Cycling, definitely. It’s just fun to do.

Of course you can be pushing hard or some jackass in a car just passed you with inches to spare, and those times aren’t fun, but most of the time it’s fun. My wife says I do my best thinking while I’m riding. If I’m on a group ride, there’s often good conversation with friends.

Thanks. The stupid part is that I love my actual job, and although I’ve been in the current position 10 years, I feel like I still have new ideas to improve our work. I’m still capable of recognizing my mistakes. I’m not to phoning it in. When I get to think about a thorny issue there, I start to really enjoy things again. I remember why I took the job in the first place.

But that other work, that has nothing to do with my main job, is poisoning the well. When I log in in the morning and see something for that work, it just kills my energy.

I’m going through something like that now.

Why do they pay me for my 20+ years of experience, then ignore my recommendations based on that experience? It doesn’t make any sense!

Why do they have me doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with that experience? I spend half my time on a project I hate and have no interest in, and has nothing to do with my real job…which, by the way, wasn’t cut back to make room for this project. (Management calls it critical work, then asks for volunteers. If it’s that critical, why aren’t we assigning people to do it? I didn’t volunteer, I was told to do it. It’s insane.)

It’s really killing my motivation, as I post this during work hours… I’m actively looking and have applied for promotions in other areas just to get out of this.

Is Slackware still active?

I started with it in the late 90s and tried to keep using it for a long time, but I got tired of dealing with dependencies. Eventually I switched to Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop, and Debian for my server. They may have added dependency checking since I gave up on it though. It has been a few years.