<story><title>I Sell Onions on the Internet</title><url>https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Panino</author><text>&amp;gt; I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks &amp;amp; giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.&lt;p&gt;It seems there&amp;#x27;s a lot of interest in gardening &amp;#x2F; food production among tech people.  For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it&amp;#x27;s totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps.  For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role.  Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and &lt;i&gt;apply&lt;/i&gt; that knowledge whereas many others clearly don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Just like a person who doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the value of a proper foundation  in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won&amp;#x27;t first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.&lt;p&gt;As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots).  They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they&amp;#x27;re back on their own!  Permanent green onion.  You can do this with a number of plants, btw.  Try it!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.&lt;p&gt;My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy.  When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided &amp;quot;you know what, it&amp;#x27;s on the other side of the country but I&amp;#x27;ll just sign up and figure it out&amp;quot;.  Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that&amp;#x27;s how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Sell Onions on the Internet</title><url>https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Panino</author><text>&amp;gt; I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks &amp;amp; giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.&lt;p&gt;It seems there&amp;#x27;s a lot of interest in gardening &amp;#x2F; food production among tech people.  For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it&amp;#x27;s totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps.  For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role.  Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and &lt;i&gt;apply&lt;/i&gt; that knowledge whereas many others clearly don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Just like a person who doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the value of a proper foundation  in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won&amp;#x27;t first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.&lt;p&gt;As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots).  They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they&amp;#x27;re back on their own!  Permanent green onion.  You can do this with a number of plants, btw.  Try it!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tvanantwerp</author><text>Moments of whimsy are some of the most important. It was a moment of whimsy that led to me studying abroad in college, and another moment of whimsy that led me to meet my wife while I was there. Couldn&amp;#x27;t have been more than 5 total minutes of thoughts no more complicated than &amp;quot;yeah, I guess I&amp;#x27;ll give it a go&amp;quot; that shaped my entire life.&lt;p&gt;And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.</text></comment>