OK, maybe not entirely boring, but I'm finding that the less I force myself to do with computers, the less interested I am in them.

I used to live and breathe all things tech. It was not only necessary to stay in front of everything for my career, but I liked it a lot. I still do like tech, but I'm a lot less motivated to stay on top of tech. I'm not nearly as focused on doing all the things I used to call hobby that are related to tech, either.

I'm at my computer now. I sit here a little most days, but it's been a few days since I've done anything important while sitting here. I've done my usual checks to see if everything is up to date. The Mac wanted to reboot to do an install, so I let it. The iPads did that yesterday or the day before. I ran through the Webmin dashboards on the servers and poked at the web interfaces on the routers to see if there were updates for them, too.

I opened my IDE. I'd updated that earlier in the week, along with the various development tools and libraries. I had also updated my Ubuntu laptop to the newly released version and updated its IDE and dev tools. I ran a quick update on the project it opened, and then I put the IDE in the background.

Firefox popped up a "new version" prompt to restart, so I let it. The open WhatsApp pinned tab also wanted to reconnect, so I did that, too. I poked at my container manager tab and found one container has an update available, so I did that, too.

Then I wondered what to do.

I have one website I maintain for our summer camp, but it gets a handful of changes each year. Most of the related work is trying to identify why Google rejects the occasional message as unsolicited, even when it's a reply to a received message from a GMail user. That's what got me to sit down at the computer this morning. I've worked the web software for that site into a mostly static site, with just little bit of Node.js (for the interest form). I've got lots of ideas of things the site could do, like support the camp participants with a dedicated social media blog or forum kind of thing, sharing stories and photos, and keeping in contact after camp, but no one else is interested in having that. 

I have a couple baseball projects I'd like to finish.

It's been like 15 years since I started the fantasy baseball idea, with a big gap after MLB changed their data and I couldn't find the new feeds. I've since found the feeds and consume them a few times a day (planning to go with a more "live" refresh when games are happening if I get that far). I've got a POC started with a roster and scoring app, and there are tweaks I want to make to that. I have a framework for making that into a user-managed team and some bits for scheduling multiple players together in leagues, and ideas for open comparisons to see who just fared better on any given day.

Similar, largely because of the effort put into displaying a scorecard, I've got a start on a baseball scoring app. There it lets you build your roster on the card in advance or ad-hoc as a game progresses. Picking an at-bat in an inning on the scorecard brings up a panel where one can edit the state of the at-bat. It's got some error handling so runners can't pass each other or have too many on one base, or do things like pick "fielder's choice" when there aren't any base runners. It has some shortcomings, partly for flexibility, like allowing selection of activities in any order, so the batter can reach second before a base runner on first advances, for example. There's not currently a way to call out the fielding, especially in complex plays like a 6-4-3 double-play, although you can mark both runners out. It is really a state view and not an activity display. I've got ideas for a wizard-driven interface so scoring can be built off of game events as they're entered and allow ways to keep it accurate as it's edited, and thoughts about how to display them so that looking at the inning shares the events as they happened.

But even though I'll open the IDE projects, I don't dig into them as much as I think I should like to.

I have the real baseball game on television now, which should give me motivation. I was at the kiddo's little league game yesterday imagining ways I could have been scoring with my app. It was making me think of how you continue to score a game with 10 or more rotating players, all in a batting order, but not all fielding every inning, and how to represent that on the scorecard.

This blog has a half-way started project, too. The person who made and maintained the software has given up and moved on. There was enough dramatic change in the PHP processor that breaks enough of the scripts that I had to make a Docker container with an old version of the OS and PHP on it so it would keep running. I've got a bit of work to take the articles from this to display it similarly but in different software, or even in a static file system, or a mesh. There's no reason the content of an article needs to be in a database, but there are dates and tags and searches that benefit from that. And there are ways to work around that. Moving the blog is a project I should finish.

I've got a couple other games started, because games are a great way to keep software savvy. Rules make for easy-to-follow requirements, calculations and validations make for server-side stuff, and displays and inputs make for great client-side stuff. All the tiers can be there in games. Card games, dice games, board games, and stuff in the middle all contribute to ways to keep going on software.

But I find myself wondering "why bother?"

I'm not doing any of it for income. We did the right things and had the right luck, and don't need more money.

I'm not doing it for anything like maintaining a career. See the income bit for some of that, but mostly since I don't need to demonstrate my capabilities or solve problems for others, why do I need to keep on top of things.

I'm not doing it to fill any real gaps in my personal information or daily maintenance. I've got e-mail and calendars and documents managed on software I didn't write. Even this blog isn't really important to anyone who isn't a web spider. Sure, there are a couple real people who check in and even comment occasionally, but most of them are looking at other social media or direct conversation instead.

I had thought maybe I could return to writing. Way back when, I had thoughts of contributing short stories to the likes of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, but who really does that any more? A bi-monthly subscription is like $70 a year! I had ideas of tapping out stuff and self-publishing, just to do it, but I'm not interested in all the things it seems one needs to do "just" go get material out there. A friend once suggested some of the penny-a-page kind of deals out there for weird stuff like dinosaur erotica (it turns out it's a thing...), where a motivated key-tapper could just churn out things that someone will read and still trickle money in. Again, I'm not in it for the money. But I don't think I have anything to say.

Even as I finish tapping this out, the first thought is "ugh, I've already edited the previous list of articles in the new blog software, so now I've got to add this one," instead of any kind of thought aligned to usefulness or entertainment.

I might just be done with computers as a contributor. I could reduce my footprint and Internet stuff dramatically if I did less.

I should go outside and pull some unwanted plants from my border gardens, drop some mulch, and even fix the dead spots in the grass. I should finish building my planting boxes and moving all the dirt that's in the wrong place. I should pull the motorcycle out and just burn some gas and get some wind in my face. It's getting harder with kid sports, but I should race down to the other house for a little spring maintenance as it's been a few weeks. I should reach out to friends and hang out in person.