I’d probably start designing and building a rolling ball clock/ sculpture, then hit some sort of obstacle and switch to making a self recirculating eddy current tube, get frustrated and try to design and build an electronically commutated counter rotating propeller driver, get frustrated and try to build a garage sized 3d printer, get frustrated and try to build a delayed action door closer get frustrated and try to build a co-planar compound cycloidal reducer, get frustrated and then forget my wife’s anniversary until 4pm the day before.

Procrastinate for eleven months, panic at the last minute, ask for a do over, fail, then try to learn Rust in 3 days and program a roguelike.

I would absolutely have a blast being a full time stay-at-home Dad. We would hit every Park, library, zoo, and aquarium within a days drive.

Then during the summer, I’d pass their kids to their grandparents house so my wife and I could find a place to SCUBA for 2 weeks straight.

I would spend my year trying to turn my side business into my actual business then I couldn’t quite my job and work for myself doing what I do now but for more money

• Run a weekly in-person D&D campaign at my house, make dinner for the players.
• Play around with Arduino and ESP32 - home automation, robots and whatever.
• Do a lot of 3d design and printing - make little toys to give away with Halloween candy.
• Build model castles.
• Listen to classic old-time radio shows.
• Help with stage productions at a local theater.
• Write some Discord bots and npm modules.
• Participate in NaNoWriMo

Spend time with my kids and play video games while they’re at school

I did have a one year sabbatical. I hiked and volunteered on farms mostly. I worked at a animal refuge farm in India and a goat farm in Montana. I hiked in the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Tetons. I hiked in Canyon, Texas and at Glacier too. I headed south for winter and explored the civic side of the civil war and the civil rights movement, hoping to learn something that would help me understand what was happening in our country. I toured Little Rock High, Fort Sumter, White Haven and Jackson’s Barracks. I read Lincoln’s speeches. I learned to cross country ski and visited my mom a lot. I went to Virginia with my family and took a detour to DC with my sister while we were there.

I’m back to working now. I moved to live near the mountains so I can hike and I volunteer on an animal refuge farm every week. My mom passed not too long after. I am forever grateful for that experience.

Buy a minivan, remove back seats. Add a bed and a battery bank, a small travel fridge and a hob for cooking then start camping at the nearest national parks. Refine my load out and start venturing farther and farther out.

I just quit yesterday with nothing else lined up. Gonna take a WHOLE MONTH for healing (isn’t it ridiculous how ridiculous that feels?) and then figure out my next move. I wanna build an app or something.

Two chicks at the same time, man…

• Do a food tour of Vietnam
• Experience more of South East Asia
• Volunteer my time at the City Mission
• Get more sleep
• Workout more
• Spend more time with the girlfriend
• Spend more time with Family
• Work on some personal Web Projects

Not in any particular order.

Sleep.

Then all the projects!!!

I can recommend a big stupid project where it’s not a big deal if you fail.

Until recently, for me that would’ve meant “run Windows programs on Android,” mashing together Wine and e.g. Unicorn Engine… but now there’s like six different “userland emulators” vying for preference. FEX-emu, Box86, others with even sillier names.

I did manage a bespoke 8-bit FPS. That only took about two months. And then I’ve been idly tweaking it over the last two years. Splitscreen multiplayer, as a joke, was maybe not the best idea.

What’d take both time and space is some extremely low-end VR. I am convinced that Quest-ish headsets could cost, like, fifty bucks. The big players keep iterating clever hacks from a decade ago. Solving those problem, instead of avoiding those problems. Light should be collimated by default, which means a point source, which is any single LED. Rendering has to be detached from software performance, which means projecting the nearby world to e.g. floating dots instead of directly making a flat image. Inside-out tracking is at least the right idea, but it doesn’t have to be especially good in order to ground an inertial estimate.

Probably a bikini inspector at my favourite beach… Seriously though the Bibbulmun Track.

Technically not a sabbatical, but I saved up a bunch of money, quit my job, and have been studying abroad in Japan.