Author: neil

Patience

Buying stuff online is a wonderful way to learn many things. Particularly, if the said purchase is for a young lad, a belated birthday present.

After months of walking the neighbour’s dog and a couple of generous gifts from older friends for his birthday, my son has earned about three-quarters of the money needed to buy his ‘dream’: a DJI Mavic Mini Drone.  He has been researching online, the retail prices and the licensing requirements to fly the drone (I was very impressed!), and has been badgering me in the last few months about getting it for his birthday.

I finally acquiesced and ordered it online on Sunday. The website we bought it off said delivery within 1-2 business days. Today happened to be day 3, and it’s still not arrived. Neither has there been any update from the retailer (a poor CX for sure, but this post is not about CX).

The young fella has been learning about logistics and supply chains, information gaps, the Australian Postal system, and that oft-quoted virtue, patience. He even tried some reverse psychology on me today, saying the drone arrived at 445pm, to examine if I got excited!

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It was a beautiful sight on our walk too!

 

Spencerian: Mitch Albom

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”

Spencerian: Toni Morrison

“I thought of myself as like the jazz musician: someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful. I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures.”

Alternate Reality

There was a brief rainbow this evening as we walked on to the beach. When we got home, our son cheerfully informed us that it bucketed down for a short time, and wondered why we hadn’t gotten wet.

Might be stretching it too far. I couldn’t help thinking how the same event creates multiple realities in as simple a thing as rain, just a couple of kms down the road. Both the realities are true for those in them. It’s easy to dig in and argue that ‘my reality’ was the true and competely miss the possibility that ‘your reality’ might have also been true.

Heading back to work next week, and the lesson is worth remembering when inevitably the challenges begin raising their multi-dimensional heads to people who won’t see alternate yet true realities.

 

Feeling Better

Rishad Tobaccowala’s most recent missive “Six Ways to Be and Feel Better” made for interesting reading, particularly the way he phrased his first one.

“Accept the 3Ls of loss, love and learning.”

The first thing that came to mind when I read the word loss was death, and almost immediately followed by loss of friendships. The worries and news of the last few days/weeks is likely just below the surface of my consciousness, and the associations are lightning fast.

I spent much time today learning too. I found myself in the zone doing code exercises with CSS, feeling instinctively the syntaxes there – and struggling really to compose them into the actual stylesheets. Accepting that I didn’t know what I was doing, and then taking a few steps, first in one direction, and then in another wasn’t as paralysing as it has been during previous attempts.

There was a lot of reminders about how much love is around me too. Accepting it exists has been something I’ve had to learn over the last couple of decades. Not only romantic love (didn’t the Greeks have names for various types of love?). Noah, our 8 month-old neighbour, has been the latest addition to the mix. His big blue eyes as he stares wondrously at the little world around him, especially when his mum walks him through our garden. His cooing I hear through my window while they amble around after his feed.

Hope is powerful, even when everything appears to be diabolically desperate.

Spencerian: Kurt Vonnegut +

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Learning Detour: CSS

Confident enough in my exercises yesterday with Rmarkdown, I decided on a very simple project for today:

Project 1: Take one slide with one word on it, and apply formats to it using CSS on ioslides

The broad steps I expected to take:

      1. Create an Rmd with one word on it. Easy enough
      2. Create a simple stylesheet which makes font huge
      3. Create some variations on it.

After about an hour or so of fumbling around Step 2, I realised I had so little conceptual understanding of CSS that I was simply stabbing in the dark. Stackoverflow’s simplest answer was a link to the CSS tutorial from W3Schools. It took a couple of hours, along with doing the exercises.

BUT:

Yihui says in a blog post that `ioslides` aren’t really customisable so he created `xaringan` as an alternative. That’s where I’m headed now.

Who said learning was a straight line?

Life is Short

Life – capital L Life – hits you with curve balls when you least expect it. Everything you’ve built your life around, everything you’ve looked forward to, suddenly is no longer certain.  Memories are the only thing you’re really left with. Time is short.

I could only lend a patient ear and listen to my friend describe how their family’s life has abruptly changed in the blink of an eye. The resilience that they all demonstrate despite the unimaginable pain that they’re going through is incredible.

Words fail me today. The skies are dark.

Spencerian: Kurt Vonnegut

A new series of calligraphy exercises starting today. A long(ish) paragraph written on plain paper, with no guides, to train the eye and hand to write in a straight line. I’m not sure that this is a good idea, so will give it a few days to reassess.

[embed-google-photos-album "https://photos.app.goo.gl/3UKzNf1sCaTDFhaDA"

A passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times. (p. 129)

Learn: Create Presentations From Markdown

Sprint 1 starts today for two weeks. Of course it had to begin with a restful sleep!

Writing and creating a presentation from the same document has been  on my mind ever since I saw Hadley Wickham’s presentations (example here).

There are a lot of writing I wish I had a presentation to talk along with, and I want to give that a go in the next two weeks. This requires me to learn several new tools and skills, and build on some I already know:

* Use RStudio‘s Markdown capability (I’ve used this a bit).
* Continue practising on iTerm as Terminal
* HTML & CSS – a 12 minute video for CSS was enough to get me on my way. I have less than a rudimentary knowlege of both. Use VSCode as the text editor
* Refer Yihui Xie’s wonderful Bookdown book for ioslides
* Write about the process of learning this, as a presentation. Embed the presentation here before Saturday 15 January). Publish the slides and code to Github.
* Stretch: Learn Xaringan because they look pretty awesome!