2026 Birthday Retrospective

I decided to start another tradition this year in the form of so called birthday retrospective. Not entirely sure if this is something that is going to stick, nor what I am actually going to yap about exactly, but it seems like a reasonable idea to do at this time.

0x14 years since “…”

It’s pretty crazy to think about the fact that it has been 0x14 since graduating high-school. What is even crazier that if I’d been a very irresponsible young-adult, and fathered a child, that child now would be 0x14 years old. How crazy is that?

Kept in touch only with a handful of my ex-classmates over the years, which is not too unconmmon, I should think.

What about the reunions over the years? I am not much of a reunions guy, but I am sure that you’ve already summized as much if you happen to read this blog with any regularity at all.

0x1D years of “…”

0x1D years of coding this year. I started at around age 11 or thereabouts, it’s always difficult to pin this down in retrospect. I do realize that there are people out there who started at age 6 and some even earlier than that.

Now, in my particular case it wasn’t anything glorious or out of the ordinary, but I did manage to cobble together a small quiz game in the form of a [batch file][bat].

How did it work? It used the limited primitives available echo, choice, if, goto. I was unaware of course of the more advanced capabitilies that were available in the more modern .cmd variant of the language, that was available in the NT family.

It still felt like black-magic, and even after this many years I am more than happy to report that the same feeling and joy never went away. Which, I am more than sure that some might find a tad surprising to hear.

You won’t always carry a “…”

“You won’t always carry a calculator in your pocket.” is a phrase that all us millenials have heard being repeated to us ad nauseam, even though everybody understood by then that it has already lost most of it’s potency and meaning.

Truth be told, I got my very own feature phone quite late in the game, in the form of a glorious Sony Ericsson K300, which of course was way more than just a calculator in my pocket.

Thinking about all this made me realize how we all used to explore every nook and cranny of these phones back in the day. And now, we carry phones in our pockets that put absolute monsters like the Pentium 4 to shame in every respect.

Quite an interesting conondrum to ponder, isn’t it so?

Blogging

Speaking of firsts, I had my first homepage up and running on Geocities in 2002 or so. The idea of free ad-less hosting was just a dream back in those days, and one frequently ended up hopping between hosts depending on what was being offered.

At any rate, I did have some articles and tutorials up there, but it most definitely wasn’t an actual blog. So much so that in fact I can’t recall anybody even mentioning the term blog until much later into the decade.

I went through what I like to call the right of passage of the great primordial blog-o-verse: Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress.com (both cloud and self-hosted), before scraping all the dynamic stuff, and going to back to the basics of having a statically generated site.

Truth be told, the sharp lines between the blog and the personal homepage kind of blurred together anyway by the 2010s or thereabouts.

Social Media

I always considered the early days of blogging as proto-social-media. Especially when the so called micro-blogging phenomena took off, and people started pushing out short controlled bursts of their most random going through their heads through the sideways-and-byways of the great information super-highway.

Now, just so it happens that I found myself working on a very interesting service that intersected at a pretty fundamental level with what I like to call the dawn of modern social media. If you ask someone today to name a couple of social media companies from let’s say between 2003 to 2009, they will very likely say MySpace and Facebook.

I say that, what about Bebo, Friendster, Hi5 or VK? Do any of these ring a bell?

The service eventually got sold for a considerable chunk of change way back in 2008, and the rest is history, but you young folks should remember that your elders also used to have rizz and did copious amounts of aura farming back in those early days. Even though our bodies might not have been tea, even back then. Too much non-diet Coke, I’m afraid.

Digital Archeology

I made no secret of being kind of a digital hoarder of sorts. Alright, it’s nothing to be worried about, I’m nowhere near where I have to stand in a circle stating: “I am X, and I am a digital data hoarder!”. Okay?

Anyway, the idea of having my very own curated archive composed of a mixture of old web, magazine demo CDs/DVDs, and old shareware has been swirling in my head for the past 2-3 years.

Did it reach the point, where I am finally going to do something about it, and birth it into existence? I honestly don’t know just yet, so I am going to exercise my 5th amendment right and remain silent.

Joking aside, when it happens it will probably just live under a sub-section of this very blog, as I have really no intention in maintaining yet another digital presence.

Obviously, I wouldn’t host any of the ISOs myself, and I’d offload them to someplace like archive.org.

English

I am sure that most people have probably picked up on the fact that English is not mother tongue, nor it is my first foreign language. English was introduced in the 6th grade In the middle-school that I was attending, while French was introduced in the 2nd grade of primary school.

Both of these languages have followed me all the way to the 12th grade, or the end of high-school if you want to be more precise.

This must surely mean that my French must be pretty good, right? Well, not exactly. I always said that the Gauls did end up defeating the Romans in the end, simply by drifting the French language as far away from Latin as it was humanly possible.

At any rate, I can read and understand French of course, but conversionally speaking, I’d rate my myself as having basic or limited proeficiency. All that is to say that I find it difficult to find my words. I almost forgot, I also happened to have taken 2 years of Latin, so I know full well what I am talking about here.

Now, English on the other hand. It’s a totally different story. I consider it to be the ultimate utilitarian language, and it most definitely became the New Latin of our days.

I am generally not the person who likes to prescibe to others what they must focus on to understand about the world in general, but not undertsnaing English in the year 2026 is equivalent of living in some sort of a weird pseudo-intelectual dark ages. Why, do I say that?

Think about it for a second. If one doesn’t understand English, then they are at the mercy of others to translate, and recurgitate pretty much everything of note that happens in the world. They are incapable of making up their own minds or learning about anything in real time, which puts them in a very vulnerable, and rather dangerous position, especially in today’s rapid changing world.

I am sure that people will try and employ all sorts of intelectual gymnastics to justify why all this is just fine, and dandy. Let me just say this, do not let these people fool you as they do not have your best interest in mind.

Writing

One of the ways of improving one’s ability at a certain language is by reading, writing and speaking said language with a certain regularity. I’d probably add to that list one additional item, which is thinking in said language, rather than in one’s mother tongue, can also prove to be extremely beneficial when it comes to commanding it well.

I am doing all these myself, but like I mentioned before, I’d really like to write a whole lot more, and not just short-form blog post type content, but also long form. Both on technical and non-technical subjects. Finding your own style, and your own voice can most definitely take some practice in my experience.

As an ardent fan of collections and anthologies, I’d love nothing more than to have a crack at some alternate historical fiction in the form of a series of short stories. That was a mouhtful, wasn’t it? Well, I feel like that it would be a good first foray into non-technical writing for a layman like myself.

Art

I am doing some new year’s clean-up as I migrate things to my new machine, and I happaned to bump into some paintings and drawings from middle-school. As this post wasn’t way too long already, I have decided to share them here for your pleasure or horror. Angels to some, demons to others as they say.

They are not much, but they are honest work of young your’s truly. I never really had any meaningful talent, but I do consider myself to have at least some minimal inherent sense of aesthetics.

The Future

All 3 loyal readers of this blog might have noticed how I became a bit more cautious when it comes to announcing my side projects. This is largely because, I came to the realization that most people do not seem to understand the basic facts that side-projects are just that; they are not part of a second job, nor do they have hard deadlines or any specific commitments.

Therefore questions like “When is it done?”, have no real meaning in relation to side-projects. The answer to that question always is and will be a very simple: “It’s done, when it’s done!”.

I’d love nothing more than to be able to retire early and spend all my available time hacking away at interesting, and perhaps not so interesting side-projects. Alas, that is not possible at the present time, and besides, I have to put food on my table which happens to require a considerable amount of my time. Given that there’s only so many hours in a day, there’s less time to spend on side-projects.

Now, I do not want to end this post with the feeling of impending doom-and-gloom as they say, so let me just put it out there that I in fact have a rather potent mixture of awesome things cooking in my owen at the moment. I do realize that I said this before, but patience is the elementary ingredient of all things as the say around these parts.

So be of good cheer, sit tight and wait! I have such sights to show you!