The Art Of Not Asking Why

The morning in NYC started with this.

Time to wake up and make some coffee. I walked toward the espresso machine zombie-like and emptied the remainder of the beans into the hopper. NK showed up soon after, a shadow of pink fluff in their onesie. They sat on the sofa with their TODOs for the vacation. I noticed the notebook they used is a college-ruled A4 size, unlike the pocket-size notebooks they usually write their thoughts in.

I hope this vacation will be Paché. Inner peace and self-reflection. I know how new-age this sounds (is this called “new-age” still? I think with the years, “new-age” is now “old-age”), but I find that in other vacations I often appreciate this the most. This is why I packed a new small notebook with me, to capture some of it on paper. The computer can be too distracting. Only now I spent half an hour researching and updating my wiki; typing paché above (with accent over the e) showed me my instructions on the wiki needed updating.

Even though I have several videos on Diode Zone, a PeerTube instance, I’m been thinking of going solo with YouTube.

The catalyst has been limited storage space, though now I am double checking, and it looks like Diode Zone always offered unlimited space… I could have sworn it was topped at 10GB at some point. However, even with unlimited storage, this instance is run by one person who hasn’t been too active online, which is always a worrying sign.

YouTube is the king of online videos, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy to work with. It’s lawyer-speak meant for brands, not people; each video I upload is scrutinized for fear of getting sued and greed for making ads. Last night, when I tried to add a link to my wiki (which I’m recording in the video itself), it informed me I had to be verified, either by uploading a video of my face or scanning a government-issued ID.

Annoyed (Google already has enough of my government-issued ID one way or another), I checked to see if I could move content from my alternative account to my primary one (not really) and found out I can have a dedicated “brand” (of course) account on the platform with my primary Google account, which is verified. So now I need to move my videos from my TAONAW dedicated account to my primary Google account to open a brand there as an alternative account for the primary account…

I’m not against making some money from my content, but Google just makes it feel so crooked. It is a well-oiled money machine, which means Google won’t shut it down any time soon (though the risk of rebranding it in new colors and logos remains, as they tend to get bored quickly over there, it seems). So do I just put up with it for now? Do I engage with it, jump through its hoops, and learn to be a “brand,” asking people to subscribe in each video?

I don’t know. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle.

The S3 video from last week is up:

Getting ready to pack for a long trip. The flight is Wednesday. I woke up worried I won’t have enough underwear, so I’m planning to buy extra. Then I’m worried my adapter will burn out my laptop when there, and I can’t remember where I placed it. And allergies… You can tell I don’t travel often.

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:

Note from 4/10/2025: I decided to take these videos down, so they’re not available anymore.

Another S3 video I recorded yesterday! In this one:

• I’m working with a Mac
• Getting back into photography and Lightroom Classic
• Some personal details and why now
• My gaming adventures in Dredge

If you watch and have opinions, I’d love to hear from you 🙂

Note to self:

If you’re using apps made by (and made for) Linux folks, use Homebrew. Sure there’s a pretty macOS package. It works nicely until it doesn’t. And you’ll only find out 2 weeks into using it and waste time digging into it. Use Homebrew. #macos

It’s important to be silly. With yourselves, with your close ones. Being silly is closer to the real us than when we have our mental clothes, for meetings or as we go about our errands.

So be silly. Be humorous. Have fun.

My name is Shay. Pronounced like Shy. And yes, I’ve been asked if I’m shy too many times. Maybe there’s some truth in this question.

I’ve been JTR for a while, and before that just JR or Josh Rollins. Why that name? I’ll leave it to your curiosity and your Googling abilities for now.

What I’m thinking this particular morning, after sleeping too little, is that it’s time to stop “branding” myself. I don’t like the word “brand.” It leaves a bad taste on a personal blog such as this one. I prefer authentic communication, with humans on each end, exchanging opinions and ideas.

Nothing too dramatic here, no big revelations after being online for 20 years (has it been this long? Yes, I guess so). It’s simply time.

I’m still an advocate of privacy. It’s an important topic that should be discussed more often. People know far too little about giving out far too much personal information. But privacy is not hiding for the sake of hiding; it’s about owning your information and having more control over who you share it with and when.

At this point, with my face on several videos I’m creating and intimate conversations in several locations online, I don’t want to be a brand - a thing. This will be a process. People know me as “JTR” in several places, not to mention that it’s my username on a couple of platforms. It’s a starting point then.

So allow me to reintroduce myself again as me, and now we can move on.