Excursions

We had so much fun watching Wonka today. Loved the music and the colourful narration. The story, though predictable, was delightful, too. Plus, it made us eat scoopful of chocolate later. In times of gory, violent movies, this one was a welcome change.

I am planning to shut down Scribe. I don’t think anyone uses it (I have no way of knowing, but I have the feeling), and it is a cost that I can very well save. Fun while it lasted.

I have recently been getting rid of all the distractions - side projects, hobbies etc. - that I have no time for.

I am planning to shut down Scribe. I don’t think anyone uses it (I have no way of knowing, but I have the feeling), and it is a cost that I can very well save. Fun while it lasted.

I have recently been getting rid of all the distractions - side projects, hobbies etc. - that I have no time for.

Every morning for the past few days, I plan to sit and jot down my thoughts sometime during the day. As the evening dawns and I sign off from my work without #writing anything, the weight of unpublished thoughts pulls me down. I console myself that there’s still night to come. I would be surrounded by silence and calmness. No distractions with everyone deep asleep. The perfect conditions for me to write.

Even though, I know very well that waiting for such perfect conditions is futile. The fact that I haven’t written anything these past few days proves the point again. I can never expect to get into the flow of writing if I wait for the conditions to be exactly right.

Seth Godin has succinctly captured this thought in his book The Practice.

We do the work, whether we feel like it or not, and then, without warning, flow can arise. Flow is a symptom of the work we’re doing, not the cause of it.

I write when I sit down and write. Not when I am thinking about writing. I have identified a process that works for me. I need to stick to it.

But should I write even if I don’t feel like writing? Hadn’t I read someone recommend never to write when I am tired? What if I am tired right now? You know what? The lazy in me loves to listen to others when it suits him. I need to shut him down. I need not overcomplicate things.

I love writing. I need to write. If it means, at times, I need to force myself to stare at a blank editor with a blinking cursor, so be it. Word will flow.

Plus it stops me from feeling like shit.

As much as I love my routines, I have recently struggled to keep one. Although there are some that I regularly follow, I lack a daily routine of any sort, whether in the mornings, evenings or through the day.

I know the routines are essential, mainly to free up some mental space for the creative work. It makes sense that “regular work processes allows workers to spend less cognitive energy on recurring tasks, which can support focus and creativity for more complex tasks.” I then find it surprising that I have a complicated relationship with my routines.

I wake up, sleep at fixed times, and have a chain of habits associated with the time after and before. But nothing else sticks.

I don’t have a time blocked for focused work. Or for my hobby projects like writing. I then wind down every day feeling frustrated not having achieved what I thought I would at the start of the day.

While ruminating over these struggles in my journal, I stumbled upon a realization. I cannot follow a daily routine because I lack a work-life balance. But unlike the pre-pandemic period, it is tilted much towards #life. Because I am always working from home, I surround myself with distractions while working.

My family, my pet and their stories. The apps on my iPad and my books. My home. All pry for my attention. And I am not strong enough to fight any of that for long.

When I visited the office, I had a clear separation of what I did and worked on while at the office. At home, that separation is difficult to attain. It’s funny that this separation of space was considered important during the pandemic’s early days. The only difference is that for others, it was not to get drained by work and leave some time for life. It is not to let my home life muddle in my work life.

This has had a predominant effect on my writing. I tell myself I can do it anytime, so I don’t do it at any time. Why do I need a creative block marked in my calendar when I can read, write and think any time I want?

Unfortunately, given how lazy and prone to procrastinate I am, I do.

I have a printer, and it has moods. It decides if it wants to print what I want it to print. It doesn't when it doesn't want to. Today it was in the mood to print one page well and then had a swing to screw up all others.

And I am not strong enough to fight the mood swings of my printer.

Here's a crazy theory - OpenAI achieved Artificial General Intelligence that went on to spread chaos all around by stitching a ploy to fire the only person who can understand and cap it.

It almost succeeded, but it hadn't mastered the art of concealing happiness yet. Like the humans do 😈

Sam Altman to return as OpenAI CEO →

The move would appear to bring resolution to a roller coaster drama that began Friday when OpenAI announced that its non-profit board had voted to remove Altman.

So much drama in just five days. I am sure many secret meetings were convened, and scenarios explored.

I read 200 pages in a day yesterday, a record for me. One trigger is that I got rid of all the video streaming apps from my phone. Yes, even YouTube.

Lone on the road #stories

I am back to wasting time on YouTube. There's too much good content on this platform. Sigh! I need to re-establish my relationship with YouTube -- make the time spent not feel all wasted.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is my feel good show. Every time I feel shit, I watch an episode.

A new Switch in the house - time to find the best, must-have games for amateurs.

I came across this question that I should ask myself - "Which of your current habits is least aligned with the type of person you hope to become?"

It has to be the habit of passive reading.

I am frustrated with Feedbin's support. There's some problem with their billing which I have been behind them to fix for the past few months. Even after multiple emails, I have never received a response.

As much as I love the service, I need to move on and find an alternative now.

Reaching into the sky! #stories

Why is USB-C pencil a top news? Just Apple?

I see more and more people set up comments on their blogs recently. If it is linked to Twitter's implosion, was Twitter an alternate comment system then? But we also have reports (for example, NPR) that Twitter didn't impact traffic to the sites much. So then, what is it? Or is it just a trend? I am afraid it's the latter.

I don't have comments on my blog, and I, for now, intend to keep it that way. Email remains the preferred form of conversation for me.

Blogging is a lifeline, a connection to people and a world that might not be possible offline because of the reticence to interact and the fear doing so generates. I can’t think of a better reason to do it.

Source: Colin Walker on Blogging →

I witnessed a minor accident today that brought back memories of a similar yet contrasting incident I was part of a few years ago. A car brushed a motorbike parked at the roadside today, and the man sitting on the bike had a tumble. He cursed. The car stopped. The driver alighted. Sensing nothing as alarming, they laughed at the situation’s futility in a somewhat anticlimactic moment.

What I faced all those years back was far from ordinary, though.

On a late morning that day, I was driving my regular route to the office. There is a section with many overpasses, and they always get busy during peak office hours. A safe driver, I had held my lane and stayed there. I don’t usually drive fast, and I wasn’t even that day.

And out of nowhere, a forward jerk and a crashing sound warned me something had bumped into my car from behind. I peeked into the rare view mirror and saw a man in the middle of the road, a motorcycle lying a few meters away. People crowded around him, some picking him up and others doing the same to his bike.

Like a good samaritan and fearing the worst, I parked my car to the side and strode, worried into the crowd that had ballooned to almost fifty.

A scruffy guy in his early twenties was standing at the centre, multiple people checking him for injuries. I was relieved to see him standing, moving, shaking himself off the dirt. At least my worst fears were unfounded.

And then, out of the crowd came a question that jolted me, “Kisne thoka isko?” - who hit him? Right away, I knew things could soon get worse than anticipated. I was rushing for answers, justifications, and truths for the bulging crowd on why I wasn’t at fault.

Someone touched my shoulder and said, “In bhaisaab ka gaadi hain”. It is this man’s car.

I knew my justifications wouldn’t work with this crowd. They wouldn’t even give me a chance to tell the truth. A guy walked towards the sweating me. I fumbled, searching for the right first word. But before I could utter anything, I heard a voice. “Mera galti tha. It was my mistake. I was driving fast, lost control of the bike and crashed into the back of this person’s car. It wasn’t his mistake.”

I heard a few audible sighs. The voice of a man who has just been in an accident and his admission of the mistake made the crowd lose all interest.

As the gathering started to dwindle, I breathed a sigh of relief. I walked to the guy and asked him if he was okay. I offered to take him to the hospital if he was hurt. He declined. Though scuffed at a lot of places, he was okay overall.

Strangely, a few people left were getting restless again and hurling enquiries at the guy. I felt a hand on my shoulder. A man in his fifties leaned and whispered, “Saheb tumhi nigha ata. You should leave now, sir. You shouldn’t have stopped at all. Things could have gotten so out of hand.”

Though I was stunned at that moment by the heartlessness of this stranger’s advice, deep down, I knew his remark had some merit.

In a world constantly on the verge of annoyance and hostility, was staying back when I knew everything was fine a mistake? I didn’t have the courage that day to find the answer. After all, #life had to happen.

Dan Moren starts his experience with iCloud this way.

Your data is in sync across all your devices, changes update immediately, and you never get a single error message.

It has never been my experience with iCloud - sync takes ages in the always-connected cloud world of today. Especially when I compare it with Dropbox and Google Cloud, the services that I use.

I am a big, big fan of Dropbox. The service has got the perfect balance of functionality and performance. Everything just works.

People get #mastodon wrong. The power of this platform lies in its decentralized nature. If you ignore the purpose of instances and look at it as part of the address to reach a handle, you will only see the messiness.

Adapt to the decentralized nature, and find the community, represented by the instance, that you most resonate with. And stick with it. Make it your home first, and know the nearest neighbours. Once and only when you have done that, visit the surrounding communities.

I look at some of the posts in my drafts and I can barely remember when (or if) I wrote them. They sound so unlike me. Did I copy the snippets as a reference but forgot to note the source? Or did I actually write them? Eventually, I don't post. I need a better system for Drafts.

Just because I saw the name floating around, I signed up to try our Kagi search. I don't know if I expect anything to change with my searching habit. Or if this will stick. I just want to be aware first-hand.

I have always disliked the apps that provide you with a 15-minute summary of the books, usually non-fiction books. Such services are reviewed well and people seem to be paying for them. For example, Blinkist. Here’s whom this service claims to be built for.

Perfect for curious people who love to learn, busy people who don’t have time to read, and even people who aren’t into reading.

I don’t get this. What’s the fun in listening to a 15-minute summary of books? Even podcasts, they claim?

It’s okay to not be into reading books. One isn’t really missing anything if they don’t read books – the information will find its way to reach them. Why, then, the farce of reading books through summaries?

With the rise of ChatGPT and likes, services now don’t even want people to read articles on the web. For example, the latest update for Arc browser launched a new feature called 5-second preview where one can “press Shift and hover over any link to generate a summary of the webpage, without a single click”. This is not good as it can potentially kill people’s (already dwindling) interest in visiting other websites.

Why are we so against any form of reading in the original voice?