I’ve been using Backblaze for almost 7 years personally and over 8 years at work. It’s super solid and one of the cheapest options out there. I can’t recommend it enough!

It’s free and EVERYONE should download it just to go through the onboarding. Beyond being the best onboarding experience I’ve ever had with an app it’s also a beautiful note taking app that is a pleasure to use.

The title of the video, and this post about it are an exaggeration. That said, the video does a great job at walking you through how to handle disrespect towards yourself and others.

You are not the source, you are only the target.

First their disrespect is not about you. It can come from several sources, including but not limited to their insecurity, fear, or need for superiority, often more than one. Most importantly though, it has nothing to do with you. It isn’t about you, it’s about them.

The general principals are:

1. Assume positive intent
2. Respond non-defensively
   • Pause for 5-7 seconds to let yourself and them process what they said and for you to find a good response
   • If at all possible, sincerely compliment them instead of getting defensive
   • This can be difficult but not getting defensive off the bat is one of the most important things you can do
3. Set boundaries and keep them
   • it’s okay to walk away
4. Get curious about them and ask questions
   • Don’t interrupt them as they answer or come up with one

It’s kind of crazy to see them written out but they make a lot of sense in the video and while it will take a long long time for me to implement I’m gong to do my best! I hope it’s helpful for y’all as well.

Periodic reminder: EVERYONE. Even very smart people. Even people who work in security. Even people who work with account phishing. Even you. EVERYONE can fall for a scam.

The more strongly you believe you could never fall for a scam, the worse you’re going to get fucked when one slips past your defenses. Scammers LOVE people who think they’re too smart to be caught.

Never shame someone for getting caught by one - be understanding and helpful and supportive. Because you’re going to be in that seat someday.

I’ve been having an absolute blast using Claude code to help me build some little tools that I’ve wanted for years and then expand on them beyond my wildest dreams. It’s super empowering and fun to be able to quickly create something. At the same time I also realize that I’m using AI tools that have been created less than ethically. How do we square the fact that something can be super helpful to a lot of people with the fact that it’s harmed others?

Spoiler: I’ve no friggin idea.

Obviously I’ve made the choice to use these tools, for better or worse. I hope that I’ve made, if not the right choice, not a bad one. I’ve tried rationalizing that I’d use more power than they’d get back in money but obviously I can’t prove that. So I’m stuck with hoping and knowing I’m not the only person struggling with this.

The ethical concerns aside (a big caveat), it’s been so so so so sooooo fun and empowering to build things that I’d never have had the ability to make on my own. AI coding tools put a ton of power in your hands and you can use that however you want. I used them to make some fun little niceties for my life (and this blog). I don’t expect to keep paying for Claude code but I might dabble with it every now and then when I need the help with stuff.

It’s truly astounding what AI coding tools can do now. I was able to have it build out (with minimal direction and input from me):

• A podcast live stream recording system with multiple rules
  • Post processing to improve the live audio
  • RSS feed for the live recordings
  • Show notes and artwork retrieval system to pull from the published episode once that goes up and add that to my live recordings
• Another RSS feed that holds all of my DRM free audio books with it’s own api query of Apple Books to get the cover art (if needed) and book description
• An RSS feed tokenization system so that only I can access my RSS feeds (or my friends if I deign to)
• This very blog!
  • The platform it runs on, the systems that maintain it
  • Tools to help me create link and recommendation posts super quick and easy
  • A feature image creator that takes emoji and glyphs I select to make the photos that go with a lot of the posts
  • An image “grabber” that lets me easily grab a photo from a site to use it in a post about that site
  • A system that converts all of the images on my site to be as compressed and small as possible to make my site super duper fast
• A web dashboard to monitor, maintain, and control all of the above systems
• And the AI coding agent even helped me migrate this system from a home Mac mini to a little Linux server in the cloud!

All of that in less than two weeks of me giving it instructions to boot, it would have done it sooner if I didn’t have to sleep or work! 😂

Since 2020 when AI first took off I’ve heard that it wasn’t very good at complex stuff and it did sloppy work. The slop may still be there, I can’t write or read code and I can’t inspect it to tell, but it damn sure works. It works so well that it’s scary.

If you haven’t seen news about AI causing huge security flaws across the internet and your computers you will as it happens more and more often. Some of this is the good team keeping stuff safe and some of it is other people hacking into stuff that then needs to get patched and fixed. It’s a war that no one is going to win but it’s a war we’re all silently caught in the crossfire of.

AI is also super helpful to researchers, scientists, and everyday people. It’s helping to cure and detect diseases, improve our understanding of the universe, and improve our normal lives. I wish I had an answer to whether AI is good or bad for us, but all I can say is to make your own choices and try to be understanding for those that make different choices.

Community can be difficult to find and even more difficult to keep. As Marco says:

Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. … We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit.

Seems like I made a new site for some reason! Thoughtson42.com is still online for now but this will be my new home. Maybe I’ll bring the To42 name over to this site but only time will tell.

Hopefully you’ll see some slightly more regular posts from me here on out! Once again, time will tell!

I’m running a campaign to help toward Relay FM’s St Jude fundraiser. My goal is $500 so if you can donate please do!!!

Oh and I’ll match the first $150 in donations (excluding my own)!

Donate here

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital gives totally free care to children and their families that are battling cancer. It’s an amazing cause and a dollar or 5 helps a lot! You can read a lot more about St. Jude here: about St. Jude

So I LOVE the discord community of Off-Nominal and while we’re not super diverse I always try to approach things with diversity in mind. I’ll note that as a community we’re working really hard to improve our diversity and we will do better (see more of what we’re doing to improve and help).

So one of the most common things that we all do on Discord is “react” to posts with emoji, everyone is familiar with this and Slack popularized it years ago. This is what it can look like with a mix of faces, custom and animated emoji.

While it might sound silly the biggest thing I do is only use the default color emoji when I react to a post. 🤘👍 I know that I would be hesitant to react using a darker skin tone “thumbs up” emoji someone had already used so I don’t want to make anyone feel that way. The default color is most neutral and is most likely to be used by everyone. I will use my own skin tone emoji when typing a post 🤘🏻👍🏻 but that’s my words and actions so I feel its okay there but in a reaction I want everyone to be able to quickly second a reaction emoji.

Another thing that I do is to always use neutral pronouns I’ll say “I think they meant” instead of “I think she/he meant” that way I’m not using a gendered pronoun where someone wouldn’t like me to.

These are tiny little things but I believe that it’s big and small acts that improve our inclusivity.

I want to tell you something so you can better understand me and so that I don’t have to hide behind lies or half truths anymore. I’m sorry that I’ve lied but this is a difficult thing for most people and especially when you’re the one going through it.

We all have routines, we go through most of them every day without even thinking about them. My routines the past three months have been quite different than what most people have. This is about what those are, how I got them and the consequences of not doing more to deal with the underlying issues.

You get up in the morning and take a shower. You drive to work. You finish work and you drive home. You make dinner. You go to bed. Among many other little things, these are some of the basics that most of you go through at least a few days a week.

But this is how my days have gone: I wake up in the morning in the back of my car and drive to the gym where I take a shower. I drive to work when my anxiety doesn’t trap me. I finish work and drive “home” to the same Walmart I’ve parked at the past three months. I eat dinner, what wont spoil in the heat and will give me something akin to a “healthy” diet. I crack the windows and curl up in the back seat of my car.

I’m homeless. I live in my car. I have a gym membership not to work out but to have a place to shower and clean up. I’m not telling you this to garner sympathy. I got myself into this situation and I trying to learn my own strength so that I can deal with things in a more healthy way.

I don’t think that my anxiety is particularly strong but I know that my responses to it need to improve a lot. I will never be rid of the anxiety in my every day life but I don’t have to let it control me. That’s why I’m getting back on medication as well as a few other things to help control it instead of trying to hide from it.

We all have anxiety about something, for me at least it’s there for everything. It’s like hearing “is this how you want to look going in there?”, “is that the right thing to say?”, “will you ever do a good enough job?”, “remember how badly this went last time?” All day about almost everything. The only time it leaves is when I’m too busy thinking about something else. Bit the moment that I slow down its back.

I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember and for as long as I can remember I’ve hid from it in books, movies, tv and learning about anything that strikes my fancy. But again, the moment something ends or is put down it comes back.

I try to push myself to go sit at Starbucks to at least be around people instead of sitting alone all day. Or I’ll make myself go dancing but I’ll hide in a corner or behind my camera. Sometimes these experiences are helpful, that show me that I can do this but then sometimes they backfire and they discourage me and trap me in a feedback loop of anxiety.

I truly haven’t really minded living in my car much. I wish I could stretch out instead of having my knees bent to fit in the back seat but I’d be content if I wasn’t afraid all the time of just interacting with people. Some of you have talked to me and may not even know of my anxiety and very few people knew of my situation because I work hard to seem “normal” in general.

But probably the most time important thing that I need to tell you is that after next weekend I’m moving back to South Georgia to live with my grandmother so she can help me get my life back on track. So I’ll be gone for 3-6 months and then I plan to return to Austin.

But I wanted you all to know because I appreciate your friendship whether it’s close or not. I only made the decision or realized I was had no other choice but to move back with my grandmother today. I wish I had more time with everyone here but I will be back.

Dancers love to see those cool shots of themselves on the dance floor doing their thing. The photos can be serious, funny, completely wacky or full of emotion. Some photographers are fantastic at capturing these moments, some of us are improving with every shot. I’d like to tell you a bit about my current thought process when I photograph dancers. 

Planning

Every time you go to take a photo you have dozens of things to think about from the lighting on the subject, what you want to convey with the photo, if you want the background sharp or blurry, the angle of the shot, making sure you’re not in anyone’s way when taking the photo, etc, etc. Thinking about each and every one of those things every single shot would drive me crazy, so I try to plan ahead. When I get somewhere I see where the best lighting is and where it’s the worst. I also check to see where you can position yourself so that you aren’t in the way. 

This gives me a mental map of the room with spots picked out to shoot from. As the dance progresses I remove spots that don’t work and add more.  This is a very crudely drawn map of a dance I shot recently, I shot this dance without a flash and so used only ambient light (I talk about the pros and cons of using a flash later). You can see how I have the light sources marked in yellow, angles with poor lighting in red and spots where I can position myself in blue.  

Perspective

Every photograph is about perspective, photos of dancers are no different. But getting the perspective you want is the interesting part. As a photographer you get to do a lot of sitting, squatting, leaning, bending over and just plain contortion.  Finding the perspectives that give you good photos is a matter of trying things out an seeing what works. Everyone takes shots that just don’t work but as you get more experience you’ll end up with more keepers and less throw alway shots. Here are a few of my favorite (read: hilarious looking) ways you can get different perspectives in our photos. 

Ariel Penu at Wild Wild Westie 2016 demonstrating the classic squat. 

A number of photographers showing off a few different poses we use at Moscow Westie Fest 2015. 

Photo: Brad Whelan

Brad Wheland showing off the “get as low as you can” technique for getting the perfect shot. 

Photo: Brad Whelan  

Ariel Penu proving she can take photos while doing the splits.  

Photo: Brad Whelan

Lighting

Lighting is one of the most important things when it comes to photography in general. We have great digital cameras these days that let us shoot in lower light than we ever could with traditional film cameras but even they have limits. There are three things you can do for lighting; have a camera and lens that let you shoot with confidence in low light, have good lighting where you’re shooting, or use a flash or multi flash setup. Each of these options has it’s pros and cons as you’d expect: 

1. If you want a camera/ lens that shoots well in low light you’re going to spend a lot of money but you will get great shots. The nice thing about having this quality equipment is it gives you a lot more flexibility in how you shoot and the types of photos you can take.
2. Shooting dancers with ambient lighting that is good enough with out a flash is difficult because we tend to like a relaxed atmosphere with lights set relatively low. Shooting with ambient light also creates a problem because you’re shooting moving subjects, to get a good exposure (see these articles on exposure and shutter speed) you can’t freeze motion so you’ll get blurs in your photos. That’s why if you’re using only ambient light you have to plan out your shots as I talked about above. 
3. Using a flash or strobe can cause problems if you’re using a direct flash instead of a bounce flash because it can temporarily blind everyone around. Using a flash can also a huge boon because not only can you freeze motion and capture some stunning photos it also lets you give your subject an extra pop in the photo. So using a flash has to be done with consideration and planning but it will give you photos that look much better.

Give consideration to how you’re going to approach the dance, even before you walk in the door or get in your car to drive over. Using a flash is the biggest difference that you can make but please use a bounce flash so it’s not blinding everyone. 

You have to start somewhere

If you’re just starting to shoot dancers start with these two things (like I am)  and then just play around till you find what works for you. As you go you’ll get comfortable with something and find that you can then start trying to do one more thing. My advice, take photos and see what you get. When you get a photo you like remember what you did to take it and try it again next time. I’ll have more posts in the future about more aspects of dance photography but I wanted to get this out there for those of you that want to get started. See you on the dance floor!

Also check out some of my favorite photographers, these are the people who I look at their photos and try to learn from. 

Ariel Penu & Brad Whelan both do awesome dance photography. 

Kate De La Rosa is an old friend of mine that does some BEAUTIFUL portraits and family shoots. 

We enjoyed achieving things, meeting goals and such. But more and more I’ve found we derive happiness from those around us, be they fleeting or anchors in our lives. It’s not about the monuments we build or the things we create. It’s about letting our emotions flow into those around us, changing their lives with your own.

For every action. there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I’m not going all Zen on you or anything, just hear me out. When you put energy into someone or something that affects someone (or even many someone’s) that energy goes somewhere. As we all know it doesn’t always come back to us, we’ve all been in a relationship where you put in all the work and the recipient seems to give you nothing in return. That said it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.

You rarely get guarantees in life but taking risks is what makes life worth living. We all face disappointment every day, I’m disappointed in myself every time I stub my toe on a piece of furniture that hasn’t moved in ages. But I don’t let that stop me from walking, nor should you let things stop you from being a light shining in what ever darkness scares you. Let your light, your positive emotions flow into those around you and they will find their own light growing.

Happiness is a positive feedback loop, the more you put out the more you get. 

The people in our lives aren’t just there to say “nice job” or “I’m so jealous of you” they’re there so you can both benefit from the positive emotions that give us satisfaction in life. Others don’t have to suffer for you to thrive, you can both enjoy happiness if you want. Give random people a compliment or drop your change on the sidewalk so that someone else can be excited to find it! Little actions can move a mountain if you make a lot of them, so go make a lot of little actions to make people happy and I’ll bet that you’ll be happy too.

The difficult thing with social anxiety is that you are inherently scared of social situations but you still crave them.  We’re just like everyone else, we still like to meet people and hang out with our friends. It’s just more difficult. 

Hopefully if if you have anxiety you’re able to find something that lets you shed those fears at least in part. Something that lets you feel free. For me that’s dancing.  

When I’m on the dance floor I can shed most (and sometimes all) my anxieties. It’s not a silver bullet and it doesn’t always work but the majority of the time it’s where I’m happiest.  

While this is all and good we can’t be content with having one place that we’re free of the fear that chains us. With time and effort we can slowly break those chains to free ourselves. While it might seem that once free of one chain there’s just one more we are more free than we were before. One less chain, one less fear, is holding us back from the life we want. 

Take your time and don’t push yourself too fast but you can make progress. You can have the life you dream of if you work towards it. I’m not saying you can have a fairytale ending but you can live without fear. 

The other day I was driving and it was pouring down rain. I was driving more carefully as the weather demanded it, but not everyone was.  I got frustrated with the people that were driving fast, tailgating or rubber necking at accidents. And this was a long three and a half hour drive in the rain so I got frustrated a lot. Then near the end of my drive two police cars zoomed past me with lights going. I instantly thought “Some idiot driver probably wrecked, maybe even got hurt” but it wasn’t a sad thought. I was mad and happy that the person might have gotten what I thought they deserved. 

This kind of thought isn’t uncommon for most people, at least not as uncommon as we might wish or even think. As humans we evolved to care and relate to what we could see and touch. We relate to the people around us but if there’s almost any kind of barrier, real or perceived, our brains switch modes. And this is an all too common thing these days, we’re exasperated by so many things that can also bring us together. 

I’m not proud of what I thought and it shocked me that I could be so callous about someone’s life. That I HOPED someone got hurt, someone that is someones friend, coworker, son, daughter, husband, wife, parent. We all have instincts programmed into us by tens of thousands of years of evolution that just don’t make sense in society today. This is just one instance of something like this happening. We all need to consider our thoughts and actions carefully. 

It’s easy to dis-associate with someone but not as easy to relate to them. But we need to more of the latter not the former. On the internet it’s easy to see something and to immediately assume the worst but we wouldn’t do that near as much face to face with people. Or to say things we’d never dream of saying to someones face. I know I’m late to the part in talking about this subject at least in the tech community with Gamer Gate being over a year old but this is a topic that should never die out and should always be on our minds. 

We (the human race as a whole) won’t change overnight or in a year or in a decade or in a hundred years. We’ve made enormous progress as country and as a planet over the past hundred years in how we treat different races sure but we have so much further to go on so many fronts. This is a fundamental problem that transcends race or culture or click in high school. We all have to fight to find ways to relate to those around us. Start small. Life doesn’t have to be black and white, not everyone has to be like you, everyone means something to someone else and what you say and do means something to the people you say it to no matter how you express it.

I hope that where ever those police cars were going, that everyone ended the day okay. 

This morning a co-workers car wouldn’t start so I gave him a ride. No biggie, nothing any normal person wouldn’t do in my place. Sure I was already at work at it was almost 8 but what was I going to say, “no”? 

So 2 o’clock rolls around and he’s asks if when I drop him off I can jump him and follow him to Auto Zone to get the battery replaced. Me being a self made hermit with no plans I of course said yes. I mean it beats sitting on the couch wondering what show I should watch or sadly swiping away in Tinder. 

After work we get back to his car and I get out my jumper cables while he goes to get his socket set. I pop my hood and then realize I don’t have a clue where the release is to let me lift it up. so I grab my cars manual out of the glove compartment and flip through the pages feeling silly. Finally finding that information I get the hood up and grab my jumper cables (obviously my first time using them).

He comes back socket set in hand and motions for the cables. But then he looks at his car and I ask “want me to do it?” to which he replies “yeah, I haven’t done this before.” So I hook up the cables and he tries to start. Nothing happens. Tries again. Nothing happens. I leaf through my car manual again to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid and low I followed the instructions correctly. 

I check the connections on my battery, I check the positive on his. They’re all good. Then I wiggle the negative and instead of hearing a metal on metal sound I hear a metal on plastic sound. This dunce tried to ground to plastic (which looked a lot like all the metal) so moving it to a proper ground and we were off to the races. 

Drove over to Auto Zone and after a fair bit of work to get a cross bar out and some bolts out of very tight spaces we pulled out the battery. 

He goes and get the new battery and we go through the whole process backwards getting the damn thing in there. Of course the new battery has no handle on it so it’s just that much more difficult to work with. But we get the battery back in, cross bar back in and everything nice and tight. I’m not even going to get into how we had to buy tools to get the new battery in because the terminals protruded from the back and we couldn’t get the ratchet in the space. 

All that done and the car comes to life. our hands are dirty and we’re starving. So he offers to take me out to dinner. I ask what he likes, he says this hibachi grill. I’m down for what ever since he’s buying. And man was it good, friggin delicious. We finish eating after talking a bit and enjoying the show. When walking out he slows down and says “I’m going to introduce you to a tradition” and plunges his hand into a huge basket of mints. These aren’t normal mints though they’re like the red and white peppermints you’d normally see but they’re  brown and green. And man were they weird tasting, like an Andies mint created by a man with no sense of taste only having heard them described. 

All this to say as we were driving away I realized he’s my friend. We aren’t best friends are even very close friends but friends none the less. I’m not as alone as I think I am at times. I’m sure many of you, like me feel alone from time to time or maybe more. But I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that we make ourselves be alone by being afraid of trying, afraid of doing. It’s easier said than done but don’t let your fear control you, even if you fight it a little that’s a small victory and small victories can turn the tide of a war.