The thing where the external hard drive on your desk is noisier than usual and suddenly you’re wondering whether it’s time to build a super-quiet NAS or just replace the drive before it blows its stack. 😬🖥💾
I’m always thinking about how I admire those people who just keep blogging at whatever their regular cadence is for years, and then decades, and, case in point: I remember reading this post from 1999 when I was a co-op student idly reading a blog instead of whatever boring job I was supposed to be doing, circa 2003. And this guy is still blogging today.
20+ years. What have I shipped in that time? Not enough. 🖋
Never really thought about the fact I’m on the Micro.blog Premium plan, and it has this bookmarking feature. I’ve been wanting to replace Instapaper (not that there’s anything wrong with Instapaper), so I definitely want to see if M.b bookmarking can slide into my workflow… 👨🏽💻
Focusing on my side projects feels impossible a lot of the time. Started thinking about what it would take to get Dropbox’s garbage software off my Mac, while still being able to access Dropbox for work. Somehow ended up back in the rabbit hole of what kind of software development do I want to do on the side, and what editor should I use… and now Dropbox is still on my computer and I’m reading about how to set up a .vimrc file. 🙄
Is this what ADHD—or some related condition—feels like? I’m not trivializing, I honestly wonder. 🧠
🍿The Dunwich Horror (1970) - Good lord, is this Lovecraft adaptation bad. Dean Stockwell sure was good-looking (and creepy) when he was young, though.
…Against my better judgement, I sort of went to see the 2008 remake where he’s the protagonist. 😂
As always, Seth Godin nails it. ✍️
This is shitty, user-hostile design.
No, don’t “remind me later”; the day will never dawn, brain.fm, on which I will want notifications from you.
Software developers: don’t be like this.
If I had any doubt whether or not I’m still a computer nerd, this is my favourite podcast of the year: 20 Macs for 2020 - Relay FM 🎧 🖥
I call this photo, “Yay, My Preorder Arrived, or, Hope Springs Eternal”. 📷 📚
Me, a few weeks ago:
Getting back into buying paper (instead of electric) books… this might help me get back into writing. Hasn’t yet, but we’ll see if the psychic weight of this pile has an effect.
…still hasn’t. I haven’t opened any of those books. Feels like I’m addicted to distraction these days, and I’m not sure how to break the spell. 🤔
Google is not your friend, it’s a tool.
[…]consider that Google can shut you out of all their services with no recourse or appeal possible. All your data, photos, calendars, emails… gone.
But yes, you can back up your data. Do it today…
– Today is Worldwide Backup Day - Seth’s Blog
An important reminder. And this doesn’t just apply to Google. Regularly export your data from other social networks and online services, because they will never care about your data as much as you will. Even if caring about your data is their job.
(For that matter, I should even be periodically backing up this stream, because it’s hosted on micro.blog, not my own servers…)
(via @patrickrhone)
“I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert… you’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.”
#lyrics
I think my least-productive behaviour is imagining arguments with strangers on the internet. 🤔
For some reason, AirPrint feels like magic.
My printer is on wifi; there is not cord connecting it with my iMac, yet printing from my iMac just feels like a thing I do.
Printing a web page from my phone, without the intermediary of a “computer” feels somehow incredible. 🤓
Getting back into buying paper (instead of electric) books… this might help me get back into writing.
Hasn’t yet, but we’ll see if the psychic weight of this pile has an effect. 🖊📷
A view from a hill. 📷
A walk at dusk. 📷
I officially left Facebook today, following the process described by @aaronpk. Do recommend.
Chocolate left in the cupboard is too soft; chocolate left in the fridge is too hard.
Summer: not my favourite season. 😜☀️
Dinner is served. Smoked paprika is where it’s at, by the way. 👌🏼 📷
This should be a selling point, right? That an app works on every platform?
But whenever I see a line of icons like this, I just think, “Oh. So it’s a ‘web app’ masquerading as a native app. It’s running Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine under the hood, uses at least 2 GB of RAM no matter what you’re actually doing—or not doing—with it, and its UI has weird non-native quirks that make it a crappy experience on the Mac.
“Too bad.
“Looked cool.”
Incentives are powerful things. I wish there were better incentives for developers to write great native apps for the Mac. Alas… I’m not sure what those would be. 👨🏽💻🙇🏽♂️
🔖 Deliberately lo-fi - Seth’s Blog
The resolution of communication has been on a downward slide for more than a decade.
Pairs nicely with my post from Saturday.
(via @patrickrhone)
The tradeoff in technology of convenience or other advanced features for reliability is fascinating to me1. I’ve used both my AirPods Pro and my Bluetooth speaker today, and neither one has worked on the first try. What do I do? It’s not like there’s a way to debug these things (not one I’m willing to attempt, anyway).
I just put the AirPods back in their case for a few seconds, then stick them in my ears again and hope that, this time, they work. This happens, I don’t know, maybe 5% of the time? But it’s enough that I looked up the process for sending them in for repairs today.
My Bluetooth speaker, on the other hand, I don’t even expect that to work; every so often I turn it on and, despite not having changed anything since the last time, it just… doesn’t connect to my phone. Sometimes it takes a minute, and then inexplicably connects, sometimes I don’t wait, and just turn it off and on again, and, usually, after a few tries… it works.
So here’s the thing: wireless earbuds and wireless speakers are super convenient… but when you plug a wire into a jack on your device, instead, it works. Almost always. Sure, the cable frays. Sure, the jack gets lint in it.
But it’s the difference between failing once every thousand times, and failing once every twenty times. That’s the difference between “reliable” and “flaky”.
I think about this with my cool Hue lights, too: I love being able to set my lighting to different colours and brightness levels. On the other hand, every so often I try to turn my lights on (or off), and they just… don’t.
When you walk into a room and flip a light switch, if the light doesn’t come on, you pull the lightbulb out, throw it away, and put in a new one, because, unless the bulb is burnt out, that mechanism always works.
You never flick a lightswitch off… and your lights just defiantly stay on.
We’ve got all this cool technology, but reliability has gone out the window.
I don’t know what to do about that, other than accept the tradeoffs or complain about them on the internet. But… well, here we are. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Iced peppermint tea. 🍹 📷
Saw this strange bird out my window. Doesn’t look like one of the ubiquitous crows… 🤔 📷
I dig this idea. Let’s do it. #DigitalMinimalism
(via @patrickrhone)
An ongoing annoyance for me is how many great companies / products exist… in America. For example, I want to order socks, over the internet. Bombas looks great! But with premium pricing, plus shipping, plus USD ➡️ CAD… I’m on the verge of paying $130 for 9 pairs of socks. 😓
Ok, where are the Canadian businesses selling equivalent products? They don’t exist. All the ones I can find sell subscriptions, not one-off pairs, and/or all of their socks are in goofy colours.
I just want a good source of, for example, men’s basics, that are made in and shipped from my own country. Too much to ask? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 🇨🇦
(Recommendations welcome, obviously!)
From Disconnect - Derek Sivers (I recently picked up Derek’s book, Hell Yeah or No, and I’ve been listening to the audio version. This chapter is timely for me!)
Every business wants to get you addicted to their infinite updates, pings, chats, messages, and news. But if what you want out of life is to create, then those are your obstacles.
and
You get no competitive edge from consuming the same stuff everyone else is consuming. It’s rare, now, to focus. And it gives such better rewards.
Alongside what I just posted about The Distraction Phone, I’ve been taking more walks without it in my pocket, especially in the evening after staring at screens all day, and, oh yes, more of this. 🙂
To capture ideas, I’m carrying a pocket Moleskine and this instantly-beloved pen, which I ordered recently after wanting it ever since the linked article came out. 🤓
It’s my first fountain pen, and I dig it. The idea of a pen I might still have in 40 years has great appeal. I almost certainly won’t have my iPhone XS even half a decade from now…
I decided to start online dating again, so I put Bumble and Hinge back on my phone. These apps are variable-reward-schedule attention sucks like nothing else; Instagram has nothing on this.
They’re designed to feed you an endless stream of what human beings are most drawn to look at: other people’s faces. And, every once in a while, you come across someone you’re attracted to! (There’s that variable reward.)
As a result, I’m connecting with some lovely people, but… I’m also spending minutes—probably hours—looking at my phone that I’d been gradually reducing before.
Not sure how to solve this problem yet. Using these apps in a different way is probably the answer (short of abandoning them completely), but I have to give it some more thought…
This machine kills time and attention. 📱 😑
These weird bunches of purple flowers. 📷
“In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest, there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.”
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
Perhaps you feel stuck, and yet there is something building inside you, some creative spark, preparing for a renewed push… #quote
Days turn into weeks, and then into months, if you’re not careful. I don’t like realizing it’s been how long since I last did X, or it’s been how long that I’ve meant to do Y?
Ugh. Time’s a-wastin’. ➡️
Laughing Stock wine club represent. 🍷 📷
The real art happens in the edit.
I’ve had an Instapaper account for ages, since long before Marco sold the product. Like other apps that could hypothetically organize my life, I always want to—mean to—develop some workflow for using Instapaper but then never stick to it. The problem with digital inboxes is, at least you can see the mess building up on your desk, and maybe someday that mess makes you feel bad enough for long enough that you take some time on the weekend to just clean the damn thing off, but apps like Instapaper and OmniFocus just become these black holes for me, where I stuff more and more things in, but that creates this stupid psychic barrier to actually using them.
It’s one of those “perfect is the enemy of good” things, where, since there’s too much stuff in my Instapaper account to possibly read, I just never use it at all.
Pah! So many behaviours are transparently silly when you describe them, but that doesn’t keep you from engaging in them.
Anyway, I decided to wipe out my Instapaper account and start over, try to going through it a more-regular routine. Ideally, the system looks like this:
Okay, I’ve decribed the process. Let’s see about actually making it work. I suspect the main hole is not having a defined time when I’ll sit down and do some reading, so the inbox just keeps getting bigger and bigger!
(Problem 2 is not having a defined time to sit down and summarize my annotations, but one battle at a time…)
An addendum to this is a more general principle, seen when you sell all your stuff to move to another country, or just go into the Instapaper app, select Archive All from the menu, then go to the Archive tab and select Delete All from the menu:
It turns out all that stuff you were holding onto doesn’t matter.
I felt a moment of trepidation: what if there was an article in there that I saved two years ago and I’d really benefit from reading it?
But I subscribe to this philosophy: if something is really so important, it’ll make its way back into your life, somehow. Especially when it comes to reading content from the internet, which is a dime a dozen-million. Leave behind all that stuff you’ve been hauling around just in case, someday. Make room for whatever it is awaits beyond the horizon.
Lofty words for some web app, sure, but… it applies as much to everything in life as it does to Instapaper.
I’d rather like to become a morning person, because I’m also not a night owl… trying to get stuff done in the evening is a tricky proposition. 😴
Almost got my WordPress website migrated from wordpress.com to self-hosted. Just need to figure out why, oh, you know, none of the permalinks resolve. 😂😭👨🏽💻
Digital Minimalism suggests long walks, which I already take. But without my phone, which I tried yesterday, and enjoyed. And, in particular, without headphones in, with the voices of others drowning out my own thoughts…
newegg.ca, a heretofore-reputable dealer of computer components, has a terribad password-configuration experience. Ahem:
What you should do: Require a strong password.
What you should not do: Apply an arbitrary upper bound of 30 characters to password length.
What you should double not do: Inexplicably let the user set a password longer than the limit, AND THEN LOCK THEM OUT OF THEIR ACCOUNT, because you did something to their too-long password upon save that renders it unusable (no, just entering the first 30 characters didn’t work).
What you should do: Allow two-factor authentication.
What you should not do: Make your fancy “six individual boxes” UI for entering the auth code DISALLOW PASTING, so instead of being able to use my password manager’s convenient feature where it automatically puts the 2FA code on the clipboard when I log in, I have to go look up the code and type it in one digit at a time, like a caveman.
I think from now on I’ll buy my computer parts from a company that can hire competent people to design their website. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Re-reading Digital Minimalism, I have today begun a gradual assault on my incredibly-distracting digital life.
First strike: close all browser tabs, wipe history and saved data, start over.
New process: any webpage not immediately used gets
Back in, oh, 2003 or so, my friend Jay and I used to go to Industrial Goth Night at the Die Maschine Cabaret in Winnipeg. Yeah, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had a fishnet shirt and pleather pants and it was fun as hell to drink beer and dance and feel a little more like the hidden version of myself I didn’t otherwise know how to show the world.
I don’t really keep in touch with Jay—through no fault of his—and the Die Maschine ceased to exist long ago. You have places and people that are tied to specific times in your life. It’s nice to be reminded of them, and nothing reminds me of that particular phase more than Beborn Beton - Another World, which just popped up in a playlist.
…Well, other than Call the Ships to Port, of course. 🎵👨🏼🎤
Sign outside the coffee shop. 📷
The door to faith, abandoned at the side of the road. 📷
Think: in this battered caravanserai, whose portals are alternate night and day, how sultan after sultan, with his pomp, abode his destined hour, and went his way.
From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, paraphrased from memory. Old favourite memento mori that popped into my head.
Took a bike ride to a park with a friend and drank a couple beers. Watched the sun go down behind the mountains. I’ve got no pics to share; my phone stayed in my bag.
It feels good, you know, to experience a moment without the urgency to record it. It still happened, still held its wonder.
Cure for the humidity. 🍻 📷
Rejoice! It seems possible that my blueberry bush isn’t dead! 🌱 📷
This tiny “gnome garden” at the foot of a tree has a tiny Black Lives Matter sign. 🖤 📷 #photowalk
🔖 Fragile, by Nic Askew - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters #poetry 📚
I certainly do have an unfinished notebook or two I could be journaling in… 😂 📷 @patrickrhone
Day One is a fine journal app, but I can’t shake the idea I want to get all my words out of app databases and into plaintext… fortunately they have a good-looking JSON export. 😎👨🏽💻
🎵 Can’t get enough of The White Buffalo lately.
Oh, the pigs are on his heels
Guns are drawn he’s in their sights
And they think they’ve got their leads
But he’s a friend of the night
Glad blossom season isn’t over quite yet. ☀️ 📷
Oh, by the way, I’ve been using ⌘ + ` a ton to switch between Safari windows1. I’ve known ⌘ + Tab switched between apps for ages, but the former shortcut took way too long to learn. I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell the world. 👨🏽💻
⌘ + ` switches between the windows of the current app.
[return]Matt Gemmell’s latest post—Using Drafts as a local Wiki—got me to check Drafts out again after years… Wow. I might have found my iOS plaintext solution… 🖋👨🏽💻
🔖 Coding C# in Vim - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
🔖 A Complete Guide To Mechanical Keyboards - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
🔖 Thanks to @aaronpk for this thorough guide to leaving Facebook. I’ve been wondering how to properly break away from the platform, unwilling to go Full Deletion, and this is the way forward: How to Leave Facebook 👨🏽💻
Cooking Tip: There’s no reason to hold your spatula by the middle of its handle and twirl it around in your fingers like you’re a rock drummer. No reason, except it makes cooking 12% more fun. 🍳
Found my initial carved into a tree. 📷
I’ve been neglecting my garden plot, so I guess this outcome is better than the alternative. 😂🌱
I feel some of my good habits slipping; nothing to do but start over again, and again, and again. Wrote about that here…
I’ve got an application group on my phone called “Distractions”, and I feel like I probably spend 80% of my time in there.
It’s hard to remember a time when you weren’t always connected to something else. I wonder what it was like. 🤔
It IS real! 📷
Stay safe. 📷
These huge wind chimes, hung from a tree on the sidewalk. 📷
Presented without comment. 📷
Sometimes seeing nature—really seeing it—is what you need. 📷
It’s time to read this melodrama in sixteen parts again. 📚 📷
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
— Henry David Thoreau
My garden plot is horribly overgrown with weeds—I haven’t made time to tend it all week—but at least the cilantro is kicking ass. 🌱 📷
If there’s some version of life you see on the internet or in others and you want to live it yourself, this phrase from Stephen Pressfield occurred to me:
Don’t prepare. Begin.
The blossoms don’t last long, but they’re magic while they’re here. 📷
If you were to take a long bike ride to a park overlooking the mountains and the water, and hang out with a friend while the sun set, and if you were to drink a couple beers in contravention of city bylaws while doing so… this hazy pilsner would be a great choice. 🍻 📷
The reflection of one lamp in another lamp.
This is my idea of experimental photography.
Or, it’s what you get when it’s the end of the day and I still need to publish something. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 📷
All veg, all good. 📷
First draft… done. Editing… underway. 🖊
I’ve been using my YubiKey as an SSH key for months, but there’s an annoying problem where the GPG agent and SSH agent seem to stop talking to each other after a while and I need to start a new terminal session to restore functionality. Gotta debug someday. 😖
💬 W.E.B. Du Bois on the Most Important Thing to Remember - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
A bee. 📷
Updated Resources for Building My Own Site Generator - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters. I’m awfully busy these days, but I’m hungry to keep working on this side project.
Much as I said I’d like to find a native-app alternative to Visual Studio Code that doesn’t eat RAM in the same way… it sure is nice to have Intellisense when I’m writing F# code… 😅
Please Print (A Journaling Rant) - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
@patrickrhone’s post got me thinking.
I’m really enjoying learning F#, a programming language I’ve been interested in for years.
Now that programming isn’t my job, it feels good to keep my skills sharpened. 🤓
Found out about Libby, by Overdrive, a good-looking app for taking ebooks out of the library.
I’d like to get more books from the library and fewer from Amazon, convenience be damned. Here’s a step in that direction. If I sometimes have to wait a few weeks for a hold, so be it: maybe getting whatever you want immediately, Amazon’s promise, isn’t the best thing in the entire world.
When you find something that works, keep doing it.
In this case, that’s texting @chris.provencher.draws at 7:30 and writing for an hour while he draws, then reporting my word count. I’m in the home stretch, and finally moving.
Bug report: @help Looks like hyperlinks don’t show up under the Posts tab in the Micro.blog iOS app. Bug? 🤔
📝 Been meaning to get back to this for a while: Getting Up and Running With F# in Visual Studio Code on macOS - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
Got a used copy of Different Seasons by Stephen King, mostly to read the story that The Shawshank Redemption came from. Not even sure I care to read the other novellas that much. 📚 📷
I hate to look a gift summer in the mouth, but I’d happily take 17° over 24°, in case you’re reading this and have a weather-control machine.
Sssssooooo closssssse… 😅🖋📷
Digging this Atomic Blonde soundtrack. Reminds me I want to watch that movie again. 🎥 🎵
You know, Curtis gave me pause: Sign in With Apple Is a Bad Idea - I was ready to use Sign in with Apple to try Readwise, simply because I didn’t feel like entering my email address and generating another password (never mind it takes five seconds in 1Password and I don’t have to remember it). But, taken to the extreme, now all my credentials rely on my Apple ID instead of an identity I control, even if that’s the email/password combo with all its shortcomings.
I’m with Curtis; I’m going to avoid any form of Sign In With… unless it’s indieweb-compatible.
Visual Studio Code is great, but… I find apps that are built on web technologies more and more obnoxious. Maybe that makes me some kind of tech racist, but… I’m officially on the hunt for a native macOS code editor that’s as versatile as VSCode. Recommendations most welcome!
This seems… reasonable. BC’s Restart Plan - Province of British Columbia I remain extremely grateful that I happen to live where I do.
‘Cause it’s in him and it’s got to come out.
I want back into the habit of getting up early in the morning and getting to work. Why? Because I’ve proven again and again that if I wait to do the stuff I care about, I won’t do it. I’ll do everything else instead: work, exercise, eating, every type of distraction… but not writing and publishing. So the key has surely got to be do those things first.
But, given when I’m posting this, I’m not starting tomorrow… let’s try the next day.
Currently writing up an editorial calendar for my little podcast, which was MIA last week. My boss Sean’s video is gold for this: 5 Months of Content in 5 Minutes - Editorial Calendar
Sometimes you’re in the mood: https://music.apple.com/ca/playlist/straight-to-the-heart-strings/pl.u-legkYsj0RxrZ 🎵
Umbrella stand? 🤔🌲📷
Signs of positivity seem to mean more than ever these days. 📷
I know most mobile apps are glorified websites, but why do they insist on logging me out after a while, like I’m using Internet Explorer at a “cyber café”?
Is there some technical reason, or just crappy design? 🤔
Seen on the sidewalk. “I understand what you’re trying to say.” 📷
Technology is not making it easy on me today. Considering going back to stone tablets.
I think the pros call this “Magic Hour”. 😎📷
Can you even believe the beauty of this season? 📷
If you’re safe, healthy, have a steady job and nonetheless find yourself thinking things like, “Come on, what do I have to be depressed about? Why can’t I stop being down in the dumps?” All I’m gonna say is, you are not alone. 🧠
I keep coming back to the Burns Depression Checklist as a quick and effective perspective-finding tool. I ran it today and got a 22, “mild depression”. Feels about right. 🧠
So that’s where it is. 📷
Onions starting to make an appearance. Nice to know I’m keeping some plants alive. 😏🌱
I need a break from social media so much right now I just closed a browser window AND the macOS desktop space it was in for good measure.
My bedtime reading for the last couple months: a collection of stories that originally appeared in Weird Tales magazine between 1923 and 1954. They’re of wildly varying quality, but make cute, creepy bite-sized bedtime stories. Solid find in a used bookstore a year ago. 📚 📷
No one’s gonna make you make the choices they made, except you.
(Trigger warning: brief mention of suicide.)
Still want to share my notes on using Pi-Hole as DNS/DHCP server, but gotta resolve an issue first: intermittently, my Mac can’t seem to find the DNS server, resulting in all website connections (that don’t already have cached DNS, I’m guessing) failing for minutes. 😬
Trying to figure out the right combo of Apache mod_rewrite rules to force [danj.ca](http://danj.ca), [www.danj.ca](http://www.danj.ca), and [danj.ca](https://danj.ca) to [www.danj.ca](https://www.danj.ca) like the scholar of an ancient and terrible language. 🙃🖥
Gosh darn, is Ramin Djawadi incredible. 🎵
Grateful to see people pulling together these days. ❤️ 📷
Got Pi-Hole working as an ad-blocking DNS/DHCP server for my home network. Gonna have some good notes to share once I fiddle with a couple more things… and clean them up for public consumption. 🤓
We are in this together. 📷
Don’t overthink it.
📝 Did some gardening, updated Resources for Gardening and Growing Vegetables - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
…now to move all those old documents to plaintext so I can still read em in another 15 years…
Spent some time going through the files I’ve been copying from computer to computer for 15+ years… even downloaded LibreOffice to read some old things I’d written.
Blast from the past, man. 😂
Not all worth keeping, but glad I’ve got it backed up.
Status: still spending my paycheque on Hellboy collections. 📚 🤪
🤦 The feels when a website doesn’t give you feedback upon pressing the “Post” button and you make the same post half a dozen times.
I’m bored.
📝 Hellboy 🔥 - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
Saw this while walking today. We will be ok. ❤️📷
Not sure what to publish today, and didn’t leave myself much time. So here’s the playlist I put on when I go to bed. If you’re like me, you could use the relaxation right now. 🎵
Reach for the sky. 📷
Been listening to a lot of back-catalogue episodes of my favourite podcasts just to hear ANYONE talking about ANYTHING other than the goddamn coronavirus. ¯\(ツ)/¯ #mentaldistancing
I was bored today, dangerously bored. Did a little writing, which helped, and then I started reading the collected Hellboy, by Mike Mignola, which I’ve meant to read for ages. That helped a lot more; I’ve just made myself put it down, or I’d never go to bed. 😜
Dealing with it.
Here’s hoping. 📷
Photo doesn’t do justice to the colour, but this experimental black-currant saison by 33 Acres is excellent. It’s a little like fruit juice, but mellower than, say, a radler. Six of these will be gone quick. 😁🍺
Hmm. I need a good emoji to mark posts about articles I’ve read.
📖 📚 📰 📄🤔
I think I like the newspaper, but do people still know what those are?
I’ve been carefully moderating my news intake, but this article is worth reading and sharing: Tom Colicchio Spent 19 Years Building a Restaurant Empire. Coronavirus Gutted It in a Month.
This is devastating for so many people, but on the positive side, it exposes the limits of our system and what happens when capitalism is unchecked. Even CEOs of big companies are starting to recognize something’s off. The focus on quarterly earnings — we need to see the end of that. All the outsourcing of manufacturing to China, now we see the pitfalls of that. Maybe it’s okay to make a little less profit so the economy can survive shocks like this. Because it will happen again.
…
I think the bigger question is what does business look like, period. Does this grease the skids for national health care and finally move the burden away from small businesses? What we’re seeing now is how fragile the whole system is. Hopefully we’ll come out of it and build something stronger and better for everyone.
I was having a similar conversation with a friend yesterday. We were talking about the concept of Antifragility, and what might change about our societies in response to this pandemic that make them stronger… and better prepared for the next one.
h/t to @brucegodin—thanks for sharing!
🎧 Oh, nothing. I’m just over here, listening to the new album that Nine Inch Nails released for FREE today. (On Apple Music) 😎
Nice photo walk today. 📷
🕹 OMG, you guys… MegaZeux still exists
I used to fool around with this ASCII-art game/game editor 25 years ago! A week off + quarantine has made me nostalgic for the games of my youth, and today I remembered MZX… and found it. 🤯🤓
Warning: I did not really like this movie very much, especially judging it against its predecessors. You have been warned.
📝 Setting Up DropShare With a VPS - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters ⬅️ I think I found my self-hosted CloudApp alternative.
A curious juxtaposition: Christmas decorations on a tree blooming for spring. 📷
Didn’t quite get DropShare working on my server, but I got partway there. Also fell into the rabbit hole of investigating setting up a URL shortener, and how to do domain/subdomain configuration properly… there’s always more to tinker with. 🤓
Dropshare looks like a great alternative to CloudApp to easily annotate and share screenshots and other files, but from a domain and backend I control. Gonna try setting it up soon—watch this space. 🤓☁️
Gonna guess I’m not the only one who needs to see this right now.
“Do not give in to despair.” 📷
🔖 Today’s bookmark round-up:
📝 A Day Without the iPhone - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
📝 A Week Without the Apple Watch - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
Just watched Alien 3, having recently rewatched Aliens. Observations:
CGI does not age well. Aliens 3 came out in the early ‘90s. The scenes where the alien is CGI just don’t look good. It has no “weight” to it, it doesn’t look like it’s really there. And the scale feels wrong. It’s supposed to be like 8 feet tall, but when it’s scampering around on all fours it looks like a misshapen dog.
When they show the head and upper body near somebody’s face, on the other hand—presumably played by a person wearing a suit—it feels like the alien is present with the actors, and it’s much more effective.
I’ve never loved how the beginning of this movie undoes the ending of Aliens. You can certainly argue that a hopeful ending isn’t the point of the franchise, but that’s a jaundiced and unfortunate position, in my opinion. The first two films end on a note of survival against the odds, and the third is about sacrifice (and, arguably, futility).
I think the series just gets too grim. I’d be happy to just watch Alien and Aliens and ignore all the rest. 🎥
Hopefully the weather’s good this weekend, and I’ll put these to use weeding my community garden plot. 🤓📷
I’m definitely noticing an uptick in my baseline level of anxiety. How I’m dealing:
While you’re taking all other precautions, folks, do whatever you need to protect your mental health. 🧠
Disabling paste functionality on password fields is user-hostile in a world of password generators and y’all web developers need to cut it out. 😤
Canceled my plans to visit Seattle this weekend. It’s not that I think I’m at terrible personal risk from Coronavirus, but it’s the responsible thing to do.
We need to normalize the idea that it’s not business as usual.
I printed this off of Instagram and now I’ve photographed the print-out and posted it on Micro.blog and I’m pretty sure this means I win the IndieWeb. 😏📷
As always, the first evening of DST is messing me up with the facts that:
😜
🔖 Did the extremely satisfying busywork of clearing Safari tabs from my iPhone: either reading them, putting them in Instapaper to read later, or putting them in OmniFocus if they’re task-related. As a result, posted a few new bookmarks on my site.
Well played, Cascade. Well played. 📷
📝 Doubling Down on Instapaper - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters - In which I consider another app that’s been waiting, forlorn, in the wings of my iPhone
Broken link to Epsilon Theory in that last post… 😔
Using apps that let me edit posts after submitting them (Discord, full-on blog software) makes me sloppy! I gotta re-read before hitting the big red button. Apologies.
I’ve been enjoying reading [Epsilon Theory]() since coming across it recently. I want to quote the end of this article, worth reading in full:
They are places where creativity and autonomy of mind can exist, where quiet can exist, where cooperative, coordinated game play can be promoted.
They are arenas in which we are each free to seek out the signal amid the noise.
Find your pack.
👆🏼That’s in the context of a list of sites and online communities. Micro.blog strikes me as another place that fits this description.
Just came across Abandoned America, via kottke and I want a copy. ❤️
Sadly1, the “Books” link on the author’s own site links directly to Amazon. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m slightly obsessed with this chipotle hot sauce. The slight smokiness is so… mmm. 📷
Went and checked out my new community garden box today.
I have a lot of weeding to do. 😅📷
📝 Resources for Gardening and Growing Vegetables - Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
“CommonMark” 👎🏼
This is a test. It’s just a test. Of how the Markdown parser works.
This is also a test. Simply a test.
Of where new lines are respected,
And where they are not.
When you need to post one more photo for a 30-day photoblogging challenge and you can’t think of what to photograph… you could do worse than this bottle of hand soap. 📷
Good golly, Miss Molly, does Micro.blog’s Markdown editor ever not handle blockquotes correctly. 🙄 Bug logged, I hope it gets fixed soon—where else am I supposed to share song lyrics?? 😬
There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
Remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving, too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
Jeff Buckley, covering Leonard Cohen’s, Hallelujah, one of those rare covers I like a lot more than the original. 🎵
I’m not really sure what to do with my old iPod mini, but I’m glad it still exists. 🤓❤️📷
Just finished Keep Going. All of Austin’s books are great for keeping the creative fires burning. 📷
The whole gendered shampoo thing is all a bit silly, but I do get a kick out of the packaging on this one. 📷
Keeps the rain off—playing with depth of field + black & white. 🌂 📷
It’s black-bean fudge brownie time. Again. 🍴 📷
Daring Fireball and the Mac (which my iPhone just autocorrected to MAC, reinforcing the upcoming point of this post, thanks phone) blog-podcast-o-sphere have been throwing lots of shade at iOS and macOS lately, and I’m glad someone with reach is expressing how I feel.
I bought my first Mac when the aluminum iMacs first came out, having used a white plastic MacBook at a co-op student job and loving it.
The Mac, software included, was just so much nicer than all the Windows computers (auto-capitalized “Windows” but then lowercased it again after I added “computers”, a baffling decision it should have made in reverse) I’d used for years.
Nowadays, if you were to ask me why I use Apple gear instead of (autocorrected “gear” to “fest”) the alternatives, I’d have a much, much harder time saying “because it’s so much nicer to use.”
And as a person who’s always loved computers, who programs computers, who is constantly using computers… that makes me sad.
It feels like the high-water mark of Apple software is somewhere in the past, alas. I hope I’m wrong.
The notebook effect: all started, none finished. ¯\(ツ)/¯ 📷
More signs of spring. My delight. 📷
There’s something… unnerving about this little box in my bedroom wall.
If you plugged something in, what might you hear? 🤔📷
RE 118. 📷
Took this the other day, and… I don’t know. Something about “comfort food promo” is subtly hilarious to me. 🤔📷
Sometimes (often) I need to remind myself that my job and my life are not chores but gifts. 📷
Not sure what these are, but I do love seeing them spring up around the roots of trees… winter is almost done. 😎📷
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Cool”. What could be cooler than this guitar pick that was inexplicably included in my jar of beard balm? 🤔😎📷
Taken on the way home through Gastown. 📷
I’m awfully fond of these black bean fudge brownies… I’ve been making them to provide myself an alternative to buying sweets at the local coffee shops.
Can’t say it’s been making a difference, but they sure are good. 📷
I enjoy having these Hue bulbs, whose colour and temperature I can customize based on my mood, task, or time of day.
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Warmth”, and here’s some light to match. 📷
Downtown Vancouver, as seen from near the Drive. 📷
This strange hexagonal fence meant to keep folks from clambering onto the pipe where it crosses high over the railroad tracks. 📷
Vancouver House. 📷
I love this reflection of the sunset off my iMac screen. 🤩📷
Today’s photoblog prompt: “sign”.
I’m trying. 📷
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Lull”. Seems appropriate to photograph my bedspread (created by my very talented mother 😊). 📷
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Contrast”. 🔲📷
Seen from above… this adorable print from brainpickings.org, visualizing the sleep habits / productivity of a variety of famous writers.
I’ve been wanting more art for my bedroom, and this is perfect for a variety of reasons. 🤓😴📷
A tiny suggestion of spring? 🤔📷
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Hide”… well. I’m a little bit in love with this leather couch. 📷
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Spot”. Can you spot the theme for today? The theme for today in Vancouver is snow. Remember what I said about grabbing the sunshine when you can? Yeah. 😂❄️📷
You take your sunny days when you get them this time of year.
Today’s photoblog prompt is “Reflection”. Well, a shadow is kind of a reflection, isn’t it? 📷
Desire for inspiration springs eternal. 😊📷
🔖 The Last Psychiatrist: Friday Diversion: Jonathan Coulton | Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
Hat tip to @manton for mentioning this month’s photoblogging challenge… I almost forgot. 😁
I don’t often photograph my food… except when I want to log my first trip to a new coffee shop. I keep a Day One journal called “Fivesquare” for this purpose. 🤓 📷
I really pay as little attention as possible to the news, and what’s going on in the outside world. Everything I’ve heard about today has only reinforced the correctness of this strategy.
Rest easy, you who find yourself on edge with anxiety. This too shall pass…
I end up at the end of the day not having put anything online yet, perhaps because I think I need to make something substantial, and that takes work I never got around to doing.
But even this is something. Because the point is to build the habit of publishing, instead of not.
The Wire, finale: I try really hard to enjoy the endings of tv series, even when they’re not very satisfying—I think it’s because I hate to have invested all that time and leave with a bad taste in my mouth.
That’s not necessary here: the last episode of The Wire does an excellent job of wrapping things up. It doesn’t pretend like justice will reign supreme over Baltimore, but it does give our favourite characters more or less what they deserve. Big fan. ❤️
I’m glad I re-watched this show. But after binging hard the last few days, I think it’s time I took a break from consuming media, and focused on producing some of my own. 📺
The Wire, season 5 episode 9: there are some nice little scenes in this episode: the stuff between Marlo, Chris, and Monk in jail is a good bit, gives you insight into Marlo’s personality, after being basically a cipher for the whole show; and Chris clearly trying to protect him from himself. The little scene between Clay Davis and Freamon, where Davis gives him a line on the crooked lawyers like Levy, also tasty. There’s a lot of setting up where things can go after we’ve left our friends in Baltimore behind. 📺
The Wire, season 5 episode 8: I always liked the way they wrote Omar out; if he’s a hero or a legend, it’s only to us and to the corner kids. In the larger story, he’s no one: his murder doesn’t make the paper, even the tag on his body bag at the ME’s office is wrong. 📺
The Wire, season 5 episode 7: there is a nice symmetry between the gathering in the newsroom and at the police, with McNulty and Templeton hiding in plain sight in the centre of the shitstorms they created.
It’s on the nose, but this show has always been that. 📺
The Wire, season 5, episode 5: yeah, that pretty much sums it up. 😂
The Wire, season 5 episode 3: McNulty’s wholesale descent into madness (or at least wholesale return to where he was in seasons 1 and 2) is, I suppose, inevitable… if a little overdone. 😛📺
The Wire, season 5: I can understand why folks are impatient with the newspaper subplot. At this point in the series it’s tough to introduce a bunch of new characters and expect us to care. I just want to know what becomes of McNulty, Marlo, Bubbles, and all. 📺
Finished The Wire season 4. Not a lot of happy endings in there. But the couple glimmers of light are good, and the ending montage is very well-done. Good setup for the final season. 📺
Two Quotations From Anaïs Nin, Visualized by Debbie Millman | Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
A la @brucegodin, grabbed some of this Ode to Wallflower, a collaboration between Powell Brewing and Odd Society: Ode to Citra Pale Ale aged in Wallflower Gin barrels. Very nice mild floral aroma, delicious beer. I tried a pint at a local place and had to grab some more. 🤓 🍻
When the plane takes off and lands, I try to put away my phone, or whatever I’m doing, and take that time to contemplate the incredible magic of what is happening. 🛫
The problem with cons is they’re fun and you meet new people, which leads to staying up past midnight two days in a row, and I am way too old for this, goddammit, send help. 😜
Strange times call for strange measures: I’m gonna try to get on a plane at six tomorrow morning, but given all the snow Vancouver’s gotten today:
a) Fingers crossed the flight doesn’t get canceled b) I have no idea how long it’ll take to get to the airport
So, here I am at 7PM, about to turn out the lights so I can wake up at 2 and begin the journey. Wish me luck, internet. 😂✈️
🗒 Doubling Down on OmniFocus | Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters
Was reminded today of this decade-old post, as relevant now as ever, and its last line:
Happy New Year. You’re running out of time.
Reminded that I posted the following on twitter, and it’s pretty good, so I should put it here instead, with a URL that I own.
In response to this tweet, which reads “Your salary is just your company’s monthly subscription of you”:
This is probably how we should all think of salaries.
Subscriptions are something a customer pays on a recurring basis in return for a service.
Treating your employer like a customer of your services is a strong mindset.
And treating your salary like merely one stream of income is, too. A stream of income can be grown, added to, replaced.
That’s a better way to think of salary than your one and only chance to make rent.
Better to think of your job as just one customer of the Business of You, even if it’s your only customer.
Better that than treating it like the Lifestone, which, when plucked from your diadem causes you to disintegrate.
That’s season 3 down. Oof, I need to not look at screens for the rest of the night. 🙃 📺
The Wire, S03E11: First time I saw this show, of course, the ending of this ep was the big deal. This time, it’s the interactions between Avon and Stringer; that last scene on the roof is amazing.
The little moment neither of them can acknowledge, like in every good gangster movie—when you realize your best friend signed your death warrant, and it’s only a matter of time.
…although that little moment of Rawls at the bar in S03E10 is a pretty close second. 🤣 📺
Further to what I said yesterday: the scene between Stringer and Avon at the end of S03E08 is the best scene in the season; I suspect nothing that I’ve forgotten in the next four episodes will change my mind. #TheWire 📺
Man, I keep forgetting to put the tv emoji at the end of my The Wire remarks. 😒 📺
The Wire Season 3 notes:
Speaking of David Allen, I’m getting back into using OmniFocus to run my life. Timely podcast episode, @brentsimmons 👍🏼
An iOS UI problem: when I create a Markdown link, I often have the URL on my clipboard. Since the Micro.blog app lets me drop in the skeleton of a link, [](), I can hold space to move my insertion pointer inside the parentheses… but there’s no way to paste without tapping the screen, which invariably moves the insertion pointer.
I wish the iPhone had copy/paste buttons on the keyboard like the iPad does. Or come up with some more- native solution, Apple, but come up with something.
For the beer fans: I had this Ode to Wallflower the other night: pale ale aged in Wallflower gin casks. It’s really good! Hoping I can still track down some cans somewhere. 🍺
Been keeping a journal on and off in the Day One app since 2012. It has this feature where it shows you entries written on the same date in previous years. It’s always interesting—sometimes enlightening, occasionally depressing—to see how much I’ve changed, or haven’t.
One of my favourite Bunk moments, from near the end of Season 2 of The Wire:
Bunk: A different look for our boy. McNulty: Yeah, Perry Ellis or some shit. Bunk: Now, how would a just-rolled-out-of-bed-looking motherfucker like you know the designer? McNulty: …Okay, I’m guessing. Bunk: It’s a Joseph Abboud. He puts dark buttons instead of brass on his blazers. That’s the Abboud signature. McNulty: You know what they call a guy who pays that much attention to his clothes, don’t you? Bunk: Mmhhmm. A grown up.
That’s season 2 of The Wire in the can. I liked it better than the first time through the series: it’s got a bit of cockamamie, but it also fits together like a Swiss watch; satisfying. 📺
I’m loving The Wire, but it’s by no means a perfect show. For example, the way presumably-sane women hurl themselves at McNulty just so we can have a throwaway simulated sex scene gets ridiculous fast.
I think it’s S02E08, where he’s piss drunk and bashes up his car, then ends up half-conscious in a diner with a bandaged hand at four in the morning, and the waitress tells him, “you can have *anything you want*”, or some similar vaguely suggestive thing, then it’s smash-cut to the two of them naked in her bed, performing a vigorous HIIT workout on each other.
And he wakes up the next morning and notices the bloodstains his hand has left on this civilian’s mattress, and he’s clearly wondering where the hell he is and what he did last night, fade to opening credits.
I get that the point of the scene is to demonstrate that, without a murder to solve, McNulty’s life flies apart at the seams, but I just don’t buy for a second that this waitress throws herself at this fucking derelict. I know she’s only in the show for a few seconds, but give her some self-respect. 📺
You know if you swap first letters on “love” and “hate” you get two other words?
Late. Hove.
Why am I just finding out about this now? #language
The habits I want seem far away. Tonight I’m maintaining my “publish something online everyday” streak by merely doing… this.
It’ll have to do.
Just finished the first season of The Wire. My second run through the series, haven’t watched it in years.
So damn good. 📺
Warren Ellis: “Here we go again…”
(via tumblr)