just wanted to say for the masses of people that have followed me over the last few weeks that i’m really touched by your compassion, empathy and time. your time is valuable and valued by me. i don’t want to squander it or waste it, i know (like me) that it’s the lifeblood of your time here on this spinning piece of space rock. i’m just happy we get to experience it together — i’m feeling the love from he community!

i wanted to give you a bit of a background and life update as to where i am here in the middle of the year and what the rest of the year hopefully contains as lots of wheels are in motion and i’m aggressively trying to position both myself and my overseas partner (@dayleeo) into a position where we can be together again (she last visited six months ago) and between locations.

dayle is paying down cards and sorting out various health care things and i’m trying to find a regular source of income from the work i do with clients virtually. i’m no longer interested in having a location based job. i need/want to be completely virtual in working. i’ve been living semi offgrid in my little van now for a few years now and i can feel the itch of wanting to be in transition between this base camp, co-working oversees and just getting out there to look at land and logistics of the creative retreat dream.

for the last six months i’ve spent a bunch of time creating online courses, i did 31 courses, one per day in december which was a massive effort and i’ve nearly completed one hundred mini courses up on skillshare, that’s drip feeding me some funds and i’ve got a plan to up the stakes on udemy as well, these funds help me get internet, food and transportation currently. it’s not a lot but i’m semi surviving, dayle helps me a massive amount — i look forward to the day the shoe is on the other foot and i can buy her a lovely meal sitting in the sunshine somewhere together.

going all in on steemit and crypto in general could have not come at a better time, i want to shift the website hosting away from wordpress to be more interactive, storytelling, transmedia driven ideas and projects and this community is a perfect vent hole to the web to open up those concepts, get them maybe funds and just generally ‘shoot the shit’ with people about things in their own lives they wish they could change. as much as change freaks me out initially it’s also the very force that pushes me forward.

i’m in a re-tooling phase

while my computer is fine (five years old iMac) i really need to get a mobile solution that i can use to write on and edit videos. i’ve got a broken MacBook pro that was working that somehow got messed up regards battery and a slow cooker (long story) so ideally i need to throw a few hundred at that to get that fixed. it’s got a really nicely broken in keyboard too so i’d love to get it going again. i don’t always need new if i can get the old tried and tested, solid devices going again! :)

i’m on borrowed time with my connectivity, i hook up my machine here via my aging and falling apart iPad2. it’s been a beast. if it was a generic tablet i’m certain it would have fallen apart by now but this thing keeps hanging in there — it’s a wifi/cellular and i have an unlimited 4g (don’t think it’s supposed to be unlimited but i think i might have found a caveat while loading up from payg, don’t want to share in case they change it!) if that iPad dies i’m offline and with the car needing repairs for mot i’m literally stuck so that’s my main focus right now. .

backups and redundancy

i’m not sure what the deal is with me but i love having a backup or a redundancy solution, maybe it was all the years as a computer operator at the local council that did it to me about keeping our uptime level and the focus on the SLA (service level agreements) that was drilled into me but i really respect the process of a parallel migration — i try and apply that methodology to the way i live my own life. run things along side each other in case of emergency, have an alternative means, car off the road, have an electric bike, iPad dying, have a secondary device - especially in this day and age when we are all remote workers plugged in remotely as nodes!

i’ve never been very good at saving or planning ahead thou, it’s always short term pangs of anxiety and stress about resolving an issue i’m having, i’d love for once in my life to actually get ahead of it all a little so i know what the next six months or year looked like, the last time i had a year like that was in 2011 when i sold a domain name to one of the founders of twitter for five figures and in the process gave myself funds to reboot my life again after two years of depression and sole seeking. it really helped me get back on track and carve out a life again.

what the nearby future holds

right now, i can honestly say i’m super excited about the next six months on a small frame of reference level. sure, the world appears to be in flames around me and the world worries me greatly but that’s not a reason for me to stop living and just exist, i’m no use to the world and the people in it just from my desktop. i, just like you have a lot to offer the people of the world, so many bits of advice and information to collect, store and consider, in my lifetime the time is now to make foundations of survival in an ever increasing delicate world structure, we need to enjoy and share every moment together.

steemfest 2 looks like it’s gonna be incredible, i’d get so much out of having some travel time with @dayleeo to that so that’s certainly on the radar, getting dayle here with me for another six months would be perfect and putting together some plans for the future i think are important too. visa’s and travelling are like a trap of the mind when you really drill deep into their ability to hinder (in some ways) access to travel freely but in other ways a good (shorterm maybe) defence against the flow of the undesirable to harm our countries lineage in a variety of ways.

my daughter is growing up fast, we hit that decade mark and my heart was full, she’s growing up and i’m super proud of her resolve and outlook on life, how full of compassion and love and smarts she has. she’s heading into teenager lands which i know will be littered with angst and questions and challenges and i’ll need to be there to hold her hand through it and wipe the hair away from her brow and provide hugs and love. i’m trying to gear up for it but i’m realistic to the fact that i’ll never be.

on the road, over there, back here

to get on the road, new transport, commuting back and forth and without any adjustment to the weekly routine i think is going to be a push but i have to try, i can’t be contained to where i am, i’ve been here for the last few years, nearby, minutes in the car to react to anything that happens at school or a place for my daughter to crash if needed aside from the weekends. i feel the call thou, i feel life calling out to me from the road, places to go, people to meet, co-working spots to stare out of windows from.

i’m up for the challenge thou and i expect in six months time when i do my year end reflection or birthday update in january that things will have changed yet again. i just wanted to let you know that it’s sharing in an open decentralised community like this that gives me the light and the forward momentum to realise it. thanks for being you and thanks for coming along on this ride with me together! :)

TRUST AND AUTHENTICATION. .

^{http://socialgandalf.com/legacy → pinterest epic wins pinboard → i was a brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won a vloggie for involvement in node666 (san francisco 2006) → on television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams (twitter) in april 2011 for 5 figures → went to phil campbell, alabama to help repair/recovery/help raise money month after a tornado ripped through the town (was on sky news, bbc news, al jazeeza, nightly news, alabama weather channel?!) → CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → i was in a music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros to kickstart web tv studio → did project work with sleepydog indirectly for nesta (responder) → crowdfunded digital signage concept called the pi street (do it for steem?)}

your upvote, resteem or comment is welcomed. new followers will often be followed back like the one big happy steemit family we are, have a fantastic day. stay safe!