The Art Of Not Asking Why

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.

Pen VS Pen: 🖊️

my favorite pen of several years at the top. The one I’m testing at the bottom. Both are similar gel 0.38 mm pens. My two partners got the same combo each. I will compare notes (pun intended) after a week. Who’s going to win?

My name is easily mispronounced because of how it’s written. Many years ago while I was still in elementary school, my father traveled to the US and sent me a gift. He wrote it down phonetically, the way he thought it should be pronounced, and it stuck.

For most of my life in the US, which is most of my life in general at this point, I didn’t bother correcting people. I never cared for it too much, and with time, it started working as a natural filter: those who were close to me or wanted to get to know me bothered to ask, while others who just shook my hand once every couple of months were out of my social club, which included knowing how to say my name correctly.

Only recently, I realized how selfish I’ve been. While I don’t care that much, people around me do. How embarrassing it must be for someone who works with me to be corrected - and usually by someone else - for something they assumed was correct for years! For a long time, I dismissed the cringes in their faces with a smile, assuring them it was OK, that it always happens. While true and I honestly don’t mind, it doesn’t mean they don’t feel bad about it.

Yesterday, I received the monthly invitation to participate in Micro.blog’s analog writing group from the excellent Halsted (if you’re into writing reading and books, definitely give her a read). It takes place on Zoom, and Halsted has a couple of good tips for participants, which I adopted immediately. One of them - you guessed it - is to include a pronunciation of your name with namedrop.

While I chose not to use this particular service over privacy concerns, creating a quick recording of my name and hosting it as a WAV file somewhere on the web is easy enough. I now have my email signature include my pronounces (this is another important thing: while you may be OK with people defaulting your pronounces to she/her or he/him, they might worry they misgender you, especially if you work in a workplace that is LGBTQIA aware!) and a public link on Google Drive with a recording of me saying my name. Wallah! No more cringes.

I’ve never been good at talking to strangers. As kids, our mom always trained us to stay away from strangers; my grandparents had the same mentality, more or less. These days, I feel there’s a certain deficit.

On one end of the spectrum, there’s always been the issue of striking up a conversation with a girl I liked. That’s a whole topic in itself, one I’m still dealing with today, but the issue arises also in more subtle situations.

As I made my coffee this morning, I thought about the person who carefully packed the beans into the paper bag and wrote “Italian Espresso” in a quick yet precise cursive. They were skinny, probably in their 20s, covered in individual small black-inked tattoos of various animals and flowers. Sometimes, my bag gets readied by a man in his 60s who stands out among the otherwise young folk in the store. He sometimes asks me to repeat my order, and I find that it’s usually the same coffee names I need to repeat. I think it’s my slight accent that confuses him.

I find both individuals and the other folks in that store interesting. They always work there, and I come there often enough to know their work style. I’d like to know their names, maybe how long they’ve been working there, how they like their coffee in the morning (if they drink it then or at all), and in general, what other roles they play in their lives besides being coffee experts. How to do that, though, I have no idea.

As a man about twice the age of most of them, I understand that striking up a conversation might be interpreted as inappropriate interest. I don’t blame them for that, unfortunately. At the same time, however, I’m not sure how to get past that. I wish I could say something like “I come in peace” and let them know at the same time that if anything I ask or say makes them uncomfortable, I’d understand and back off - but it’s not something you can bring up without sounding weird in a bad way, or even creepy. So, for the most part, I smile slightly in gratitude and get out of the store. But I can’t help feeling that at least to an extent it’s a missed opportunity.

Another interesting article in the “they don’t make them like they used to” series (see this previous post, and this one). Hat tip: Jeff Atwood.

I’ve Become Absolutely Obsessed With Ralph Nader’s Pens. Join Me on My Continuing Investigation. nytimes.com

I woke up from a long nap, and I’m almost 100%. Whatever that thing was, it’s gone now. Has a pretty weird out-of-it night with dizziness. The weather is perfect now:

In this kind of weather, I can wear shorts or pants, and when I walk outside, I can wear a hoodie but a T-shirt is also fine.

I took a nap earlier and woke up a bit loopy. The feeling has faded, but still there, feeling dizzy. It’s weird for a cold. Tested for fever and covid again, both negative. I don’t feel horrible, more like weird and weak. Do not like.

I know crontab works on macOS, but I wanted to utilize something more “as intended.” Ended up with an Automator workflow that executes a shell command every weekend. The calendar GUI is way more “human” than crontab!

chatGPT was a boon. Sometimes AI is exactly what it’s supposed to be: a helper.

Sick day. What started yesterday as annoyance became more obvious today. Now, I have to slow down.

Also, man, this photo is overprocessed.

Only three days ago, I linked to an article from Mark Dent, which puts our shortening toilet paper conspiracy theories to rest (spoiler: it’s not a conspiracy, and you’re not crazy, it’s for real).

I contacted Dent with another conspiracy of my own about t-shirts: the t-shirts I bought over the last couple of years seem to almost melt away in the laundry. I tried different brands, and most returned from the laundry with tiny holes, as if I washed them in acid.

Dent did not investigate t-shirts or clothing directly, but he did point me in the direction of another interesting article looking into the alarmingly decreased quality of sweaters.

As it turns out:

Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic.

It’s not just plastic and your usual capitalistic poison, which is a big part of this problem, but also:

This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries.

I don’t know about you, but I find these things fascinating. Turns out that you can say, “they don’t make them like they used to,” and you be right, supported by evidence.

About two months ago, I criticized Life Hacker’s article about de-googling. In a nutshell, the article is oversimplified and doesn’t go further beyond the same recycled bullet points of “use DuckDuckGo” and the like.

LifeHacker is not alone in this. I once read a similar article from the NYT tech reporter (I believe it’s somewhere on my old blog; I need to find it), and there are others, too.

The problem with simplifying de-googling is that it’s not simple at all. Even some tech folks I respect, like Irreal (which is how I learned about the LifeHacker article), oversimplify it with a blanket solution like “just use Apple.”

Every now and then, someone has a few good tips. This morning, I saw a video from Louis Rossman, who recommended someone I haven’t followed in a while: Linus Tech Tips.

Linus' video kickstarts a de-goolging series, because the ways Google is tracking our lives have enough material for a couple of 20-minute videos. Linus goes through all of the big things, including YouTube.

It’s no surprise that part 2, which discusses YouTube in depth, was removed from the platform because of “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” If this is not proof of the quality of the content, I don’t know what is. Part 2 is still available on Linus' Reddit at the time of this writing. I suggest you watch it while you still can. There are other platforms that can be used to advertise this content, and I think it’s worth it.

I watched part 1, and I can confidently say that it gives an excellent rundown of options that most folks would be comfortable enough to try. It does get a bit deeper into the woods with DNS and routers, but Linus makes an effort to explain these things without getting too deep into them. Still, I think this is where most people who need De-Googling will give up. After all, part of the problem with De-Googling is understanding what Google does so you can seek replacements.

I was just asked for an ID in the supermarket because I bought a six pack. I lifted my cap, showing my bald head: “is this good enough?”

We both had had a laugh and I have my beer. 🍻 Fun moments.