Day 00 — System Audit

Debugging the System

Things have been weighing me down for years and I have never stopped to ask why, or try seeking a solution. I noticed that I was getting annoyed with small things like the fingerprint sensor on my laptop not unlocking it, or an unresponsive AI prompt where you type in some information on a topic you are researching and it just goes blank like you never typed anything in at all.

Things that should not make you mad, suddenly do. From out of nowhere and for no real reason. This is what kind of led me to thinking more about what was really going on under the hood.

The goal is to try to fix the operating system in my mind so that I could move forward with my life. There is probably a corrupt file or a bunch of zombie processes running in the background that I don’w realize are draining what little resources I have left, and leading my to crash out randomly.

Step 00 is to figure those things out.

System Load

Looking at it from an outside view sometimes helps diagnose things. When you can step back and say “OK what is really going on with this system that could be causing these issues” you start to think in a very different light.

Since 2020 I have been listening to more news and political content while I am at work, and even when I come home. It is always doom and gloom and nothing ever really changes.

Listening to that for over 10hrs a day will lead anyone to believe that there is a major collapse about to happen, AI will take over everyone’s jobs, you will eat bugs and like them and there is nothing you can do about any of it.

Compound that with having to work in a windowless office for 10hrs a day and in 2023, I had to take over the role from our engineer at the company I work for because he was retiring.

So I basically went from doing full time programming to also engineering, talking with customers, working on quoting, designing the part and then programming the part all by myself with not even a pay raise offered or considered.

Add on to that there is no one to talk to when I run into issues that can actually help me and it feels like you are beating your head against a wall for 10hrs for no real reason.

There is also almost no human contact besides phone calls to customers or people coming to see where I am on a project that should have shipped last week, even though I have been working on something else that is already late for the past few days.

You can’t dig your way out of a hole like that. It just keeps getting deeper and deeper and you start to question your existence at some point.

Compounding this is the lack of nutrition and sleep I have been getting for the past few years. I figured out that I was eating way less calories then I need for my body to even function.

Add to that a couple of beers after work and not always eating dinner, I think that is a recipe for disaster to be honest. I have tried to address this in the past, but never got anywhere for more then a week or two before I relapsed into my old ways.

Part of me has felt burned out for the past 5 or 6 years and part of me says that other people have it worse then I do so I should just be thankful for what I have and just smile though the pain.

I don’t think that is a very good way to approach this however, because the issue is still there. The zombie process is still running in the back of your mind. You still feel helpless and hopeless.

Observing Instability

I thought taking a walk during my lunch break would be a good idea, but my brain was just focused on the imperfections in the environment.

The cracks in the pavement, the dead grass, the gloomy clouds all seemed to taunt me as I walked down the street to get my lunch. It was as if I was just passing through life and not really there.

Looking around, I noticed that the colors were more of a muted gray and not as vibrant as I once remembered. Maybe it was the environment that had changed?

Input Variables

I tried to make some progress and work on some projects at home that made me feel like I had more control over my life. I started building webpages even though I had nothing to really say.

I started with Wordpress and some shared hosting which uses the one click install so you really have no idea what is going on behind the scenes. I wanted to learn more about how it actually deploys a page to the internet when you click publish.

That lead me to learn about Hugo, a static site generator that allows you to create simple static websites that are way more secure then Wordpress ever could be. Then I needed a place to put it. Rather then go the github pages or Cloudflare pages route, I set up my own VPS on Linode.

Then I had to learn to SSH into the VPS and configure it properly so it is actually secure. I had to break a couple of config files and do a few reinstall’s before I got the hang of it, but after a couple of weeks I had things locked down pretty good.

I added Yubikey login along with a keyfile and had to deal with PAM in the process which probably strengthened my Linux security skills.

OK cool, now I had a VPS I could deploy my static site to. So I ran hugo to build my site and manually copied everything into the /var/www/mycoolsite.com folder on my VPS and boom.

We were live and I was feeling pretty good about it.

The days stress was not even a factor during that moment. I am not sure what happened there, but it was a really good feeling.

Immediate Mitigation Steps

So my thinking on this now is that I need to focus on a couple of areas of my life that need attention.

1. Nutrition. Setting up a plan so I can eat at least 3000 calories per day instead of the 1500 I was consuming for years of processed garbage. Whole foods and water should be at the top of the list.

2. Exercise. Not just walking, but weight lifting. I don’t know what the deal was with my brain focusing on the doom and gloom of the walks I would take at lunch, but I have a feeling it was because I was not properly fueled up. I will be testing this theory in the coming weeks.

3. Cut out the background noise. Political and news content are going to have to be a thing of the past. I don’t care what is going on out there or how bad things get. Cutting that along with black-pill content out of my life and just listening to music while I work is what I am going to try and focus on. Lofi Girl is what I am listening to as I write this, and it seems to be helping.

4. Work on changing careers. This one is going to take the most time to achieve since I want to transition into a sysadmin or devops roll. I have a lot of the basic skills I need and the troubleshooting capability to become really good in this field, I just need to work toward it and ignore the opinion that AI is going to take over and you won’t have a job anymore. If AI can harden a server by itself and not mess it up, then Skynet will be a real thing.

Conclusion for Now

I didn’t start out writing a post that would be this long, but I guess I have a lot to say about this issue and maybe this can help someone in the same boat as me.

The thing is that you have to look forward and try to strategically figure a way out of where you are now, to where you want to be in the next year or two.

For me it is definitely not the position I am in right now, but it does not help that I am under-fueled and filling my head with the worst content on the planet.

Once I get that part straightened out, the rest might come a little easier. But I guess we will see.