It is a skill I possess and deploy as needed

So is the EFF and the FSF, but take your comfort where you find it.

Have you reached out to anyone in softwareunderground? I’m sure someone has some industry connections. Even if it isn’t hydrology, it’s field adjacent and good networking

I’m almost wondering if I wrote this because it sounds a lot like me. I made a pitch for doing light (to us) coding for several other people last week. I also talked about automation. It’s something I really want to do because I like working on many small projects (I literally said I have at least 100 repos on gitlab) rather than monolithic ones. We’ll see if they bite. They are going to get back to me tomorrow.

Here’s my advice. Keep doing what you are doing. Work on small projects. But for employment, most people want specialists. They aren’t going to take you on for one small project for you to just move to something else. Or let you hop between other things within their organization unproven. People are afraid of generalists because there is no way to know if you are just ok at one thing or generally helpful at many things. Why should they take your word for it? Specialization is how they can tell if you are excellent.

You need to pick one thing and get VERY good at it. Better than the average specialist. This doesn’t need to be programming, in fact it is probably easier if it isn’t. I’m a teacher. By becoming a good specialist at something, in my case teaching, you show you are capable of being great at at least one thing, and it gives you a broad understanding of the organization and then you can make a pitch.

A pitch is something you need to figure out for yourself. You need to convince them your value is addressing the needs of other specialists. Very specifically. You need to be conversational in all of their projects and this takes a lot of people skills.

TLDR: Pick a singular career to support yourself first. If you want your job to be to dabble, be excellent at your job, then prove your real talent is horizontal not vertical

Radio

If it’s going to be as useful as possible, yes.

I take trains whenever I can, but that’s difficult where I live ☹️

You don’t have to feel bad about being nervous. I did. It’s not unlikely you’ll be the only one in that line who decides to opt out. What happens if something goes wrong? Everyone else will be pissed at you. Turns out it’s not a big deal. You just ask and there’s one less thing they have to do.

What recourse do we have otherwise? Sure it’s unlikely to change anything, but it doesn’t cost anything either.

Domestic flights within the united states still require an id. They recently (in may iirc) require you use a “real id”. I guess those are harder to conterfeit, but still they strengthened the traditional id requirement recently, so I expect that to remain the standard, at least for a while

I suggest having two separate hard drives rather than dual booting

It’s work from someone’s home 🤷‍♀️

Politics is what happens whenever more than 2 people make a decision

HVAC.

That much facial hair doesn’t take long to grow. Try all combos. Nothing. Stash only. Beard only. Both. I have a full beard (including neck) if I do nothing. But I’ll cut it in several ways depending how I feel. I figured why not try it a few ways and see how I like it. Some stuck. Others didn’t

I’m a little unclear. Are you saying you are dating her new boyfriend? If it is the case you and another person are dating her, don’t eliminate the possibility she is breaking up with you without breaking up with you.

I really wish this was built in!

You might just email the chemistry teacher at your nearest high school. Those kind of things are probably like optiplexes. Organizations buy the new panacea rather than learn what they have. The person who uses the old ones know they work fine and stash them in a closet where they will never be used again. You’d probably make someone’s day just by asking.

Are you suggesting distrohopping to a new user? For shame! (Use virtualbox)

Say hello to my little friend