December 1 2023: November was a very long month at work. Interest rate increases and inflation in my country means I am having to work a lot more than I want to and I have to become very selective about my free time. Sadly, labours of love are often unpaid and therefore neglected. This site falls into that category. The effects of being overworked are not just a physical exhaustion. It is a total breakdown of yourself. You start to neglect what you enjoy and suddenly what you do enjoy feels like neglect. The moment you stop being productive it never leaves your mind if you could be doing something productive. What you enjoy stops becoming enjoyable because it feels counterproductive all of a sudden. Having this burden in the mind makes doing anything - especially projects like this site - feel so vain. This kind of productivity anxiety eats away at your very being. It makes you question what is there for you. Is there anything for you? It is never feeling content in spaces you would have once felt so. I fully acknowledge that I need to make a conscious effort ro reclaim my time in order to reclaim myself.
September 18 2023: Just at the end of the three days off from work and didn't do any extra work to the site. I have been spending more time thinking about what I want to have as opposed to actually making what I already know I need to have. This coming week I will strive to put an hour a day towards contributing towards the site, even if its just a blog update every second day. With that said these days off were quite fulfilling. Spent a lot of time outdoors and being active. Never a bad thing. It is just a matter of keeping the ball rolling with staying active, stopping makes it hard to start again. My next significant update to the site will be an article detailing my process of how I catalogue my CD collection on my end including a deepdive into some opensource media players and their pros-and-cons. Since I use a laptop without a CD-ROM built in I will also have a mini-review of the one I bought and its compatability on some popular distributions.
September 9 2023: I got through the first week back at work after about a month spent overseas. I come back to work to find out that my workplace has completely restricted internet access to the point where only intranet apps are accessible, there isn't even search engine access! I can understand the motivations behind why an employer might do this, but I don't believe that it solves the problems it attempts to remedy. Does taking away the ability to use the internet really bring someone into competency? Not necessarily, and all it means is that these underperforming employees will find new ways to continue to be underperforming. There are some security considerations about my workplace that can make this change understandable as well, but again it doesn't entirely solve the problem. There is nothing stopping someone from writing down the sensitive information on a piece of paper and walking it out. Just a superficial attempt that is going to end up hurting employee marole in the long run.
September 5 2023: Today a lot of improvements were made to the site. The most notable improvement is deciding on some thematic consistency with the top navigation bars. Since I want the blog to be more of a running thought log than it is well thought out I am considering adding a section for more well thought out articles about various topics. Learning HTML and CSS as I go is proving to be a lot more fun and less frustration than I was expecting. There are so many learning resources that it is easy to find an example of what I want and use it.
I have actually started to think about how I will begin to catalogue my CD collection. My initial goal was to scan in the covers, booklet, the disc itself, enter in the track list and other notes akin to a mini album review or anything external that's interesting about the album. I am strugging to find a document scanner that isn't attached to a printer. I thought that just a flat-bed scanner on its own would be easy to find, but its not. There are portable scanners that appear to be handheld. They seem like an interesting solution but I need to do more research.
When I have a system in place for properly cataloguing my CD collection I plan on writing an article detailing what software and hardware I use. I want to do this as to provide others with an insight on how to catalogue their own collections for sharing. This still might be quite some time away though.
September 3 2023: First blog post. I am finally happy to be back working on this site. One of the major problems I have of the modern internet is that in all attempts for designers to make pages "aethstically pleasing" there is simply not enough effort made towards giving people information. I find modern websites hard to navigate as they hide information under poor labelling and focus on graphics too much. My motivations for starting Eternal Solace is to provide information with an emphasis on the quality of information as opposed to anything else. I am admittedly learning HTML as I grow so expect the site to improve as I do. At the moment I am just focusing on adding the blog, CD collection and open source software sections on the website.