Bloggers Block

I blog every week and have been since my new years resolution of 2018, but the passion to have a thoughtful post every week changes.

Some posts I start months in advance and slowly piece together experiments, research or additional photos. These posts feel robust and like they've have some serious effort behind them. For example, my research on Halo 2 map editors took me a solid amount of time for research and it shows with an estimated 12 minute read.

On the flip side some articles like my collection of random stories are pieced together on the last day of the week and barely pass 500 words (my bare minimum word count).

So what I wanted to review this time was my collection of drafts and remember why they are there.

Ship Broken. Patch Later

This draft was started in pure anger five years ago when Halo MCC was not playable, a $60 game that just refused to work. Back then in the moment I was hoping the game would just start working and I could finish my blog post. It took 1185 days later for an update to be released that made the game actually playable.

Understanding the metaresources.arsc file

Following my Apktool tag I wanted to do some research to help document a new type of ARSC file. However, as I started doing that research I realized that my little time I have for Apktool should be better spent fixing bugs than supporting new formats. So it decayed into my drafts.

Destiny 2: The Bad & The Ugly

This was another post built out of rage. I couldn't believe when the 2nd iteration of Destiny came out - that it imploded our gaming group and no one played it. This was such a sad sight as the first game had easily thousands of hours played between the friends. I found that since I didn't really play it anymore I didn't even have the drive to make a post to rant about it.

The Ugly Side of Ingress

This post was aimed to go out during the rise of Pokemon Go to capture some of the negative traffic aimed at attacking both games. I had a good outline of discussing spoofing, weaponizing of support processes and real world dangers. However as I started writing it out - it felt quite "whiny" so I let it decay.

Downloading P.T on a PS4

This post was a cool little guide of tricking your PlayStation to download the demo horror game that was quite popular. The downside being that I didn't own a PlayStation, so my only confirmation that my test worked was the one time I did it on a friend's console. So I just didn't have the ability to replay some aspects for more photos/proof and it just decayed.

Hurricane Irma for a Tampa Resident

I wanted to blog about the odd behaviors that occurred as the expected Category 5 Irma would arrive. It ended up missing Tampa by a lot, but the complete clearing of gasoline and basic items at the grocery store led me to starting this post. However, once I realized that countries and other cities were literally destroyed - it seems quite wrong to blog about a city that was slightly inconvenienced.

Bots are everywhere

This was a fun post to do where I just started taking photos of all the spam/bot communication I got between social media, email and text messages. The problem was most of this stuff was highly inappropriate to publish - I didn't exactly want to publish half naked women. Not to mention I think it back-fired as I started responding to some to gather more responses and that just led to even more spam messages.

Home Automation Exploration

This was an attempt of documenting all the home technology I have for auto-locking, auto-lights and some clever commands that automate some common actions I would do. The problem as I got near to finishing this post is it just felt like a massive advertisement for Phillips Hue and Google. It wasn't my intent, but once I removed the things that felt like a pure advertisement not much content seemed left so it stayed in the drafts.

Apktool: The Spare Resource Table

This was another developer blog to dive into the sparse resources that were recently patched in Apktool. However, I felt I needed to understand it more than the tiny bit I understood in order to patch support and that understanding never arrived. Every once in awhile I would wake up this draft and work on some research and sample applications, but then I wondered why I was doing that when folks wanted bug fixes.

Junior -> Senior -> Manager

This post was about my work journey through the ranks, but it felt odd writing it. Even though I didn't leak any company details - it was quite easy for those in the know to understand who I was referencing or talking about in vague terms. It didn't seem like a good idea so I stopped working on it.

World A-Changin'

This post was a pure anger driven rant as I sat in a Waffle House and listened to some older gentlemen just rant about my generation to whomever he was sitting with for 20 minutes. So I was collecting his points and preparing a post to prove them all wrong, but boy the post felt so toxic that I stopped working on it.

React Native: A Rough Ecosystem

As I worked in React Native more and more - I just started getting really upset about package quality for things like cameras, GPS and queues. When I paired that with the quite horrible developer experience for updates and debugging - I started working on a real rant post. However, React Native conducted a survey and all these points went public with timelines to resolve them all. I felt my post was in bad faith at that point and just let it decay.

Personal Service is Fading

Another post that was driven from a rant that it seemed like retail workers were so toxic in a few circumstances and I didn't know what I did to deserve it. However, I was only like 100 words into this post and I remembered every single human that was an asshole to service workers and then I understood why they occasionally act a bit stern - so I dropped it.

Tampa Bay Water Sources

This was a fun technical post where I requested water usage for Tampa Bay over last 20 years and got an amazing Excel sheet of data. I visualized it into some charts, but making those interactive while working in the bounds of Ghost was a bit difficult. I wanted the data to be interactive with my commentary, but I struggled to present the data in a clean format so it sat.

NDAs and Staying Quiet

Every once in awhile I would read a great Hacker News post about some person who was employed at X and would break down inside knowledge about processes or technologies. However, chances are most of these stories were like 30-40 years ago. I have some cool stories and odd stories I wanted to share, but these are still in business companies and of course I would be invalidating NDAs so instead I stayed quiet. When I've basically recapped the entire post in this summary is why I stopped working on it.

AirGradient

I purchased some air quality monitors and set them up. I stupidly forgot to take pictures as I assembled them and half the journey with a DIY air monitor is the journey of building. So I sat it aside to take apart one model and build it again with photos, but I just haven't gotten around to that. So they sit as I work on perfecting my data collection pipeline and obtaining more photos.

All in all I doubt any of those posts will ever see the light of day, with the exception of the Air Gradient one.