I don't really have a blog but I still wanted to do this.
I turned 40. I celebrated 20 years married to Helen. My youngest son finished high school, turned 18 and got a job. The three of us became Canadian citizens. My eldest step-son and his wife have spent the last few months living with us. I left my job of seven years. I joined and immediately left a different job. I spent two weeks back in Dublin; the most time I have spent since I left at 19.
It’s been a lot.
I started getting dizzy spells in January, ranging in frequency from “every day” to “every few weeks” through the year.
I saw my doctor and she believes it’s environmental (i.e. it’s caused by something I am doing or something in my environment – not an underlying physical problem). That’s good news! But I still don’t know what, so that sucks. I gave up alcohol (a complete positive, rarely miss it) and dramatically reduced my caffeine, sugar and salt intake (although not all at once, and not entirely consistently). I changed my office around. I got my prescription checked and started wearing reading glasses for computer work.
These are positive changes to make regardless and maybe one of them has reduced the incidence of dizziness but so far I haven’t correlated any of these changes. 🤷
Seeking out therapy last year was an excellent decision. I finished up in the springtime and feel armed with tools to manage and understand my mood better.
Leaving work has had a major impact on my mental health. It was one of my main sources of stress and frustration, but also a source of extrinsic motivation. Most of the people that I know in Canada are current or former Shopify folks, and work was my main source of social interaction with people who aren’t related to me.
From now on I need to actually make an effort to socialize; it’s not just going to happen on its own.
RDR2. Dredge. Celeste. Hob’s Barrow. Slay the Spire.
The Steamdeck has let me play far more games than I would have otherwise. It makes me embarassed to have an RTX3060 sitting in my gaming PC seeing less use 😀
Not great. I enjoyed quite a bit of reading this year, especially G.K. Chesterton, but I didn’t do a lot of it. A lot of time that I would have spent reading went to YouTube instead.
Normal, by Warren Ellis, was probably the best thing I read this year that wasn’t a part of an ongoing series or a re-read.
I watch it a lot, it’s my main streaming thing. I am not having recommendations fed to me, but I have a steady stream of weekly stuff according to my interest to watch. I consider this a good thing, but I have to watch out for accidentally replacing doing my hobbies with watching people do theirs. It’s one thing to watch machining content, but I have to make sure I’m still going out an making chips.
I got an Arturia MiniFreak and I love it. It’s lots of fun and never makes me feel guilty. (When I had Eurorack gear I used to occasionally feel bad about the expense vs. the usefulness vs. the amount of time that I used it). MiniFreak hits the sweet spot for me.
I only did a couple of days of Looptober, which made me sad. I look forward to it a lot. It just didn’t work out for me this year.
I did a reasonable amount of piano practice in the Summer and every time I practice I feel good and think I should do it more. Then I stop and it takes me weeks to start again. Motivation is weird.
Consistent. I continued to buy CDs, LPs and MP3s. I’ve found new things I like and enjoyed things I already liked more. I refurbed a second record player so I could have one in my office and it sees more use than the one in the parlour.
I left Shopify.
I still feel strongly about it months later. It’s difficult for me to move on. I was suffering some burnout, but it’s more than that. About four of those seven years were the best in my whole career (not contiguous) and by the end I was angry about a lot of things.
Shopify in 2016 had an amazingly well crafted employee experience and was full of people who cared about their work and had the context and autonomy to do a good job. I believe a few decisions made during COVID burned that all down.
In a way, it feels worse to have had such a great experience early in my time there and to see it fade, than to have just had the mediocre experience which is the norm in most jobs.
(removed: ~1000 words of ranting that no one needs to read)
My friend Dan (VE3NNE) sent me an email in June asking if I was interested in getting back into building radios. Both of us got our licences at the same time in 2017 and had a flurry of activity and it died out and neither of us has done much since.
This time we decided to not “skip steps” and to make slow and steady progress towards building out a full “shack” for 10 meters (for Dan) and 20 meters (for me). It’s been great.
We started with making antennas, tuning them, measuring them. A NanoVNA was a great purchase: when you don’t know if your radio is good, and you don’t know if your antenna is good, you really need to have some piece of test equipment to let you know you’re on the right track.
Then writing an FT8 implementation for the Raspberry Pi using an Si5351 oscillator. Then a WSPR implementation. Then building an class A amplifier for HF. Swapped the crystals on a Pixie kit so we could receive and send FT8. (FT8 is a very hardy mode).
I had a Tayloe detector based radio I built from a kit, but we also implemented one on a breadboard using a variation on Hans Summers’ design (using the second clock in an Si5351 out of phase with the original signal, to avoid needing to run the oscillator at 4x the desired reception frequency and divide it back down with a counter).
At the end of the year we both fabricated morse keys, as a change from electronics and writing software.
This was pretty much the ideal for hobby projects for me: each thing we did built on the last thing, increased our confidence, and was just hard enough to give a sense of achievement (but not so hard that it feels like work). It’s been great to hang out with my friend every week or two and work towards something, where we’re both kind-of keeping eachother accountable, but not in a stressful way.
I made a leather desk mat for my standing desk, almost the full size of the desk. I already had the leather but I was still worried about using around $100 worth of material on this – but now it’s built up a nice patina from use and it just makes using that desk feel nicer. I’ll admit I was inspired by Adam Savage’s workbench.
This year I continue to enjoy writing with pencils, and quite cheap Parker pens. I went through a whole load of my collected pens and gave away a lot of them for just not feeling nice. They’re not bad pens, just not for me. Also there seems to be no correlation between price and the enjoyment of using a given pen, which is great. I don’t think I’ll need to think about writing utensils for a long time: Staedtler 2B pencils and Parker Jotter pens have been and will be made for a long, long time.
I did a couple of long flights. Bose QuietComfort headphones help me so much. I will endeavour to never fly without them again. My pair are pretty old QC15s which I bought (broken) from eBay and repaired. I would have had a hard time justifying nearly C$400 on headphones, but now that I have experienced them, I think I’d be happy to buy them new. (But who am I kidding: I love buying broken stuff and fixing it …)
When I was working, and keeping prolific paper notes, I bought a little self-inking date stamp. Loved it. There’s something pleasant about changing the date at the start of the day, stamping the corner of a page when I start a meeting with someone, and having my notebook consistently dated.
I like writing these, and I like having them to look back on, years later. I don't know if they make sense to anyone other than future-Aaron, but thanks for reading anyway. 👋