The Art Of Not Asking Why

Correcting photo orientation for org-mode in Linux

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:29:09 -0400

Here’s a niche problem: When viewing iPhone-captured photos in org-mode on Linux, they always appear in landscape orientation, even if you took them in portrait.

The reason is that the sensor of the camera on the phone is physically embedded in landscape mode, so all photos are in landscape mode; when you hold the phone in portrait mode (which is how you hold it most of the time), the phone detects that and implements a fix in the EXIF data file. Essentially, a software fix to a hardware design issue.

Since most photos I take are usually in portrait orientation, it means I need to twist my neck and view images at a 90-degree angle when I look at my Journelly entries.

The source of the problem seems to stem from how org-mode interprets EXIF data in the photo: it doesn’t. It relies on other parts of Emacs, which in turn rely on parts of the OS, to do the job. On Linux (at least on Kubuntu, which is what I use these days), those parts don’t handle EXIF orientation information. Why and how, I am not sure, it’s more digging than I have the time for right now… but anyway - there’s a simple fix.

Auto-orient, which is part of ImageMagick’s mogrify tool. And if you use Emacs on Linux, good chance it’s already installed:

This operator reads and resets the EXIF image profile setting ‘Orientation’ and then performs the appropriate 90 degree rotation on the image to orient the image, for correct viewing.

To execute on an image file: mogrify -auto-orient <file>.

And because I use Emacs, of course there’s a dwim-shell-command solution:

    (defun jtr/dwim-image-auto-orient ()
      "Auto-orient images based on EXIF data using mogrify."
      (interactive)
      (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
       "Auto-orient images"
       "mogrify -auto-orient '<<f>>'"
       :utils "mogrify"
       :silent-success t))

That last part,:silent-success, closes the empty buffer that pops up after successful execution, as mogrify doesn’t really produce an output window. So, it will just bring us back to Dired.

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:00:47 -0400

Traveling to a remote site for work today, got a chance to enjoy the beautiful weather and take a breather.

A good weekend

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:46:10 -0400

Last weekend was good. I came to a realization not too long ago that most of my weekends are good, which is a good thing in itself, but I wanted to ramble a little about why.

My sleeping issues (I should coin the term somehow. “My Sleeping Issues” sounds like a terrible album name stuck on repeat at this point) meant that I woke up at 4, walked around for a bit, and went back to bed around 6. This pattern has been going on since last Thursday, when I pushed myself to be in bed at around 23:00. Seems like I sleep 5-6 hours no matter what I do, so if I go to sleep earlier, I wake up earlier without enough sleep. The good part? Going to bed around 6 again means I’m not a complete zombie the whole first half of the day, which definitely played a role here.

First off, there was a lot of Subnautica. With Part 2 out in early access, I saw Subnautica: Below Zero was on sale on Humble Bundle and snatched it. I never finished the first Subnautica (it was too scary, ~~and yes, I need to get this post over to the new blog~~ moved!), and I wanted to try again. Man, Subnautica is a treat. It was easy to get hooked again. This time around, I watched plenty of YouTube videos to help me out with tips, and building my underwater base was fun in a relaxing kind of way. There’s something about being able to organize a stressful situation that doesn’t let you breathe (literally in this game) into something safe that makes sense to you. And, yes, that’s also a metaphor.

I mentioned before I want to make some video content for gaming, but it’s not easy. Or rather, it’s a lot. I am no stranger to OBS Studio, but I had to re-learn to do a couple of things, and even then, going back and watching an hour or more of content and starting editing takes a lot of time. It’s a serious commitment. I haven’t given up on the idea, but I might change it around a bit toward a mix of writing and video content. I’m not sure yet. There are too many good games out there, and I don’t think there are enough places reviewing them from a personal perspective (by the way, let me introduce you to Laura Michet’s blog. She is a game writer/narrative designer, and she writes often).

Then I had a nice hangout with my partner, who works as an EMT. They are awesome in general (obviously I think so), and they recently got themselves a car, and driving in Manhattan is… well, let’s just say parking is one tough SOB boss. Imagine working a 9-hour shift in an ambulance, driving around (on a weekend, because during the week they’re busy with their other job), just to drive another two hours, the last hour and a half(!) of it is in order to find parking. They pretty much showed up just to crash and fall asleep, but then the next day, we went to the Farmer’s market together and drove around and walked the parks of upper Manhattan. It’s a sort of buffer, a break that makes my brain slow down a bit and appreciate my life outside of work and tech.

Which means that when I got back to my /own/ tech on Sunday, I was refreshed and full of energy. This weekend I installed Harper on my Linux desktop. Working through it but especially writing the post about it requires geek brain energy, which I just don’t have during the week. I really enjoy these projects; I learn more about stuff I’m passionate about, and it’s very rewarding.

I also wrote a lot in my journal, which I’m reorganizing, and it made me realize that, hey, I write a lot. Between my posts, emails to other bloggers, journaling, and experimenting with TiddlyWiki, there’s a lot of keyboard typing going on. This, as usual, makes me appreciate Emacs and org-mode, which has its own dedicated category. But that’s what happens when you can customize everything about a tool you use all the time: it’s a game in itself.

And now, with coffee done and this draft more or less complete, it’s time to get in the shower and quickly get some groceries before the work day gets the chance to kick my ass back into gear.

Installing Harper on Kubuntu: The Right Way. Maybe.

Sun, 31 May 2026 18:41:31 -0400

I recently installed Harper on my Linux Desktop to work with Emacs, but since I’m running Kubuntu, I ran into difficulties. In short, there’s no Flatpak or Apt option when it comes to Harper.

After a few interesting changes to the way I journal in Emacs (this is something I hope to discuss soon), I decided to go for the full version, and that meant installing Rust and Cargo.

This was another “programming quest” I didn’t know how to start in the past. I used Claude.ai to guide me, but as usual, I asked a million questions about everything, so I can explain it again here (this is my test to myself). So if you’re new to all of this like I am, take the explanations with a grain of salt, and if you’re an experienced developer who understands Rust (and curl, for that matter) feel free to reach out and educate me further.

Alright, here we go:

To install Rust and Cargo with it:

    curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

The above is a bit more complex than what’s in Cargo’s documentation, but based on a quick search, it is what’s directly recommended in rustup, which is where you install Rust. The idea is the same as other curl installations, with a few more options for added security and to ensure we’re getting what we really want:

Run curl, but restrict it only to https (no http):

curl --proto '=https'

Somewhat redundant: curl will usually refuse anything lower than 1.2 by default. This forces TLS 1.2 as the minimum. This is good practice and also what they tell us to use, so why not:

--tlsv1.2

options for silent mode s (so don’t show us progress and status), but show us if we get errors S, and if we get a 404 error or similar, just stop silently f (otherwise it will pipe it into the sh command at the end):

-sSf

Then we have the URL to download from:

https://sh.rustup.rs

and finally we pipe it | into a shell sh command so it runs as a script as intended here. If you go to the above URL directly, it will download a shell script - so this is how we get it and run it in one go:

| sh

Because we’re about to run commands for Rust, it’s a good idea to add it to our source environment, the same as editing ~/.bashrc manually and adding . "$HOME/.cargo/env". Without it, we’ll have to specify where Cargo is installed for the next commands

    source ~/.bashrc

At first, I installed what was available on crates.io. Crates, as I learned, is the official repository for Cargo, our “app store” for Rust, (or Elpa for Emacs). The individual packages are called “crates”. Makes sense now, but before it all looked like a bunch of command-line voodoo to me.

However, apperently what’s available on Crates is not up to snuff. The official repository for Harper is at https://github.com/Automattic/harper, and it specifies version 2.3.1, whereas the one available in Crates is 2.0.0. We are still using cargo (it’s the “installer” for Rust), but specify to get what we need directly from there:

    cargo install --git https://github.com/Automattic/harper harper-ls --locked

The git option tells Cargo we’re installing directly with git, which is what we’re doing here; the locked option is specified in Harper’s documentation, and upon some research, I learned this forces the exact dependency versions specified in Cargo.lock. Without it, cargo might choose newer dependency versions that were not tested or are not specified in the documentation.

Finally, in Emacs, we want to tell eglot where to find Harper:

    (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
      (add-to-list 'exec-path (expand-file-name "~/.cargo/bin")))

In my case, since I use the same config on my Mac, I want this to run only on Linux. On my Mac, Harper is installed without all these shenanigans directly from Homebrew, which also keeps it up to date. This is added to the same config block I specified in my earlier post. It now looks like this:

            (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
              (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                           '(org-mode . ("harper-ls" "--stdio"))))
    
             (setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
                        '(:harper-ls (:dialect "American" :linters (:LongSentences :json-false :AvoidCurses :json-false))))

      ;; Besides choosing American as the language, I also want to ignore long sentences (the main issue is that it hides other errors nested in those), and I also want Harper not to tell me when it thinks something is offensive. I'm a big boy/an old fart. The full list of these options is in https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules. It needs to be nested inside the :linters option.
    
    (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
      (add-to-list 'exec-path (expand-file-name "~/.cargo/bin")))

In the future, when I need to update:

    cargo install --git https://github.com/Automattic/harper harper-ls --locked

Now, Harper works as it should on my Linux Desktop. Another geeky weekend project.

Sun, 31 May 2026 11:30:05 -0400

With recent CSS changes to the blog seemingly holding for now, I’m going for another big one: switching from Hugo 0.91 to 0.158 (the latest available on Micro.blog). Works ok on my test blog… what can go wrong? I’m just waiting for the backups to complete 😬

Fri, 29 May 2026 19:44:18 -0400

Started fixing up my CSS.

Earlier, I said I need to move over all my custom-made CSS changes to custom.css from the Tiny Theme’s original CSS file. That’s what I just did. Now let’s see what broke in the proccess.

Using Denote for Email: A manual workflow

Tue, 26 May 2026 09:44:27 -0400

As I started to write more emails to other bloggers, the annoyance with macOS’ built-in email client grew. It wasn’t just the fact that it has small text that’s hard on the eyes especially on the harsh white background anymore; it just started to feel restricting.

Emacs is my natural writing environment for longer texts, like blog posts or the kind of emails I end up writing.

I’ve considered mu4e before, but setting it up seems a daunting overkill: the place I would benefit from mu4e is work, but I’m blocked by Microsoft-only 2FA authentication, so I have to stick with Outlook; meanwhile, for the three or so emails I write to other bloggers, it doesn’t require such heavy lifting.

One day about two weeks ago, I just fired up Denote, and suddenly it clicked. Denote, when you invoke it for a new note, asks for a directory - so I created an email directory in my parent Notes folder, and started writing. For a title, I use the subject, and the keyword is reserved for the recipient.

Now my eyes thank me again, as some of these emails can take an hour (and more even) to write. Links are a breeze to include, and quotes - which I use heavily in emails - are just a keyboard press away. It also looks nice when I go to the email directory and see all my drafts there, organized nicely as Denote knows how to do.

Since Denote doesn’t handle emails, for this I simply export the org file to HTML, and then with Dired (which opens in the same directory as the note I’m writing by default), I open the HTML file with my browser. From there, I copy-paste into Apple Mail, which acts as a proofread enhancer with Grammarly going to work there (this is something I’d miss if I were to use mu4e, though I could probably use Harper).

It’s a bit of a manual process, and I do need to delete the HTML files from the email directory every now and then, but for now it’s fine. It’s probably easy enough to create some shortcut that will open these HTML files directly with Mail instead of copy-pasting¹ though.

Footnotes

¹ Opening an HTML file with Dired with ! open -a Mail would make sense, but it opens Mail with the HTML file as an attachment, not as the body of the text.

Journelly and OSM for Emacs are good together

Mon, 25 May 2026 13:55:54 -0400

I mentioned OSM for emacs briefly before, but I haven’t played with it much. That’s because the maps never showed up correctly in the buffer: the map tiles were not aligned correctly and some appeared blank.

As it turns out, someone else had this problem and also found the culprit: visual-line-mode. I have it turned on by default as the majority of my work in Emacs involves org-mode and I need my lines wrapped in the buffer. With visual-line-mode disabled, OSM works as expected, including zooming in and out. Good stuff.

Now that I fixed OSM, I was wondering about something else I wanted to do for a while: having Journelly’s latitude and longitude fed automatically to OSM in Emacs, so I can view the location on a map.

Journelly captures locations and weather information for each note and stores those under properties, like so:

PROPERTIES:
:LATITUDE: ##.##########
:LONGITUDE: ##.##########
:WEATHER_TEMPERATURE: 62.1°F
:WEATHER_CONDITION: Cloudy
:WEATHER_SYMBOL: cloud
:END:

The OSM function that calls for those is osm-goto.

So what we need is a simple function to feed the properties values directly:

(defun jtr-goto-from-properties ()
(interactive)
(let ((lat (org-entry-get (point) "LATITUDE"))
(lon (org-entry-get (point) "LONGITUDE")))
(if (and lat lon)
(osm-goto (string-to-number lat) (string-to-number lon) osm-default-zoom)
(message "No LATITUDE/LONGITUDE properties found on this entry"))))

This is an interactive function that I use when I’m standing on the header in Journelly I want to see on a map. It’s quick and works well. Now I can use my Journelly entries, which are already in org-mode, as a base for a post with a map tile inside Emacs. OSM doesn’t have a native function to export an image, but since I usually want to annotate the image anyway before I make a post out of it, a regular screen-capture app is a good solution, at least for now.

Sun, 24 May 2026 13:47:22 -0400

In other geek news, I found out about What the Cable a week ago through Mastodon:

GitHub - darrylmorley/whatcable: macOS menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do github.com
GitHub · Change is constant. GitHub keeps you ahead. https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

It’s a nice little app for macOS that gives you a bunch of information regarding what your USB cables are connected to, what kind of cable, and if they’re optimized. nicely made.

Sun, 24 May 2026 11:09:50 -0400

I wrote about Harper before, but I wanted to expand now that I have it working on Kubuntu with a couple of more options.

Harper is good in two scenarios for me: first, when I want something quick and I don’t feel like starting a browser with Grammarly in it, and second, when I write a personal email and the idea of my words going to some AI grammar bot somewhere makes my skin crawl. Otherwise, for my blog (which is public anyway) and work email (I don’t care about those) Grammarly is definitely better.

The issue with Linux is that the makers of Harper geared it toward macOS (Homebrew) and Arch Linux, among other things. It was made for programmers by programmers, and these guys don’t bother with Ubuntu-like distros. Fair, but up until recently it meant I had to jump through hoops.

The quick and easy route in Ubuntu distros (which is what Kubuntu is) is to use snap. I know, I know. I didn’t want to either, but since the Harper makers don’t bother with flatpak, the other option was to install a Rust environment, which is a big overkill just for an app inside Emacs I use like once a month or so or less. I don’t like snap and I don’t use it, but I made an exception here. (Edit: I actually decided to go ahead with Rust and Cargo, and explained what I did)

Now, that snap “shortcut” is by a guy who works with Ubuntu (I think) and maintains his own package for it, so it’s on the edge channel (not stable) and seems to be a lot behind (version .49 to be exact, and Harper is currently 2.2.1!) so if Harper is your choice of grammar check, and you use it daily, I’d suggest against what I’m doing below. I’d install as needed in that case, Rust and all.

With that disclaimer, let’s move on: sudo snap install harper --edge.

Now in Emacs, in Linux, we want to tell it where harper is:

    (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
               (add-to-list 'exec-path "/snap/harper/current/bin"))

When tells it to add the snap path only when running Linux, since I have the same config for both macOS and Linux.

That’s all… After that, I’ve added some of Harper’s flags, or linters. Here’s the whole code as I have it in my emacs org settings:

          (with-eval-after-load 'eglot
            (add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs
                         '(org-mode . ("harper-ls" "--stdio"))))
    
           (setq-default eglot-workspace-configuration
                      '(:harper-ls (:dialect "American" :linters (:LongSentences :json-false :AvoidCurses :json-false))))
    
    ;; Besides choosing American as the language, I also want to ignore long sentences (the main issue is that it hides other errors nested in those) and I also want harper not to tell me when it thinks something is offensive. The full list of these options is in https://writewithharper.com/docs/rules. It needs to be nested inside the :linters option.
    
           (when (eq system-type 'gnu/linux)
             (add-to-list 'exec-path "/snap/harper/current/bin"))
    
    ;; on a mac, Harper is installed via Homebrew - on Kubuntu, the best option is snap - the harper team does not do a package (flatpak) unfortunately, and I don't want to install Rust just for harper. So.. meh.  I did sudo 'snap install harper --edge' for this.

Lazy Chopped Salad

Fri, 22 May 2026 09:23:12 -0400

One of the awesome things that came out of me becoming mostly vegan since August of last year is the farmer’s market.

The walk there, every weekend, takes me about 40 minutes. It’s through the quiet streets and city parks of Upper Manhattan that stand in contrast to its otherwise loud and grungy surroundings. It’s not a particularly big market, just one short street behind a school, but the smaller selection of food (especially since I don’t buy dairy or meat products) motivates me to explore different ways to make food.

One of my more recent discoveries was the extra-firm tofu, which they sell already cut into snack-size, water-free pieces. I sometimes just grab one right from the fridge and eat it “raw”.

Lazy Salad

I call it “lazy” because of how I mix it, and also because I was too lazy to make more food. The tofu makes this filling enough, at least for me.

What’s in it

Two tofu “cubes” as mentioned (the off-white yellowish pieces with a bit of texture)
1 mini (Persian) cucumber
3 small radishes
1 small strip of Violife vegan feta cheese (other brands are also good), cut into cubes
a handful of cherry tomatoes (yellow in this salad)
a handful of mixed greens (spinach, arugula, possibly one more thing I forget right now)
half a small lemon, for juice

The cucumber, tomatoes (both not in season yet), and the lemon are from the grocery store. The rest is from the farmer’s market. My local store tries different varieties of cherry tomatoes, but I find the ones I like the most seem to come from Canada. As for the mini cucumber, I grab whatever they have because they often don’t have any. It’s a shame because these cucumbers are tastier, and their size makes them perfect for a quick addition to any meal, or even as a snack on their own, cut into strips with a small dash of spicy salt.

The difference a good knife can make

You can cut all these veggies with whatever knife you have, but it’s the chef’s knife I got not too long ago that makes me want to chop. Vegetables! I mean vegetables, yeesh.

With this knife, it’s easy to cut softer things (like leaves or tomatoes) without a problem. I did watch a couple of YouTube videos explaining a few cutting techniques and how to hold the knife when I bought it. While I’m /far/ from being an expert, I recommend you also watch a couple if you get one. You don’t want any fingers in the salad; this is a vegan recipe after all.

You can see from the picture that I didn’t chop anything too fine. Big enough to stab individual pieces with a fork, small enough that it fits in the bowl you’re going to eat from. Fast and easy.

Middle Eastern salad seasoning

I think most if not all Middle Eastern salads use three main ingredients when it comes to making the salad “dressing,” or as I call it, juice, because that’s what it is. It’s just lemon, salt, and black pepper.

I recommend you find a place that sells black peppercorns that you can grind yourself. You can taste the difference immediately. I get my black pepper at the same place I get my coffee beans (along with the salt, pink Himalayan, which I grind also, but that’s not as important). As for the lemon, get a real one and squeeze it with your hand over a strainer, or get a lemon squeezer. I love my personal portion with half a lemon, but this might be too much for you, so just squeeze it into a spoon and use that if you want less.

Mixing

Add the salt, the pepper, and the lemon on top of the salad. If your bowl is full of salad to the point that pushing a spoon in to mix it means you’ll end up spilling stuff over (as the case was for me), just cover it with another bowl, upside down. Then, above a sink (because some juice will spill out), carefully turn the whole thing over, and back - do this 3 to 5 times, and… it’s ready.

You could make the salad in a bigger bowl and mix it. Actually, you can also use your hands (you washed them, right? And you use them anyway to chop the veggies, so you’ve already touched everything). It is sometimes easier to “massage” the salad gently.

Stuff to change around

You could easily substitute vegetables in the salad depending on what’s available. A red onion (I’d do half) instead of the radishes, or perhaps some Seitan-based meat instead of the feta cheese or the tofu. You could also add almonds or pine nuts to the mix if you feel fancy (want super fancy? throw the pine nuts into a frying pan and heat over low for a few minutes to toast them lightly). You can change the portion or how fine you cut also.

Thu, 21 May 2026 07:27:31 -0400

It’s becoming one of those days where I discover even more new people with blogs. Some people out there are fun, some serious, others are grumpy… At this rate I won’t stop writing emails all morning. And you know what, I think I’d like that.

It's official: I prefer Inkwell over Elfeed

Wed, 20 May 2026 08:17:42 -0400

Last night I realized two things:

I haven’t touched Elfeed in about a month
I’ve been reading and interacting more with people’s posts than ever As I was looking at my Inkwell’s RSS feeds and cleaning up, I couldn’t help but notice how nice it looks:

And, yes, I prefer it over my list of feeds in elfeed, which are stored in an .org file - essentially lines of text with comments and tags.

I’m pretty sure this is the opposite case for most folks who use Emacs. First, Emacs users want to use Emacs more, not less, and second, Inkwell is not available without Micro.blog¹.

But I think this is the point I’m getting at: Inkwell belongs in Micro.blog; actually, it is Micro.blog.

When I started using Micro.blog three years ago, I considered it mostly an alternative to running my own static site with Hugo, between fixing issues with Hugo, my CSS, Netlify and ~~understanding~~ attempting to understand git and Magit. Yes, Micro.blog is an alternative to all of that, but it isn’t just a blogging platform; It’s a definition of a contemporary blogger.

If you look at Micro.blog’s set of tools, you’ll see what I mean: it contains tools to keep track and post about books, movies and TV shows, private (encrypted) notes, photos and self-made video clips², save articles and qoutes from around the internet (pocket style), automatic integration with other social media where possible - all of this around your hosted blog, complete with plugins and a theme (and let’s not forget the AI integration, if you want it and turn it on) you can tweak and take with you - your posts, media, css, everything - wherever you go.

And Inkwell adds an important direction to this mix.

My blogging hour in the morning now continues where I left off the night before, with saved highlights and complete articles from other people I keep track of. The integration between Inkwell and Micro.blog, where my reading turns into writing, still requires some work as the UI and some of the bugs get sorted out, but it’s there. And it’s already better and more intuitive for me than Elfeed, which takes place in its own isolated space.

Elfeed is very good at what it does (and hopefully, what it will keep on doing, with its creator leaving Emacs), and it has been good to me. It still is. But Inkwell, Micro.blog, and my recent adventures with finding out more bloggers and learning more about the Indieweb feel like an evolution. It’s the next step of whatever I’m doing here.

Footnotes

¹: I recall Manton borrowed the idea from a different RSS reader, but I can’t find the reference right now

²: Finding an alternative to YouTube these days is not easy, and if you’re not trying to “build a brand” and repeat the chant of “click and subscribe,” the only semi-reliable alternative that comes to mind is PeerTube and (maybe Dailymotion?) - but Manton found a way that seem sustainable, at least for now.

Tue, 19 May 2026 20:57:30 -0400

Any recommendations for a good dark cyberpunk book? Not Necromancer or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, these are the classics. Something more recent?

Tue, 19 May 2026 08:24:52 -0400

Sebastian explains why guestbooks are nice:

But sitting down and working your butt off for several minutes to create a tiny, silly drawing on a screen that’s way too small in an interface that’s way too cramped, that’s the kind of appreciation and recognition that, in my opinion, is needed much more often on the internet these days. Probably more urgent today than ever before.

Need I say more?

Mon, 18 May 2026 20:23:18 -0400

Over the past few days, I’ve been taking walks again. This was something I used to do regularly, but now that I sit here on a park bench, I realize it’s probably only been a weekly habit at best.

Both weather and work kept me away from my walks. With the weather getting better and work pressing, which means I need to reset my brain often, I find myself craving walks more often.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how we take certain things for granted. This park, this bench, this pleasant breeze right now; the fact that I can walk at all. It’s all truly wonderful, isn’t it?

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:52:34 -0400

A phone battery experiment:

Manu is considering charging his phone ~~once~~ twice a week. He lives in a “quiet place” that, I suspect, makes that possible. Meanwhile, I usually charge my phone once a day, even though the battery is still OK. Makes me wonder.

Of Overworking and Deligating

Sun, 17 May 2026 09:07:11 -0400

One of the departments under my care at work was left without the leading finance people. This put the department in a bad spot, since financial obligations were not getting done. So the main manager (a VIP) stepped in to help with finance.

By doing so, this manager who already works crazy hours dealing with their department, has now effectively added another job and a half to their plate. The workload became impossible. The solution was to hire more people, and fast.

Usually when everything works, the manager takes care of the person they’re hiring. This means creating several tickets for IT-related tasks: an account needs to be created, computers (often both a laptop and a desktop) need to be purchased and set up, permissions for shared drives need to be granted, etc. There are also non-IT tickets, such as preparing the physical office space and granting access to door locks with the ID card, as well as HR-related items, etc.

However, since the direct managers are gone, the role of following up with tickets falls upon the already impossibly busy VIP, who obviously doesn’t have the time to handle the additional workload, so they end up delegating these tasks to HR (since they start the hiring process) and possibly freshly-hired people. These people do not have experience with the workflow and don’t know what tickets to create or how. They are often left guessing, which can make things worse. This is where I come in. I need to look at the process as a whole, identify where the problems are, and address them, at least when they relate to IT.

But my co-workers and I (the other managers in my role) are swamped. We each have several departments like the above to take care of, each with several VIPs who require assistance across different areas. Each one of us already helps with several IT projects in each department, anything from helping with creating a new site in a new building with everything IT that comes with it (construction, costs, equipment, and a lot of meetings) to helping out with refreshing computer inventories, to assisting with listserv issues. The team is too small, with several members in the process of transitioning to different roles, which means they essentially work more than one role at once.

Since the department mentioned above was onboarding several individuals on very short notice (a few days), I’ve spent too much time doing some of these tasks myself to help expedite the process. Time that I had to take away from other projects and departments (as well as my personal time, as working into the evening became a regular habit). So I asked for help, and I was offered the help, for which I am grateful.

But help, which comes with good intentions and good people, does not come with the needed skills and experience. I now needed to explain, teach, document, and follow up with people who help me to ensure things get done. This requires exactly the kind of time and attention I don’t have enough time for to begin with. At this point, things are actually worse: since I’ve asked for help, I’m expected to hand over tasks (tickets) I need help with, the same tickets that are either not getting created to begin with, or contain issues that need to be corrected. I’m also expected to meet deadlines better now that I have the help. I was better off before asking for help.

This is why I don’t want to ask for help anymore. It makes things worse.

The problem is always the process. You need a very specific, detailed process to prevent issues later, but this complex process means only a few people can go through it. So people work around the process, which in turn puts more pressure because the right people are not informed in time, and urgent emails and chat constantly interrupt work.

Sometimes this works. Sometimes things are temporary: the pressure lasts only a few weeks, and then everyone goes out to get cold beers. But everyone wants a vacation when the dust settles, and the mess never gets cleaned up. You know what’s more resilient than a process that fails once? A process that fails three times. Five times. Eventually, you lose sight of the problem. You just do things because “that’s how it is,” so you don’t want to mess with it because you have other new more pressing issues. After all, if it ain’t broken…

But it is. We just forgot. And who wants to kick this rusty can of worms? We don’t have the time right now. We have other emergencies. And it’s not just your own brain that is resisting; it’s everyone else who is in the dumpster fire with you. Everyone wants to get everything done, so eventually nothing does.

The solution is counterproductive.

You have to slow down instead of going faster. You need to identify who to delegate tasks to, explain procedures, and refuse to take on any more work. No one wants to be the slow one, the weaker link, the one who says “I can’t.” Maybe try “I can’t, but I know who can, and I’m figuring this out with them.”

The person who comes to you won’t care. They’d put the responsibility on you, no matter how you delegate it. That’s fine, because once they hand that responsibility over, it’s yours to handle as you see fit, which includes delegating. Don’t ask them for permission: they practically gave it to you with the responsibility. If a process involves other people, it can’t just be you by definition - which is why you shouldn’t own the entire process, or attempt to. This goes for blame as well. They say there’s no I in a team; it applies to blame as well.

This is a process in itself, so do it in parts. Dedicate a small part of the day to delegating, with all that it entails. Then a bit more. Then a bit more. It will become easier with time. You will do it faster, with less internal conflict and less friction from others, because they’ll also get used to it. You might not be that magical person who knows everything anymore, but guess what - it also means you’re not that magical person who needs to do everything either.

Goodluck.

Sat, 16 May 2026 08:13:38 -0400

Been watching Common Side Effects 📺. Somehow I’m already mostly done with Season 1. Part sci-fi, part suspense, part drama, dark and appealing.

Thu, 14 May 2026 19:01:21 -0400

Some color goes a long way 📷

Thu, 14 May 2026 18:28:00 -0400

It’s Pie day for me.

Well, the pie day was on March (3/14). But every month on the 14th, I decided to have a pizza. Otherwise, I don’t eat cheese. I stopped completely, besides unavoidable butter in some pastries and such. 📷 🍕

Technical debt, aka I keep forgetting about custom.css

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:39:35 -0400

A month ago, I decided to make a tiny innocent change to my blog: change the dates to ISO 8601 format, AKA just ISO dates, which has been my favorite way to write dates ever since I started journaling on a computer.

That little change proved to be more involved than I thought, and broke a few things. I have since then fixed them, but others are still hidden. At this point, I’m starting to lose track as to what I broke with that change and what has been, to one degree or another, broken for a while.

Wait, how can something on a website be broken to one degree or another? Is it broken or not? Well, you see… CSS.

If you go to my actual website (RSS wouldn’t pick this up), you’d see that the dates for each blog post use the same red color as the heading and other elements in the theme. That red has been with me for a long time, since the days of the old blog and before. If you inspect it in your browser, you will see that this color (#8b0000) is defined in custom.css, but the font size is defined in main.css. The element, a.post-date, is defined in both of those CSS files.

That’s because when I changed to ISO dates, I forgot about my custom.css. The size was off, I right-clicked, figured out where to make the change, and made it. But custom.css is there for a reason. It’s a file meant to replace the default theme with, you guessed it, whatever custom changes I want to apply.

My memory is a funny place though, and it seems like I forget this file exists at times. The result is a bunch of messy definitions like the one you see above. Ideally, all changes should be in custom.css.

And it’s not just good code hygiene. It’s a CSS file filled with comments and short memos to my future self, telling me what changes I’ve made and why, with helpful references.

custom.css is so important in micro.blog that it has its own dedicated button, conveniently enough right above the edit themes option, which I end up using to mess with the main.css, which I shouldn’t. Is it obvious? Yes. Do I miss it anyway? Of course.

There are a lot of tweaks to my theme I should move over to custom.css at this point.¹

Since I was already looking into it, I realized that the overall colors I’ve overwritten (like the red color I mentioned above) can probably be worked into the helpful root{} section² I have in there. It was the very first thing I did when I started messing with the theme, and it’s meant just for the sort of changes I usually do around my blog.

So I’m considering refactoring my CSS, which I think is a hobby or self-torture (or both; some of us are weird, OK?) for many bloggers and website owners out there.

What can possibly go wrong?

Footnotes

¹ : According to AI, what I’m describing here is called a Technical debt: “While an expedited solution can accelerate development in the short term, the resulting low quality may increase future costs if left unresolved.” My frustrations have a Wikipedia entry! Thanks, AI.

² : Turns out these are called custom properties (I know, crazy right?)

Re: Who Knows That You Blog?

Wed, 13 May 2026 22:52:56 -0400

David at Forking Mad + asked: “Do you tell people you blog?” which also made its way to Kai. I saved both posts in my Bookmarks (which is Micro.blog’s take on ‘Read it Later’/Pocket) and planned to answer at some point, but then David emailed me the other day and reminded me of this question.

David’s take is that if it shouldn’t be public, it wouldn’t end up on his blog. Kai is more or less of a similar opinion. For me though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced.

I don’t use my real name on my blog like Kai or Kev. JTR is totally made up. It wasn’t always JTR: it evolved over the last 15 years or so, give or take, and it stuck.

Back when I started writing, my posts used to be more R-rated, and the places I worked at weren’t the kind of organizations that wanted to associate with R-rated material. It wasn’t anything offensive (I don’t think), just… uncouth.

With time, both my workplace(s) and my posts changed to meet in the middle of that spectrum. I work for a big medical center in NYC, and most of my more mature-oriented posts are philosophical, not the dramatic angsty kind. Some of them can still raise eyebrows probably, but I imagine most people would just shrug and move on if they’re uncomfortable. There’s a lot of stuff on this blog, and these kinds of posts are just another dash of flavor to the overall theme, so I feel it’s not such a big deal.

At the same time, I don’t usually tell people I blog. My partners know, my sister knows (I send her a few links here and there for my thoughts), and while my parents know about my blog, both language barrier and lack of interest (I ramble about tech most of the time) mean that they don’t really read it. And if they do and find something, well, my lifestyle is already unorthodox enough for them to just sigh and shake their head and move on with their lives.

So yes, nuanced is a good way to put it. My relationships with different people and the topics I write about mean that some people know I blog, but most don’t. I don’t keep this blog a secret. If someone really wanted to find out my real name, they could find it easily enough. At the same time, it does require some work; it’s not exactly the kind of information you’d get straight out of Google (at least I don’t think so), but then again, if it happens, not the end of the world.

That’s the other thing I started realizing not too long ago: I stand behind who I am today in a way I haven’t in the past (and couldn’t). My about page says I’m non-monogamous for example, and I mention in a few places I see myself as a queer person simply because I don’t identify as a “straight” man (but I don’t see myself as gay, bi, or all the other fancy labels which I don’t care much for).

While this might sound like too much information for a simple question like “who knows that you blog,” I don’t think so - at least not in my case. That’s because I write about these things, which means I should at least be open to a conversation about them. Maybe not with every person (it is personal after all), but in general, it’s not a blocked off category. By the way, I don’t think this means every person who writes about personal things should be open to a conversation about them. It’s a choice.

While I am generally open about my life (at least what I write about here), it doesn’t mean the people I write about are. When I mention my partners, I have their permission to do so. I can be a bit absurd about how explicit I make it sometimes, because I want and need to be sure they’re OK to be mentioned.

And a final note, in line with my recent posts about emails to other bloggers: I’d like to think of myself as a ‘safe person’ to talk to about these things. If someone is reading this post somewhere and feels a bit alone and/or against the world being somewhat different, be it LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, non-binary, or whatever, and feels like they want to reach out, please do. You’re my people, people. Feel free.

Well, I think that was a rather long and complicated way to answer a simple question, but I do tend to do that. Be good, and have a good night!

Mon, 11 May 2026 16:46:42 -0400

Manton Reece

I didn’t know that extra info about.bar files! Pretty awesome you came up with it.

I will explore the backup option for the blog, I just wrote a post wondering about a contingency plan for mb. Is there anything like it?

Paying for the good internet (with an escape plan)

Sun, 10 May 2026 18:15:43 -0400

Sal ~~is moving~~ (has moved) his blog off of Bear to an independent repository on CloudFlare, and that caused recurring concerns with Micro.blog.

As Sal said about Bear, I have nothing but good things to say about Micro.blog. Really. I love it here, and I recommend Micro.blog to anyone who seems to be slightly passionate about starting a blog. I think it’s unique in terms of what it provides and in terms of a positive community, and it comes with a suite of complementary apps that enhance blogging as an experience. But.

As the saying goes, it’s not a matter of if but a matter of when. And, as far as I know, Micro. blog doesn’t have a contingency plan (is that what you call it?).

Personally, as long as Micro.blog offers an option to export data (which I do regularly, as well as backing up my blog) I think I’ll be OK - and I don’t believe it will ever be turned off. There are other options if something happens, and I could self-host my own site again if I have to, but as Sal mentioned in his post: “I’d wager that most bloggers would rather not bother and would much prefer a platform like Bear to take care of all the nuts and bolts.”

Yep. Been there, done that. There’s more than enough tech related stuff I do around my website (if you’ve been around for more than a month you’ve probably encountered one or two) as is. Besides, I also like the idea of Micro.blog, not just what it does. Paying for it as a service feels good. It’s part of the “good internet” the way I see it.

Oh well, the good news is that maybe I’ll get to read more posts from Sal, now that he can use his work laptop 😁