The Art Of Not Asking Why

Breakfast is veggie lasagna with a glass of intense juice at a local French cafe. A walk with a fluffy dog is next on the agenda.

Note to self, again: don’t write long posts. It doesn’t work well, especially after not blogging for several days. Short posts already take enough time between writing, editing, uploading photos, checking links, and spreading the word. Long posts never see the light of day. Split ‘em.

I don’t know Bob yet, but this place smells nice 🥯and it is much cheaper than flying to NYC, for sure ☺️

I’m up. Way too early for Seattle, but normal for New York. I’m ready to make coffee and ready to work, jump on my emails, fill up my schedule, drop down to pushups.

I don’t understand this time off. I’m not sure I like it just yet. What is happening?

Extra money for priority boarding. Buy lunch on the plane if you want more than crackers and juice. Pay up if you want space so your knees don’t touch the seats in front of you. Faster WiFi that allows you to work is premium.

And ads. Ads everywhere. On the walls of the jetway, on the terminal top walls, when you have to see them as you slowly zigzag in line to the security check. Before movies. After movies. On brochures.

Services are crappy in advance, so you have to pay your way out of the imposed sub-minimum. Sad.

We arrived. Krickland feels colder than New York, probably because of the humidity next to Washington Lake. It’s a chill kind of evening here, with no obligations. My stomach is full, and I’m ready to go to bed, but it’s too early for me in this time zone.

We’re headed to Seattle tomorrow to meet friends. I’m excited to have a camera with me in a place I don’t know again, and I could use some time off.

Today, I broke down and wrote in my Emacs journal instead of my written one for the first time in over a year. There was just too much to write, and there were too many places I wanted to mention and link to, something I can do easily with Emacs OSM package, as I mentioned before. There was resistance at first since I was writing something personal since Emacs is not as intimate as my notebook, but the words came flowing soon enough. I’m glad I did it this way. We’ll see if I switch back or not; I’m not sure at this point.

On the other hand, I almost finished my pocket notebook and I’m ready to start a new one. It’s been good. I like that I can open it and look through my various reminders and notes and start working on things I need whenever.

Jason Becker]] writes that that the situation in Israel is not simple for him, and it frustrates him when people pretend it is:

how angry I felt toward Americans who overnight felt like they were experts on this conflict. What little I could say is “a whole lot of people seem to think that this is all very simple and clear – simple and clear what the United States should do and what Israel should do– and anyone who has ever spent any time understanding the Middle East would not be so sure.”

As an American-Israeli with most of his family still in Israel, I feel the same way. In fact, these days, I automatically block/ignore anyone new who has some sort of “free Palestine” or its equivalent emoji on their blog or a pin on themselves. The notion that you can reduce what’s going on to a mere pin on a bag or an emoji is infuriating.

I hate car horns so much sometimes. Someone was blocked in the street, and they leaned into their horn for half a minute (after that, I put on my noise-canceling headset).

What’s the dea,l you think they’ll move from the soundwaves? Do you have to make it my problem too at 07:30 AM?

I said I’ll do it, but I finally did: macOS Sequoia. My main concern is dealing with the permissions (as described here among other places).

I ran and upgraded Homebrew and its various packages with no issues. Emacs however seemed to have “forgotten” how to access the Desktop. Looking into this.

For Halloween, I decided to get parts 1 and 2 and see if I could finish it this time. The game 🎮 is beautifully animated and creepy. It does indeed feel like a kid’s nightmare.

I wrote about writing thoughts down vs typing them before, and this morning, I did another round. There are quite a few things that repeat, but some are new.

I forget who explained it and where, but when I looked into notebooks 📓 again, that person said that writing something down in a notebook is not supposed to be as easy as saying, “Siri, remind me to,” because it acts as a delicate filter for stupid things. If you really need to remember something, you will reach for the notebook and write it down. Because it’s important enough to write it down, most chances are you’re going to remember it anyway without looking into your notebook 🖊️. It might sound counterproductive, but I enjoy the ability to recall things I’m supposed to do when I take a break from an active task I’m doing.

The notebook also “cuts the crap” with all the apps available: what should you use? Reminders? Notes? Beorg for Emacs? Calendar? No such thing with the notebook. You write it down, and that’s that.

Another somewhat odd benefit of the notebook is privacy. Sure, you can encrypt your notes, and as long as you use a custom ROM on an Android and something like syncthing you don’t depended on “the cloud,” but that’s a pretty hefty setup for something as simple as a quick grocery list, no? And as soon as you start thinking, well, maybe the grocery list can go somewhere else, you’re starting to break the Notebook idea down because then it’s not all in one place.

A notebook doesn’t depend on the whims of a developer and the features they choose to include or exclude. I drew a table in the picture above; call me crazy, but I could swear Apple Notes didn’t always support it. Some apps support it, some don’t. I can always find something to use for tables later, if the table is important for the note I’m going to save, but I don’t want to be bothered about what an app supports and what it doesn’t when I need to write something quick. A notebook also doesn’t go away, get bought, or change how it works like Evernote did on me back in the day. Even Emacs, as stable and as available as it is, is out of my control. There’s a comfort in a notebook that it won’t go anywhere.

Here’s a page featuring videos showing the differences between rainfalls, from 1.5 down to inches to 0.05 inches. Useful!

Preparing a Time Machine backup before upgrading to macOS Sequoia. I’m not usually one to rush macOS updates, and I feel I’ll regret it. It’s mostly about “it’s going to happen in a couple of months anyway, might as well get used to it now” thinking.

Well, as long as I have a backup, right?

I enjoyed this video: a couple of fun facts about flying:

• Why don’t we need to lock the doors on a plane?
• Why do we fly so high to begin with?
• Can you really crash a plane with phone interferences?
• Why does everyone (me included) love to drink tomato juice on planes?

I’ve had a nice lazy weekend. These days I can aim for rest, but getting it is a different thing. Between my brain having ideas and anxieties that wake me up in crazy hours in the morning and various urgent matters at work, something as simple as a 10-15 minute nap can become very challenging.

There’s been so much work I couldn’t even organize my notes in the little notebook I carry with me everywhere. I wanted to attend the Micro.blog Analog Tools meetup, which I was invited to, but I managed to forget and napped instead. I had a conversation with my mom on Facetime during the weekend, and only then, through telling her what was going on, I realized how much I’ve been doing this past week alone, as I had to stop one story and go to another that explains it, and then another one that explains that story as well. I was trying to sum it up, and as I did that, I thought: “Wow, this is crazy. Did I actually do all of that?”

There are two personal challenges I’m trying to conquer. The first one is dealing with the new leading role I’m in. I’m back with many people I worked with, but this time, I need to ask them to do things, organize priorities, and talk to their managers to get it all working. While I’ve been in a leading position before, I always lead from within the team as a member. I wasn’t leading by a title. I was just the guy who had the project sheet open and had an eye on the bigger scope. This is now different, and I’m often conscious about other people’s time and the notion that perhaps they can’t be as honest with me as they have been.

The other more difficult issue is that I feel like a fake. Who am I to ask about our security groups in Active Directory next to a sysadmin who’s done their job for over a decade? How can I ask someone to prep workstations if I forgot how to do it myself? Why was I chosen for this role at all? I’m familiar with imposter syndrome, and I think I wrote about it here before, but I don’t like to fit feelings and thoughts into neat little boxes. It helps to know that someone else made the choice because they thought I was a good idea for this role. It’s also good to have some anxiety going on to keep me on my toes and have me learning new things and re-learning old ones.

One thing I can say for sure is that rest or even slowing down was not something I allowed myself to do throughout the week and parts of the weekend. Having a weekend like I just did was well-earned. And another thing: I think I’m done talking about how I feel in this role for now. Venting about something is OK, but it’s enough now; reminiscing and repeating the same points is not something I want to keep doing.