In the same vein, I hate looking at job ads. It seems like I never have quite the skills that they're looking for. I'm always missing this, or don't have quite the experience in that that they want, or what have you.

I guess I should be building skills. It's not like I don't have ideas; I have lots, actually. I just never seem to get started on a project, or if I do, I don't see it through, or worse, I feel like I lack the resources to see it through. Tonight I talked to Gurugrrl about my lack of solid NT experience, and she suggested I get some by using NT. Of course, I had a ready counter that I couldn't because most of what I lack means I need a network and a client machine, too, which I don't have and can't acquire. And then, sometimes I think there's no time to do the project, and I spend more and more time fretting about not doing things, rather than accomplishing anything.

Is this really what I'm made of? Geez, I hope not.

At the same time, I think about things that I feel like I ought to be doing, even if there is no monetary gain in them. These occasional rants I go into on how we're being screwed by the media and we have so little real choice mean nothing if I don't do something. But what to do?

Just the other day I heard this story on the FCC licensing low-power radio stations, finally. I have to wonder, though: what would it really mean if I started pumping out Free Radio Restless?

I fear probably nothing. I'd have to enlist a bunch of people. Since running a radio station the pool of potential talent is local, which limits the possibilities. I couldn't engineer, program, generate content and broadcast, I'd need help, obviously, not to mention getting ears to listen. Why bother?

I still think I'd love to pump out a stream on the web. Why? Well, first, I could output some music, and collect talk that I would like to play back (playback of talk is ideal, because it requires so little storage to encode voice properly). Maybe even take text files, convert them to speech with software and squirt them out... who knows?

I just don't know. It makes me tired thinking about it.

Isn't it weird how things from your past can elicit so much emotion, almost effortlessly?

I dug up a bunch of old diskettes. I had no idea what was on them, but apparently there was quite a bit (there are literally a few hundred). I started to shove them into Gillian, one by one, to see what was on them.

All manner of wondrous things were uncovered. Old web pages rendered into text with Lynx and saved. Research papers in Postscript, Acrobat and rendered into HPGL for printing. Old image files. A paper I thought I'd never see again, that was one of my first (and largely unsuccessful) attempts for me to put words to this... thing, this idea... I've been looking for and wanting to explain and put into practice, off and on through my life. Old saved email. A whole intellectual snapshot of me, rendered in files.

Sort of like how I want my webspaces to be, huh?

Scary.

I am considering taking them, sifting through them, and burning them all to a CD. My intellectual past, burned to what will probably amount to a small portion of a CD. Sad.

I've got to do better.

restlessmind