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My burnout cure is to do exactly whatever I want until I'm not burned out. Maybe that's coding. Maybe it's the motorcycle. Maybe it's watching dumb YouTube vide
by beej71 4y ago
My burnout cure is to do exactly whatever I want until I'm not burned out. Maybe that's coding. Maybe it's the motorcycle. Maybe it's watching dumb YouTube videos. Maybe it's helping build a barn. Whatever I want.
The worst bout took me about a year to get over. Quit my job and rode my mountain bike a lot. I realized that if I tried to force myself back into some project, I'd just procrastinate and remain unhappy. So I only worked on whatever it was I wanted to work on that day. I'd actively ask myself "What do I want to do?" instead of "What should I be doing?"
That might sound selfish... and it is. 100% selfish. But I get burned out from giving more than I get, so sometimes I have to make time for myself to balance it out. Fair's fair.
I was doing a lot of stuff with GPS tracks because I love maps (cheap consumer GPSes were a relative novelty at the time). And I was processing one with a program called Viking when I noticed that Viking supported a new basemap layer: OpenStreetMap. What's that, I wondered? And then I got hooked, mapping my area which barely had any data (the Bay Area barely had any OSM data, if you can imagine!). And virtually no cities were named in the US on the map. But I could get the GNIS city name and location data... all that was needed was to write a Python script to import it all through the OSM API.
Of course there were some cities in OSM already, so I had to search to make sure I didn't replace any existing ones that were relatively close in location and name. And of course some were misspelled in one dataset or the other, so I used Levenshtein distance to look for closeness.
That was the first program I wrote after my year-ish off. And it was fun again! And I got there by doing what I wanted to.
A few months later, I took some part time contract work, paid hourly. It was a great way to dip back in.
- dirtybirdnj 4y agoThe OSM stuff piques my interest. Sorry to ask a deep / dumb / lmgtfy question but did you uncover a way to extract vector data from that dataset? I have a hobby of doing pen plotter maps, my data source is USGS and the process to prepare it is manual and awful. I've often considered switching to OSM but afraid of the learning curve. Please send a PM/DM about this if you'd like to chat more on maps. Your on-topic comment is interesting because I can resonate with the whole "have to do something you want till your un-burned". My problem is that I can't do what I want and I feel blocked from getting that. I try to re-calibrate my desires (lower expectations) and then I get blocked from THAT. I have lowered my expectations so much that I have a negatively reflexive response to things being diminished in general for me. I call it the "starving crackhead" mentality but I think the medical term is scarcity mindset. Pain causes unhealthy obsessions and maladaptive loops... like fishing lines getting infinitely knotted.
- beej71 4y agoThere are a few ways to extract data: 1. Use JOSM to download a chunk (this is what I do if I'm editing the map) 2. Use an API like Overpass to download larger datasets (e.g. "all the drinking fountains in North America") 3. Use a QGIS plugin to download the data directly into a project (this is what I do if I'm making a paper or PDF map) Once you have the data in OSM format (just another point/line/poly XML format), you can convert it to other things with a tool like GPSBabel. Re blocked on doing things you want, I think I tempered that with what I could do. And I was "lucky" that my burnout job was so time-consuming that I was unable to really spend money or take vacations. So I had plenty banked to be lazy. "Don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Look at my cousin--he's broke, don't do shit." --Lawrence, Office Space The bummer was when I'd iterate through the list of things I could do, and zero of them appealed. That was a hard place to be. One trick I used there was to increase the size of the list of things I could do. I did this by writing down every idea I was even inspired by. ("Learn to sketch landscapes!") Then I had a big list for inspiration. The larger that list, the less likely I was to come up dry when looking for a task for the day. If you simply can't financially afford to decompress, that seems a harder problem. I don't have a good answer there, except maybe a different gig entirely, tighten the belt, work with your SO to get through it, etc.
- dirtybirdnj 4y agoBurnout is an ongoing thing and while I've tried to stand up and keep going a few times there is a structural weakness that keeps me falling down. It feels like an infinite loop where I'm too weak to recover, to survive I have to get up but it takes all of my energy and I fall down. But I can only recover if I try to get up again... I followed your IG account with my art project robotdrawsyou, one of my maps is on there. I need to follow up on the list of things you recommended it's a fantastic guide. Maybe we can chat about maps some day.