In 2020 I encountered persistent lower back pain that I had to go to a physical therapist to remedy to no avail. Going to physio resulted in getting some exercises that would help for about 20 minutes before the pain came back. It turned out to be a $10 pair of slippers that had zero arch support that I wore around the house long enough for the pain to develop. The pain ended within a day of not wearing the slippers, but that experience of a couple of weeks being centered around pain management altered my life. Before the pain ended I had browsed many fitness-based websites with the hope that I would find some set of exercises that would alleviate the pain for longer than 20 minutes. I didn’t, but I found Nerd Fitness and as the days went by I came to appreciate how much they simplified the idea of incorporating fitness and nutrition into life. When I stopped wearing the slippers and the pain ended I was set on living a healthier life, if only to prolong the amount of time I live without pain.

cocaine bear

As the days went on and I flirted with consistent yoga and weight lifting practice my growing interest in fitness shaped what I browsed online. One particular idea caught my eye, using an Xbox Kinect device to track movements, and my imagination caused me to fantasize about using it for weight lifting. Don’t ask me why I connected those two things, I don’t tend to keep track of how delusions form in my mind. That idea caused me to go down a rabbit hole that eventually brought me to a much more feasible project (although still very much outside of my capability), an electronic whiteboard using a Nintendo Wii remote and an infrared pen.

With this idea bouncing around in my head I started trying out a number of websites that promise to teach one software development. I was not able to persist with any of them long enough to learn anything until I found the resource I’m still using today, Learn Enough to Be Dangerous. Not that still sticking with it to this day means anything, but this site offers a holistic approach whereas I’m inclined to believe most other resources don’t. So for a long time this idea of building an electronic whiteboard has been driving me, but at the time, knowing nothing about anything, the project seemed damn-near insurmountable. It turns out that it’s really easy to read a few articles and buy a bunch of crap online than it is to sit down and learn a new skill, so I bought a bunch of electronic parts, a multi-meter and a soldering station and it’s all been sitting for several years, not even gathering dust because I stuck it all in a toolbox.

At this point, having installed a Linux operating system several times over the past few years, setting up a Ruby and Python software development environment on my computer, gaining some cursory knowledge of how to at least get an HTML and CSS website up and running, and being close to starting the tutorial on Javascript, along with all the other stuff I had to learn along the way, reviewing the whiteboard project makes it seem a lot more achievable than when I first found out about it. Although I say that and I still haven’t actually learned any programming yet.

So all this explanation is really to say that the last few days of reading Electronics For Dummies makes me remember why I quit learning about electronics the first time I tried to learn about it. It’s difficult to follow along let alone understand. If it turns out to be anything like software development then when I get to the point of building some circuits, the knowledge will stick. The hope is that the past few years of striving to apply myself with fitness and software development will bleed into learning some electronics so I can make an infrared pen. I can just buy an infrared pen at this point but that’s no fun.

It’s pretty amusing but writing out the path I’m on, and especially reading it aloud, gives me the impression that I make poor choices.