It can be hard at times, but having the greatest girlfriend in the known universe is a burden I’ve learned to live with.

Ain’t it funny how me being a “know it all” and “pedantic” led to nearly all of my successes in life? Glad I kept trying to know it all and nail things down tight intellectually.

It really paid off.

It's funny and easy to forget, but there are still significant swathes of the Earth's surface (not even underwater) that are largely uncharted and unexplored in the modern day. If you have the will, the funding, and the itch, you can still just go and see places nobody else has.

— psychosomatica (@Xenoimpulse) May 20, 2025

I’ve been to one of those places.

It was in Egypt, flying on the UH-1 Hueys they had there. The pilot said we were going to do something fun that day. After flying a long way out over the Sinai desert in the vast middle of absolutely nowhere, he set the chopper down. It was at least a hundred miles from any roads, any civilization, anything; we had not seen a camel or a house for 30 or 40 minutes. The area was bounded by mountains and there was no sign of any life.

As we stepped out of the cabin into the blistering heat the pilot said, “Congratulations, gentleman and lady¹, you’re standing on ground it’s likely no human has ever stood on, and if so no one has been here for many thousands of years.”

Though it was hard, I am glad I joined the army and became a paratrooper. I got to see and do things that almost no one else ever gets the chance to experience.

1. There was one woman with us.

the problem, dear reader, is that I live with her https://t.co/VoLvJohiCS

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) May 20, 2025

I have the same “problem.”

It’s common knowledge that charging people for their time results in experts being paid less since they work faster, which is why experts charge more for their time.

This is true. My former side gig hired a few people to replace me when I stopped doing it due to lack of interest and time. These people eventually completed a project in approximately two months that would’ve taken me 4-5 hours of a single night.

My fee is $200 an hour so my charge for the project would’ve been $1,000. I estimate my replacements spent 80 hours real work time on the project overall. Let’s say the three people who worked on that project were charging $100 an hour. Pretty cheap in my field, by the way. That’s $8,000 there for their labor. And I am probably underestimating.

Even though I charge twice as much, I would’ve saved my former side gig approximately $7,000 and two months of wasted time.

Experts only look expensive if you don’t know a damn thing.

What’s the most “guy” thing you’ve done that you’re secretly proud of, but would never admit in public?

I’d admit most anything in public, but a very “guy” thing I did was this.

I was at a company picnic. Saw some dudes with their truck stuck in the mud in one of the nearby fields in the park where the shindig was being held. I grew up in rural North Florida so one of the few car things I know is how to get a truck out of the mud.

I’d seen some discarded boards and such nearby so I picked up some of those, walked over and said I could help get them get their truck free. They were amenable to the idea as they had made zero progress. So I placed a few of the boards in front of the rear tires in a little ramp and had the driver put the truck in L. Then me and one of the guys rocked the vehicle a little as the driver slowly gave it some gas. The truck came out quite easily after that of course because it had some traction.

Even though they’d been trying to get out of the mud for 20 minutes (and making it worse), in less than two minutes I had freed their truck like it was nothing.

Then I walked back over to the ~100 spectators from my work, many of whom congratulated me on how smooth that was.

That was pretty cool.

You can tell I’ve read too damn many medical books because there’s a scene in The Pitt where one of the over-confident trainee doctors orders a BiPap for a pneumothorax in the ER and I was like, “Wait, what the hell is she doing? That’s gonna make it worse!”

And sure enough the patient crashes out because pneuomothorax pressure goes through the roof and collapses his lung.

I’m not a doctor, but I do know some of the shit they do. What happens when you read a skrillion books about everything.

Being told what’s impossible and then deciding that you don’t care is the key to getting anywhere in life.

There are people who say things like, “You can’t possibly keep the sleep schedule that you do and survive.”

Then they stay with me or are around me for a bit and see that it’s true — that I have no discernible circadian rhythm and only take naps. It’s funny how often in my life that has happened. I don’t know why I am the way I am. Just am.

But it’s not hard for me. In fact, the opposite. It’s quite easy. I don’t get jet lag and I sleep when I am tired. Nothing difficult about that at all.

I wrote my own Firefox extension:

None of the existing ones did quite what I wanted or had a single right-click menu entry. My little extension does what it says on the tin: It converts text to title case, ignoring some words that aren’t typically capitalized. It’s signed and everything (though that is an evil scheme).

The extension is not available in the Mozilla Add-Ons site as it’s about as tested as a wombat in space, but it works for me.

NO I AM NOT A DEVELOPER LEAVE ME ALONE

I’m disagreeable – and it’s backed by science.

I’m disagreeable and I love it. I don’t give a fuck about the science!

West Point graduate becomes first woman to complete Army Ranger competition.

I went to (did not participate, watched!) the Best Ranger competition back in 1997. That thing is intense. I have respect for anyone who can complete it. The majority of the teams drop out each year.

This is what I do routinely as well. I am the final tier. Often when I get a problem, it’s been through three layers of helpdesk at two different vendors, two or three levels of sysadmin types, several tiers of developers, and frequently even more resources than that.

Many times, a team of 2-10+ people has been working the issue for weeks.

Most of those problems I solve in 20 minutes or less. When you’ve been doing the same sort of thing since 1980 and professionally for 25 years, you’ve seen a whole lot. And I just have a brain that is optimized for troubleshooting for some reason — probably because I have a great memory, accept nothing at face value from anyone, try things everyone “knows” cannot be the cause, and am relentless. These qualities take you very far in figuring shit out.