About Me

The 1’s and I dare say even the 0’s seem to be calling me. I may start speaking binary.

I am Shayne, a CE student at UVU, aiming at vulnerability research. This site is where I put things instead of leaving them in my head and in Notion. Six sections: posts, notes, projects, writeups, wiki, and open questions. Writeups is empty until I solve something worth writing up. The posts and the projects are the two I write in, so those are the two explained here. The rest are described on the wiki.

Logs

A log is anything I find interesting enough to write on, tethered to learning and ideas. Could be notes from something I’ve learned, a factual writeup, or a review of something that taught me. No reviews of shows or movies, I have no opinion on those.

At least one a week, possibly more depending on what I run into. The week resets Sunday and a post goes up by Friday night. This is the third personal site I have built. The first two are gone, and neither of them ever had a date attached to anything.

I also study on stream, and most of what ends up here starts there.

I write these for myself, not for followers.

Projects

A project is something with multiple steps to it, not something I can fix by reading one page.

One post per project. Updates are dated and added to the same post, so it reads top to bottom as it happened. If something gets benched or abandoned, the status on the post says so.

Most of it is hardware and the machines I use. I like old hardware because it is cheap and because I can open it, and I like a device that does one thing and nothing else.

Philosophy

I think a life spent in pursuit of something you deem worthy is a life worth living, whether or not you get there. The pursuit is the thing, not the result. Your way of seeing should be evolving the whole time, and that is the part that actually moves. Someone who sits at work dying to go home, watching the clock run down, gets home with nothing but spent time to show for it. The time is finite either way. The full version, with the rules that came out of my own record, is The Pursuit, and What I Use to Steer It.

This pursuit has a caveat that depends on where your pursuit lies. If you are chasing the cutting edge of a field, at a high level it will create instability in the world around you. People working at that level cannot in most cases have functional lives outside of it. Exceptions as always. Someone like Richard Feynman, who claimed to be an ordinary person who studied hard… I’ll bet.

I have derailed from the pursuit. I have failed for long periods of my life to live up to my own philosophy, clouded by cheap dopamine and an overwhelming fear of failing. I was obsessed with controlling outcomes. I was a planner to exhaustion. Plan plan plan, never follow through. Research research research, next thing, so I can’t fail. What I care about now is the gap between noticing I have derailed and getting back on, and I would rather keep shortening that gap.

I don’t expect to be the next Einstein or produce anything new. But a person who stops reading, stops taking in information, stops analyzing, has stopped moving, and I do not want that. I’m just writing.

I think people are shaped heavily by what surrounds them, not only by what the people around them say but by what they make, the books and the videos that have sat close to you for years. I doubt I am an exception. So I try to question what is actually true about my biology and what was installed, or handed to me by someone describing their own limit as if it were mine.

I at my core yearn to be absorbed by something so completely that the mundane cannot reach me.

Contact

I am happy to talk. I like people who broaden how I think, I like having my beliefs challenged, and I would rather hear an opinion on what I have written than not.

Email is the fastest: shayne@sixhourlog.com. I am also on GitHub, YouTube, Substack, X and Instagram, and the posts have an RSS feed.