When my aunt and I stayed over at the house of Iain's parents (thank you!) for Linuxfest Northwest, we admired their gorgeous memory foam bed. So they sent us the link to buy the same mattress. I want to get one of these as soon as I get a stable apartment (I'm not sure when that will be, though... I have 8 more days before I'm allowed to hunt for a permanent job.) As much as I enjoy being a transient, there are advantages to being able to sleep on a really good bed consistently - something you're not treated to often when you alternate between the couches of friends, a futon, the hammock, on the floor in a sleeping bag... wherever there's 24 square feet of empty floorspace.
A rice cooker would also be nice, the kind that makes lugaw (congee, rice porridge, call it what you will, it's tasty). When did I get so materialistic? Is hankering for a mattress and a rice cooker and a nice teacup materialistic?
I've decided that in addition to (and sometimes coinciding with) my Mentat Wiki Month adventures (tonight: learn Teeline shorthand!) I will try to learn/do (they're the same thing, right?) one technical thing per day. No excuses. My internship is basically grassroots. Don't get me wrong; I love grassroots. I'm getting better at doing it. I think I'm pretty decent at it now.
I also, somewhat masochistically, want to get better at engineering. I miss it, I love it, and I'm not very good at it, and I can fix that. I don't want to become the best engineer in the world; I probably never will be. I do want to be able to speak the language fluently and be able to make things. Working output is the language of engineers - solutions to problems make up our grammar.
Engineering as a hobby, grassroots as a "career"? Works for me right now.