Child rearing! Nothing better than to slowly introduce a new witness to the miracle of existence all around us.
Ask HN: How are you having fun?
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#12Travel for vacations - my wife and I heavily downsized our fixed expenses between 2020-2022 and my youngest (step)son graduated high school. I started working remotely and I was able to “retire my wife” when she was 44 and I was 46 in 2020. We are knocking places off our bucket list 8-12 trips a year (nothing fancy or extravagant, extended weekend trips mostly)
Travel to see and with friends and family - my friends and family are mostly in the city where I grew up or the city where I moved to after I graduated and lived until a couple of years ago. I spend a fair amount of time in both cuties
Exercise - I wouldn’t call it “fun”. But it is necessary to stay in shape at 50.
Learn Spanish - we are thinking about establishing residency in either Costa Rica or Panama eventually.
Balance - I shut my computer down and don’t think about work or anything else computer related when it’s time to clock out. It’s “fun” not to worry about keeping up or getting ahead outside of office hours.
We moved to the “tourist capital of the US” and we will eventually start doing things locally.
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#13I somehow keep falling into rabbit-hole projects that are deeply heretical in nature.
I've attempted a video game reverse-engineering/decompilation project and somehow ended up with a Ghidra extension that can export relocatable object files from a program selection. In other words, I can tear out pieces of a program and reuse them inside new programs willy-nilly, like how a mechanic can rip out parts from a car scrapyard and build Mad Max-style contraptions out of them. I've documented some of my achievements with that stuff on my blog, like making a native port of a proprietary Linux program to Windows without decompiling it or having access to its source code. These acts seem to give the vast majority of software developers a huge migraine, probably because they are impossible according to CS 101.
As a side-note, I've also managed to successfully perform a version tracking session with Ghidra from a source binary that doesn't exist, but that's a lesser sin in my opinion.
Lately, I wanted to get rid of a vintage network card in an old APC UPS and that somehow resulted in me attempting to stick a competitor's card in there. Not only that, but to do it in the most roundabout way possible: write a USB HID stack so that I can create a virtual power device, then write acquisitors that can get data from a UPS and puppeteer the virtual one and then write projectors to whatever communication protocol the card uses. It's a project that is still very early in development so I currently have nothing to show for it but a work-in-progress homegrown USB HID library.
It even seeps through in my professional work, because I'm the person that is air-dropped across teams onto a problem when everything else has failed. The magic words usually include "we need your dark magic" or "we're out of options" or "there's no one else to escalate to". Most of the time it's for debugging an elusive issue, but I've also built in a hurry contraptions that defy conventional software engineering but are somehow perfectly fit for purpose.
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#14[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#15Podcasts
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#16And an important thing I did was make a list of things I would not do, as I tend to get distracted trying to do too many activities and I do not want to fall down rabbit holes. Helping the homeless. One night a week is a multi-church organization featuring clothing, blankets, etc downtown. The other night is a secular support group, similar activity. We also have a former homeless person take care of our property, an…
> And an important thing I did was make a list of things I would not do, as I tend to get distracted trying to do too many activities and I do not want to fall down rabbit holes.
I’m curious about this list.
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#17Playing Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
Re: Ask HN: How are you having fun?
#18And an important thing I did was make a list of things I would not do, as I tend to get distracted trying to do too many activities and I do not want to fall down rabbit holes. Helping the homeless. One night a week is a multi-church organization featuring clothing, blankets, etc downtown. The other night is a secular support group, similar activity. We also have a former homeless person take care of our property, an…
> And an important thing I did was make a list of things I would not do, as I tend to get distracted trying to do too many activities and I do not want to fall down rabbit holes. I’m curious about this list.
For this list, its about opportunity costs. I look at my life expectancy, and what I want to do and what areas I can reasonably obtain.
It’s better for me to focus on those areas I can maximize enjoyment and avoid frustration. It also allows me to avoid getting drawn into projects because someone thinks I know something.
I love certain foreign languages, and have studied them, but I’ll seriously never get good speaking them based on my limitations, and where I live, and I have no plans to ever go to those countries.
I love road bike bicycling, but I’m too afraid of being on the road now-a-days with people on cell phones and their not concentrating on driving. I do still think about time trials on an isolated road.
I’ve reduced my goal of becoming a chess senior master to a chess master. That is good enough.
No python for me, R/Julia is good enough.
No need for world travel, been to a lot of places.
Oh! One project I will do in 2025, I have my dad’s lathe and will turn out a nice wooden chess set. But, it’s not about building a chess set, but being with the memories of my dad.