The movie itself was fine: My parking lot comment was “very efficient execution of the Rocky formula.”
Jonathan Majors, on the other hand, was transfixing. You see some of what he can do in AntMan, but he was the best part of Creed III. I can’t think of the last time I was really excited by an actor. Drawn in by the performance, not for a second thinking about the performance, buying the character completely. I hope between this and the Kang stuff he just gets a boost and takes off.
Oh, nice. I put the two non-Airplay Sonos 1’s in my office, but I hate the Sonos app so much. I gave myself 30 minutes to see if I could do better and found AirConnect packages for my Synology:
I expected some futzing but it took more time to pick the right package than it did to get things working. Zero config except ticking a radio button during install. The stereo pair advertises itself normally and just works.
I had a Gameboy when they came out and have missed Tetris on that for 30 years. I liked a few of the clones like Meteos. But playing this on the Switch is the closest to the basic experience, and I don’t mind the modernizing touches.
The snow gave and the snow took away this week.
We had a winter storm here a few nights ago, so Al and I put on the YakTrax and took a walk around the neighborhood. It was beautiful.
But we also didn't get out on some morning walks because it was just too cold and windy to consider.
I wrote a pretty long post about my MOCA and Edgerouter makeover. For not a ton of money or time the house feels more competently networked than it ever has: The MOCA drops bring gig speeds to all the wireless access points, and the Edgerouter has made the PPPoE connection to CenturyLink feel much more solid than it did with the Eeros.
As I wrote I was reminded of my time in charge of Practically Networked. I would have lived off the project for weeks of tutorials and guides.
More on this down below.
I picked up Nnedi Okorafor's Remote Control. Evidently it is part of a larger collection of Afrofuturist science fiction. Based on the strength of what I've read so far, I'm going to run down the rest of the work. Here's a nice, short summary.
I took a detour into Titanfall 2 this past week, and stuck with the single player campaign to the end.
I enjoyed the whole "giant battle robot" premise, and I like the way you both play in the robot and play as a super-capable soldier/ninja thing. I get the impression the game's heart is really in the online multiplayer, and that's just not my thing.
On the game overall:
Fun, but there is a technique they invented for character motion -- wall running -- that goes from "oh, that's an interesting idea that could add some interest to the basic fps mechanic" to absurd in the form of dozens of contrived situations where you have to do assorted kinds of wall-running as what I can only think of as some sort of hazing/dexterity test.
Wall-running is basically just running up a wall then running along the wall. You can bound over to another wall. That's about it. I used it in a few firefights to drop into stealth mode, scramble along a wall, and flank enemy soldiers.
The campaign, however, is chock full of these situations where you have to use wall running in, for instance, a giant factory that makes wall-shaped slabs that hang from cranes. So you have to traverse this giant, cavernous factory with your wall-running skills. It's fine a few times, but I think every phase of the campaign involves some sort of wall-running challenge or puzzle. It gets old.
Worse, there's a contrived holo-ghost thing you can invoke to show you how to do the wall-running in tight situations, which serves to bleed some of the scenarios of a sense of urgency or drama.
Fun enough, and I played it all the way through, but I kept thinking of the 1985 travesty Gymkata.
Last year I did an inventory of all the organizational tools I use. I wrote them all down, asked myself what value I got from them, and committed to the idea that I wouldn't add a tool to the inventory without thinking about why I was doing it and what I hoped to get out of it.
That practice has helped in a few ways: One, just the thought of writing down some notes on something is usually enough to get me to realize I just wanted something to play with. Two, I have notes to go back to when I've found a frustration with something to help me remember what problem it was supposed to help me solve (lest I throw out the baby with the bathwater).
This past week I got into a tussle with an app, and after chasing it around a few times I got frustrated and asked myself "why are you even using this thing?"
When I couldn't find it in my notes I realized it was just one of those things I had a license for and started using without thinking about it much. I wanted to play around with it, I guess. Knowing I hadn't picked it up for any particular purpose made it easier to just set it aside.
I am giving TickTick a spin, though.
In the process of using Obsidian to track a lot of todos and tasks using its kanban view, I realized I really don't like Obsidian's phone experience. It's fine for pecking in notes, and I guess you could use it for Markdown todos, but it feels fussy and delicate.
I have also wanted to add some sort of habit tracking. That's something else Obsidian can do, but I've been down a similar path with Emacs and other "could do it" apps over the years, and I never like the experience.
So I looked around and came across TickTick, which does normal todos and habit tracking, and sort of blends them together in some views. It does the whole "do this on an interval" scheduling I really appreciated from Sciral Consistency for habits, and it has a nice journal popup when you complete one for the day. It also has pomodoros.
I think it might be in danger of trying to do too much: There's a note feature I keep glimpsing and I am not sure how it fits in. But it also presents a very clean and basic list, has tons of keyboard shortcuts, and is available as native apps for everything I use.
In the best world possible I'd just be using Apple's built-in Reminders, but it is not great ergonomically.
A little down this week. The snow made it hard to get out and do the brisk daily walk I like to get in, and that always effects my mood (and sleep).
On the other hand, I had a lot of fun with my networking makeover. I've written a few times here about play and rest over the past couple of months, and this is connected.
Fine-tuning a home network is a kind of play. It was fun to learn how to do a few new things (like work with coax cables, configure a more complex router, or re-learn how to automate things I'd done differently in the past). It's a low stakes kind of thing to do and you get some benefit in the form of stuff working better and faster.
So, you know, okay.
Night Snow Walk, 2023-02-22
Lents, Portland, OR
#photography #pdxtst #monochrome #fujifilm #lents #pdx #portland
Another small “thanks, past me” moment:
I was struggling with an app that replaces a decent/uninspiring macOS/iOS app. I asked “when did you decide to use this & what problem were you trying to solve?”
Because I did a thorough Digital Minimalism-inspired inventory about a year ago & have mostly kept maintaining it, I had notes about this class of tool.
Answer: I just decided to try it out & it stuck, but it wasn’t solving any unique problem. So into the trash and life is simpler.
Two things I am grateful for:
8 years ago I used my office allowance from The Foundation We Will Not Name to buy a 72" Jarvis desk & I mean to be buried with it.
After years of wrecking my back with office chairs I used my pandemic office allowance to buy a HÅG Capisco. It is oddly shaped but allows for a lot of positions while still feeling solid & planted.
Grateful because I paid some attention during a phase of “just work on the sofa” & remembered some things just need a good desk.
Whenever I’m going over why 1999 was an amazing, awesome year for movies I miss Ghost Dog because I didn’t see it in theaters that year. Whenever I’m reminded it was part of the class of ‘99, I will endeavor to correct that mistake. I love it so much. Time for a rewatch.
One false start, but I’ve got the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter in place with my CenturyLink connection and it seems fine. I can put the CL modem on a shelf, anyhow.
I did have to make one config change to enable hardware offloading:
That took me from ~350Mbps to my actual promised speed of ~940Mbps.
I took a few pictures every morning this week. It was pretty cold all week long, and we spent more time moving than looking around, but one morning in particular was gorgeous. There was frost on everything as we entered the floodplain natural area. The sun began to peek through a little as we walked, and by the time we came back the same way ten minutes later, the frost was disappearing.
I'm beginning to think I need to just do a photo safari somewhere soon. There's always something to see in the neighborhood and on the familiar routes, but I could do for more people and motion and new things.
We published the weblog.lol quick start guide this week. It is satisfying to see it in the world. I wrote about it a little on my main blog:
My favorite writing during my time on LinuxToday, LinuxPlanet, and Practically Networked all involved writing howtos and little tutorials, and my biggest contribution to the Puppet docs was a getting started guide on Hiera. It took months to learn enough Puppet to learn enough Hiera to explain it credibly, and it was all fun.
I enjoy learning how something works then writing that down with an eye to helping other people along, and it turns out that’s a useful skill to have for everything from telling people what that button does when you click it to explaining and directing an organizational design change for a 200-person R&D organization.
When I get the "what's your super power" interview question, I don't mention writing enough.
I remember the first time I ever got 3,000 words into a piece of writing I started meaning to change everyone's mind, then abandoned not because everybody else was right (they still weren't) but because I was wrong.
At first I felt something like chagrin and frustration, but then I realized I'd actually learned a lot and was thinking about the problem in such a way that I could become right. And did. And wrote another 3,000 words about that and got to be victorious.
Once I got over some profound hangups about writing in college it became something I could do well both in terms of the quality of the writing, and in terms of the mental staying power it requires.
One of my philosophy professors had a finals system that involved getting three essay questions on Monday for which you could prepare for Friday's final. You could come and take the allotted two hours to write one essay by hand on the question of his choice in his classroom on Friday, or you could write all three that week and just hand him the one he asked for. I preferred to just write the three.
It's a fine line being a writer in a non-writing world, or working among people who don't value it. You can end up being That Guy if you don't watch it. But even if you never send a single essay-length email or write an epic RFC, the time spent writing about whatever the non-writers are going to force you to talk through or "write about" in a terse email thread and keeping it to yourself is valuable. You may not be That Guy for carpet-bombing everyone with words, but you can be That Guy for the much better distinction of having infuriatingly thought the goddamn problem through better than anyone else.
I'm glad writing is something I can "just do."
I seem to have abandoned Shards of Earth. More books came in from the library and I got distracted. So I seem to be reading five things and nothing because each of them got a chapter or two.
I downloaded Quake for the PS4 on a whim. I remember when Quake came out partly because it was a "big" download for the time and my DSL installer insisted it was an excellent test of download speeds for that reason. But also because it seemed so smooth and polished and the graphics seemed so awesome.
Okay.
But that caused me to wonder about the Doom remake, so I downloaded that thinking I'd play for a bit and set it aside.
I had a roommate at Fort Bragg who got super into Doom in its PS1 incarnation, and that got weird. He became insistent the game had "a message" that he was going to decipher because it contained "wisdom" of a kind he could not specify but was sure was there. That made it hard for me to really want to have much to do with Doom, because my strongest association with the game has nothing to do with the actual game -- just the weird, religious glow in my roommate's eyes as he talked about The Message and its Wisdom.
I have not picked up on any such thing, but I have put some hours into it.
One particular platforming sequence infuriated me so badly that I wouldn't put the controller down and walk away until I got it right. There have been a few progressive challenges like that along the way, and now I guess I'm just sort of into Doom because I am able to eventually get through whatever kills me 79 times first.
What a disjointed, weird week. I want to write about my job search and general life organization in some sort of long-form "here's a way to do some things in Obsidian that could be a job search or could be anything" but I wasn't doing much of that this week.
I think it had to do with my health stuff, which continues to trend positively, but which caused some quiet part of me to say "you should take a breather, onboard this new situation, and get back in the game when it feels fully metabolized."
I also poked at a few Obsidian plugins to help with organizational stuff and came across two things:
I'm not going to complain. It's amateur open source from people who scratch an itch and move on -- maybe those two are passionate Evernote influencers by now -- but the projects I prize the most are the ones that do some curation of third-party content.
The difference between Drupal and Joomla back in the day, for instance, was the difference between knowing third-party content had been vetted and security tested or simply tossed on the sidewalk for anyone to eat. Joomla's lousy policies ended up keeping me up until two in the morning running down the source of a botnet on a client's sites.
So nothing new there.
Better this week than last. I moved to full doses of my medication this week after two weeks of gradual onboarding. That's meant my symptoms have improved some, and the relevant metrics are all moving into an acceptable zone.
That's balanced out a little by job search stuff. It is very quiet out there.
But overall ... feeling good.
Coffee Walk, 2023-02-16
Foster Road Floodplain
Lents, Portland, Oregon
#SpringwaterCorridor #Lents #pdx #portland #photography #fujifilm
Streetpass for Firefox is kinda cool: As you visit sites with Mastodon verification links, it collects them and lights up its widget.
This is a nice workflow for Alfred. It indexes all your Sublime projects for quick opening with st #{project}:
This wasn't a great week for taking pictures. I got out a few times and have a few exposures waiting to be processed, but nothing really inspired me.
I've been here before and I've learned that the best thing to do is not think about it much. The weather hasn't changed a ton lately, I haven't had many changes of scenery, so it makes sense that here we are in February and I'm not feeling inspired.
Most of my writing time this week went to working on a quick start guide for weblog.lol. It's meant to help people who are new to omg.lol and maybe somewhat new to blogging get from a blank page to something they can personalize and customize a little.
It was pretty easy to get into a flow state with the writing, and I enjoyed the work of doing a thing, writing it down, doing a thing, writing it down. I used to write a lot of tutorials and howtos and it was always a nice mental space to be in.
Next up will be some documentation about weblog.lol's git-based publishing workflow, then on to the general reference.
Still working through Shards of Earth. I spent more time playing video games this week than reading.
In fact ...
I got a new-to-me Playstation 4 and was immediately blown away at how much stuff there is in the online store for very little money. As a pretty devoted casual, I went in just wanting to grab a few arcade games and get a little better experience on the big screen than a Switch can manage.
I found Elite Dangerous, based on the original 8-bit Elite from the '80s, and love it so much. It captures the look and mechanics of the original but adds some welcome depth and detail. Al noted how slow a game it seems to be -- the way you spend a lot of time just going between places -- and I realized how much I enjoyed that part of it. There's always stuff to do, but it happens at this pace that feels rare. A few times I found myself reaching for something to read while I traversed a system. When I took little 30-minute gaming breaks that was usually enough to do one mission of some kind.
Pretty steady state here. I've hit some sort of groove with tracking what I need to do, making sure I do it, etc. I have days where it takes a little work to make myself bear down and do a thing, but I feel very on top of everything.
I have moments where I think about fiddling with Things or OmniFocus or something, but I think about all the clicking and arranging and organizing, and then I look at the Markdown-based boards I'm maintaining and how well they're working for me as simple as they are, and I set the idea aside.
Good.
I mentioned last week that I got some health news. This week was a lot about the continuing adjustments that requires. Things are going okay there. I'm not ready to talk about it in a ton of detail, but:
Something I've always sort of liked about myself and how I come at the world is my capacity for acceptance. I didn't like the news -- to the extent it was given I had some inkling -- but with it has come some changes, and some medication that is helping things I thought were just age catching up to me that were not after all. My sleep has gotten better, some annoying things have stopped being things at all, and the required lifestyle changes are pretty welcome. I'm realizing now how much I probably knew something was going on and just wasn't facing it head on.
I had a great time working on the weblog.lol documentation. It was easy to get into flow and easy to stick with a given writing sprint's objective. Some of that, I think, was benefits of addressing the health stuff I've had to deal with: Being better rested and having more energy does a lot for the ability to just sit and do a thing.
Other stuff:
A former colleague recommended me for a role at their place, and it felt great to be thought of that way. We'll see where that goes. Still wresting with how to engage the network and how to do some self-promotion. Something that's definitely come out of laying back is that when I look down my job board I can see what I'm interested in and what has gone unapplied for. So I'm more clear on what I want.
I got out more on my bike than I have in a while, rain and shine. It feels great to bike on a sunny day, but there is something about riding on a rainy day that I really love. I've got decent gear so I don't get uncomfortable and it just feels energizing.
Huh. Well, the CG became more distracting than Tom Cruise.
Subscription service for Apple devices where you’re entitled to two of:
… on hand at any given time.
Or just get us to pro iPhones as smart streaming cores for dumb tablets and dumb Air-class laptops.
When I was a managing editor I’d tell people interested in switching from straight reporting to opinion columns that I’d consider it if they could pitch me 12 ideas up front, and never have fewer than four ideas ready to go thereafter. I’m remembering that because I just unsubscribed from the last of a bunch of newsletters that just … petered out. It is hard work to have a few thousand interesting words worth saying every week for years. People who do that are exceptional.
I was a managing editor in tech journalism for years & the current deluge of AI scare stories (this morning it was that AI will replace human job interviewers) is just like when “the cloud” was a new marketing hook. We need a federated ad blocker that penalizes trend reporting.
Another old favorite. I used to play Elite until dawn on a Commodore 64 in the ’80s. I thought this would be a loose adaptation but it’s clear the developers remembered the original with affection. $7.99!
Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-02-04
Mt. Scott/Arleta
Portland, OR
🎮 WipEout Omega Collection (2017)
First thing on my new (to me) PS4. I played the original to death on a PS1. Such an optimistic aesthetic.
It was really cold this week, so we didn't take many coffee walks, and I had a bunch of appointments mid-week that dampened my interest in getting out much, so I didn't take a lot of pictures. I did, however, go out to lunch on Wednesday and saw a few things around Alberta St.
I also spent some time on a "picture of the week" feature for my new Hugo blog, documented here. It was pretty fun to put that together because it leverages some workflow changes I've made using imgup and I got to take something from "clunky, semi-manual" to "mostly automated."
Also rare to catch a crow very close, but it was on the other side of a fence and I had the 35mm on the camera.
It wasn't a bad writing week. I have been pushing myself to do a few pomodoros of writing each day, whether I like where they're going or not. This week I posted a few, too:
I'm still stuck on the whole LinkedIn thing. I can feel the wheels turning but I haven't arrived anywhere yet.
I started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth, a space opera that manages high stakes and a sense of humor. He's one of my favorite authors and this has been delivering. I've look forward to it every night.
I ought to write up my job hunting board. It has been working pretty well for me. Last week I added some metadata to the notes attached to cards I use for tracking, e.g.:
---
opened: 2023-01-24
applied:
closed: 2023-01-30
closereason: Bad fit
---This week I also learned about Obsidian's data view. It lets you take metadata from individual notes and build reports around them. Here's an example of a query:
table closed, closereason
from "Kanbans/Job Notes"
sort opened desc
where closed It just goes through the listings I've applied for if they have a value in the "closed" field and lists when and why.
It offers a little more concise reporting than visually scanning down the closed column, and it has been helpful for keeping perspective on my job search.
I am feeling ... okay.
I had some medical appointments this week and learned a few things that I sort of suspected but hadn't gotten around to acknowledging or really facing. I was hoping for better, I feared worse. After a round of tests, followup tests, then more followups to assess where I'm at, I am optimistic, but it's also the first time in my life that I've come up against a limitation with my body and that is taking some getting used to.
All that activity -- repeated trips for labs, doctor and nurse visits, more nurse visits, etc. -- was draining. I don't want to say "exhausting" because I kept doing most of the stuff I needed to do and didn't feel too put upon. I was just ready to be done each day.
I spent some time this week hacking on imgup, getting it to provide a JSON endpoint for the picture of the week feature I built on Hugo. It was fun to be in that place where I understand the thing I've build and can just add a feature without a lot of fuss.
I also rediscovered Minecraft. It's a sort of psychic comfort food to set up an easy game and just go through the cycle of gathering, basic shelter, mining, agriculture, and ultimately boredom with the game. There's this moment where I don't have to worry about anything and could just sustain what I've got indefinitely, and I briefly think "ah, I've arrived." Then it's just "I guess I could try to make something cool but it is amazingly tedious to make things of any complexity, maybe it's time for Diablo or something."
Weekly update: mph.weblog.lol/2023/02
It was really cold this week, so we didn't take many coffee walks, and I had a bunch of appointments mid-week that dampened my interest in getting out much, so I didn't take a lot of pictures. I did, however, go out to lunch on Wednesday and saw a few things around Alberta St.
I also spent some time on a "picture of the week" feature for my new Hugo blog, documented here. It was pretty fun to put that together because it leverages some workflow changes I've made using imgup and I got to take something from "clunky, semi-manual" to "mostly automated."
Also rare to catch a crow very close, but it was on the other side of a fence and I had the 35mm on the camera.
It wasn't a bad writing week. I have been pushing myself to do a few pomodoros of writing each day, whether I like where they're going or not. This week I posted a few, too:
I'm still stuck on the whole LinkedIn thing. I can feel the wheels turning but I haven't arrived anywhere yet.
I started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth, a space opera that manages high stakes and a sense of humor. He's one of my favorite authors and this has been delivering. I've look forward to it every night.
I ought to write up my job hunting board. It has been working pretty well for me. Last week I added some metadata to the notes attached to cards I use for tracking, e.g.:
---
opened: 2023-01-24
applied:
closed: 2023-01-30
closereason: Bad fit
---This week I also learned about Obsidian's data view. It lets you take metadata from individual notes and build reports around them. Here's an example of a query:
table closed, closereason
from "Kanbans/Job Notes"
sort opened desc
where closed It just goes through the listings I've applied for if they have a value in the "closed" field and lists when and why.
It offers a little more concise reporting than visually scanning down the closed column, and it has been helpful for keeping perspective on my job search.
I am feeling ... okay.
I had some medical appointments this week and learned a few things that I sort of suspected but hadn't gotten around to acknowledging or really facing. I was hoping for better, I feared worse. After a round of tests, followup tests, then more followups to assess where I'm at, I am optimistic, but it's also the first time in my life that I've come up against a limitation with my body and that is taking some getting used to.
All that activity -- repeated trips for labs, doctor and nurse visits, more nurse visits, etc. -- was draining. I don't want to say "exhausting" because I kept doing most of the stuff I needed to do and didn't feel too put upon. I was just ready to be done each day.
I spent some time this week hacking on imgup, getting it to provide a JSON endpoint for the picture of the week feature I built on Hugo. It was fun to be in that place where I understand the thing I've build and can just add a feature without a lot of fuss.
I also rediscovered Minecraft. It's a sort of psychic comfort food to set up an easy game and just go through the cycle of gathering, basic shelter, mining, agriculture, and ultimately boredom with the game. There's this moment where I don't have to worry about anything and could just sustain what I've got indefinitely, and I briefly think "ah, I've arrived." Then it's just "I guess I could try to make something cool but it is amazingly tedious to make things of any complexity, maybe it's time for Diablo or something."
Coffee Walk, 2023-02-03
Foster Road, Portland, OR
