Excursions

Not visiting timelines was refreshing. I don’t think this experiment will stay though. Being stagnant online is not something I like. That’s what I become when I’m not reading other’s thoughts. Funny how our minds work – you give it more space, it stretches and goes to sleep.

iPhone SE is a lazy upgrade — Apple is a boring company. If there is one thing that will dent the juggernaut that is Apple, it is their tendency to play safe to cater to the majority. We need to sell in millions, so we can’t experiment too much on design. I understand the why. Consumer aren’t supposed to care.

The strategy might work in US. Apple might throw numbers to prove that SE sells well worldwide. But all they are doing is to keep a manufacturing unit running since last 2014.

India is an extremely competitive market on price and I am tired of waiting for Apple to price their low end devices well.

SE needs a better, modern design. Be bold and make one custom for smaller devices. Or stay lazy and make iPhone 12 mini your new SE. Or if that’s too premium, make iPhone 11 the new SE. But kill those bezels already.

And 64GB? Still. Seriously?

I have recently been a lot picky about the stuff I buy. Or the subscriptions I sign up for. Or the projects I undertake. I was never good at it. And I don’t claim that I have mastered the skill now. I still struggle to recognise the price that I would eventually have to pay. First look, the listed cost looks cheap. But I have started asking now, “can I pay the second price?”

The answer is usually a big no. David Cain succinctly words the reasons behind this problem of mine (the above linked essay is a must-read).

I believe this is one reason our modern lifestyles can feel a little self-defeating sometimes. In our search for fulfillment, we keep paying first prices, creating a correspondingly enormous debt of unpaid second prices. Yet the rewards of any purchase – the reason we buy it at all — stay locked up until both prices are paid.

I could also closely associate with the side effects of this problem, as David lists them. This made me acutely aware of the gravity of this pilling debt.

This scarcity feeling creates one of the major side-effects of our insurmountable second-price debt: we reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing. This stuff is attractive because it takes little effort (and we’re tired from working to pay for so many first prices) but it can eat up a ton of time, depleting the second-price budget even further.

I have been away on vacation since the last few days – I had no network I could connect to. My hotel did provide me an option to connect to Wifi, an offer that I humbly declined. As a result, I don’t remember any other visit to a beach that was this peaceful.

The guiding philosophy is “Go deeper, not wider.” Drill down for value and enrichment instead of fanning out. You turn to the wealth of options already in your house, literally and figuratively. We could call it a “Depth Year” or a “Year of Deepening” or something. In the consumer age, where it’s so easy to pick up and abandon new pursuits, I imagine this Depth Year thing really catching on, and maybe becoming a kind of rite of passage. People are already getting sick of being half-assed about things, I like to think.

Source: Go Deeper, Not Wider →

Last year, TikTokker Avery Steeves posted a video asking why no one talks about how there’s an entire generation of teenage girls who taught themselves to code HTML on Tumblr. “People are like, ‘Oh, there’s no girls in STEM,’” she says, imitating the faceless internet mob. “No, there were! They were just making pale blogs,” an emblem of the washed-out, soft-grunge aesthetic popular on the platform in 2014.

Source: How Tumblr taught young women to code →

Seriously Samsung, do you want me to still “pre-book” S22 — one you launched on 9th February — for a delivery in April first week? How do you always find new ways to botch up launches?

This year (2022) is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook. After many attempts to write this up, I’m just going to disgorge it all. This article is long and rambling and I make no apology for it.

Source: My Notebook System - ratfactor.

I don’t even know what to think of this. It is extensive and over-planned for my liking. I can’t do consistently follow through with such a system even if I wanted to. I am glad I don’t want to.

Whenever I wake my daughter up in the morning (thankfully, I don’t have to do it every day), she has this habit of pushing her face further deep into her pillow and just raising her one finger. It conveys just one more minute, Dad! It’s so adorable, and freshens me up every time she does that. And I play along as a dutiful father.

It doesn’t matter for how long she has been in the bed. She may have slept a good 10 hours of good night’s sleep, she still has her finger up when I go and wake her up. It is the sleep that she gets in the extra minute that’s dear to her.

We love this little game of ours. When I knowingly wake her up early, and she knowingly raises her finger up. When that minute is up, I act tough and pull her out of the bed. She knows I am acting. I know she knows. Both of us wear a smug smile on our faces.

Liked a thought by Noah Garfinkel →

One reason I still have trouble believing crypto currency is money is that there aren’t commercials for money.