Dinhternet

(Been on a Sub­lime kick lately, so I’ve been lov­ing this song.)

I came back from my Min­nesota vaca­tion this year with the work­ing assump­tion that I wasn’t going to law school this fall. Got my last offi­cial rejec­tion let­ter a cou­ple of weeks ago, and I’ve been pussy-footing around. Well, no more. I put in my notice at the end of work today… my last day with Gray & Prouty will be on the 17th.

In the mean­time, I’m look­ing for a place to lay my head down in San Fran­cisco. Actu­ally, I’m look­ing for both an apart­ment and a job, but I’m hop­ing that if I just move out there, my chances of get­ting to inter­views and such will be bet­ter. Also, I can try free­lance cod­ing to hold me over while I look for some­thing more permanent.

If you can help me at all on either of these fronts, please let me know! Ide­ally, both my job and res­i­dence would be in SF, but I’ll hon­estly take any­thing in the Bay Area. Also, I’m look­ing for some­thing law and/or com­puter ori­ented, but again, any­thing will do. I’ll take any foothold to greater opportunities.

I recently saw this PSA on a friend’s blog -

The first thing I thought of was, “What if my PIN is a palin­drome?” Turns out, other peo­ple thought of this case, too. The tip is fake.

I don’t under­stand why peo­ple would make up fake announce­ments like this. I remem­ber all sorts of scares that I’ve had passed to me, espe­cially by older, less tech-savvy folks who don’t know bet­ter. In fact, I book­marked Snopes for my mom to check all the ran­dom shit she gets from fam­ily, friends, and co-workers. My aunt would often send me stuff and ask me to fact-check.

What is the point of mak­ing up fake help­ful tips? Either you are scar­ing peo­ple need­lessly about bad things that will not hap­pen, or risk­ing people’s lives by get­ting them to believe in good things that will not happen.

Any­way, long story short, Snopes is your friend. Use it before you pass on ANYTHING you see online.

I just want to make some­thing. Or fail­ing total cre­ation, at least fix or improve something.

I’m sure that desire is hard-wired into all of us, but it’s dif­fi­cult in this day and age for a lot of us to make a liv­ing that way. So many of us deal only with the abstract and intan­gi­ble in our daily lives. Even jobs in man­u­fac­tur­ing are usu­ally lim­ited to being a cog on an assem­bly line, with no sense of crafts­man­ship or own­er­ship over the fin­ished prod­uct like arti­sans of old. I’m sure that’s at least in part why there’s always a pas­toral move­ment counter to indus­tri­al­iza­tion — you can’t get more DIY than sub­sis­tence farming.

For most of us, that desire has to be ful­filled through our hob­bies — from cook­ing, gar­den­ing, and craft­ing to car mod­ding and Arduino build­ing. I’ve played on the fringes of all of those, but can’t really com­mit heav­ily to any par­tic­u­lar one, due to time and cost con­straints. Usu­ally, if I can’t work with tan­gi­bles, I’ll at least try to code. It’s easy to pick up and put down, and there’s a sem­blance of a fin­ished product.

Of course, pro­gram­ming is pretty rapidly chang­ing, so I’m try­ing to refresh, which can be frus­trat­ing. At least with this hobby, though, I can try to spin it into free­lanc­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties pretty eas­ily. And then maybe I’ll have the time and money to try some more hands-on stuff.

(These ideas have been cov­ered in more detail by greater minds than my own.)

Any­way, this was all brought up when I saw this paper­craft project online -

(See the whole process at the orig­i­nal post.)

Now I’m off to go work on a car.