Tools for Online Speech logo
by Jacob O'Bryant

What I wish I could've done instead of college

My daughter is just over a month old now. She’s very cute and stuff. I didn’t realize how much babies vomit. (Yes, I know about burping). I feel like that doesn’t get talked about as much as changing diapers or sleep deprivation.

I feel sad sometimes that I probably will never be able to spend as much time working as I have up till now,* but that’s life. It has made me feel more pissed off about the time I spent in college. At this point, I’m honestly pretty confident that going to college was a mistake for me. I wrote a little about that here: What I wish I could've done instead of college.

*This is on my list of things I would never say on Twitter.

I’ve been wanting (but not strictly needing) a new computer for a while, and it recently occurred to me that the latest government stimulus package would be the perfect way to justify it to my wife. After all, we’re supposed to spend the money, otherwise it wouldn’t be very stimulating. It’s our patriotic duty to get me a new laptop.

So I’m proud to announce that I’m typing this from my new Lenovo Legion 5. It’s a gaming laptop (I started playing WoW with my brother when the pandemic started; and it’s also nice that editing videos no longer takes forever), has a great keyboard (like a Thinkpad), and it came with 16GB of RAM (surprisingly uncommon. I upgraded the RAM in my last laptop, but generally I prefer to spend my time on other things) and a half-terrabyte SSD.

The most surprising thing is that after 10 years of running Arch Linux as my main OS, I’ve decided to stick with Windows 10. I figured I might as well try out Windows 10 a bit before switching to dual-boot… and it’s actually been pretty nice.

WSL has been working just fine for coding, and it’s nice to have all my hardware work out of the box. There’s even a really swanky keyboard remapper. Plus I don’t have to decide how much SSD space to leave with Windows and how much I should give to Linux.

I’ve got a couple new websites you should check out:

I also wrote a little post about how I handle form posts on Findka, and I spruced up the landing page a bit.

Published 2 Feb 2021

I write an occasional newsletter
about my work and ideas.

RSS feed · Archive

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.