Can’t seem to draw anything into focus today. I’ve tried doing so coding and can’t seem to concentrate. This normally means that I have some fiction in coming.
But for now, the computer is closed.
March 2020
Star Trek binge
Wil Wheaton said on his Facebook page recently that he’s been getting a lot of people tweeting at him to let him know that they are spending their time in self isolation watching or re-watching Star Trek.
That’s kind of inspired me so I’ve been re-watching Star Trek Voyager. So far, it’s not as uneven as I remember. But I’ve only re-watched a handful of episodes so far. However, every time I see an interesting story line start to get teased out, my wife says, “Yeah, they don’t go anywhere with that.”
But each episode I watch is pretty good in and of itself. Maybe it’s just the universe’s way of telling me to live in the moment more.
Good advice for right now.
Recenter
Today was a bit of a blur of re-watching Aladdin and talking Star Trek with the wife. Sometimes it’s good to re-center.
Wait for the wheel
Today has been a bit of a wash. I was looking at the news and that’s taken a bit out of me. But tomorrow will be better. I’m going to get back to a web development course tomorrow, so maybe we can both look forward to a slightly better design for the site.
A fresh redesign might be what we all need right now.
Glass computer
One thing about posting the output of neofetch on your blog is that you make it known to the entire world that you haven’t turned off your computer in over 60 days.
So I restarted the computer, and since I was doing that anyway, I decided it was a good idea to update it as well. It then started showing signs of giving up the ghost.
This means the urgency of getting all my configs backed up just raised a little bit. Not that I think my computer is going to randomly die, I just don’t know how many more updates it has in it.
Sites that don’t freak me out
GoodReads might be the only social media site that I actually like. It’s certainly the only one that doesn’t fill me with crushing anxiety every time I log in. While I understand that’s because you can’t link out to the screaming freak shows the news sites plug us into, I think it’s more than that.
I felt positively about goodReads before the world was literally and figurative on fire. It’s probably because unlike most of the sites that make up social media, it has something to offer me, the user. It’s not just a gapping maw to fling links into so the algorithm can drip feed it back to people with some kind of connection to me; it wants to provide me with recommendations of books.
Yes, this is not done out of the goodness of its heart. Amazon is trying to make a sale. (Remember when Amazon was just a book seller? Grandpa Millennial does!) But this transactional model feels quaint by todays standard of creating linked based Skinner Boxes to farm users for data points.
I’m a writer, so by definition I like books. Not just reading them; I like talking about books, I like thinking about books, I like book shopping, and making reading lists. GoodReads gives me tools to do all of these things, and gets out of my way and lets me use them.
While all of this seems basic, they are become novel concepts in the Year of Our Lord 2020. We should relearn them and apply them to the things we build: be direct about what you are, and make the service you provide users the core of your business.
Tuesday
Email is still a mess – never did get around to cleaning it up the other week. Haven’t been out of the house in a few days, so that’s on the docket for tomorrow as well.
We’ll play it by ear.
Current Laptop
Since I was talking about it in the last post, I thought I would post a screen grab of my current laptop’s setup.
Believe it or not, the computer still does about everything I need it to do. I was always meant to be a writing machine, which it’s handled that pretty well. Along with some scripting and web dev.
Backing things up
It’s colder in the house than I’d like, but not so cold that I’m actually going to do anything about it. My news feeds were also bothering me so I did do something about them.
Now my propensity for doing things is shot.
Today was a lot of dealing with my tooling. I managed to get some back programs to actually work and I went through the arduous process of getting all the applications on my laptop ran though my package manager. This way I can get my secondary computers as well as future computers all on the same page.
Yes, Macs are hearty things. My MacBook Air is almost six years old, and while it is running fine for now, I did kill it stone dead last year and had to nurse it back to health.
Making backups for my backups is making me happy right now so I’m going to keep chasing it.
Quite and Still
Just got groceries and watched some TV with the wife. There’s not a lot of chatter outside the house. Social Media is a different story. People are posting memes but don’t appear to be saying much of anything.
So I’ve stopped looking at Reddit and Facebook.
I’m looking forward to another lazy Sunday. Hope everything is quite for you.