Excursions

After three weeks of bearing the beard, I shaved it off today. That act felt nothing short of tearing it apart from my face. These three weeks have elevated my respect for those who regularly sport a beard. Maintaining this beast ain’t easy. It grows willy-nilly. And twists and twirls. And bites the face. And scratches the lips. And pokes the nose.

I was done enduring all of that.

Even that wasn’t easy to do at home, either. The beard struggled with the face. The razor struggled with the beard. And I struggled with the razor. Cleaning the mess the mayhem left behind was no less than cleaning up a crime scene. It took a toll on my morale. I needed a nice warm shower to get back to my #life.

I am past my fascination for a beard.

Surprisingly, the clean-shaven me felt much less burdened, as if the beard weighed kilos. With the weight of the beard off my face, I walked more throughout the day. A nice morning walk. And a long evening stroll around the neighbourhood. I paused at a coffee lounge and sipped my coffee slowly. It felt good not to share it with my facial hair.

For a Monday, today was also unexpectedly productive. I could focus on work better. I do need to improve my way of closing tasks at hand. I like to be particular. I have my way of building a list and ticking the tasks off the list. Though it works for me, I have stopped doing it. It is time to bring out the notepad & the pen and place it on the table again.

There’s also an update on the meta concern from yesterday. Matt responded to my support request and has generously extended the trial by a week while he finds a fix for my payment issue. What that means is blog is up and running as before.

I am happy I didn’t have to give up on this beautiful writing interface. Sure, the issue isn’t resolved yet. But I hope Matt finds a solution before this trial period runs out. After all, the problem isn’t unique, and I assume it has a standard, tried-and-tested solution.

Walked across this cosy little cafe during my evening stroll. The aroma of coffee beans was simply too pure to ignore. I’ve now found another nice spot to read in silence. Yay!

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 My blog got unpublished as the trial ran out, and I felt frustrated that I couldn’t get help from anyone from the platform.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.