I’m a little unusual in the software development profession in that I have a “serious” side hobby. I play an instrument in what you’d probably call a semi-professional capacity. On a good year I probably play 20-30 gigs, play on a record or two, and make a couple thousand bucks (then squander all of it on instruments).

I’m not in it for the money; I’d starve to death if I was. I got a huge thrill out of playing in front of audiences in the beginning, and still do when they’re gracious. Playing in clubs is usually a pain in the ass though, so the joy in playing now comes from being able to impress people I respect with my playing and having them call me back for gigs.

…

I enjoyed reading an article from a fellow named Ben Northrop. About 90% of the posts I find by way Hacker News, et al, are crap; in a roundabout way that’s actually the topic of this post.

I am vastly more cynical than Mr. Northrop. I stormed through his essay and was annoyed that the programmer motivation I’d been spending the past few months thinking about was missing from his diagram. I stewed overnight, ruminating about my own post, the re-read Ben’s post, and realized my mistake.

…

In the past, passing –without-x-toolkit to the configure script for emacs was sufficient to get it to omit window system support from the build. Maybe this still works elsewhere but on my new work box running Wheezy, I still get a build with X. This works though:

./configure --prefix=$HOME \
    --with-xpm=no \
    --with-jpeg=no \
    --with-png=no \
    --with-tiff=no \
    --with-gif=no \
    --with-x-toolkit=no \
    --without-x

…

I used to keep a blog where I would write a combination of stories I thought were funny, along with occasional long rambling pieces about politics or technology. After doing this for a few years I realized I’m ok at writing funny stories, but that when I wrote about politics or technology it was boring as ass to read, mostly because I tried to make it sound like I was some kind of expert on politics or history. I labored under the fantasy that impressionable people would wander across these posts and be moved by them in some way. In reality, the readers were almost all friends of mine. They already knew how I felt about stuff. They liked my funny stories and would endure the other stuff.

…