The Art Of Not Asking Why

My wiki can be addicting. I forget how fun it is to organize information, make it more presentable, and just have fun with it.

When I started working on it today, my goal was to straight some rough edges to get it ready for another S3 Video. Instead, here I am, still tweaking and changing things, writing logs, submitting changes, and having a good time.

Hopefully, I’ll get to recording pretty soon.

I keep reading that Mastodon is “complicated” from mainstream media, like Verge and Techcrunch.

What’s so complicated? Find a server, register, use. Are people so braindead they don’t know how to look in a directory of servers? If you know how to read an Excel sheet, you can read that list. What’s so hard?

I can’t get over the fact that the Mac mini (M1) restarts so fast it’s actually easier to reboot than to close all the different apps to start from a clean slate.

My Linux desktop stopped syncing my Emacs files yesterday. I noticed this in the morning, realized what the issue was, and didn’t get a chance to fix it until the evening. Two human errors caused the issue:

1. I changed the Syncthing folders to be under ~/Sync/ instead of the home folder in my emacs settings
2. I deleted the .emacs.d folder from my home folder

I fixed the path for the settings file but introduced a typo. I typed emacs_setting.org instead of emacs_settings.org. I only noticed the typo in the evening.

As usual with my singular/plural typos, they are invisible to me. I can read the l line 5 times and not see that S is missing. It’s the same with my writing, where I’d publish a post without noticing these typos until I run it through a grammar check. I need a strategy to counter that.

I’m not sure why I removed emacs.d from the Linux desktop. It was a hectic morning with Nat trying to find a clinic that would see him, among several other things. For some reason, restoring the folder from the trash didn’t work. It seems it got stuck restoring some files that weren’t there; I guess it was a file corruption issue.

The .emacs.d folder mostly contains the Emacs packages I use, so the solution was to re-download those. Here I learned an important tip: to repeat a command in Emacs (which is M-x or Alt+M), press M-n or M-p after M-x. This is similar to pressing the up or down arrow in the terminal window.

On Linux, it’s easy to run another instance of Emacs. I used one instance to download packages as I kept opening new instances to read error messages that told me which package was missing. Launch, see the error, go to the other instance, M-x install-package, launch a new instance, and repeat. Within 2 minutes, Emacs was functional again.

What’s left now is to see about the bookmarks file. I still keep it in the home folder under .emacs.d since my connections to my servers change depending on which computer I’m on. This is another thing I need to fix.

Just like I wrote about my name not too long ago, it occurred to me I should write about being non-monogamous.

At this point, it’s not about showing the world who I am and what I am. As NK would jokingly say, I’m a “grumpy old man” who doesn’t care what people think about that anyway.

But I don’t want to keep people guessing or scratching their heads either, especially when I use the term “my partner” or switch between “he” and"them" when I talk about them - my partners. Of which I have two.

And that’s the other thing. I don’t talk much about my partners; as a matter of fact, I’ve been avoiding it. A habit of keeping my non-monogamous status a secret from days past.

For example, I wanted to write about a bit of a medical situation with Nat (my other partner, and he’s fine, by the way) this morning, but I didn’t. Part of it is his privacy, sure, but the part about me, how I tie into this and what I did, that’s my story too. When you hang around your significant others for over 10 years, you have a lot of stories to share that involve them too.

For now, I’ll tell you there’s NK (they/them) and Nat (he/him). They are both awesome and different in their own ways, and I love them both to bits.

We don’t have a perfect life together; we have a realistic one. We go through hardships, we pay bills, we do the daily grind, and we have a love/hate relationship with NYC.

After a good nap, I was able to work more on an animated gif for a knowledge base article I’m working on (can’t integrate movie clips, so it’s a workaround).

Then it was time for a quick walk. The clouds left earlier and the sun came out, so I enjoyed our neighborhood park.

My list writing this morning was interrupted by trash that had to be taken out, then dishes, and then NK was up, and it was time to make coffee. I found that even though I was grumpy from lack of sleep (this has been going on for a couple of weeks now; I briefly talked about it in my last S3 video), I was happy with the “noise of life” around me.

While I couldn’t continue the list in my notebook, I felt good being wrapped in the momentum of an ordinary Monday. Sometimes it’s just good to be and observe the little things.

As for sleep - I hope to catch up at some point in the afternoon.

I’ve been struggling with sleep issues this week, and it shows in terms of creative energy. Most wake time was dedicated to day job stuff and pushing harder on exercise after rest.

Happy to report Mac Prep on the wiki is up. This is a big section and still a work in progress as I keep finding issues and fixing them.

I just created a new list of instructions for my journal-writing routine:

1. Scan a note with a list of what you want to do today
2. Create an entry, insert the scan
3. Write throughout the day as you do things.
   • If a certain event takes a paragraph to describe, make an event for it and link to it
4. Take pictures, especially if it’s something fun/relaxing
5. As you close the day’s entry, ask yourself of elements: (good) sleep? exercise? meditation? (good) food?

I write my journal in Emacs org-mode, but this can probably be converted to any software or a notebook (a “link” to an event in a notebook would probably be a separate header under the same date).

My favorite item right now is the handwritten list of stuff I want to do that day. I write it while sipping my morning latte and looking out the window in the early morning before I turn on my computer and look at my agenda for the day. This way, my list is unfiltered. It may contain amusing things like shopping for my favorite seltzer water or getting in touch with my old college newspaper friends. When it’s time to close the entry for the day in the journal, I review my scanned list of wants. Here’s a sample from yesterday:

For the last couple of weeks, I have had the task “WIKI Mac wipe @ Home”. I wiped my Mac, and then I started documenting what sort of things I’m doing as I slowly re-build my environment. I say started because every time I want to put it up on the wiki there are more notes I keep adding to it.

Here are some added notes from this morning: