do this, I will naturally need to ask for funding, so I have set up a Campaign at GiveSendGo: The "Trash Panda Arcane Research Center". Additionally, as I write blog posts, I also intend to collect various posts, perhaps refine them for a bit, and then publish them as e-books or books-on-demand. Come to think of it, I may even discover it's possible to do "manufacturing on demand", at least for smallish items. And who knows? If I get a substantial enough fan base, maybe I can produce merch!
In any case, this is the direction I've been thinking of going in the last days of my internship. Heck, I've been thinking about doing something like this since at least my college days! So it will be interesting to see what happens, as I forge ahead in this direction.
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