I generally don’t enter into competitions. I never win them anyway. But his one was too much fun to pass up. Here’s the competition outlined (ignore the US-only part, because that was amended in a later video) So yeah, the goal is to make this guy laugh with a self-written metal track. I decided to make a spoof of every black metal videoclip out there. here’s my entry: Yes, that’s me frolicking around in corpse paint, with a very deep set of lyrics (ahem).

I was messing with a new track and recording some random things, and I stumbled upon something great. The tone I am after. It sounds like this: It’s nice and heavy. Cuts through mixes like an axe murderer. Plenty of juicy mids, and not too woofy. I like it.

I have a peculiar problem. As some of you know, I sometimes make all types of noise on instruments like guitar, bass, drums and I’ve been known to shout into a microphone every once in a while. When it comes to stuff to play on instruments, I haven’t had a shortage of stuff to play. Riffs and ideas just well up out of nowhere, and I end up with little gems like these:

Very short answer? Yes, but I don’t want to. Long answer? Yes, I could. But why would I want to? I enjoy the flavours, the vapour, the hardware, the coil building, the community, helping people off of tobacco, etcetera. Vaping turned compulsive nicotine consumption into a recreational one. Note the difference. Vaping is like having a coffee, eating a cupcake, drinking a beer, having a soda. I want alcohol in my beer.

You have no doubt seen them. Those silly memes that imply that vapers are all gay, are all flat capped hipsters that blow huge clouds. In the beginning I thought they were funny. Hell, some where even original. But now I see the same ones reappearing every time. Yeah, I get it, you don’t understand enough about vaping to see what benefits there are to doing it instead of smoking, and it can look ridiculous, so I understand the potential for ridicule.

Yes, I get it. You vape, and you are livid about public health spokesholes misrepresenting the facts. I know vaping has the potential of eradicating smoking tobacco. I enjoy my mods. atomizers, DIY coil building and all the flavorful juices out there. I’m just like you. I kicked a nasty habit, and I want to tell the world that big tobacco is evil and that most public health organizations are either BT (big tobacco) shills or on the Big Pharma payroll.

Wow, has it really been more than four months since I last lit a cigarette? Yes, I replaced the habit with another habit, but with one that is undoubtedly less damaging to myselfand my surroundings. I have also jumped into the fray of advocacy. Yes, I am fighting the good fight against Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and corrupt public health organizations that rig studies and massage science to fit their wish (instead of science proving the inverse).

I have to pay the bills to be able to pursue what I like, so I work. Preferably I like to work at a place where I actually like working. This is taken from my LinkedIn profile, it’s there too. But it can’ t hurt to post it here as well.

Imagine, for a moment, that you could create your own job with ideal conditions for you to work in. What would it be? This question I get asked sometimes during job interviews. My answer is usually the same, but I thought it would be worthwhile to share this and expound on it a bit. This way I could also elaborate on why this would be ideal for me, and hopefully, some enterprising person has this exact job for me (unlikely, but I like to be surprised).

I will start with soundbite-like sentences and I will elaborate on these. First, a little background on myself and how I like to work. First of all, I am a creative and curious person, and this has been the greatest contributing factor in myself being quite a generalist when it comes to skills. When someone asks me if I know anything about a certain thing (be it operating systems, technology, products, protocol, APIs, frameworks or what have you) I haven’t encountered before, I usually respond with “not yet”. If it tickles a certain fancy, I will dive into it in my free time. This also makes my work seem chaotic, but there is a certain method to my madness. When I have to come from an unknown angle, the work takes longer, but I will learn a lot in the process. This enriches my tool chest of tricks I can later employ. Needless to say, I have built up quite a war chest of knowledge that way in my career.

So, what would my ideal work environment look like? Well, the job itself would be a combination of system administration, engineering, slacking and playing with new technology (preferably open source). Inspiration was gleaned from the things I liked when I worked at several companies. More after the jump.

I started vaping 2 months ago. This coincided with me quitting smoking. I made do with a Lavatube 2 Mouth to Lung device for a while. When I knew I was serious, I got myself a serious device. I explain here:  So. nowadays I wire my own custom coils and stuff. I twist kanthal and nickel wire with drills, and I fiddle with screwdrivers and cotton to get something like so:

So, I decided to make an effort to dump OpenSSL and replace it with LibreSSL. This has been mostly succesful (there are a few holdouts, but they are non-critical and they are not internet-facing, so no worries). But man, if you see how many places OpenSSL has stuck it’s grubby paws into, you would be shocked. It’s really a lot. Most of it software that has been around for a while.