Based on a journal entry written on June 8th, 2020. I wonder about what it would take to become a “great person”. I mean someone who is great at what they do. Among the best in the world. Pushing the boundaries of what’s been done before. Thinking of novel ideas or applications. Thinking How much do they think about being great? They must know their skills are elite, but they didn’t think their path to greatness. They were too busy doing the things that made them who they became. They didn’t plot it, because they would have spent too much time plotting instead of doing. ...

In my previous post about Learning Raspberry Pi Hardware, I wired up a few simple LEDS. Now it’s time to step it up a notch. Even More LEDS Actually, we’re just keeping it at the same notch for a moment. We need to use an “LED Bar Graph”, which is a compact set of ten LEDs. Here it is all wired up. The white jumpers take power from various controllable GPIO pins to the upper half of the breadboard. The LED bar bridges from the top half of the board to the bottom half. Resistors bridge that side to ground, just like the single LEDS. ...

I was thinking about what to write a blog post about. I set a weekly goal to at least work on a blog post every night, even if I don’t publish anything. So, I did what I do and DuckDuckGo’d “how to find good blog post ideas”. That led me to How to come up with great ideas for articles, every single time. The #11 tip on that blog says to “Train your idea muscle” with a link to The Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine. ...

I became interested in the hardware side of Raspberry Pis a couple weeks ago. We have this thing at work called “Hack Week”. Everyone spends a few days on things unrelated to their normal project work. The theme of this recent week was IoT and edge computing. Everyone was given a Raspberry Pi Zero to hack with. Most people only used the Pi incidentally, including myself. There were a couple teams that came up with some interesting ideas using cameras. One team used a microphone. ...

Reading Lately I haven’t been reading as much. Last month, I read Seveneves, The Fractal Prince, the beginning of The Phoenix Project, and the endings of Cryptonomicon and The Brothers Karamazov. That’s as much reading as I’ve ever done in a month. In particular, I read the Fractal Prince in a single weekend. It was simultaneously invigorating and relaxing. I’m a bit burned out on reading, though. Reading for over three hours a day is tiring. Holding a book or e-reader and sitting for hours is exhausting. I need to move around more. ...