Microsoft keeps me busy - working on technical documentation. In the picture, my personal notes.
I forget sometimes how expensive NYC can be. Coffee and sandwich cost close to $20 with 15% tip…
Porto Rico Importing has been my go-to for coffee beans 🫘 for about a year. They’ve been around for a couple of generations and have three locations in lower Manhattan. Recommended if you’re in the area and need some beans or a cup of coffee ☕️
Anatomy of a Fall, 2023 - ★★★½
I made a mistake. I went in thinking "murder mystery," but the real death in this movie is the fairy tale of a perfect marriage. And it's brutal.
The acting in the film is so authentic and so close to home, this movie feels more like a documentary to me than fiction. Many families go through the same thing, perhaps not to the extreme that is required from a movie to attract an audience, but the drama and intensity are all there. As a matter of fact, I could argue that in a way it's worse since it lasts and continues into your teenage years and adulthood. These things shape you and your opinions of relationships forever.
As someone who grew up with parents fighting constantly to the point of a divorce, this was an odd healing experience. "Someone had the same life I had, but it ended up even worse," I told myself. And I don't even need to feel guilty since this is fiction; yet, it is so real I know the writers of this movie must have gone through the same things I did.
There is a point in this movie where one of the characters explains how deep desperation looks like, the kind that leads to a bottomless depression. I nodded in my seat and thought, I wish I could explain it this well. Thankfully, someone made this movie.
Be warned, if you have a past or familiarity with intense fighting and/or divorce (I want to say, who doesn't these days?), this movie will rip you apart. For me, this proved to be a healing experience, a confirmation of the choices my family made, and later I did, as an adult. The friend who watched it with me was not OK after this movie ended and needed to recover.
Week 45
This was a challenging week. My mind and soul were at odds with each other constantly, most of which is now documented in my handwritten journal.
I haven’t said much on the topic publicly, and I’m not ready to do so yet: the situation in Israel has affected me greatly. It stands in harsh contrast to my quiet life in the US. I have family in Israel, and I’ve experienced the overall fear during the Gulf War firsthand when I lived there, among other experiences. I’ve come to discover this “soul pressure,” for lack of a better term, has started to shape into something else, something that might be positive in a way I never thought about in a long time.
As I said, I am not ready to talk much more about this further at this point, and being able to say the above words is a lot as is. A step in - I hope - the right direction.
Self-care and reflection took a big part of my personal time this week. I started documenting some of my methods in my wiki last week, and I’m in the process of looking over my old notes, and selecting what to combine with my current notes. There’s a new (but in terms of practice, also very old) Elements section on the wiki.
On the blog, the new search function (built with search space for Micro.blog) indexes conversations and comments; the links at the top changed along with the about section, which in turn led me to look into my Ko-Fi page.
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about how to be able to get some financial backing from my blog, my pictures, and my wiki. I never liked subscriptions and ads. The idea of charging money for something that should be free, like information and opinions, is even more absurd to me today than it was before. This conflict has kept me in an infinite thinking loop, and I think I’m finally able to put it behind me now. In turn, this will lead to more of “me” on the blog and the wiki and less of my “brand,” which, in a word, is bullshit. I am a human being to talk to, not a brand to rent or purchase.
I feel I should apologize for this vague summary. It doesn’t explain what I did this week as much as it explains what I felt. But I think that’s OK. This is important, and writing it down is progress.
SoHo Park.
My new printer is here, and it's fantastic.
📷
Fred, which is how I decided to name it (we’ll see if it sticks), is already proving to be a crucial part of my photography process I didn’t know I needed. Fortunately for me, good folks like Jack exist on Micro.blog to share their knowledge.
Jack helped me several times in the last couple of weeks. When I was stuck in my “funk” two weeks ago, he directed me toward the magnetic cables he uses. That, and getting around to organizing my photos, finally pulled me out of the mental mud I was in. The pictures below are from Maine, which you can see in the photos section on the blog:
Then I read his post about the Epson Printer, and I found the idea of printing my own photos exciting. It took me a couple of days to decide to buy it, and then Amazon teased me about the delivery for a day and a half. I was sitting on the stairs of the lobby of my building in the evening, waiting for the delivery guy to show up. I told myself I was worried because they’d just leave it in the lobby for thieves to grab (which unfortunately happens in my building more often than not), but looking back at it now, I understand there was more excitement in the printer than just that concern. Now that I see my photos on the wall, I think I get it.
The printer lets me see my photos around me as physical objects, a part of who I am and what I do. It puts my photography to a new level. It’s one thing to occasionally open Lightroom or Photoshop (or Darktable when I started out) and browse through your photos, nod with a smile, and move on. It’s something different to see them on a wall in front of you, greeting you every day. Sure, you can order prints, and I did. But sending photos to professional printing doesn’t happen as often as printing on your own: It took me two months to send three photos to print; it took me one night to print the same number at home.
Even more important is the trial and error, learning the process, and being a part of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack feels the same way (probably to a higher degree) when he develops photos in a dark room. It’s probably an amazing feeling.
More changes over at the wiki; I wrote a CaptainLog about those. It’s good to keep the wiki updated, especially with such important personal information.
There have been a few staff changes within the team, but basically what we’re saying is starting January 1, 2024 we’ll try a different structure with smaller, more focused teams working on the core parts of Tumblr that people say they want improved.
I don’t know; they always say something like this, and then in a year or so, poof, it’s gone. I don’t currently use Tumblr, but I always liked what it is. In a way, it’s similar to Micro.blog.
After I added my website’s email to Outlook (which I have to use because of work), I started emailing people more often from my own domain. I just wrote a personal email to someone I had a very deep conversation with, and writing it from my own website’s domain just feels right.
The old and the new.
Jon Stewart’s Show on Apple Is Ending
Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives, a person with knowledge of the meeting said. As the 2024 presidential campaign begins to heat up, there was potential for further creative disagreements
Man, now I really want to watch this show: the fact that it’s too heated for Apple’s babysitting means he’s doing something right. Another nail in the coffin of objective journalism.
Added a new search to the blog, powered by Sven’s Search Space. Click the little magnifying glass 🔎 at the top bar to check it out. I also took the chance to change the order of pages and update the about page slightly.
I bought a new photo printer
I seem to be enjoying writing in my journal, and the arm pain is slowly fading. I posted some of my Maine photos, and I’d like to be able to have more of my photos around me on the walls. And then Jack (of course it’s Jack. It’s always Jack. I think I should have an “Ask Jack” section on my blog) talked about his photo printer, the only positive review of a printer I read in ages.
So this morning, after seeing Amazon has an additional $50 off for the printer, I caved in and bought the damn thing.
Writing Analog 📙
Shoved in the back of my bookcase behind a couple of forgotten books, covered by dust, was my latest hand-written journal I wrote. A black large-sized Moleskin (5x8.25), with a few notes sticking out in neon green and yellow, I parted ways with it on February 2nd, 2016, sometime after 06:30 AM: I always kept dates and times in my entries, along with page numbers.
I don’t recall if it was Typora or TiddlyWiki that replaced the written journal temporarily (I suspect the latter), but it was org-mode that became the full replacement in 2018. I still use org-mode every day, and I’m writing this post in it. Later, I will visit my projects in my org-mode agenda and write notes with timestamps. I would, as a habit sometimes goes, keep more personal notes in my daily journal org-mode entry a couple of times throughout the day.
Indeed, I use org-mode for many things. As I reunited with my old written journal yesterday, affectingly reading through my own scribbles and looking at the pictures I carefully cut and glued inside it, the notes, the sketches, I thought to myself I might be using org-mode might for too many things.
Even when fully engrossed with org-mode, I always felt pen-written notes are the most intimate kind. It’s the kind of record that is the most private, where there’s nothing between me and the pen: no code, no operating systems, no files. It is also - surprisingly - the longest-lasting form of note-taking. My oldest journal is over 20 years old, but my old digital notes are lost between several apps that came and went until I settled on Evernote, and these days I regret I did (before you jump - yes, I exported my notes from Evernote and they live in a somewhat messy org-mode form).
So I opened a page in my journal, and after almost 10 years of not writing in it, I wrote an entry ✍🏻. My handwriting was sluggish and slow, and my arm started to hurt almost as soon as I held the pen. I’m not used to handwriting notes anymore, but I want to change that.
Maine, 2023
To see a larger version, check out the photos page or right-click on an image and open it in a new tab.
Week 44
In the past, I created a couple of weekly video updates (you can find a couple of those on Diode Zone, a PeerTube instance), but it seems written updates are gathering momentum, so I figured I’d give it a try.
Locations chek-ins on the blog
I started looking into location check-ins in Micro.blog two weeks ago. The idea came to me one early morning and woke me up, as these ideas do often enough. Since I use the blog to keep track of my photos, my reading list, my books, and my movies, why not use it to keep track of my visits to certain locations? For that, I started using OwnYourSwarm. Unfortunately, OwnYourSwarm postings are pretty fragile. It took a long time to get it to work the way I wanted, and now it’s broken yet again, and I’m tired of figuring out why.
I’m considering doing this process half-manually. My latest post from Central Park is an example of that: it includes a picture of the place, a “soundtrack” I recorded while I was there, and a map which I grabbed directly from my Check-in in Swarm through Foursquare. I like how it came out.
RSS organization & Bookmarks in Micro.blog
I wanted to consolidate my RSS feeds since I have two three RSS stashes: one on my Android device, which I use for reading (it’s also my dedicated ebook reading device), Emacs on the Mac, and a small list of news outlets on my iPhone.
The best place for feeds For me is Emacs with Elfeed, as I use it to write my posts as well. Emacs also opens links in EWW, the script-free Emacs built-in browser, which makes reading easier without annoying ads and links.
I’m mostly done at this point, with a couple of places I visit in a browser: Micro.blog’s Timeline and Discover is one, and my interest-specific lists on Mastodon are the nother. I can check these sources once or twice a day and look for interesting articles to bookmark on Micro.Blog.
Speaking of which, I rediscovered Micro.blog’s bookmarking feature. It’s excellent. It reminds me a lot of Pocket, but it goes further by storing the articles I grabbed in an Amazon bucket, stripped of any ads and annoyances. This means I can go back and look at something I read five years from now without worrying about the original content being down. The premium plan I’m on allows me to tag these bookmarks, and I’ve decided on three tags so far: read, reply, and post. I tag the bookmarks after I skimmed the article so that I know if it contains good nuggets I want to learn or implement in my own workflows (read), if it’s just a good post from someone and I want to write back to (reply), or if I want to use the highlight feature (another perk of Micro.blog’s bookmarks) to create quotes and write (post) about it.
Cross-posting to Mastodon
The issue I previously had with cross-posting to my existing Mastodon account from Micro.blog was the replies. I wanted folks from Mastodon to reply to my blog so that the discussion would show there. But Manton’s book made me change my mind (see Cross-posting and Silos.) I realized that I’m missing out on good discussions I’ve had for two years on Mastodon because I want readers to read my content the way I tell them to. And that’s dumb.
While Micro.blog does come with a basic “built-in” Mastodon account, it’s not optimized for Mastodon as well as my full-time Mastodon account on Fosstodon. Thankfully, Mastodon allows me to edit posts now, so I can go back to any post automatically created by Micro.blog to add hashtags and edit the content in a way that makes it easier and more welcoming to folks there. This worked better than I thought, as folks boosted and started discussions with me on Mastodon I would otherwise missed - sometimes from folks on Micro.blog itself even.
I’m considering copying over some of my stuff to Instagram as well since this is where I have more friends and family, and they can’t be bothered with RSS feeds and websites.
The Wiki
I haven’t added something substantial to the wiki this week, but I should mention I’ve added personal notes about meditation and mental health in the last month or so. This week, I added a note about following Mastodon users with RSS feeds, Improved instructions about accent above letters (and other symbols) in Emacs, and updated the About section in the wiki.
Location: Conservatory Water
“Conservatory Water is a pond located in a natural hollow within Central Park in Manhattan, New York City. It is located west of Fifth Avenue, centered opposite East 74th Street. The pond is surrounded by several landscaped hills, including Pilgrim Hill dotted by groves of Yoshino cherry trees and Pug Hill, resulting in a somewhat manicured park landscape, planned in deferential reference to the estate plantings of the owners of the mansions that once lined the adjacent stretch of Fifth Avenue.”
A walk outside for a break is always a good idea.
They didn’t send an invite to the meeting they scheduled. Then, when I asked what’s going on, they sent one 40 minutes late. Then I waited in the meeting lobby for 15 minutes before giving up. Then they rescheduled while keeping on misspelling my name. “Microsoft: attitude is not just for our apps.”