Feeling full

I like computers; I like them a lot. I jump between hobbies all the time, but computers have been a long, long-standing passion of mine. One of the reasons is that there is just so much to learn; "worlds within worlds", I like to say when I'm in an expansive mood. (Or mode.) (And really, when am I not?) Networking. Programming. Automation. Electronics. System administration, which covers all of these and so much more, has been a wonderful career for me. My varied interests have turned out to be a good skillset: curiosity nearly unbounded.

But that can backfire on me, too. I tend to be a packrat. I think it's complimentary, the flip side to being broadly curious: I dive deep into new interests and want to inhale everything. In my closet I've got a milk crate full of weird screeds and pamphlets from my days of collecting psychoceramics. I go to the library and come out with eight books on the same subject. I discover a new podcast and download all 57 extant episodes so I can catch up. I flit between trying to write a script that'll make an EPUB file from forty random URLs (Devops Weekly on my Kobo!), and trying to fix an old, broken utility to make mirrors of all the Github repos you've ever created or starred or forked or watched. And if I'm not careful I'll be up all night, head whirling, unable to get to sleep; anxious the next day at the thought of all the things I have yet to do.

Long ago, I realized that I will go to my grave with things left undone: books and PDFs unread, Emacs techniques unmastered, wonderful music unheard. It's frustrating, sure, but it's also wonderful to have this strategic reserve of curiosities. I get tired and bored from time to time, but it never lasts long. How could it, when there's so much?

I'm losing weight right now by using the techniques in The Hacker's Diet. They're pretty simple: eat less, go hungry, weigh yourself daily but pay attention to the 30-day moving average. One of the side effects of going hungry is that I've learned to feel uncomfortable when I eat too much. It's a novelty: I'm full sooner, after much, much less food than before, and I recognize the feeling in advance of the discomfort. The mechanism isn't perfect, but it's better. I'm hoping to learn the same lesson with knowledge: to limit, and to savour.