Recently a friend asked for my recommendations for home gym equipment as they wanted to start building out theirs. Little do they know I’ve spent way too many hours thinking about this. My home gym is nothing special but it keeps me healthy, out of commercial gyms, and never leaves me wishing I had more equipment. I like to think that’s due to making the right choices on how to fill it....
in roughly chronological order… got convinced by friends to start a magic the gathering team. took it from 6 -> 20 people not everyone pictured got engaged to my college sweetheart and the love of my life been waiting a while for this one. took a trip to Japan where I played in 12+ magic tournaments, got invited to dinner with locals, and found my best man left to right: new tokyo magic friend, me, best man...
Back in grad school I used to make some extra cash by coaching and writing articles about Hearthstone (an online collectible card game made by Blizzard). I primarily wrote “deck techs”, guides that explained how to play the most powerful and consistent decks that were dominating the scene. I loved this job, it was a surprisingly technical creative outlet and paid for the occasional treat meals at my favorite restaurant in St....
Most SRE-aligned engineers will tell you they have a home lab. Depending on how grey the beard is, it may be an old blade they acquired when a company moved data centers, an intricate setup of Raspberry Pi 4s set up in a custom cooling rack, or like me and many others, it may just be an old gaming computer they no longer use but cannot bring themselves to get rid of....
It’s a system (sigh) built on getting people to buy things they can’t reasonably afford through the veil of “it’s only X a month.” Unnecessary consumer debt sets people up to fail by putting them on a treadmill of excess consumption they believe is under control. Sticker shock is a good thing. If you see the price tag of something and it has your head reeling, there’s probably a good reason you shouldn’t be buying it....