Category: Writing

Writing (nearly) every day has been a rewarding experience, allowing me to process the day’s emotional journey with lesser damage to myself and those around me than otherwise likely.

I read through what I wrote this year in my journals, and some consistent themes show up. Some I’m aware of, explicitly.  There are others that keep showing up now and then, very tied to my emotional state on the day.

Reflecting on the writing is what I have planned for the next few hours, and to identify the ones I believe are useful in the next sprint – 2 weeks of doing something consistently every single day. 2 weeks I can do, and 2 weeks can help me build some systems.

Today I had another success too – I finally managed to resuscitate the otherwise healthy Macbook Pro that had somehow upgraded itself to MontereyOS and then killed itself.  It took patience, a little bit of googling, finding the right Apple links for download. In the end, I was able to turn it into a working device that is now available for use. Pleased with the outcome.

 

It was a quiet Christmas, with some friends spending time with us this morning and walking on the beach to with the kids to end the day. It was a day to be thankful for, and I’m truly thankful for the gift of family & friends I have.

The exhaustion I’m feeling continues, with the cough persisting despite the medication.  The weather today didn’t help either.

Hopefully tomorrow is a better day: the forecast suggests a cooler change coming through tonight.

*Yet Another Christmas Day.

I invested two days of the holiday season learning how to build / repair a website.

I’ve sort of done it before.  This blog, for example, was inspired by reading Dave Winer’s blog, and then learning how to set up a site from scratch. I know enough to be dangerous – as in, I’ll probably take the site out – but not enough that it could be a side hustle.

So when the opportunity arose to resuscitate the community radio station’s rather unhealthy and slow website, I decided to jump in, do it and learn while at it. If something broke, I’d beg forgiveness and ask the professional who manages the website to restore it.

Watching a generous two hour video by Tyler Moore while waiting for my doctor’s appointment yesterday morning was how I started it. Learnt enough – or remembered enough – to deactivate all the plug-ins on the site that had made the exercise a painfully slow process the evening before.

I pretty quickly figured out how the various pages hung together in the theme that’s used as default, the menus and sub-menus, the widgets that brought things together, and some of the quirky pages that were hobbled together.   I rearranged the pages, made them a little more consistent in appearance, brought together things that should be, and removed things that didn’t need to be. I learnt how to use Elementor and it’s various options as I was building or rearranging the site.

I learnt also how to set up and embed an online payment option on the site so membership and donations can start to flow in quicker than by post (not a joke!).

None of my volunteer colleagues on the Board have the skills, or the inclination to do what I did in two days. I’m by no means an expert – or want to be – and yet, in two days I’ve built enough skills to talk to the webmaster to communicate the intent of the radio station. I know enough about this now to know why it takes time, & where the bullshit starts with costs.

Taking the initiative means I get to do the work (or I have to do the work, as many would describe it). I get to walk the talk, not merely posture or wave hands in frustration or anger.  The skills I’ve built are transferable, and they will certainly be. I have come to realise that I love being the generalist – jack of many trades and master of a very few – and it is where I play the strongest.

 

The 18 days of break over Christmas & New Years started today.
The exhaustion is real – and so is the fatigue over the newest outbreak.

NSW saw 5715 cases today and the Premier and Prime Minister seem to be stuck in election cycle. Freedom for everyone, open for business was the song.  The traffic on the streets today suggests that not everyone’s buying it.  Most people are masked despite the pollies not wanting to use the ‘m’ word – mandatory. The queues for testing are getting longer, while the duration the testing centers remain open is getting shorter. Christmas is in two days and it is very likely that cases are going to hit 10K in the next week or so.

Rest and relax at home. That’s the best we can do.

And I’m learning how to build a website. So rest, relax and learn.

The Byrds sang “Turn! Turn! Turn!” the lyrics from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ecclesiastes (with music made famous I didn’t know by Pete Seeger!).

The season right now, in the part of the world I live in, is supposed to be one of celebration and gifting and food. There’s a strange feeling in the air of joy and freedom and festivities, mixed with the weight of the renewed outbreak of the omicron variant.  Let’s just get on with our lives, and deal with the effects later say our local political leaders, much to the chagrin of the health officials.  The exhaustion that medical professionals are feeling, behind the veneer of privacy for patients in hospital wards and corridors, is palpable – our several friends who work in healthcare tell us explicitly.

I saw today a lot of people unmasked while going about their day. A trivial inconvenience at best, two years of living under low level stress seemingly has made people mad at the virus, and not wearing a mask is the way of showing strength (?) at something that doesn’t care nor discriminate.

There’s an election around the corner and the politicians seem mostly interested in not letting this crisis go to waste, & feeding the collective psyche with ‘good news’.  The inability to go to hospital and be attended for something that is not covid related hurts a lot of vulnerable people who will be collateral casualties. But for the moment, ‘merry christmas’ is the only thing on our collective minds.

It’s a whole different kind of a mask we’re wearing instead of the one we need to.

 

Nearly a year into my feedreader experiment, has the friction I added to my reading workflow has done anything to my habits?

I’m feeling that I’ve read much less.

The friction – I have to click on a button to open up Feedbro – has meant I don’t click on it often. The computer I use, a work one, has restrictions on automatically opening tabs, so that option is also out for me.

With just this in place, I have 74 starred items on my list. Finding them is hard in context. They’re not available on other devices, so when I do want to share things with people (very often), I’m struggling to find out where they are so end up doing  a search and wasting far more time.

The lack of a curated list available means I am now reading stuff that is utterly banal (news media/reddit) when the opportunity to read exists.

I think it’s back to feedly for now. But in the meanwhile, I’m also keeping an eye on Matter  to integrate the other feeds.

To be continued…

 

A day of routine health tests to round out the year that is 2021.

The experience of having blood drawn out of me, although painless, always seems to be a bit more challenging every time I’ve had that done the last few times.

Today was not much different. The clinician who tried to do so this morning “struggled to find a vein”. When she did, she was able to draw only a tiny bit, so had to fish around until she filled a vial. The second vial only had air drawn into it (is that even possible? I wouldn’t have thought so if I hadn’t seen it myself) – and so tried a few more times. I’m not sure she got enough but she told me “that should be enough for this particular test” and I was out of there.  I had to do it again this afternoon, and it was the same story with a different technician at a different clinic.

I had a bunch of other tests and an appointment with the GP too. Today helped me figure out at least two of my next 100 days habits: Eating better and exercising consistently, in addition to the daily walks.

I’m going to try out some vocal exercises tonight, despite the cough. Getting back into warm-up routine and just doing it is important.

The mercury hit 35+C for two days in a row, and it has taken its toll on energy. Exhaustion brought on both by the heat and the christmas baking that I’ve been helping my wife with.

In the midst of all that, I had a hare-brained idea to fix the slow macbook pro laptop with a OS reinstall. Ha. Should have known better. It has been an exercise in patience, and I’m at the point where I want to throw it against a wall.

I need to tidy up my mental state of affairs. The cough has returned, the frustration of not getting through things is causing more angst. I’ve not done much writing – calligraphy or otherwise – and the vocal training is not even a thought at this point.  I have done little if any reading.

Tomorrow, I begin with tests, and that will start the ball rolling.

If this post sounds all over the place, it’s probably because it is. I’m okay with it. Tomorrow will be another day.

Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements are simple:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions.
4. Always Do Your Best.

Identity – another simple word that has complex implications on how we live out our lives. Reflecting on my hours long effort last night to send out that list to just 10 people because I made a promise, I recognise that success in the things that truly matter to me have come by because of living up to my word.   There are times, more often that I admit, that I don’t live up to my word for reasons beyond my control.  Yet I am trusted.  By my peers, my family, my friends.

For what it’s worth, I don’t quite know the reason for this meandering post.  Many conversations in the last few days have made me wonder about – and be grateful for – the trust that others have reposed in me.  My daughter writes about her struggle to find her identity, and I tell her often that I still am searching for mine.  I think it’s okay: we start by focusing on who we wish to become, as James Clear so well puts it in “Identity based habits”

I’m going to read through my journals over the next few days and assess the anecdotes against Ruiz’s four agreements. I’m sure there’s much that’s revealing.

I  spent the entire train trip and now a fair bit of time writing up a list of things I thought were worth sharing with my colleagues.  A day spent in the office to farewell a colleague left little time to write today so this list will have to do.

Tech Strategy/Big Ideas

Ben Thompson, Stratechery: A recent one that questions Twitter’s business model while it has a change in its CEO. I have come to the realisation that few people who work at a corporate can truly explain what the business model is, regardless of their hierarchy in the organisation.

Benedict Evans:  Browse through any of his highly opinionated presentations, and despite how much I dislike his Twitter style, I found his perspectives always challenge and expand my world.

Inspiration/Ethics in Tech

Doug Engelbart now deceased – most famously known as the inventor of the mouse, I’ve been a huge fan of his writing and ideas that still have barely been scratched – take for example this 2002 talk called “Improving our Ability to Improve”.

Aaron Swartz now deceased. Known as the Internet’s Own Boy until he died by his own hand at the age of 26, Aaron has probably had something to do with the tools you and I now use. I do regard him as  a prodigy, and maybe an idealist. I find his principled stand against the publishing industry which landed him in hot water quite inspiring. I won’t link to a single article from him but this eulogy from one of his mentors Larry Lessig, (who I should also list here but won’t) is worth a listen.

dana boyd – she writes her name in small case – is a technology & media researcher at Microsoft.  A recent article “Behind every algorithm, there be politics”

Kevin Kelly – The cofounder of WIRED magazine, KK spends much time on pursuits that I can’t even categorize – which is one reason he ranks highly in my  reading list. I discovered recently (to my total surprise) that he is also involved with the Long Now Foundation with Stewart Brand (another person will likely make it into my list soon), a veritable goldmine of long-form, long-term talks. Eric Ries ,the author of Lean Startup, was a speaker in 2019, about building a new form of Stock Exchanges in the US.  But back to Kelly, here’s a bet he had with a Luddite-loving doomsdayer 25 years ago, & it’s outcome.

Marketing Tech

Doc Searls, one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto – a series of 95 theses about the Internet worth revisiting, Searls is an advertising guru who has turned his attention to the “intention economy”. A prolific writer and speaker, his ability to synthesize (for me) complex ideas into inspiring ideals is a huge draw.

Prof Scott Galloway: A recent entrant into my reading list, I’ve beginning to see why some of my favourite authors like his discipline of writing. Here’s one about BNPL (buy now pay later companies)

Math

Numberphile YT channel – hours of fun learning about things. James Grimes hosts fun people like this one by Hannah Fry about how railway timetables are created.

3Blue1Brown: YT channel – I love Grant Sanderson’s skill in explaining complex concepts effectively- one so beautifully demonstrated when Covid started last year and a simulation

AI/ML/Visualisation

Andrew Ng (Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg) / Twitter) is inspiring, a visionary, and a brilliant explainer of all things AI & ML, their practical limitations and opportunities. His weekly newsletter The Batch is one to subscribe to, for wonderful coverage (& great dad jokes since Andrew had a baby J). Particularly so if you are considering or introducing AI/ML in your own area. Leaders particularly would do well to listen to the experience that Andrew commands. A course I’d highly recommend, even if you’re a ML/AI practitioner, is this free one title AI for everyone on Coursera, a company incidentally co-founded by Andrew Ng. It is a no-nonsense primer to the world, accessible even if you’re not a practitioner.

I started reading Jack Clark (Jack Clark (@jackclarkSF) / Twitter)’s blog ImportAI for the futuristic stories he writes in them. Inspired by real events, Jack’s imagination and writing skills are captivating, and I’ve come to appreciate both his optimism and cautions about AI.  A slightly older one but one that was vivid is in ImportAI 231 (scroll right down to the end)

Nathan Yao (Nathan Yau (@flowingdata) / Twitter) brings statistics to life and data stories through visualisations. See this one visualising age of workers and the jobs they are employed in.

Investments

Prof Aswath Damodaran (Aswath Damodaran (@AswathDamodaran) / Twitter) makes this cut in the hope that it inspires you to think about companies and valuation and your own personal investment philosophies.  He teaches his students to think, really think, about how companies are valued. I fell in love with his Talks at Google titled “The Value of Stories in Business”.  Substance over form on his website, but don’t let that stop you from digging into his lectures that he freely posts on his YouTube channel.

Observation & Attention

Rob Walker (Rob Walker (@notrobwalker) / Twitter) is the author of “The Art of Noticing”.  He was an accidental find for me when lockdowns started last year, & I found it overwhelming to deal with everything. Mediation helped of course,  as did some of the simple pleasures that Rob encouraged his design students to do long before the pandemic even began. Learning to notice has helped me have better conversations with people.  His weekly newsletter is brimful of ideas to use either for personal application, for team activities, or for simply becoming a better listener.

Authors of great sense-making help:

• Robert Fulghum. He’s had a wonderfully long & varied life and career, a fantastic eye for the world around him, & the ability to distil the quintessence from the madness. This should be  a sample enough
• Robert Caro, Working. The one book that has had the most influence on my approach to my own work.
• Call me a nerd, but I read a book titled “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler (see this review by Shane Parrish of Farnam St Blog). And in hindsight it was the first thing I should have done when I learnt how to read.
• Seth Godin’s blog.  Not everyone likes his style of writing instantly but I say persevere.  A. & I did this workshop  together at the beginning of 2020. I  rank it as one of the 3 best things I’ve done in my life, besides the woman I married, & the next on the list.
• Dr. Barbara Oakley, Learning How to Learn on Coursera.  I listen to the content of this course once every year or so (& now with my kids too) to be reminded of the gold that Dr. Barb shares. It was a proud moment for me when she accepted my invite to share her insights with us just before the Datathon in 2019, when I discovered she was holidaying in Australia. She’s also the one person on this list that I have actually met in person and grown to become friends with.