Excursions

I had almost decided that I would not publish anything today. My blog got unpublished as the trial ran out, and I felt frustrated that I couldn’t get help from anyone from the platform. I still am. Can I trust a platform if it can’t guarantee support and get the working of basic functionality right?

But I am not letting this #meta concern break my streak of publishing the thoughts. Life updates have to wait as I publish another meta update.

I have undone most of the configurations and have set up the redirects. Setting things up with a trial account as if it were a fully working project was a mistake. But then, I didn’t expect basic functionality like payment to fail for a paid service. International payments are hard; I am surprised the platform didn’t hit this problem earlier.

I wonder if I even want this update on my blog as I write this. When I started regularly publishing at this place, I thought the posts would be more personal. A slice of my life. But then, I had also said this space has no structure. No throughline. It contains what is at the top of my mind.

Venting my frustration about the platform is that today. So that’s what I publish. I hope things sort out before I sit down for tomorrow’s session. Another chance to set things right.

The more that text generated by large-language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.

Source - ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web →

If you read only one analysis on ChatGPT, it should be this on The New Yorker.

It’s time to shake things up, to turn the ship around. To innovate. Meta’s big, new idea: Charge people for basic support features and … a blue check mark.

Source - Why Would Anyone Pay for Facebook? →

Email really is an amazing, miraculous technology. But at the end of the day, it’s in the hands of humans who are always going to screw it up.

Source: Why Is Email Still So Terrible? →

We had guests at our home today early in the morning. Usually, I would get a lot flustered when there’s an unplanned visit. Not today, as these are the guests that I generally look forward to meeting in real #life. And the meeting we had. It started with lots of chitchats about nothing in particular. Chitchats are usually that, aren’t they?

We followed it up with a brunch, all delicacies of our choice and liking. Home delivered. A movie screening with popcorn at home. Winding the fun down with fresh mango ice cream. Everything was sprinkled throughout with lots of chatter and laughter.

I love such pleasant mornings when you meet folks you enjoy spending time with.

On the other hand, this messed up my routine thoroughly. I didn’t do anything that I had planned to do. A couple of projects have been pushed to tomorrow. Some planned study time with my daughter got delayed. I hardly spent time alone with myself as there was none left. I didn’t exercise; I screwed up my diet. I hardly read anything – the streak, alas, is broken.

Fortunately, a streak that isn’t broken yet is spending the time before bed staring at the cursor blinking in this space. That I enjoy doing, and I am glad I didn’t miss it even on a day like today of messed up routine.

I thoroughly enjoyed Vaalvi, a Marathi dark comedy thriller. I don’t remember the last time I laughed out this loud while the characters in the movie handled one serious situation after another. I wasn’t laughing at the idiocy of the film or the characters; rather, the movie wanted me to laugh. Therein lies the brilliance of this film.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it’s an intelligent film. Sure, it has moments where it leans towards absurdity. But if you recognise the tight budget for Marathi movies and ignore such rare moments, you can enjoy even the absurdity thoroughly.

I wish this movie was more readily available. Do watch the trailer – I am sure you will enjoy it.

There is a sudden rise in minimal blogging engines that claim to have simple, no-nonsense writing interfaces. I guess many developers realise there is no point in fighting the big platforms like WordPress and Ghost on the features they are pros at. Strip out everything bloggers do not want and call that a simple system. But it is difficult to be simple and still attract users – you can’t roll out the same features WordPress has, just in black and white.

As I have noted in a couple of #meta posts till now, write.as does it well. It has got a brilliant writing interface and a wonderful default reading experience. It is not minimal. It is just pleasant enough. And it is in this restrained form that it achieves simplicity and yet looks and behaves aesthetically to appeal to users.

In quest of going minimal, many systems strip out the polish off the features they provide. They look ugly. To me, it matters how the systems look. If where I write doesn’t give me a pleasant vibe, I may not visit the place that often. I am picky about the fonts in the places I read stuff at. Flaunting system default fonts is not my definition of simplicity.

A simple system is not one that makes and gives no choices. Instead, it makes bold, opinionated choices.

It was a wonderful morning today – I spent time reading and #writing a lot. Nothing public. I made a journal entry in Day One after almost a month. And read a few posts from the read-later backlog. As I browse social timelines daily, I come across many excellent articles that I push to be read later. The list, though, continues to pile up. In my read-later queue are articles going back years which I know I would never reach. But they stay there, forgotten.

I do not like this and wish I would improve on both – make private journaling and reading from my feeds & queues more regular. However, I recently found brilliant services for this.

Given my love for Day One, I was psyched to read the recent update of it being available on the web. It makes the service even more accessible. I made today’s entry from the web interface itself, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how clean the experience was. With the feature still in Beta, though, the developers have warned of the possibility of losing the data. That’s not something I would like; hence I logged off immediately. But I do see the potential.

I am enjoying using Readwise Reader (also in Beta) as my read-it-later service. It has everything I want - support for subscribing to RSS feeds and newsletters. However, the most significant benefit is its integration with Readwise (duh, of course). So my highlights from the articles are regularly presented along with those from the books on Kindle. I love the experience Reader provides and wish to use it more.

I find it funny, though, that it is not my smartphone that I enjoy doing either of these tasks. Instead, the smartphone continues to be a distraction, something to be kept feet away from myself while reading or writing. That is all.

I watched all four episodes of The Romantics today. I loved the first two that documented the early life of Yash Chopra and the Yash Raj Films. I especially enjoyed the references to the early 90’s movies – especially the music. That was also my biggest gripe with the docuseries – it just didn’t speak enough about Yash Chopra’s taste in music. And his love for lyrics.

I remember listening once to Javed Akhtar on how valuable the lyrics, the words, and the poetry was to Yash Chopra. “If music is the body of a song, lyrics are its soul,” Javed Akhtar had said. Yash Chopra understood that.

So as I got nostalgic while listening to all the songs from the yesteryears – Waqt, Kabhi Kabhi, Silsila, Chandni, Darr – play in the background, I wished the makers of The Romantics had spent a whole episode just on his appreciation and quest for good music. There are so few Indian directors left who still value music as a core identity of movies. Yash Chopra was one of them.

Somedays are frustratingly productive, leaving me drained to the core. I am that today. What started as a routine day gradually turned into a busy nightmare as it went along. The only positive is that it was productive. I did everything that I had planned to complete in the morning, and then I did some more. I also checked off a couple of unplanned but priority tasks that got added to my list.

I am not fond of such a level of productivity. Not that I don’t want to work. I love working, especially when that work involves any amount of coding. The more complicated the problem, the better I feel.

But I have found over 17 years of working that such productivity levels aren’t sustainable. They leave me exhausted, needing that much more of a downtime and cool-off period. I would prefer consistently efficient days to the occasional burst of high productivity.

That said, there is some innate pleasure in such productive days. As I wind off the day well spent today, there is a smile of satisfaction on my face. Could I push some work to tomorrow? Sure. But it becomes difficult to pull away once I am in the flow.

One would think that years of experience at work make you immune to such bouts of focus. But there is no negating the drive for productivity. Especially for someone who loves what he does. Someone like me.

It’s summer enough for a nice natural’s ice-cream. With dry fruits overloaded.

Since uninstalling YouTube from my phone, the first result that comes up as I start searching for the app (typing “yo”) is Day One. I take that as a nudge to get away from the phone. I like that! 😎

Too much is said about how AI - ChatGPT & likes - is already challenging our being. Our personhood. But AI can learn from and build over only its training data.

What makes us human is we invent our own training data. As long as we keep the bulbs in our heads flashing, we have nothing to fear.

I have always carried a clean-shaven face, yet I often want to sport a beard. Sure, I frequently keep an unkempt stubble. 2-3 days of facial hair is my look when I am not meeting someone. But if we are going out, I shave. Or if we are expecting guests at home, I shave. And if I see a tired me looking back at me in the mirror, I shave. Keeping a beard hence has not been easy for me.

I inherited this clean look from my father, who he shaves daily without a miss. That is part of his morning routine. A cup of tea can wait. I have rarely seen him with stubble, let alone a full-grown beard.

Yet, as I write this, I carry a week’s stubble on my face today. I am pretty certain that I want to grow a beard this time. There is a fad amongst men in India to keep a well-trimmed beard. And that last part makes me nervous. It is not easy to keep a beard. It takes effort to maintain it. The beard needs attention. It needs grooming. I know because I already feel itchy after a week without shaving.

I know there are oils and beard washes to help with the discomfort.

But I ask myself, why put myself through all this trouble? Why not just go with what I know and am more comfortable with? Am I ready to pay the price of experimentation on the face? Well, time to find out tomorrow.

The weekly report from Digital Wellbeing on my phone informs me that the daily average screen time was 20 minutes less than last week’s. And I am pleased to see that trend has been downwards for the last few weeks. I uninstalled YouTube from my phone a few weeks back, which is one of the key reasons for lowered usage.

YouTube sucks away time without you noticing. The best way I know to control this beast is to not be available to you. The web app is a pain enough to not be distracting. So just get rid of the app from the phone and get your time back.

It’s just February, not peak summer yet by any means. But the afternoons are already hot enough that it has started to feel like the season of Mangos isn’t far enough. Today was another warm afternoon, and we couldn’t resist the Pune special Mango Mastani from Sujata Mastani.

I sometimes hate how I read stuff online – hopping from link to link. Reading, but not letting it absorb within. To not pause and think. That’s not the way I like to do it. If what I read doesn’t make me agree, disagree or learn something new, it’s futile.

Though it sounds cheesy, I love the word play in this advertisement of Federal Bank. “Rishta Aap Se Hai, Sirf App Se Nahi”.

It’s in Hindi and I won’t even try to translate - the fun will be lost.

Seth Godin reminded me today that “no one cares about the noise in our head (or the actions we take) nearly as much as we do”. That noise kept me wary of changing a few things with my setup till today. I pulled the plug and have changed how and where I write. Thanks, Seth!

We are enjoying the walks around the neighbourhood with Snoopy. With this guy getting all the attention, it makes our evenings joyous. He is the favourite among my daughter’s friends. And they all are his best friends. He enjoys running around and walking along with them. Neither of them can get enough of the other. The goodbyes are sad; none of them wants to go back home.

They can’t even converse with him. He can’t tell them anything. Yet you would commonly hear the phrases “he is tired now”, “he wants you to run”, and “he is saying slow down” as they play along. It is heartening to see the friends unable to talk to one another yet understand each other so well.

I had another realization today. Since we started walking Snoopy, I have been a lot social in general. Not swiping, committing and liking on my smartphone. But social in real #life. I have met and talked to many old friends with whom I had lost touch. And I love talking to people.

Why couldn’t I do that when I went on my walks alone? Well, for one, I always had headphones in my ear. So the only interaction we friends had was a nod of acknowledgement. Another reason was none of us had any topic to make us pause in our steps. Now we do.

Will this continue? Who knows. But I want to enjoy these cheerful evenings as long as they last.

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much.

Source: God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter →

I can’t remember the last time I had read all the new items from Stoop and Reeder. No unread items - they both read. It felt nice - we must get some badge for that.

I do not plan to crosspost any of the posts I write here to the known social timelines. So no Micro.blog or Mastodon. And, of course, not on Twitter. I may selectively share or reference them in other places. But there is no timeline where you can follow these. What I write here is first for the audience of one - me.

That said, this blog is part of the open web, and there are still open, conventional standards that allow you to subscribe to this blog. Pick the method that works the best for you – or as many as your like.

Email: This remains an option for most, simple yet highly personal. You can get every post I write delivered to your inbox. Just enter your email address below, and you are all set.

RSS: You can also subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed through the feed reader or your choice. I suggest you give this method a try and recommend Feedbin or Feedly.

Just enter the URL of the website or the RSS feed.

It’s only been two weeks since I have written a post every night, and I already feel off if I do not sit down to write as the people around me sleep. This has been a nice routine. I feel relieved that I publish something every day. I was very close today to skipping writing. A brief moment ago, I was extremely sleepy. Then I needed to record one observation.

Even while doing nothing, walking around the house is enough to freshen me up. Putting me back in the mood to get back to the routine. And once I am in the zone, sleep doesn’t disturb me. It’s only a brief moment of weariness that I need to fend off typically. That I need to overcome it to sit down at my regular place.

And then the words start flowing.

What also helps is I have marked a corner as my #writing place. Every day, at a fixed time, I sit down and start typing on a blank page. Today, I tried writing at a place which wasn’t my regular corner. I failed. I was distracted by sounds. Or the lack of regular sounds in my corner.

The moment I returned to the writing place, the process became easier.

Being productive writing only at a particular place/time or in a particular environment isn’t sustainable. But it’s a hack that works for me and might help pull me out of the writing slump.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. ― Stephen King

I am done waiting.

I had no idea a Mercedes-Benz makes a special sound before a crash which helps “make the noise from the crash impact not nearly as harmful” to our ears. Now I Know.

That’s a smart feature. And here I was getting pleased having a few buttons aligned to the centre through CSS.