There is a lot of posts all over facebook today comparing the “Transgender Debate” to the “Jewish Question.” Seeing this comparison makes me wince hard, recoil from it even! This phrasing invokes a feeling of taking the analogy too far. However, the fact that I’m trying to be reputed out of existence by my government makes me feel this whole “holy shit our government is run by white nationalists” feel a lot less like something I can point at and make grim laughter about or mock.

I am distraught and disturbed over the New York Times article1 about a memo looking to define trans people out of existence as a part of a change to Title IX. It’s not the wording of the article or the attempt to change Title IX that has me most upset; Not to underplay that if this happens, I have no idea what I’ll do. Considering the timing and the political climate, this feels more like an extremely conservative call to arms.

In part one of this post I talked about what I feel the hardest part of every system is, maintence. I talked about identifying tasks that take up large amounts of mental stress and what you should maybe do with them. Hint, throw them out or defer them. What if you really need to do this thing though?

I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past years evangelizing the power of having a system and the David Allen Getting Things Done (GTD) method. One thing I haven’t talked much about is that while having a trusted system has huge advantages it doesn’t come for free. Like all systems it must be maintained or it breaks down slowly until one day it either stops working completely, or you’ve given up on it for it’s inefficiency.

Every day people say horrible things to me, constantly judging me, tearing me down, and invalidating me. Sometimes it’s my friends, sometimes it’s my family, other times it’s just me looking in a mirror. It starts first thing in the morning when I open my eyes and I feel gross by the time I get out of the shower. Most of these things never actually come out of another person’s mouth though.

Sometimes it’s a little odd to hear these things from other people so I thought I’d leave a nice open letter to whom it may concern. No wait, this isn’t a generic letter to just anyone. This is a letter I am writing specifically for you. That’s right, directly from me to you; Just you. You probably heard some confusing things, or caught wind of some stuff you don’t understand. I am here to make some clarifications, set the record straight, just in case you missed the news.

For those that don’t know I’m a Chef for a living. Not the kind that works with food but one that works with code. What you may not know is I’m a FreeBSD guy, or at least claim to be one. I’ve been building a new FreeBSD workstation and discovered that there is no chef-dk for FreeBSD. Building it isn’t bad, but there is a trick to it. So without further ado, here is building Chef-DK for FreeBSD 10.

I wanna take a moment to to address what I like to call Burnout as a Service; how I see burnout as a product of the tech industry and culture. My friends, coworkers, and I have all experienced it in various levels, sometimes to crippling physical side effects. In this article I’m going to use strong language like need, and should, and I won’t work with you if you [don’t|do] $thing.

In my personal experience not everyone wants to be happy. When I say that I’m not talking about that one friend either. I’m talking about me. For a very long time I didn’t wanna be happy. It was a very frustrating time. I can’t say I knew I wanted to be unhappy, I just was all the time. I was angry, depressed, and off and on apathetic. It was actually my mother who coined the phrase “You just need to be unhappy.

Not a big blog, but a quick problem I got solved on IRC that I thought might help others.

I have a Gateway LT4009u with an Atom N2600. It’s my “hacker/workshop” laptop. The atom N processors are a bit gimpy so sometimes things don’t run right. One thing is GNURadio on Pentoo. Pentoo runs hardened and this pisses off the Atom N.