I’m currently going down the software engineer to woodworker pipeline…
I was a programmer for 25-some years but I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I now get my engineering jollies from the used school bus I converted to a motorhome and from the house I bought three years ago and am finishing up renovating. For money I drive a school bus, which pays about 1/6 of what I used to make but is infinitely more satisfying. As far as retirement goes, I’m hoping to die a painless death before AI replaces all the CDL jobs in the country. I think AI will work fine for school buses, mainly because kids are easier to replace the younger they are.
Literally me soon because of AI
The AI-related bullshit definitely sucks the fun out of programming, but carpenters still have to deal with customers…
I’m in biotech and my wife and I keep talking about quitting our jobs and opening a meadery.
Intriguing!
Probably more as a small scale personal project than a business venture (the bureaucracy around food-production would kill me) for me though.
Do you make it already on your free time? Can it be made without honey?
Wouldn’t be mead without honey.
Mead-ish? Meadly?
Ha! Only 2 questions in and you are already in “you won’t believe it is butter” territory.
Haha unfortunately it comes with the territory when refusing animal products but still wanting to eat similar to everyone else - I CAN have my cake and eat it too, kinda (with soy cream).
I’ll slogan my homebrewed syrup-beer: “you won’t believe it’s mead! (it’s not)”.
Honestly, while I love eating butter, I’d rather not look for similar looking replacements.
I can very well go with peanut/coconut oil (for cooking) and blended peanut for spreading, instead of using randomly processed industrial idk-what-oil based stuff that was originally developed with the intent to reduce costs to companies and then half-heartedly attempted to cater to those who care about nutrition, with a whole fake health campaign to make it work.Forget that, I’d rather just eat my bread with water.
Fun mead fact: The word “mead” descends from the Proto-Indo-European word for honey.
I’d have to call it Sirop (sugared drink) or something… Maybe “sugar meadley” or “agave meadley”!
Agave makes the basis for tequila, before distillation.
But if it’s just sugar water and yeast, it will be a bit gross.
In my foggy memory, mead tasted like very sweet beer, so I assumed some grain would be involved, but perhaps not.
If the flavour comes only from honey (and the process), it’ll probably be a lot harder to imitate.
I have friends who’ve made mead out of skittles
Isn’t sugar, water, and yeast basically the ingredients for hard seltzer? Add some flavoring after the fact and I feel like you’re having a pretty good time
Our area is filled with local breweries, so I think a meadery as a local business would work.
We do! We’ve been doing ~1 gallon batches which gives us 5 or 6 bottles of finished product. We’ve been buying honey from the big box grocers but I want to switch to buying from a local beekeeper.
I’ve never tried using not honey, do you mean like Agave nectar or similar?
If you make alcohol out of agave, you’re just making tequila at that point
If any of the small time beekeepers I’ve met are anything to go by, they’ll be happy to make a deal where you take some of their honey to make mead with, a portion of which they’d sell.
The beekeeper I dealt with was a moron. He texts me and says he’s got a bucket of honey that he thinks started to ferment with wild yeast. So I offered a reasonable price for the bucket and he counters with full price, like I’m just gonna take a full risk on his fuck up. I finished up what dealings I had with him and haven’t talked to to him since. They’re just people, in other words.
Maybe even a beekeeper who also could retail your mead, if they already have store space and customers and an assortment of honey-related products…!
Yeah, I don’t eat honey so haven’t even thought about mead in a decade, but the one time I had it, it was delicious! I suppose the market of buyers with allergies or dietary restrictions against honey is too small, but I wonder if it could be possible for home use (where no one cares that it’s not “real mead”).
Depending on where you are, selling booze is a massive financial undertaking. In the US, you better have 6 figures hanging around to blow. And years to wait.
i once took over a consultancy gig at a high-tech optical lab. when me and the guy i was replacing were leaving on the last day of the handover i asked just conversationally where he was going next, and he told me he was going back to school to be a painter. guy was in his mid-50s.
It’s NOT funny! With all the AI shit, micro-managers trying to be clones of Hitler, and unemployment to make the line go up, it’s something I’m seriously considering.
It used to be a meme, because every so often a dev left into that direction, even though most devs loved their job. A month ago, I was talking in the office with three other devs when this came up as a topic. It was not a meme anymore, every single one of us had seriously considered it.
even though most devs loved their job
This is the crazy reality of tech workers. I work in security and I really enjoy my work, but I’m about two days from rage quitting and making furniture out of wood.
Shit I’m considering going back to retail!
17 year IT veteran here. I work on a dairy farm now. It’s a peaceful life.
My buddy recently asked if I had any leads on stagehand work, because he spontaneously quit his IT job last month. He said that compared to the stress of modern IT work, he’d rather be a local roadcase pusher.
None of that shit except maybe the AI goes away in a woodshop. Hell, owners probably love AI because now they don’t need to pay a designer and drawer.
The AI reason is enough, but if someone has their own shop, then there aren’t micromanagers either.
Oh you mean a one man shop. Unless you’re already famous it’s just going to be a hobby shop, the furniture market is completely fucked by overseas competition. We made furniture for David Iatesta, which I guess is some fancy ass design house. A ~40 4poster king size bedframe in red oak was our priciest standard option, we sold to them for ~$2.5k, they sanded a little more, and added ugly finishes and sold for $10k+
The fat ass that hasn’t physically produced a piece of furniture in 25 years, changes plans halfway through builds, checks scrap for “egregious waste”, nickles and dimes overtime, always has out of scope tasks for anyone he takes a disliking to, I could go on… is absolutely a micromanager. The foreman was paid the most to be in charge on the shop floor, make decisions on the fly, handle vendors and materials purchases, but was frequently overridden by a voice yelling from a lofted office space. Just because they own the business doesn’t mean they can’t micromanage. Sounds like the stuff a micromanager owner would say
https://www.iatestastudio.com/product-details/nantucket-lamp-M205
I turned so many of these omg
I recognize that screenshot, pretty sure this was before widespread AI adoption. I can still relate to this guy today, just like I could back when I first saw that comment.
Living the literal dream. Every software engineers fantasy is to be an artisan carpenter.
Not true, some of them want to raise goats.
Is this is reference to the Microsoft guy’s LinkedIn meme? This one: https://programmerhumor.io/microsoft-memes/peak-programmer-career-trajectory-lntk
I assumed it was the neofetch guy.
Personally, I want to make historical reproductions of early 1900s fountain pens but with modern materials. Moore’s non-leakable in chased ultem, my white whale…
Sign me up. I’ll take one
I’ve gotta get my lathe trued and my CNC… uh… assembled, but if in three years when I get around to doing that I remember this comment I’ll send you one lol.
I’ll remind you about your cnc just as soon as I replace my x-axis screw. So, uh, also about three years?
It’s a deal.
Geese, thank you very much
Reindeer, but close enough.
My fantasy is to taste-test crisps.
Did that once. Not as exciting as you might think.
The shop teacher at my school actually did lose a couple of fingers to a table saw (not at school). Like right after he retired, too.
Ours got his tie caught in a belt sander. If it wasn’t for a quick thinking kid who pulled the cord…
He did get some chin sanding in, which is nice.
wearing a tie in a workshop is mental 🤮
Those teachers wore ties in my school… They were clip-on for exactly this reason.
Wearing a tie in a workshop is like pointing a gun at other people at the shooting range. Never do it unless you want bad things to happen.
I bet he switched to bowties after that!
He did not. He made learning exciting though.
The original reason that Geek Squad employees wear clip on ties is in the event it gets on pulled into a printer, it won’t choke them. At least that’s what I was taught 15+ years ago when I worked GS.
Real men wear real ties that will get them killed in case of a minor accident. Not like you woke liberal tech dorks with your safety standards and learning things 🙄
Yeah we’ve had enough Poe’s law. This isn’t really funny any more
Yeah, our shop teacher lost a finger as well. Luckily it was on the job.
