(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of January, and the public at the beginning(ish) of February.)
My thoughts on last month? “Well, that was a thing that happened.” Lost two weeks to holiday chaos, but managed to get a few words made anyway.
The Dear Abyss Kickstarter is basically complete. Three people still owe me their addresses to ship books. That’s a problem, but I’ve poked them to fill out their backer surveys. When I get addresses, I’ll ship. My conscience is clean. I’m having an online launch party for this book. You’re invited. Details are at the bottom of this post.
Releasing a weird book on 1 April might not be my annual tradition, but after the Networknomicon, the two editions of Ed Mastery, the Savaged by Systemd audiobook, and Only Footnotes, it’s certainly a tradition. One that I’m continuing this year. This is a full-length book that I have done actual writing for, unlike Only Footnotes. (People claim they want a book containing only the footnotes, but when I release one they don’t buy it. Weird. Well, at least they stopped asking for it. I’ll take the win.) However low your expectations are, I can guarantee that this book will not meet them.
I’m still on the accountant hunt, but it appears that I’m not going to find an accountant specializing in intellectual property who is interested in taking me on as a client. I don’t make enough to be worth their while. Oh well. If you’re interested in the money side of my career, I put up my annual “where my money comes from” blog post.
I’m also still pondering doing a large book. For contractual reasons, I’m not going to indie publish a large OpenBSD or FreeBSD book at this time. Allan Jude is interested in updating our ZFS books, though, so that’s probably what’ll happen. Yes, I still want to write It’s Always DNS and What To Do About It, but I gotta shamelessly vacuum Allan’s brain while it’s available. FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FM: Advanced ZFS are still valid, but ZFS has developed many new features since those books came out. We’ll cover both FreeBSD and Linux. Yes, ZFS is better integrated with FreeBSD than Linux, but there are myriad Linux OpenZFS users. On the publishing side, I’ll combine them in one large book and call it OpenZFS Mastery. I’m guessing it’ll come to about 150,000 words, about three times the size of the typical Mastery title. That’s enough that it’ll need professional indexing and heavy copyediting and tech review, but it’s less ambitious than a big Unix book.
It’s a small step, not a giant leap, but it’s probably wiser.
One of my goals over the last couple of years has been learning to speak coherently. Yes, I give talks. Those talks get recorded and put online. Those recordings show the whole world that I am a) incoherent, and b) daft. I can discover antigravity more easily than I can change the second, but the first could be improved. That’s why I have the 60 Seconds of WIP podcast; it forces me to speak regularly. One of my dear Patronizers used professional-grade podcast equipment at work for an internal company podcast, but the company shut down the podcast. Long story short, I now have professional-grade podcasting equipment. This might be the impetus I need to convert my office bathroom into a recording room. I at least need to set up a computer in a different room for recordings: the fans on my new desktop are loud enough to show up on the recordings. I’ve never played with audio or video on BSD, so that might be fun. Especially with a fancy Heil mic. I do worry that it might require understanding more about video formats than I want to know, but if it stops being fun I could move it over to the MacOS laptop. I’ve ordered a small wheeled standing desk that should fit nicely in the bathroom. Running water doesn’t mix with sound-damping foam, but even with bare walls it will be an improvement over the Apocalypse Fans.
The new Networking for Systems Administrators is coming along. It now has over a hundred print sponsors, which means I I’ll do a challenge coin. This book has picked up more sponsors than any other I’ve written. Many of the new sponsors are folks who backed the RYOMS Kickstarter and signed up for the sponsors mailing list. That gives me a horrid nervous complex that I better deliver a quality book or they’ll hunt me down–uh, I mean, warm fuzzy feelings. Yeah. Warm fuzzy feelings.
Anyway: you’re all welcome to the Dear Abyss launch party. Party is a strong word for a Zoom session, but we live in an age where companies describe their new shoes as “hope” so I’m going with it. Saturday 25 January 2025 at 10AM EST, or 15:00 UTC. The US West Coast can get up at 7AM, the Europeans can skip dinner time, and as usual Australia is fubar. One day I’ll do one of these in Australian time and annoy everyone else.
(zoom info deleted, because it’s past and wasn’t public.)