The Art Of Not Asking Why

The following was hard to write - and this is an understatement. It will probably be difficult to read, also. If you don’t want to read about feelings of war and trauma or the situation in the Middle East overall, please don’t. You don’t need to.

Like an ant on a tree, I started climbing on a different branch after the events of October 7th, 2023, or “Black Saturday,” as Israeli media dubbed it. I didn’t know it back then, as the change was too slow and too big to grasp. It’s only now that I reflect on what I wrote and what I talked to people around me about since then, over a period of months, that I understand I’m not the same person.

Up until that day, my life in Israel was the past, and my life in the US was the present. Most of my family members are still in Israel: my father, my aunts, my cousins, a few friends, and many memories. The life I left there was of a different person, someone who didn’t just speak a different language but also lived in a different culture, had different beliefs and values, and had different kinds of friends. It was another life.

I’m jumping ahead of myself here, but it seems like a good place to mention that many of my values and beliefs conflict with my past life and with Israel in general. I grew apart from that, and while I miss some people and part of the culture, I feel this is a healthy distance for me overall.

Past and present collide

What Black Saturday did was create a wormhole that brought past me into the present. The separation line melted away, and with it, the familiarity and stability of my reality here in the US. I felt I existed in two places at once, both past and present. It’s hard to describe and exhausting to remember. Most of all, I hated being dragged into this confusing mind mess without a choice or a say in the matter.

To understand how something like this happens, let me share a memory with you. Let me take you back to The Gulf War.

I am 11. My sister, my mom, and I are sitting on the floor in my sister’s room. This room, the smallest in our apartment with only one window, was the dedicated “sealed room”: it’s a room sealed with sheets of plastic, duck tape, and wet towels under the door to create makeshift protection against chemical weapons. At the time, everyone in Israel had one.

The Air-raid sirens in the background, a wave pattern of ups and downs, were reflected in my mom’s heavy breathing. She reminded me of a terrified animal. I couldn’t see her eyes since they were behind a gas mask; mine were too, and so was my sister’s, with additional plastic covering meant to protect younger children from gas. My mom slowly worked the panic-menaced logic in her mind, thinking out loud if she should inject me and my sister with Atropine. Atropine came in plastic single-use syringes, which were meant to be used if we were infected by nerve gas. It is not meant to use as a preventative; the side effects can be really nasty.

Fortunately, we managed to talk my mom down, and Saddam Hussein “only” launched explosive warheads with his Scuds into Israel. But the memory remains, and with it, the feeling of total helplessness when all you can do is to sit, trapped in a room, and do absolutely nothing while missiles explode around you and shake the windows of your home.

I have this memory and a few others, but I’ll save you from those. The reason I’m bringing this up is to set up the stage for the reaction to such severe helplessness. The reaction is what I (and I believe many Israelis and Palestinians) would call “survival mode.” It’s when the planning and stargazing part of your brain shuts down to a narrow tunnel vision of what’s happening right now, this moment. Once this happens to you as a result of an event like I discussed above, this can happen again from time to time out of the blue. It’s not a matter of choice. It happens out of reflex. I discussed this in a previous post, and at the time, I wondered why I was reflecting on it. Well, here’s the answer. Mind’s working in mysterious ways and all of that.

Fear is the mind killer

A couple of days after Black Saturday, an entire country full of people switched into survival mode after the initial shock. What Hamas did that day was not something I can put into words, but I can still feel it. My family over there felt it. And the other survivors of families near Gaza, who were slaughtered in ways even animals aren’t butchered, felt it. Let me emphasize that I am not capable of feeling or even having a taste of what those survivors went through. I believe the human brain shields us from such things with denial and other methods to protect us from going insane, which some of these people probably did. All I go by is a hunch of a feeling.

For days and weeks after black Saturday, a whole country reacted out of a narrow tunnel vision of the need to survive. There was nothing else; no plan, no strategy, and no revenge. There was just a boiling, overwhelming rage and pain.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much thinking since then. No long-term plan and no strategy. The whole thing reminds me of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq on a smaller scale. But we’ll get there.

I was here, in New York City, when the demonstrations started, when people on the left - my left, my people - started chanting a slogan that came directly from the mouths of Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and other such terrorist organization who wanted to exterminate the Jews since 1948 onward. I don’t think (or I don’t want to think) people knew what they were saying exactly. I understand the point, and I understand what they were trying to achieve, but the extreme demonstrators' actions pushed me away toward the right. I did not want my opinions to change, just as I didn’t want my Israeli past to come back, but sometimes life punches you in the face for a wake-up call.

Despite all I felt and what I still feel, I understand. I wish I hadn’t, and I wish I could just be “pro-Israel” or whatever. It would simplify things. But I simply cannot accept what’s going on to Palestinians today, in Palatine, in their own homes, when bombs fall around them, and their windows are shaking, thinking if the next explosion is going to be the last sound they’ll ever hear. And this is something that drives me further away from friends and family who lean more toward Israel. I know a few Israelis like me, and most of them have left Israel for similar reasons I’m happy to be where I am today. I don’t think there are many of us.

What Hamas did is one thing, and Israel’s immediate reaction is something I still support. But we are almost a year into this mess, with no end in sight and just more bloodshed, most of which belongs to people who have no choice but to stand in the way of IDF’s bombs.

This is where I want to stop for now. I understand this is a sensitive topic for many people. Thank you for reading.

This is potentially huge if it means Google will no longer be able to practice its search advertising policies. The waves from this will affect how we search the internet and bleed into AI capabilities.

Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance | CNN Business

The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly'

and:

Specifically, Google’s exclusive deals with Apple and other key players in the mobile ecosystem were anticompetitive

Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance | CNN Business cnn.com

October 19, 2023. I’m sketching an amulet my mom brought me from her last visit to Israel about a year prior in my journal. My head is heavy with thoughts.

The page describes a feeling that I had a hard time pointing down for a couple of days because it was too big to grasp: Fear. The heavy kind that smothers you slowly with its irrationality. The amulet’s sketch is of a shield of David, which I have hanging on my doorknob.

I’m not a religious person and never was. There was a time in my life when the thought of wearing anything religion-oriented would make me scoff. Over the years in the US, as I taught Hebrew to children in a synagogue, I learned that religion has shades. Not all religious folks are necessarily hard-headed Orthodox who can be distinguished by what they wear. Jews come in all shapes and colors, and I’ve learned that I can be Jewish to a certain degree without showing for it if I don’t want to. With time, I just learned to accept it as part of my past, and through that, a part of who I am today.

And so, on the 19th, for the first time in my life, I was scared of simply being who I am. Scared of being Jewish in the US, of all places. The absurdity of the situation was so pronounced that it alone was what made me realize that what I feel is not normal, at least not me. I took some time looking into space after I wrote in the journal, needing my thoughts to settle. I was happy I could frame what I was feeling though.

The fear sharpened my identity as a Jewish person and connected me to my past in a way I haven’t in years, possibly ever. To be clear, I didn’t want to be connected: not with being Jewish and not with my Israeli past. These are two things I don’t care too much for in my day-to-day life. After all, there’s a reason I still live here, in the US, and lead a religion-free life. This was a rude and powerful pull, as if I was dragged by my hair, kicking and screaming against my will. I didn’t have a choice. The helplessness of this whole situation hit hard and turned into anger.

What I want to expand on is that anger. But to do so, I have to recognize the fear it came from, a place I will probably revisit as I look deeper and explain what has happened since.

This is part 1 of whatever this is going to be. From here, I went on several tangents. I’m not sure what to write next yet; I just know that I need to do so, which is fine (this I tell myself more than to you). The point is to let it out, at least some of it. We’ll see how it goes.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been writing a long post on what’s been going on in my head since October 7th of last year, and I broke my two blog writing rules:

1. Don’t write a post for more than two full days.
2. Don’t write negative things about other people.

Let me explain first what I mean by these self-imposed rules.

Two full days mean usually two full mornings writing and not being done. I revise my posts and check for typos and grammar before I publish them, but this editing process is not part of “spilling the beans.” When I run out of time writing, I give myself the option to wrap things up the next day (or later in that day if I get the chance), but not to sit down and continue writing a second part.

Why not keep on writing? I found that if I’m not done writing down what I have to say in one sitting, I’m probably never going to publish what I’m writing. I will keep on writing until I forget my point and go into endless tangents or get overwhelmed during the editing part, which takes a decent amount of time, and the whole thing will feel like a chore. This used to happen sometimes with my old blog, and it sucks.

As for saying negative things about people, this is something I picked somewhere else a couple of years back: it’s a positive-karma-enhancing tool and a troll-preventative measure in one. It’s one thing to be grumpy and complain about an idea; it’s another to criticize a group of people (or someone specifically, which is even worse) in a negative light. This can be tricky at times, but usually, it means criticizing the idea a person (or a certain group) is after rather than the individuals themselves.

For my October 7th post, I gave up somewhere around the third day of writing. I was also getting too judgmental of people, and I came across as bitter and negative. The post started to look like the kind of post that makes me stop reading and even stop following a person, at least for a while. These are crazy political times for all of us, after all.

It’s natural that there are a lot of feelings about what happened and what is still happening, and it’s a good thing that I feel like I can talk about it more in length now. But. I must remember my two rules, they are there two help me. So, what can I do when approaching a difficult topic like this one?

For one, I should write one idea at a time without expanding on tangents and related events. For another, if I write about other people, I should focus on how they make me feel, not what they are saying and what I feel they are saying. One is authentic and honest, while the other is negative speculation.

I will try to salvage the big mess of a post I have for parts and see what I come up with. I’m also considering some sort of content warning for people who don’t want to read anything of the sort but still like other stuff I write about.

I gave up on The Last Girl Scout 📚. It started out OK, but it quickly became too “cute” for me with “Sugar” here and “Honey” there every time the two transwomen (which is important to mention in the context of the book) talk to each other. I’m not that kind of person and not that kind of a reader.

I’ve had my MacBook Pro docking station for a while, but this morning I was thinking that the term “docking station” is a bit vague. Wikipedia doesn’t help much: “Because a wide range of dockable devices—from mobile phones to wireless mouse—have different connectors, power signaling, and uses, docks are unstandardized and are therefore often designed for a specific type of device.”

This is why I couldn’t find a simple “docking station” for my MacBook Pro when I was looking for one about a year ago. It was (and still is) a long list of USB hubs, aluminum brackets, cables, and other things in between.

I found a MacBook stand in the end, which is a simple metal bracket. It’s a nice sturdy stand that holds the MacBook safe next to my PC. Here it is with the MacBook connected to everything I use daily:

The MacBook is connected to a KVM switch, which allows me to switch to my PC (the monster you see in the background) at any moment with a keyboard shortcut. I use it for gaming (Windows) and networking/private browsing/productivity (Linux). The KVM needs HDMI and USB connections, which you can see on the left. There’s also a small case under the HDMI cable to hold it up straight since it’s heavy and needs support in this position.

The MacBook needs to be connected to power to work with its lid closed (docking mode). I was concerned about the battery at the start, growing up at an age where keeping devices with batteries connected to power at all times is a bad idea and even a fire hazard, but the MagSafe connector (lower right) is a sophisticated chip that knows to turn off the power automatically, designed to work like this. This is why the LED is orange: the battery is never full when it’s like this; it keeps the battery at around 75-80 percent. I’ve had the Mac for a year now, and the battery can still hold a charge of about 10 - 12 hours of work.

The MacBook Pro came with USB Cs, and I had a perfectly working USB-A 4-port “dock” (see?), so I’m using a metal USB-A to USB-C converter. On the other side, I have cables for my Android phone if I need to load files on the Mac, and these days, a Wacom tablet for drawing. The charger for my Apple Watch is connected to the remaining USB-C port. I charge the watch daily whenever I take a shower (the Watch can take water no problem, but showers work as a good reminder to charge it)

I use the Mac remotely about once every two weeks. When I do, I carefully remove all the cables and place the Mac in a plastic shell (with stickers, of course) that goes into my backpack. I usually don’t even bother taking the charger with me, even if I’m going to stay overnight.

The MacBook is the best device I’ve ever had for work/life balance. It can run whatever I need for work (these days, it’s mostly Microsoft Edge) while providing me with classical music (IDAGIO), Signal (to chat with friends), WhatsApp (to chat with family, sometimes work), and all the other necessaries, from email to Photoshop, and of course, Emacs to bridge both worlds.

A few quick updates:

• Insomnia has been hitting hard for the second week in a row. My days have two parts: a small one from around 4 AM to 8 AM, and then after I get to sleep again, 9 AM to until 3 PM or so when I crash and take another 20-minute nap until later.

• There’s a lot going on out there. Some good, some bad, and too much to express, especially in my state right now. I’m aware and am following with interest

• Work’s been taking extra of my time with projects, and that was before the whole CrowdStrike thing. Yeesh. Between that, other hobbies, and trying to shove some exercise when I’m not a zombie, there’s little time left for other things

Hope everyone else’s doing alright, these days are a crazy ride.

This, in a nutshell, was the problem Friday, and it still carries on to next week in some places:

Crowdstrike : its fine u just have to manually visit the PC boot it into safe mode and remove a sys file

US Organization with 50,000 pcs and a completely outsourced IT department in Bangalore : what

— Hammancheez (@Hammancheez) July 19, 2024

Not only hundreds of computers stopped working because of CrowdStrike, to fix those, you had to manually get to the computer.

Not only do you have to get to these hundred computers with an IT department that has 10 or so people on call, but many of these computers are locked away in offices you don’t have access to or belong to people who happen to be in a different state or a different country.

Not only many of these computers were impossible to reach, but there were computers IT didn’t even know they had in their inventory until they got BSOD, and users who work have been remote since 2020 or were forgotten in the basement next to their red staple called the helplines until those collapsed.

Not only IT have computers they didn’t know existed, but management was (and is) in full panic mode and wanted a full report of inventory (how many computers you have vs how many are fixed) ASAP. Because IT can’t give them such a report because they don’t even know how many computers they have or are affected, management demands that IT keeps reporting every few hours for a meeting that goes for an hour between all IT departments in an organization while they are running around fixing issues.

The technical issue is always just the tip of the iceberg.

At least at my organization, most managers are IT folks themselves and have known the people they work with for years, even decades. They trust each other to do their job, and it shows. And I have to say (I wish for the day I wouldn’t have to say this and it will just be normal) that the few women who lead IT groups through all this did an amazing job. They led by example and came up with ideas that helped everyone. Happy to be working in a place like this.

Had a couple of things to go over this morning, but the CrowdStrike ordeal kicked me to work in high gear. The memes on social media are awesome though! Should collect them in one post when I get the chance.

I love @jthingelstad’s blog gardening idea and I think I’m going to utilize it soon. I have posts going back about five years now (this and my older blog), and this will be a good way to get them all in here and clean them up. Good stuff.

Blog Gardening thingelstad.com

Reader: www.thingelstad.com

The other day I wrote that indie blogs are doing fine in response to what happened to blogs on Hacker News. Now that I let the grump out, let me share some of my methods for finding these blogs.

First thing first: don’t use Google. Indie blogs and personal websites are not usually optimized for SEO and Google’s shenanigans (and if they are, they can’t compete with big companies with a budget and marketing teams that do SEO all day). I use Kagi (work is Bing, which is not much better than Google, but that’s why it’s for work), and it’s excellent. Among other things, It has a “small web” toggle that allows you to reach places you won’t usually find with a regular search.

Indie blogs are like good spots in town. Sure, they’re on the map, but you need to ask the locals to point them out. In terms of indie blogs, this means other bloggers. The biggest contributions to my RSS feeds are from other blogs I follow, where one blogger mentioned another as a comment. I then do a quick test (more on that later) and if I find that the blog’s good, it gets added to my list.

Next, there are places on the net dedicated to indie blogs. I’m biased, and I love mine, so I’ll point to it first: Micro.blog. You can read more about Micro.blog in the About section of this blog, but the gist is that the guy who made it is all about the indie web and reviving the good old blog culture. The Discover part of Micro.blog is curated by a human, each post usually has a blog attached to it. Spend some time there, and you’ll probably find one or two places you’d like. Also, while I’m here, blogrolls. Micro.blog recently re-introduced those, and quite a few members of the Micro.blog community (this blog included) have some interesting links to suggest.

Speaking of blogrolls, some of those exist on the net. One of the famous ones is Ye Olde Blogroll. It is a bit too noisy for my taste and not organized as well as it could be, but put some time into it, and you’ll find something. There are a few more, but I can’t find them now, and I’m running low on coffee, so check @amerpie’s comment below. There’s also People and Blogs by Manu, which is quite nice, though it tends to be a bit too tech-leaning (more on this later) for my taste at times. Give it a try.

Indie social media is a thing, and you should use it. Mastodon is an excellent place to start because it’s pretty easy to build columns based on your interests. Then all you have to do is go fishing: once a week I find someone mentioning a post they write (or someone else’s post) in my topic-related columns.

The last tip I have is a bit of a catch. Write an indie blog yourself. If you’re reading this post and have read this far, you’re probably interested in indie blogs (I know my deductive reasoning is excellent, but thank you anyway), and the best way to find blogs is to become a blogger yourself. How is a different topic, but in a nutshell, start by writing something simple and mundane; never start with something big and “important” because you’ll get stuck in the not-good-enough cycle. Trust me, I got stuck in it many times.

This leads me to my two main guides for adding a blog to my RSS list. These might sound harsh, but hear me out. First, I try not to add web developers or other techies whose job is IT in general. This is because their blogs tend to be more about what they do for work and less about their lives (in general! This is not true for everyone, hence why this is a guide, not a rule), and their lives are actually what I’m after. I talk to enough IT folks every day the way it is. Second, I don’t generally read bloggers who write less than once a week unless they are very consistent and have been around for a long time; otherwise, chances are I won’t read more from them in a good while, if at all.

I hope this helps! Live well, and may your RSS list prosper.

It feels like everyone’s screaming constantly, and for a guy who lives in NYC of all places, I don’t like much noise.

I spent some time on my Mastodon filters (I don’t use other social media really so the rest is not a problem), uninstalled anything NYT-related from my iPhone and Mac, and sat down to listen to some Tchaikovsky for the fairy tales music.

People lost the ability to talk to each other. Everything is cranked up to max volume, everything is loud, everything is the end of the world, and there’s just so much mental bandwidth a guy can take before he becomes numb, you know? I don’t want to be numb. It’s not the time and the place to be numb. I have to be smart about what and where I spend the energy I have.

Personal blogs, as in actual personal blogs written by real individuals, exist. I find them all the time. I just don’t use Google to look for them, is all.

WTF happened to blogs | Michal's corner mpmisko.github.io

Reader: mpmisko.github.io

My attempts to learn how to draw turned into attempts to learn how to sketch, which turned into attempts to learn how to visually break things down into shapes, which turned into learning how to use the Wacom tablet Nat gave me, which turned into how-to Inkscape tutorials.

Let me give you an example. In Inkscape, you can turn on the pressure input for the Pencil tool. With this on, Inkscape detects how hard you press your stylus on the tablet, which translates to line thickness. This makes drawing feel more fluid. However, when you turn this option on, the Pencil tool does not let you choose a “stroke” anymore but just a “fill.” This makes sense: when you use pressure, the lines you draw are indicated by pressure, not by a shape (which consists of fills and strokes in Inkscape).

I was going nuts for two days because fills and strokes in Inkscape are everything I learned - when I was working with a mouse. In other words, drawing in Inkscape with a tablet is a different animal than creating shapes with Inkscape. It’s almost like using a different program.

It took me two paragraphs to explain this to you, and I’m sure some folks are still stretching their heads. Now imagine trying to convey this without having an idea of why Inkscape behaves the way it does. And I didn’t even tell you that the tablet’s range of motion is very different than that of a mouse, and learning how to scroll with it is also an entirely different skill to learn… but you get the point.

I’ve tried to sketch in a notebook too. “What’s the problem,” I thought, “just break it down into shapes.” Ha. Haha. You think you know how to draw a circle until you actually try to draw one by hand. Draw it fast, and it looks like a broken egg on a good day; draw it slow, and it picks up bumps along the way. I’m learning that I should probably learn how to draw circles and squares by hand all over again. Needless to say, breaking things down to shape, a whole ordeal by itself, will have to wait a bit.

I think this is the problem I always had with drawing. You see, I’m a visual person. I love visual aids. I love symbols. Our brain sees symbols and not what the objects are, which means when I want to draw something, what I’m visualizing is a concept that doesn’t exist. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that learning to draw means learning to see all over again. It’s a long process, and it requires patience. Who has patience when all you need to do is to ask your AI program of choice to draw a house to get one? Not me. But I’m working on it.

Any radio station that has this sort of image featuring its programming is going to have me listen to it.

In this case, WFMU, a nutty station from NJ, because of course.

I’m trying to figure out who made this image for them. If you have an idea, let me know.