Excursions

This social distancing exercise takes a toll on one’s mind, it is not very easy to undergo. When we go outside and meet others, be social that is, we let our mind wander from the day to day grind. It doesn’t matter then if the “social gathering” is as regular as just at the office. People around have stories that they are keen to share.

We chat, discuss, debate, tease, prank, laugh. We brainstorm, we learn from others, we teach others. We do this all together as a group. Everything kind of stops when the group is no longer present in-person. Video and audio conferencing feel too formal.

This all can’t be healthy - it is sure to have some psychological effect. Melissa Pandika writes on Mic about the emotional toll such social distancing precautions can take.

Right now, even the simplest, purest of human gestures, the ones we crave most in times like these — a hug or squeeze of our hand, reassuring us everything will turn out okay — now carry risk.

So true. There are already reports of how this is affecting families all around the world. I am afraid the chances are people will soon get fed-up, get impatient. They might stop caring about others, become isolated within. Become indifferent.

Of course, another possibility is that this will bring immediate families even closer. I can do all that I do in a group while I am at home with family. I can decide not to isolate myself at home. I get focused hours for work and at the same time decide not to stay glued to the laptop throughout the day while working. Take the breaks that I usually take and spend that time with my family.

There is no need to wind the working day down with media consumption as I can relieve stress throughout the day when required. Look beyond the mobile, tablet and television screens. I can spend the hours I generally wasted on commutes on something productive.

Share stories. Hear from loved ones. Play with my daughter. Talk, chat, discuss, debate, tease. Laugh. Do everything I do at the office. And more.

I think I will give this possibility a chance. Distance, not isolate. May be, social distancing, physically distancing myself from the outside world, will bring me emotionally closer to my family.

Coronavirus has completely taken over all forms of media and the discussions around me. Not an hour goes by without a mention of the global pandemic. It’s not an all-out panic yet, but an increasing number of positive cases in my city has, for sure, put the people on alert.

I am avoiding unverified information that gets spread on social media and group messaging platforms. But it is difficult to stay and keep others, sane amidst the deluge of news bites that get spewed across every few minutes. It becomes tedious and tiring to focus on facts and keep enlightening people around you about the same.

It sure looks like a storm is brewing within all. I just wish that the uncertainty subsides before there are more cases of worst sides of humans on display. If not, any hope for the social solidarity that Kara Swisher, so succinctly, calls for will be lost.

In addition to social distancing, societies have often drawn on another resource to survive disasters and pandemics: social solidarity, or the interdependence between individuals and across groups. This an essential tool for combating infectious diseases and other collective threats. Solidarity motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security. It keeps us from hoarding medicine, toughing out a cold in the workplace or sending a sick child to school. It compels us to let a ship of stranded people dock in our safe harbors, to knock on our older neighbor’s door.

I am having fun getting back into Indieweb stuff — working on adding support for updates to Blotpub. This has been in works for so long, I had to get to it. I also recently added support for syndicating longer posts to Twitter and Mastodon. Always makes me relaxed.

Is there anyone who can easily find the one emoji that they do not use very often? How many of the 1500+ emojis can one possibly use? There is a limited set of emojis I use regularly. And because they are front and centre every time I open an emoji keyboard, they tend to get used even more often.

Even the way they get categorized is horrible. Which category do you think you will find a loudspeaker in? Objects, you say? What about a balloon? Now the answer to that might differ based on which platform you use. Android puts it under “Activities” while iOS puts it under Objects. Not just do the emojis vary across platforms, even the simple thing like how to categorize them varies.

I think the emojis need a better, simpler replacement. I do not think memoji is that - it calls for too much effort before one starts to use them. Maybe the whole emoji set needs a complete reset. Anyway, how many of the myriad face emojis can you correctly identify and use? Do you know how many we started with? Just two - a smiling face and a frowning face. Now that is manageable.

A quick question for the IndieWeb community here, how do you send the webmentions? Is it automated on posting? Is it part of the micropub or an independent script? Are there ready resources, scripts or tools available? I couldn’t find much on indieweb.org.

With the recent exercise of changing a few things around, I have also reset my \now page. I intend to keep it very simple going onwards - my thoughts log as a list. I know I won’t keep up with anything more complicated.

I have completed the consolidation exercise that I had planned to carry out this weekend. All the posts exist on the home page of the root domain now and is hosted by Blot. There are no sub-domains for separate posts. There is no landing page. It’s all words.

Of course, I had butterflies in my stomach before I began the whole exercise. I had posts spread across different categories. I had very specific styling done for some rarely used components of the blog posts. And I had pages.

Then I had some complex pages and posts. It was the thought of migrating this varied content that made me a bit edgy. Posts like this guide on moving to Hugo. Or this one about displaying webmentions along with posts. I had to manually migrate such posts along with the necessary styles.

I am happy overall with what I have achieved. Things are simpler now. If I have to post something, I know where it would be. Doesn’t matter what the nature of the post is. This space now supports all types. Along with the /now page reseted to begin from now.

What this also means that I have to bear with few things. I have lost webmentions to the blog sub-domain posts. I have to reset my indieweb presence, clear all caches with indieauth sites. Thankfully, not much was broken that couldn’t be fixed simple re-logins and re-configurations. I (and you) have to bear with the configured redirects to propagate through the Internet and reach all. So the old links will stay unreachable till that happens.

I have kept the Hugo site alive. It hosts the archive, something I did not want to carry along. I just restyled it to make it resemble a timeline leading back into the time. I do not wish to ever post to it again. Simplicity of maintaining and updating my website with Blot has won me over.

I am going to consolidate all my online posts at single place. I currently have posts spread across Hugo and Blot. I want to simplify this — and am extremely comfortable currently with posting to Blot. So I will eventually migrate all my posts there and make that my main and the only web presence. It will also help me get rid of all the sub-domain mess that I currently have spewed across.

This will, for sure, break a few stuff. But I am ok to live with that. I do not think I want to get into this mess ever again. All the posts need to stay in a single place. I do not want to divide them based on their types.

I know the biggest problem in the whole plan is my curious mind. Next time a new platform comes around, am sure I will get on board and sign-up for another experiment. This time, I will try to not bring it onto my domain and let it stay offline.

Anyway, no point thinking about the future. I know what I want to achieve now. And that’s the goal for this weekend.

Stand-up is an extremely difficult form of comedy — it cannot be easily mastered. There are very few who actually manage to talk sense and still make folks laugh out loud. The abundance of the streaming platforms unleashed recently has flooded the timelines with available non-heard folks doing stand-up. But very few of them are any good.

The problem is actually finding them. And I am tired of watching the same set of voices. Any recommendations?

What’s it with the UX of the apps on Android? They just don’t look clean, finished. Is it a limitation of the platform? Or the complexity of the SDK? Or it is simply the misguided belief that design is not really important for users of an “open” platform?

I recently ordered a new t-shirt and, of course, it was delivered with a pair of extra red buttons. I have never used these - most often, I simply throw them away. Who finds these useful?

I couldn’t help but remember this act from Seinfeld.

I recently finished reading Suspect by Robert Crais. I enjoyed this book, almost most of it. However it is, by no means, a great book.

The story is too formulaic. The mystery is predictable. Most of the characters are not built well. Every plot “twist” can be seen chapters ahead. Even the narration is too simplistic. It is linear with the problems introduced in a chapter and solved right in the next one. There is simply no tension.

However, the overall book is a breezy read. No part gets boring. I especially liked the parts where it was just about Scott and Maggie, the German Shepherd. I usually do not enjoy the subplots involving pets. They are overdone most often, made too dramatic. That’s not the case here. The bonding between them is developed really well. You care for both. And that’s where lies the strength of the novel. I just wish it was backed by a nice crime mystery.

I do not fathom the recent craze for folding devices. Basically, we were tired earlier of the thick phones - so we all rushed behind thinness. And the devices became larger. Now we want smaller ones, the thickness is fine again? I can never fully understand us.

I was part of a technical forum today where a question was casually floated - what is the difference between AI and ML? And I was surprised to see so many varied reactions.

This left me wondering what’s the simplest and not-too-technical way to summarize the distinction?

My 6-year old daughter casually said, “the roads are so bumpy now-a-days”. And left me wondering how old this girl thinks she is to confidently claim she remembers roads from any other age. Kids these days 🤷🏽‍♂️

The decade gone by - 2010-2019 - was the most important decade of my life.

This was the first full decade that I lived an independent life away from my parents - shaping my own life in a way. My personal life. And my professional life. I spent the decade before this one completing my education, setting things up for my life to come. But it was in this decade when I started recognizing myself. Defining myself.

I got settled into my first job. I fell in love and then married her. We moved in into a house and made it our home. We learned to live together. We purchased our first car. We decided to settle in and shifted to a new town to do just that. We found a house where we felt we could start our independent life together and purchased it.

We decided the time was right to welcome another member to our family. We were blessed with a baby girl, our little angel, and I fell in love again. She became our life. For the next years to come, every decision we took, I took was to make sure our daughter has the best life.

I grew professionally. I proved my worth and gained respect amongst colleagues. And when that started dwindling towards the end of the decade, I decided it was time to move on to a new job. By this time, I was pretty clear what I wanted out of my carrier and thankfully I found a place and a role that could provide me with that.

I identified my interests outside of work. And they have managed to provide me with the stability, the sanity in my lone times.

As I look back at the years gone by, I can’t help but think this was indeed the most important decade of my life.

If there was one common theme that defined this decade for me was the decisions, the life-altering decisions I had to make throughout the past 10 years. The decisions that would make or break my life.

And I think I have managed to come out unscathed. Bruised, scraped now and then, sure. But not marred. I feel satisfied with that.

Here’s me looking inwards at the start of the year on how the past 10 years have affected me.

the fidgety teen from 10 years back has given way to the calmer, saner, thoughtful self of today. I feel content within and that is the most important thing.

No doubt, today’s is a changed, improved me over 10-years-younger myself. But if the decade gone by was defined by the decisions, I believe it would be the balance that defines the next decade - a balance between change and stability. Exciting times!

Login to your Google account and access the activity controls.

Find the “YouTube History” section and switch off the setting. Also, make sure both the checkboxes in the section are unchecked — the first one is about the videos you watch and the second one is about the searches you make on YouTube. You do not want recommendations from either. And apparently switching the whole setting off does not disable both by default.

Click on the “Manage Activity” setting and clear all the activity. You can also consider setting it to automatically delete after every 3 months.

(And while you are at it, you should also consider pausing the location history tracking. This does not break any of the Google services.)

You can also make the “Cinema Mode” as default on your video controls. This should leave less space for related/similar videos recommendations from YouTube.

It is easy to get addicted to YouTube - unknowingly spend hours clicking through the myriad of recommendations that algorithms through at you. The experience sucks. I have been burnt many a time. So much so that I spent a month off YouTube this year. It helped.

But staying off YouTube completely is difficult. The above steps have helped me not stay glued to the app for hours. I either access the video directly (if I know what I want to watch) or browse my Subscriptions page (when I don’t know what to watch). The home page is useless without history turned on. And so are other recommendations. Trust me, you do not want them.

The season finale of The Morning Show was brilliant. Extremely powerful, and so well performed. Not just the leads, but supporting cast too. And the use of opera was brilliant. Over 10 episodes, the makers have managed to make me connect with and care for all the key characters.

Spotify has one job: make a great music player. They execute. Their app has none of these problems. It’s fast and bug-free. Spotify delights.

Even I had recently switched to Spotify. I believed Apple always nails an experience - so they would even for music listening. At least, they would do a better job than other players. But I was wrong. Spotify is far ahead, especially with playlists and recommendations. They rarely get it wrong.

As a side note, I always wonder why companies struggle while designing good music apps. It is such a simple use case, however most fail to get it right.

I started watching a couple more shows from Apple TV+, Servant and Dickinson. I have enjoyed whatever I have seen till now from both of them. 3 episodes in and I have no clue who is playing with whom in Servant. It is creepy as hell, but not disgusting. Dickinson is refreshing. A brilliant, unseen tale.

I’m pleased with the variety of shows that Apple has managed to serve in the first outing. The drama from The Morning Show. The fantasy world of See. And the scifi one of For All Mankind. And now a thriller and a comedy-drama too. Nice!

I loved the position of the lone tree overlooking the valley - seemingly wondering how the life amidst the forest down would be.

I learn that Microblogvember runs through till 6th - I intend to complete the story I’d started at the beginning of the month, but got left behind during holidays. The story about that one night in November. I am pretty excited to see where the night leaves Roy, Mary and Gina.

I was feeling a little down in the morning today, so I stayed in the bed for a little longer. As my 6 year old was leaving for her school, I wished her good bye and told her, as I regularly do, to have fun in the school.

Prompt came her reply. “I will, but you don’t. You take rest, dad. And take care!”

Sigh! I am always amused at how kids can behave way too grown up for their age at times.

I did not realise releasing Twitter handles that are not in use for long would actually be an issue. I understand Dave Winer’s point around link rot. But that exactly is the reason why people should own personal spaces and share everything that matters to them only there.

Also, while linking to something external, it preferably be a website. Because Twitter and others just rent us spaces for our thoughts on their platforms. It is too much to expect from theses businesses to not lend them ever to anyone else. Just own your space and let the lights on as long as you want.

I am sure link rot is a problem that’s not really very high on the list of issues that face these guys. Neither is the goal to be a better citizen of the larger web.

I have slowly started realizing that I still have a use for Twitter. There are some thoughts that are simply too micro or meaningless for them to exists as “posts” on my blog. I feel what exists here on my blog somehow has my name associated with it. Lot more so than what exists on my Twitter profile - it does not have that burden.

May be it is just me. May be I am overthiking this. But some posts (like a quick one line blurb) better exists on the fleeting Twitter timeline than on my website.

This feeling of aloofness towards the service might exactly be the cause of all the problems with Twitter.