Greetings.

Long time since I last posted…. 3 years….
Can’t say a lot has happened but there have been a few major and minor events.

Some of the notables have been selling the old car and buying a new one, doing so has added on repayments but has also saved me a lot on fuel, registration and insurance costs. Fuel economy has gone from around 12L/100km in the old car to around 7L/100km. Overall a better cost. The new car is a VW Polo “Beats” edition, middle range in the Polo series it’s still quite zippy being a small car and IMHO actually handles better on the road than the old one even tho that was more of a sports car. But the best thing about the new car is the sound, “Beats” edition features a factory sound system designed with Dr Dre and the Beats branding. Main feature being the spare wheel has been replaced with a decent Sub Woofer. Full smart head unit with SD card and DVD drive for storing music on as well as android/iphone integration and sat-nav. How good is the sound? Well since getting this car we had to completely re-do our music collection, the audio is so clear and wide range that all our old MP3 files now sounded flat and you could hear the compression. So we have now re-encoded all out CD’s into FLAC format (“Free Lossless Audio Codec”) and WOW, Awesome sound! We now go for long drives just to hear the music! 😀

Other majors has been a few project on my list getting completed:

• The Workshed was completed as a place for me to do Man-Cave things and build projects.
• Enclosed Veranda had finally been completed, something I’ve wanted since moving into here.
• Web server machine had been updated and is due for another move.
• My local NAS storage is now on a newer DELL server, I now get all 7TB of storage. ( need to move the websites over here as well but that’s still to-do.

Other minors have been done and forgotten over the years, nothing particularly notable other than ongoing studies in Unity3D and C# programming.

Why have I not posted for so long? Well, many reasons, mostly lack of self-confidence, depression and all that. I don’t do social very well. Machines, computers, animals, etc I handle fine, I’m very logical in my thinking. People I don’t handle well, some I’m fine with but most just come across to me as illogical and frustrating. Its an issue I’ve had pretty much all my life and its fed other issues such as anger management and depression. Late 2016 this anger and poor stress management led to a chain of health issues and resulted in my blood pressure reaching over 220/150… ended up in hospital 3 times while they tried to figure out why. Even aver a years worth of testing we still don’t have a medical cause.  So mostly I’ve been hiding in my shell, trying to ignore the world and just do what I have to do. Not a great solution but has worked for keeping me calm. My BP has been kept “ok” by mainly diet, mental changes and BP medication, although the latter has recently been less effective. Seems I’m sensitive to Salt, too much and up the BP goes, my limit seems to be about 1-2 grams per day. Other things are drinking enough water and avoiding alcohol, too much sugar and the like.
So yeah, not a great life but won’t complain as there other out there that have it much worse. I’m still alive, have a home to live in, a great partner and all my toys. Sure I only earn around $30k/year despite what I know and can do, but I don’t really have much in debt either so is money that important? I don’t think so. 

Starting to pull myself out of the rut now with the help of some wins building my positivity, but it’s going to be a long road. One of these wins have been the Pergola build being a big success. I’ve also been invited into a D&D group with a few friends and this has been helping the social side of my complicated persona. The Workshed got completely cluttered up over the last few years so I’ve been getting that cleaned out and part of the clean-out is to actually THROW OUT junk that has no use. I do suffer hoarding tendencies, with a lot of thought like “I could use that for something”. Yeah well no, if It does not have an immediate use or a direct use with a project on the short-list then out it goes. Clean up like this is hard but does help the mental state too, clutter is never healthy!

So probably enough mental gibberish for one post here, I have started to build up drafts for some of the projects in the workshed so those will be appearing here soon as well. I also have promised a friend that I’ll do a post on techniques for 3D-printing centered around printing small figurines, so keep and eye out for that. Coming soon ™.

As always, Thanks for reading!

• Radan.