/reader

Programming work: I was trying to work out a feature for WordLand that isn't cooperating, having to do with the clipboard and the MediumEditor package, which does all these nice things for us with the clipboard, but it isn't willing to share custody, or perhaps more accurately we can't figure out how to. The feature I want is when you paste a URL and there's a selection, the selected text is turned into a link. A video explanation. I've burned two full sessions on this, seeking advice from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. They all pretend to know what to do, but in fact they don't. The clipboard is one of those areas of the browser that is held together with rumors and confusion, as is MediumEditor, and the intersection is rumors and confusion squared. Tomorrow I'm going to work on other things, and the day after until I have an idea for another way to approach this. I really want this feature because apparently it's supported in Slack, WordPress and other software that supports links. #

BTW, we could use a few more testers with good experience with bug reporting who use WordPress. I'm sure there are more bugs we haven't gotten reports on yet. #

I've figured out more precisely what WordLand is meant to compete with --> the tiny little text boxes of the social web. Ours is slightly bigger, and grows as your piece gets longer. Neatly arranged like the others, and all your writing flows through WordPress and RSS, where each of the TLTBs only flows into their limited and incompatible views of the social web. RSS and WordPress are a powerful distribution system. Lots of software works with those two protocols, as do many programmers, and they're both marvelously open, stable over more than twenty years each, and can't be owned by billionaires. Pretty powerful place, kind of amazing that there's so much room here, and the people are friendly. 😄#

Amazing that the tech industry hasn't tried to retrieve its reputation from the ones who are repping us in DC nowadays. Software doesn't have to treat their users like nobodies. Quite the opposite. I come from the school that says our users are the smartest most powerful people in the world and it's our privilege to create tools for them.#

One more thing. I love taking the time to craft a delicious piece of software. I have never really done that in the 50 years I've been doing this. This time I decided there's no rush. I'm going to wait until people want what I've created. We're not there yet. 😄#

Looking forward to: I sent my client a couple deliverables today so I’ll probably give myself next week off work… to write? 🤔

Stuff I did:

• 3.5 hours consulting
• 3.25 hours writing — met my goal of 3 writing sessions 😄
• 9.75 hours business development (website updates)
• reviewed two more people’s blog posts 🙌 and got three more requests for feedback! (If you’ve been thinking about asking but putting it off, hmu about January)
• went through two racks of folders and purged a bunch of papers like workbooks I’d printed off in 2020 but never filled out and random notes from workshops
• boxed up some books that I don’t look at much to clean out my bookshelf so it’s just reference books, books I haven’t read, graphic novels and art books
• managed a few health insurance issues
• more returns 😔 I wish clothes were the size they say they’ll be! Bombas gave me my money back then told me to keep the shirt??? OK 🤷‍♀️
• baked Cinnamon Maple Sourdough Apple Cobbler 👎 (too eggy! we didn’t even finish it 😔)
• cleaned up my feed reader — there are always a few feeds that stop working so I have to find the new ones — I unsubscribed from a bunch of newsletters to lighten up the load of new material in my feed reader — I’ve been feeling like I need a little break what with politics and all
• one virtual appointment
• played games with my sister — somehow we’ve been playing for almost a year? 😲 this week I learned that it might actually be useful to use the A and D keys of WASD (I am SO bad at video games 🤣) I’m hoping that controlling my character’s movement less woozily will help the mild motion sickness I get after playing for 2-3 hours 🤦‍♀️

Dinners:

• red lentil curry 👍 + brown rice + naan (naan helps with texture variety)
• chickpeas and pasta 👍(doubled it, next time I should try an even bigger batch!)
• breakfast for dinner: scrambled eggs, toast and baked beans
• Lebanese takeout — eggplant and cauliflower wrap + fries + Coke
• barley bean soup 👍 (I added kale, used diced tomatoes and white beans, added an extra cup of water and 1/2t salt — I think you could double the barley — the fresh rosemary makes it imo) + ciabatta bread
• loaded Mediterranean fries 👎 I would describe this as Mediterranean salad with sweet potato fries on top
• Mexican fusion takeout: potato quesadilla + ginger beer

Reading:

Still slogging on with pared back reading* on my phone. Eventually, my brain will adjust, surely. I’m so desperate for light reading material I even read a short story 😂

• Read the short story Lena by qntm
• Re-read Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik
• Continued reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
• Started reading The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
• Ordered used copies of Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, Collective Wisdom, and Status and Culture by W. David Marx

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

• speleological 🔦
• asyndeton
• brio (hey I remembered this one!)
• atopy
• phalanstery
• isotropic
• monad
• erethism 🎩

Choice phrases:

“What’s the real work, anyway? Is it reading? Or is learning from the reading? Is the real work what gets published by a “real” magazine, or is it getting to have that thing called a community—people who are reading and writing and thinking about similar things?” — Celine Nguyen

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.

— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Interesting stuff I watched:

This week in pop science and engineering YouTube…

• The bridge that changed the map of Europe – B1M – every time I see this (stunning) bridge I’m like, looks fake, how could it possibly have been cheaper to build across rather than go down to the valley? joke’s on me apparently it paid for itself in 3 years 😂 – would never have guessed how the deck was put in place – also the architect’s purple velvet suit 👀💜
• The hidden engineering of wildlife crossings – Practical Engineering – I love wildlife crossings and was psyched there was some stuff I didn’t know already in here (e.g. 4 types of animal crossing behaviors)
• When Neandertals became apex predators – PBS Eons – seems that humans and Neandertals had different hunting styles (we used projectiles and persistence hunting, they were ambush hunters) – what I really appreciated about this video was how much of a story we can glean from some scrape marks on really, really old bones
• 6 futuristic fishing nets – SciShow – cool but this is the sort of thing I’m super skeptical about because, like, we know tons of simple and easy ways to reduce energy and water usage yet adoption of new methods and equipment takes freaking forever
• Which planet is the closest? – CGP Grey – three minutes and yields the delightful phrase, “mostest closest”

New music I listened to:

This week I have been opening last.fm and previewing synthwave song recommendations, then listening to full albums on Bandcamp. This has been astonishingly successful, why haven’t I used last.fm for recommendations before? 🤔 Turns out all it takes to make me actually listen to new music is … switching to a new computer where my music library hasn’t been set up yet 🤣🤦‍♀️

• Timecop 1983 – Metropolis 👍
• Tonebox – Nocturn 👍
• Droid Bishop – Lost in Symmetry 👍
• Blood Rage by Nightcrawler (song) 👍
• Nightcrawler – Visionary
• Nightshop – Streetwalker 👍
• Ghosts of Chiba – Mercenary
• Gods of AI by Synthetikon (song) 👍

Website changes:

I got a Google alert that a page on my site was indexed and I was like 😒😒😒 how tho

Turns out that even if you have noindex on your page, if you have *also* blocked the googlebot crawler in your robots.txt file, then it won’t see the noindex instruction. That means if someone else’s page that is crawled/indexed (?) links to yours, Google will know the page exists but not that they aren’t supposed to index it. (If I am parsing correctly.) So, I have unblocked the googlebot crawler in my robots.txt file 🙄 (Also unblocked bingbot under the same logic.)

I finally got domain verification to work on Google Search Console so I’m going to try using the removal tool to manually remove pages that have been added since I added googlebot to my robots.txt file.

I think there's been an element of that ever since COVID.

Five days a week in the office was a chore but it set boundaries. Working from home has significant advantages for me but the one big disadvantage is that the line between work and home becomes more blurred when you don't have a specific area solely for that purpose.

In a Teams channel at work, someone mentioned PDA — I didn't know what it meant.

Pathological Demand Avoidance:

a persistent and marked resistance to 'the demands of everyday life’, which may include essential demands such as eating and sleeping as well as expected demands such as going to school or work.

It puts a name to something I've experienced for most of my life.

I just don't like being told what to do, it's why I've never liked work. No matter the role. I'll enjoy certain aspects but they are usually the parts where I have an element of control and can geek out to my heart's content. It will usually be something that I over-engineer or go to unnecessary depth on.

But normal daily "you must do this" stuff frustrates and infuriates me. It's probably why I procrastinate so badly.

I don't just procrastinate at work, I do it all the time. My family say that my favourite/most used phrase is "in a minute" — many a true word said in jest.

I delay getting out of bed or going to sleep, getting out of the bath, off the toilet, doing things for others, doing things for myself. I will actively seek distractions to justify not doing something, at least for a while longer. "I just need to do X" or "I have to finish Y" or "I need to quickly look up Z" — the distraction becomes hyperfocus and, without realising it, half an hour, an hour, or maybe more has disappeared.

This can obviously cause problems.

The more I learn and discover the more I am able to explain why I am how I am.