2016-08-22
Hello. My name is Jack…
[Group: Hello, Jack]
…and I’m a news addict.
In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I unplug my phone and open up the news.
2016-08-22
I spend a lot of my time picking apart how things work, and a lot of time sticking things together to see if they work in the way that I hope. That’s tinkering. I’ve been thinking about how I first started working this way.
I remember when I was a kid, I spent long days in my dad’s office. His office was actually a garage, a separate building from the house, across the back yard. He had his main desk in the corner, three computers lined up underneath with one of those boxy, ninetees monitors on top. His workspace was never clear and minimal; he was always snowed in with papers, and pieces of circuit board. He had slapped together racks of power supplies and oscilloscopes that spouted wires with little plugs and clips on the ends. On the other side of room was a standing workbench with even more electronics equipment: a soldering iron and endless reels of solder that I used to bend into animal shapes, breadboards and bags of loose microchips. Piled up in the warmest corner of the often chilly building was a set of servers, keyboards, and monitors. Somewhere between three and six servers were built into standard PC boxes, linked up by an octopus of Ethernet cables, VGA leads, and KVM switches.