I can’t sleep. Let me rephrase that — I am so tired, that I can’t even sleep. I have spent the last two weeks upgrading and reconfiguring the infrastructure at ABI, while at the rest of my time, trying to answer the question “what do I need to be independent on the internet?”. I still don’t have a complete answer, but something is moving towards that direction. I applied for an ASN, and did the payments, now just waiting for my paperwork to go through. Let’s see how it goes.

The last couple of months have been really interesting. I start seeing changes that I both like and hate at the same time. And well, what should I do if I can’t sleep? blog about these changes.

These are not good always good changes, like I’ve said, some of them I do indeed hate, but most of them should be fine.

Last year I got a Valve Steam Deck. Actually, I kind of “won” a Steam Deck? One of our projects was over-budget, and my friend joked with the vendor saying “can we get a PS5? we’re redoing the office”. The reply was as expected — “no, that’s categorized in the Gaming Console section, I can give you anything you want in the computer section”. So I asked, as a joke, again, “can I get a Steam Deck if you have any?”, and to my surprise, the vendor say “actually yes, and I think it’s categorized in the PC section”. It was. I got it. Totally love it.

This change is nice, if you have it under control. Gaming for 12 hours a day? Not a good thing to do, unless its Sunday, and you have no plans. But gaming every day for 12 hours? Well, some people, I’m sure, have the luxury of doing that, but not me. Even if I had the luxury, my brain would crave for a challenge, on a Unix system — a bug to be fixed, a setup to be complete, a research to be read.

But I have to confess — going to bed every day, knowing that I will be using the Steam Deck to play a game, instead of scrolling on not-very-social-media, is one of the best changes in my life.

You’d think a computer like the Steam Deck — portable, tiny, with mid-size fans — would not be very powerful, but oh my how far have we become. I can play all of the games that I was never able to play on my top-of-the-line laptop from back in 2015, and I can even play some of the games I was able to play on my PlayStation 4 Pro from just less than 5 years ago.

I mean, sure, we’re a Unix household. The computers are a Mac, the TV is from Apple, the mobiles are iPhone, the routers are OpenBSD, the servers are FreeBSD, and I’m sure I have NetBSD and illumos somewhere, but seeing Linux do its thing as a gaming machine is absolutely fascinating.

Not only I can play my favorite MMORPG game — Star Wars: The Old Republic — in a pretty high quality, but I can even play Star Wars Battlefront II while I’m on the toilet in the taxi. And no, I don’t mean Battlefront 2 from 2005, I mean the one from 20… something.

You’d think that things are going well, but oh no, the bad changes can become terrible if you don’t get them under control, and I have not been able to get them under control for a while.

Not so long ago, I started using the GTD methodology as a way to organize my… life. It was all going very well, until it just didn’t I forgot to do my weekly reviews for weeks, and then I started forgetting to do my monthly reviews for months. I am still not sure what happened there, but I started feeling like I lost control of my life. Luckily, my brain started going into “auto-pilot” mode and just doing the actual daily things that I needed to do. Follow up with a customer, call a friend, boot up the game for 30 mins, reply to that SMS as soon as you got it. Nothing… major, nothing… new. Just an auto-pilot to keep things running.

Where does that get us to? Well, I stopped blogging, I stopped checking up with my projects, I stopped even to read books for a while. Actually, forget books, I even forgot to listen to the podcast that I care about. I forgot to upload pictures to my photo blogs, I stopped caring about my home servers.

It’s almost mid-night, and I haven’t had a proper sleep for the last week. Yes, I am proud of the new setup, yes, I will document everything I did (even tho I never do, and haven’t, for years now), but for now, all I need, is just a bit of sleep, a proper wake up, and a good morning coffee.

And if I can follow that with a morning, more of a happy blog post, then I can finally say “I’m back baby”.

Good night.