Just When I Thought I Was Out….

It is such a great line I couldn’t resist. Not that I consider myself to be any kind of Godfather figure but sometimes I do definitely feel like a criminal. I’m actually a good law abiding citizen and I pay my taxes (if I can’t minimise them to zero) but when it comes to Cryptos and some of the talk here of Revolution and defiance of Central Authorities it does at times seem a bit subversive. I half expect that one day I’ll get a knock on the door and be hauled off on charges of sedition, and that’s why I like to stay mostly Anonymous….but maybe I’m just being paranoid. I digress, the quote just fits and Silvio is my kind of character.

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I tried to take a break from STEEM and depending on how you look at it, I never really left or maybe I am not really coming back. I was posting daily for a while there and I had to stop that to take care of business….and it’s business that still hasn’t been taken care of. I’ve actually been sick for over a month now – first with a crippling case of Bronchitis and now I’ve been hit with Shingles. When I asked my Doctor where this Shingles came from he explained that as I had Chicken Pox when I was about 2, the virus stays in my system for life and can relapse if I get overly stressed, extremely tired or run down from another illness. Yep, you guessed it – I hit the Trifecta. So here I am loaded up on pain killers and unable to do anything particularly productive or cranial. But hey, I can still write a mindless, rambling post on STEEM and earn a few cents! So here I am today!

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So what have I been doing these last couple months? Well, Cryptos have been getting hammered and while I’m now a fully converted Crypto Zealot dosed up on the Kool Aid, even blind Freddy can see that the easy money from straight up Crypto Investing that we enjoyed in 2017 is gone for now. So I decided to “Get my Dev back on” and re-tool for some actual blockchain development. There are a whole heap of ICOs that flushed projects with cash in 2017 and from what I’ve seen many are now going to struggle to actually deliver on their promises. Blockchain Engineers are likely to be in high demand as the Charlatans Marketing People take a back seat in 2018. Well that is my thinking anyway.

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The first goal I set myself was to get to the EOS Hackathon in Sydney in early August. I’d never been to a Hackathon before and my Dev toolset was not only out of date, but it was mostly proprietary technology in the Microsoft .NET sphere. So I got a new laptop and built myself a new “Open Source” Dev environment on Linux Mint, started looking into EOS Smart Contracts (written in C++ which is very similar to C# that I use) and NodeJS (which is basically just a next generation JavaScript library) and even some ReactJS. It’s a bit like riding an old bike and I’m coming up to speed on the new tools pretty quick. I’ve been surprised and impressed with how far the front end dev has come in recent years! Anyway, the whole EOS Hackathon experience is probably worthy of a post in its own right. It didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped, mostly because I got sick, but I also was surprised with the event itself. It was a lot more serious and competitive than I expected.…and a lot less focused on the actual Dev too.

After I got home I’ve just been focusing on getting well and have been lurking around STEEM a bit making random comments with my iPad in bed. I’d seen that the STEEM DOLLAR finally dropped below $1 USD so I thought I should make a post about that since I’ve been banging on about the SBD situation for many months now. Anyway, after writing that post the always lovely and helpful @choogirl put me in contact with @scaredycatguide about doing a radio interview on the topic for his MSP Waves show Music and Money with ScaredyCatGuide. I originally baulked as I’ve never been a public speaking type, but the idea grew on me and I finally came around to a “Why the hell not” attitude and I’m really glad I did. He’s a really good host and it was good fun talking about a bunch of stuff that I’m really interested in and passionate about. I’ll post up the recording when it comes out for anyone who’s interested.

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So, while I’ve enjoyed the break from STEEM it’s been hard to stay away. On top of it all, the #SteemSilverGold community are doing another Monster Raffle this month which I am naturally drawn to like a moth to flame. I know I can’t sustain a daily post rate and full on engagement with my communities like I was trying to do before. I also know the STEEM platform has a few warts and some serious flaws that my inner investor baulks at, but there is just too much good stuff and good people here to totally walk away. Maybe I’ll just go back to being a fringe-dweller, lurking in the shadows for a while – but I am here and I’ll probably pop up with a post here and there when you least expect it.

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Images and Credits
https://www.pinterest.com.au
https://imgur.com
https://www.fasttech.com
https://steemit.com/@scaredycatguide
https://steemit.com/@msp-waves