I assume it's your personality. I hope it's not because you have to. I'm not going to do that. I was done 12 years ago on the felony arrest and conviction.

My billing rate was $100 an hour 12 years ago. And that's where it started since I was the senior VP at boa at that moment and that really pushed up my billing rate for my consulting.

Edit: I realized that the moment I got that job while my financial future looked open and infinite, my actual day-to-day happiness level dropped pretty dramatically. I loved coding and accomplishing, but that was for other people. I'd spent the previous 6 months woodworking, building up my house and rehabbing it and getting my hands dirty. I loved it.

A year later I was getting paid $9.25 an hour to wash cars and fill gas. 2 years later I was up to $16 an hour, in charge of the building and all the personnel during the overnight shift and being the dispatcher in charge. I was so proud.

Two years later I was physically unable to walk more than a few feet from for a few minutes and unable to do anything physical for a couple of years and then it was off and on every few months where I was good versus bad and capable of doing stuff.

So my time value is nothing. At least from a dollar amount perspective. From a comparative basis versus other people wasting my time? My time is worth infinity.

I had a time of money. I know what I value. And I know what I don't. I'll be smiling and happy until I die. And I'll do it by spending tiny amounts at used stores.

And yes I know he had fancy wood. Who cares? It's wood. Give me the ugly cast off crap. A few hours later it's gorgeous.

Edit: 2:00 a.m., M's at work and I have the Nickelback Pandora channel on. They throw The offspring on and you're going to go far kid starts playing.

My goddamn theme song. That was my time of money. Screaming and dancing and moving materials around. I'm going to put in the base units. I had removed them from the house, they shook it too much. Screw that, they're coming back.

Your clove garden is amazing. I'm glad you enjoy working on it because the benefit to humanity is up there.

We have a huge crossover in our technology and our history. Yes I soldered those rs 232s. Yes I lived in sco and had the first multiprocessor box that wasn't the compaq. It was better. Okay, getting past all that.

I have found I am living what was my dream 15 years ago. Truly a dream since I had two tools and picked up everything off of Craigslist and did everything wrong. I was so proud of the final result but it was stupid.

This time around I'm doing it right. 3 years ago I had a bunch of money. My lawyer told me to spend that money on the house, and tools are included in that. Who was I to argue?

M bought a crap crap crap rolling cabinet off of temu. Spent some serious money on it but at the same time it was far far less than the Amazon offering.

It's got 20 pages of instructions and hundreds of bits of hardware. She thought I was going to read that and sit and put this crap together?

It came with a bunch of decent boards though. It came with a lot of hardware to pick and choose from. It came with a couple of very nice countertop pieces.

I had to open up multiple boxes downstairs and carry them all upstairs and it took about 15 trips.

I brought it all back downstairs.

You can tell I'm ripping everything apart and using it to build my tool table. Didn't come out of my budget. And M is very happy to see me do that because she knows what I'll create next. She solved the final result of when I was bad at it and she liked it.

Almost everything else I have is stuff I ripped apart from ripping apart the kitchen cabinets. The previous owner thought he was handy and he built a whole bunch of crap with lots of plywood. It's filled with nails though. At least some of it.

As I told you already, I bought everything already, and now it's on the cheap. And I'm good at it.

They just didn't know it.

Yes, I loved the multi-port various boards/ cluster Port combos. I gave my boss a long lecture on the utility of allowing a hundred people on a single 386 because each keystroke was not interrupting the main CPU. I can have a very large Oracle back end and be doing other stuff simultaneously and we can all work happily as long as he bought those damn boards. I have gone through many iterations of those boards before we moved on to non-rs-232 communications in my world for the most part.

I've worked on pretty much every Digi and mega and any other insane blinky light box in the 1985 time frame.

I also coded ioctl device drivers for them in C and assembler, and associated printers, terminals and modems (I can whistle an escape) because it was my job to support a third party printer subsystem called XPD and terminal program called Teleterm. I then had to port the printer subsystem to the NCR Tower when it came out. Those ioctls were not the same.

When dealing with the printer subsystem that meant I had to fake both Berkeley and AT&t and be better which wasn't tough in those days, I didn't write it originally but I was hired to support it and then it was my job to port it other Unix systems.

I had just learned the C language in the last 4 months when they started allowing me to actually touch their code. They were idiots.

I think the bottom line was when I had already proved out the Linux running Oracle. It wasn't supported yet, but if you were willing to take a chance you could run it. So I had a dozen or so multiprocessor sco Unix boxes running in my data warehousing systems room and one Linux box. Just checking it out.

I'd been using Linux for utility boxes for about 3 or 4 years at that point but it took a lot to say we were going to use it for the database back end.

At that moment sco had the 2 GB file limitation so I had to do all kinds of juggling to deal with that. Veritas helped but it still sucked. I had 80 GB files I had to deal with. I had 100 GB Oracle table spaces I had to deal with. And every single one of them had to be constructed out of 2 GB segments. It was insane.

So I went to the sun boxes at that point. But I still had the sco boxes. So I had a bunch of ultra 450s and a couple of 3500s and a few racks of discs and a whole bunch of sco boxes and sco called me up to renew support.

Linux had blown past the 2 GB file limit at that point. They had third party support. Oracle said. Sure, give it a shot.

I told that guy I was going to turn off every sco box in the room, I had already moved every bit of functionality to either low end sun or Linux boxes, and my cluster of Linux boxes is kicking ass right now. I will never buy sco again and I will never recommend them. I hope they go down in flames.

They were in the middle of the lawsuits as well.

Nothing against it. It's fun to wander and pick and choose and try the tools. They have different grades of tools that are sometimes made in the same factory of the expensive ones.

I made multiple weekly trips to harbor freight for many years. Even if I wasn't going to harbor freight I'd stop off because I was passing one. No more.

It's not worth my time. Trying to figure out which of the tools will break in the first 10 minutes versus which ones won't is not worth my time. Those plastic little fiddly bits that break off in my hand and the inevitable blood and screaming that happens is not worth my time.

The closest harbor freight is approximately 35 minutes from me. It used to be 2 minutes from me. Amazon and temu and an occasional specialized order off the web is where I get my stuff if I can't just walk outside and pick it off the wood pile. Or the parts pile.

I had a blast yesterday taking it apart my refrigerator. I have a stack of stuff in my bathtub ready to be washed and all the hardware that was inside that refrigerator is now categorized and ready to be used. It has really strong rolling arms as well as hanging drawers and the monster basket assembly on the bottom will create a great structure in my wood shop. I saved every one of those screws and wire clusters. Today I'll work on the compressor and save all the copper and everything else that comes through there.

I listen to loud music and I danced up and down with a few power tools and I had a step ladder that I circled this thing with and I have the perfect bright lights and I was not cursing once due to a missing bit or whatever tool I wanted.

2 hours later I had at least $500 worth of parts that I was already considering ordering when I was done. And the refrigerator shell itself is going to make an incredible vacuum table. Okay I'm up to a thousand bucks for that 2 hours.

I'm going to take apart an electric car next.

People pay you to take them away when their battery is bad. I don't care. So 20 cells out of a thousand cell battery is bad and they can't afford to fix it. At that point that vehicle becomes a gold mine.

I want the motors to start off with because you run them mechanically and they become generators and that seems to be the highest efficiency motors you can get nowadays for free. Every other connecting part in that car will become part of my inventory. Every bar, every wire, every gasket every belt.

I'll set it up in a tent in my backyard.