Doubtfully Daily Matigo

Elon Musk has been talking a great deal about neurotechnology and attaching computers directly to our brains to help us interact more quickly and efficiently depending on the situations we find ourselves in. While I'm an avid proponent of using technology to solve problems, I struggle to find what problem is actually solved by connecting our brains to cold silicon. Is it just for efficiency? Is it for correctness? Is it to make us a species of equals, as everybody will have the same skillset despite the different backgrounds? Even when I think about just the positive aspects of such a technology, I can't help but ask the question: who really benefits from this?

It sure as heck isn't the common person.

A week has passed since this podcast began (again), and I'm quite surprised that an episode has been published every day. While the "personal podcast" genre has mostly piddled out over the last few years, I have a number of goals for this show that will hopefully encourage me to do some bigger and better things. Namely:

• no complaining (if possible)
• no parenting stuff (for the most part)
• keep the show under 10 minutes (if possible)
• don't get bogged down with editing

We'll see how this goes. So long as I can maintain the enthusiasm, it should be completely reasonable to take on larger podcasting projects later in the year that focus on more technical subjects, such as databases and other items that pique interests.

Buried in a corner of my closet at home is a hard-working Atom-based netbook that has been heavily modified over the years to act as a NAS with a grand total of 42TB of storage, 41.2 of which is in active use. It's not a pretty setup by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm honestly surprised the thing has gone this long. As moving day to the new house fast approaches, I'm wondering if this is the moment to spring for a proper machine with a nice AMD processor, a good amount of RAM, and 60TB in a RAID6 array. I also wonder why more people don't have storage servers of their own at home running on older, semi-retired hardware.

A dozen people will interrupt us throughout the day if we let them, making deadlines difficult to meet and priority lists pointless due to the endless shuffling. While it's nice to feel needed, there must also be a good amount of clear communication with people to let everyone know that changing gears to focus on one new thing will directly impact other priorities. Getting this idea across in a polite manner is crucial, and incredibly difficult.

It's the start of the year and the day job has a lot of managers in new roles who are trying to assert authority and rally allies. Some people are trying to rope me into their reindeer games, and I have no interest in such pettiness. At the end of the day, I just want to do my job, do it well, involve as many people who can actually contribute, and ensure the ultimate goals of the organisation are met.

A rather serious design flaw in Intel CPUs has been discovered and it's going to cost us all a good deal of processing performance to fix it: between five and thirty percent. Given the number of people who have older notebooks at home, this could very well trigger a lot of people to ditch the old paradigm of using a computer for the modern tablet + phone combination that seems to be catching on with students and young adults. Seeing how most people actually use their computers, this wouldn't be a bad decision, either.

Nozomi has had a pretty rough holiday season, spending more time at the vet in the last week than she has in her entire lifetime. One overnight stay, two IVs, and seven needles are hardly ways to mark the end of the year, but this is just what she needed to endure to overcome a terrible bout of … something.

Update: Since recording this episode, Nozomi has passed the final hurdle to being considered "back to normal". As a result, tomorrow she'll get to go out for a short walk in the park for the first time in a week.

With a new year comes new expectations. There was a great deal of change in 2016 and 2017, much of it stealing focus away from some of the things I really wanted to do, like podcasting and actually finishing 10C expansions rather than having them essentially collect dust. So with the start of 2018, I plan on setting some goals for myself, including focusing on the people and projects that matter most to me.