Oh hey I graduated and drove around Chile for a month, now it’s time to (find) work

I’m a graduated guy who doesn’t have any particular plan for the next several months. If nothing pops up I’ll probably move out of my parents’ place in suburban St. Louis to Boston (where I went to college), Chicago, Minneapolis or Austin. I’m sort of playing it by ear for now. I have to be home for a bit anyway to attend a friend’s wedding.

I’m applying to a couple places with a variety of job titles, but I think what I want to do *long term* is make money off of publishing on the internet. It’s just so low-cost if you look at the things that are actually being disseminated compared to any other sort of publishing. There’s got to be room to make sort sort of consistent money in that space.

I love writing and reporting and interviewing. It’s hard. Being a  beat reporter for an understaffed and overworked newsroom isn’t my first choice right now. Having said that, I care deeply about information and news and the narratives that make up what we might call “society.” Journalism is a very good thing, and the dire straits that local journalism is going through are very bad for us all.

I think that the internet and technology and the increasing proclivity for people to happily sit in their own rooms and not leave most of the time is creating a lot of problems. The narratives that people attribute to public events are changing, possibly as a result of how narrow everyone’s focus has become.

“Anti-establishment” voicings are becoming more common in the US. It’s not clear that this is a bad thing per se. It does mean that people trust the guys on TV telling us how it is *way* less.

I’m not sure that random guys and gals on TV should be trusted very much at all, certainly not in the current age of PR and spin. But I do know that the journalists who write for a living are pretty much always good at their job. If you read written stories by an actual publication that employs people calling themselves journalists (and it’s not marked as opinion), the standards are pretty high. Trust them, please. For the most part. There are exceptions. Breitbart is not serious journalism.

I also love working with computers and creating complicated things that interact with other programs in complicated ways. It’s very hard. Or it can be. I haven’t been working on anything recently (not since I finished school doing a bunch of Computer Science coursework the last semester or two), but I will be investigating how to make some sort of elixir-driven application or rickety internet radio application in the coming days.

One thing I loved doing the last years of college was broadcasting dj sets on the radio. I would like to do more of that, but I don’t want to worry too much about twitch rules or like copyright infringement. I’d rather just make a small site that can broadcast live audio to say a thousand listeners at a time if it needed to, but probably it would max out at like 5. Streaming video would probably be a whole ‘nother beast entirely. I just need to figure out how to set up a server for this content that’s hooked into those ‘website serving’ conventions that everyone uses, I’ve done this before using Google Cloud, but mostly just did static content. I might use just an always-on laptop if I can for developing the web-app’s backend. I think the frontend could be as simple as an html header and footer, maybe a proto-blog or wiki apparatus (something that can be ripped from the Golang book I have, say) that is desecrated with a giant Orange play button that toggles currently broadcasted audio on Chrome and Firefox.

Also I’ve been doing some Linux learning, so that’s fun. I switched over to Ubuntu and am having fun with LVM. Currently trying not to destroy everything on my hard drive by resizing logical volumes in a dumb way. Basically I want several Linux operating systems and I chose a weirdly abstract way to put them on my machine. It’ll be fine.

Anyway, these are the things I’m thinking about currently. Chile was insanely cool. I highly recommend that everyone pays a visit to South America just as soon as they learn some Spanish.