Dave VR – Page 24

When things don’t go to plan

When things don’t go to plan.
When a spanner is thrown into the works.
When people let you down.
When it’s one of those days.
When the brown stuff hits the fan.

It’s easy to become depressed, trigger anxiety, and become stressed out. It’s a natural reaction. Yet the more you feed that particular reaction the stronger it will get. The trick is to grow thicker skin. What doesn’t kill you and all that.

Life is complicated. Plus the more technically advanced we become as a species the more complex the problems will get. The more big things you own like cars, houses, and businesses, the more problems you are likely to face. Renting properties? You have to deal with lettings agents, tenants, and contractors. Own a business? There are customers, suppliers, employees, lawyers, accountants, and so on. You get the picture. The more you take on in life the more opportunities there are for problems to occur.

When life knocks you down the trick is to get back up, brush yourself off, and get on with it. Grow thicker skin. You will have to deal with idiots, incompetence, plain stupidity, angry people, delays, wear and tear, the economy, inflation, greed, and many more variables that shape the world that we live in.

Each day that you wake up, think that today will be a good day, but I will probably have to deal with people who are lazy and incompetent, or mean, angry, or just generally having a bad day. I may suffer losses in terms of time and money but I will survive this thing called life.

This problem that is stressing you out right now; you won’t remember it in five years time. Maybe not even in a year. So why stress about it now? Resolve it as best as you can and move on. Learn from it, grow, then let it go.

Things don’t always go to plan, so plan for them not to, and then you won’t be so stressed when the inevitable happens.

Embrace the wild rain.

Hustling

Instagram is full of people pushing products and trying to show complete strangers how amazing their lives are, but there are some nuggets of wisdom on the platform. I don’t post myself, I just have a sock puppet account I use for OSINT purposes, which if I’m honest I may also use just to browse.. on occasion.

One thing I’ve learned from Insta is how much some people really hustle. By hustle I mean work hard at promoting their brand, their products, their whole reason for being.

For example just look at The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. They both post multiple times a day pushing their products and movies. If you didn’t have Insta you may only hear about their occasional movie and catch a snippet of news about them and probably think they have it easy, make a movie, collect the millions, repeat, right? With thanks to Insta you can actually see how much they are hustling. Up in the early hours each day hitting the gym, then promoting their clothing / alcohol / sports nutrition products, then doing interviews and photoshoots, followed by attending events for further networking opportunities. It looks exhausting!

These two are constantly hustling. And they are not the only ones. Check out Arnold and Stallone. Both in their 70s still hustling like crazy. Like a duck swimming we have this picture of these celebrities in our minds that everything is easy for them on the surface, but Insta pulls back the curtain and shows us how crazy active these people are underneath, working at maintaining their image and brand.

Take a look at sports personalities and fitness models. In the gym multiple times a day, promoting their classes or courses, doing photo shoots and training videos, attending events and working hard to promote both their image and what they are selling.

It may be full of cat videos but there are still nuggets of wisdom on Insta.

Digital mindfulness

I’ve discovered a new form of relaxation, using a digital form of procrastination that I like to call digital mindfulness.

To indulge in this past-time you have to have reached a god-like mode in an open-world video game. Something that can be played offline where you have completed the game, or campaign, and unlocked everything. By everything I mean one hundred percent completion of absolutely everything and every easter egg found and all weaponry and power-ups unlocked. Your character is essentially pretty indestructible.

Once in this state whenever you are bored you can just boot your game and just go explore the digital world aimlessly, maybe collecting more stuff, killing stuff, exploring looking for possible easter eggs that no one has found yet, or at least reported online.

There are several such go-to games in my collection depending on my mood.

For something mild where children are around I like to dip into Lego City Undercover. I enable a few mods such as turbo on all vehicles so I can get around faster. It’s a pleasant PG way to pass some time.

For something more adult there’s Days Gone. Get on your customised motorbike and head out into the post apocalyptic wasteland hunting freakers and looking for easter eggs. There are a few. Have you found the naughty photograph or bottles of whiskey?

My current favourite is Horizon Zero Dawn. I have the sequel to play but somehow I just like dipping back into the game with my shimmering armour exploring the various landmass areas hunting machines and crafting. Hours can easily pass before you notice.

They say everyone should practise mindfulness as a form of meditation and a way to relax. I’d like to add digital mindfulness to that recommendation. Go try it.

Paint Shop Pro

I miss Paint Shop Pro. The last version I had was 8. The software was originally created by Jasc then taken over by Corel and after that it became just another PhotoShop clone.

I’ve spoken previously about being a graphics artist on the Commodore Amiga back in the day using tools like Deluxe and Photon Paint. When I switched to the PC I continued creating pixel art using Paint Shop Pro. Over time though it seems like all the paint software became variations on PhotoShop; image manipulation and effects.

What I really needed was a tool that would allow me to create pixel art. There are a few web sites that allow you to do this to some extent but you need to be online to use them. You have Gimp, an open source tool, but if you’ve ever used it you will know how awkward and non-intuitive the controls are. I’d rather go to the hassle of running Paint Shop Pro on an ancient PC than having to use Gimp.

I get that most people want fancy high-definition graphics these days but some of us just want to create something old-school using a mouse, free-hand, and maybe on occasion the line tool.

I do miss Paint Shop Pro.

Losing your mojo

Losing your mojo: Losing your ambition, your purpose, your reason for being. A general feeling of being lost without aim or goals.

Losing your mojo is no joke. It induces a feeling of anxiety and stress with an overlay of depression. For those of us that thrive on ambition, losing your mojo is like a derailment of sorts. You no longer know in your mind what the future holds for you as you feel no sense of purpose or direction. It’s like your strings have been severed and each day feels.. samey.

Therapists will tell you that with CBT you can train yourself to be ok, to not need your mojo, just live your life and enjoy each day as it comes. It does work in that you feel less depressed, but your loss of mojo is merely stifled. You know the loss is still there under the surface. You yearn for the you that you once were. Thriving on ambition, knowing where you were heading and how you would get there. Now you are just driving a car with a broken GPS. You can go where you want and enjoy the journey but there’s no overall destination in mind.

Getting your mojo back is challenging and requires a lot of self analysis. What matters to you in life? What makes you happy? Given where you are now, your interests, your passions, where do you want to be? What really really drives you?

If you can figure all that out then you may just get your mojo back. In the meantime try new things and experiment. Maybe you’ll trigger something that will spark an idea, a passion, a driver.

Good luck.

Deluxe Paint

Watching the young ‘uns today playing games like Minecraft takes me back to the late 80s / early 90s when I used to create graphics for the Commodore Amiga using tools such as Deluxe paint and Photon paint. The resolutions we had back then plus the number of available colours were not as great as they are today. We had to learn techniques such as anti-aliasing and cross-hatching to give the illusion of smooth graphics with less rigid edges.

Why people want games with blocky-looking graphics escapes me, but it does trigger memories of nostalgia for the days when I had to create such graphics every time I see such games. Memories of Beneath a Steel Sky, Universe, and Monkey Island. Or the Amiga scene demos.

Now where did I store those old floppies..

Ready player one

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is one of my favourite books. Although to be honest I’ve never actually read it. I have had it read to me, three times in fact, by Wil Wheaton. In my opinion it is absolutely the best way to consume this book. Go try it. Get the audio book and sit back and revel in both the future and the 1980s at the same time. You’ll thank me later.

That’s not the point of this post however. No, I wanted to compare the aforementioned experience to hacking, well ethical hacking obviously. You see, when learning the craft you often spend time exploring virtual rabbit holes getting side-tracked with learning fun tools and techniques. Kind of like Parcival on his egg hunt. Whether he’s learning the lines to War Games or mastering ancient arcade games.

With hacking you can spend days learning a new tool or figuring out how a protocol works. Under normal circumstances that may sound as dull as dishwater, but as part of a gamified hacking challenge it can be a lot of fun. Lots of fun in fact. Especially if it gets you a foothold on a box, or even privilege escalation to root!

Sign up to an ethical hacking platform like Hack The Box or Try Hack Me and you’ll see what I mean. It suddenly becomes fun to learn as you earn points and level up. Plus you start to fill your brain with useful skills and knowledge during the process. Go give it a try. Gamified ethical hacking can be a lot of fun.

Ready player one?

Sorry for your loss

It’s something we say when we don’t know what to say. Someone close to you has passed on. Words can’t make it better. We want to express our sympathy but words fail us so we rely on the old faithful:

Sorry for your loss.

You’ve lost a friend, a good friend. Someone you’ve known for years. Someone you’ve had adventures with, been through stuff with, experienced life with, shared secrets, and dreams. You’ve celebrated their birthdays and anniversaries. Spent time with their loved ones. Had many beers with late into the night, discussing anything and everything.

And now they are gone. Just like that.

Sorry for your loss.

As you get older it happens more and more. You are going to more funerals than weddings and celebrations. You hear it more and more. Loss. Your loss, their loss.

Sorry for your loss.

Don’t ask do

Sometimes you just have to make decisions, take the initiative, go with your gut. Don’t live a life in the shadow of others, asking what they are going to do, what are their plans, what are they going to wear, what time they are planning to turn up, and so on. Be the leader, the doer, the ones others follow.

Create your own mantra.

Take action, make decisions, don’t wait on others. Don’t ask, do.

Throw away culture

I was watching a documentary where people in countries like India and Egypt had lots of these one-person businesses specialising in one thing such as motorbike exhausts, metal cooking pans, mobile phone repair, etc. Where everything was recycled or up-cycled. Nothing was thrown away or wasted. Another person’s trash was something they could re-use to turn into a product or part of a product.

It was fascinating. We have such a throw-away culture here in the UK. It’s far cheaper to buy a new device than attempt to repair the old one, partly due to the cost of spare parts and labour costs plus taxes, and partly because many manufacturers don’t support their products for long and access to spare parts can be limited, if they are available at all.

Yet in this documentary these individuals made their own parts or harvested them from other devices. There was less going into landfills.

This inspired me. I have this all-in-one printer that is sitting at the end of my desk no longer working properly. I had started to research new printers to see what I would buy next. But I really liked the one I had. I could get ink cheaply for it. It had a paper feeder hidden underneath rather than those top-loading ones where the paper can flop awkwardly forwards and needs constant reloading. The scanner worked smoothly and it was a great photocopier. Plus I didn’t want to toss another device in a landfill.

Inspired by the documentary I decided to see if I could repair it myself. I did some online googling and watched a few YouTube videos and then bought some stuff online.

Once it all arrived it took an hour or so but I’m happy to say that my printer now works like new. Everything I bought is either part of the working printer or can be used to repair it in future. I did not consign another electronic device to the local dump.