Writing fiction, mostly. Once I get going I have a hard time thinking about anything else.
Beyond that, my plants. LOL. Here’s just a few of them in the picture. I have so many houseplants that they’re spread out all over the house. When I’m fussing over them it reminds me of Morticia Addams feeding her carnivorous plants by hand. 🤭
I am a lifelong Linux System Administrator/Systems Engineer and one of the activities I consistently get lost in is when I am learning some new server subsystem or when I am troubleshooting issues. Invariably as I do my research whether that be watching YouTube videos, Googling for answers, or especially when I’m in the process of fixing some broken thing. A good example is sendmail (here comes the geekspeek). Sendmail is a mail subsystem I have been using for many years (20+) but some of my clients or even some of my various mail servers simply don’t need such a complicated and difficult mail subsystem. Sure it’s fine for me but last year I needed to set up a mail server for a client who was terribly afraid of installing, configuring, and heavens forbid maintaining such a complicated mail subsystem. He didn’t have the time, patience, or interest to divert in learning this particular mail subsystem. He wanted to use a mail server by the name of postfix, which up until that point I only had a passing knowledge of.
I tend to learn things quickly and was aware that postfix in many ways is similar to sendmail, but much pared down, modular, and not so monolithic. It was now my time to get a working knowledge of postfix and in the beginning things went very well as much of my sendmail knowledge plus my working knowledge of how mail is routed on the internet was transferable. As I was learning and putting together a postfix sandbox server things went quick and I was confident that not only could I put a working postfix mail server quickly for my client, but after I configured the details it would pretty much be a hands off affair. A minimal knowledge transfer was doable and I knew that once I wrote up some documentation on the key features and files he would most be interested in, I would be able to quickly hand off the administration and consider another project done.
However, as I was learning postfix there were further subsystems included which augmented the postfix operation and I quickly found myself heading down a rabbit hole. Dovecot, spamassassin, OpenDMARC, OpenDKIM, authentication subsystems, proxy relay detection, POP/IMAP, and literally over 100 other pieces of software and modules which were either natively supported by postfix or were add-ons which covered every aspect of mail server navigation and administration. This is where the rabbit hole opened up for me. Though my client wouldn’t be interacting with HIS server in a manner that would require him to be on a years long education mission learning about all this stuff, it absolutely was all highly interesting to me.
I looked over all the configurations and additional subsystems and realized there were either other subsystems or modules that I would personally like to learn, brush up on, or implement myself at some time.
So I would start with Googling the thing I was interested in. From there I would locate the documentation that I needed. Then within that documentation there would invariably be something in there that I would want to learn or implement. This process would repeat itself and I would end up with literally five to ten tabs open in my browser as I went along “learning” and picking up other items that interested me.
But, this is something I like to do. I enjoy my career and I love learning new things. Plus in my line of work the forward march of progress has a lot to say in how long I might use a piece of software or some subsystem. It took me two weeks to put together my clients needs, but I spent an additional 3 months on my own fascinated by all the new things I was learning and had picked up another skill which would be beneficial to me and my clients.
Now this all describes an event which was a positive experience for me. But it’s not always like that. Sometimes a similar line of experiential learning is not so fun or is a downright chore. But I think I’d have to say it would be attacked in the same way, just with a lot more grumbling
Whew, I didn’t expect this to turn out so long winded. Maybe I’ll look it over and turn it into an article down the line but the prompt is what got my wheels turning.
Thanks for allowing me the opportunity to write all this based on the excellent prompt.
Darcy Branwyn 
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