Journal entries in the last 30 days

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πŸ“… day [[2023-12-05]]
  • Forgot this tool existed. Im horrible at self hosting.
πŸ“… day [[2023-12-04]]

2023-12-04

πŸ“… day [[2023-12-03]]

2023-12-03

  • Snow. Lots of snow.

  • I fixed a long-standing bug on my site where backlinks often didn't work.

  • I also fixed up the backlinks section for each node to only include backlinking nodes once.

πŸ“… day [[2023-12-02]]

2023-12-02

πŸ“… day [[2023-12-01]]

2023-12-01

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-30]]

2023-11-30

  • Listened: [[A blast in Manhattan]]

    • First episode of [[The Santiago Boys]].
    • Really well made.
    • This first episode covers a lot of the geopolitics and general shittery of the CIA and corporations in South America.
  • Read: [[Doughnut Economics]]

    • Finished it.
    • Really good book.
    • Chapter on growth is interesting. She proposes being agnostic about [[growth]], so long as you're staying within the Doughnut. Which is fair enough, but I think the [[degrowth]] perspective would argue that it's simply not possible to stay in the Doughnut without degrowth.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-29]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-28]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-27]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-26]]
  • Beautiful start to the day thanks to [[AG]]!
    • Oncall, got paged at 9am -- not too early thankfully. And I had left the bedroom so AG could sleep through it as I hoped.
    • [[Lady Burup]] is softer than ever it seems :) I have been thinking of maybe introducing her to a loyal/earnest feline companion, be it Lord or Page, maybe short in years and happy to learn from her -- and assist? :) When I leave her alone (e.g. for going to work, or if I stay a night at AG's) I find it sad she might be lonely, and I wonder if she might be happier living also with another cat.
    • I spoke to [[Chat GPT]] in call mode and it was mindblowing again. They reacted with interest when a 'Burup' (intended for my Lady) got into our call, and to my information that it was human-feline language.
  • Thought about numbers and mindfulness.
    • Counted 89 mindful breaths using my [[binary mala]], my hands, while following to Sam Harris' daily meditation (10-11 minutes usually).
    • [[Magnetic mala]] probably should be 127 balls by default, as that's the first centered hex number which exceeds [[108]]. Incidentally is the amount of spare magnets I have after gifting a lot (gladly).
  • Some [[social coop]] work, didn't find the root cause for the issue with indexing someone reported yet but made some progress.
  • Thought of [[Richard Francis Burton]], the [[victorian scholar]].
  • [[OEIS]] has a great page on [[offsets]] which make me think hex(1) should be 1, hex(2) should be 7 -- e.g. offset for [[hex numbers]] should be 1.
    • I'll fix hex.py in my bin/ in the garden accordingly ;)
    • This will let me assert: "the hexagon which is n long on any one side contains hex(n) magnets", e.g. hex(7) = 127.

2023-11-26

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-25]]

As I deal with [[pain]], I think of my [[friends]] and the [[heart sutra]].


Gone, gone beyond!

All gone to the other shore


Gone kindly

If you have to go

[[Go kindly]]!

2023-11-25

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-24]]

Yesterday I woke up with back pain in a new place, mid-back; it got a bit worse in the evening after attending the beautiful event of [[AG]] presenting. It didn't get in the way of enjoyment but I need to keep an eye on it/take care and try to rest and recover.

...Having said that, I cleaned the bathroom and [[Lady Burup]]'s toilet and my back got a bit worse :) But I feel it still gave me energy.

Then I worked a bit more, after oncall handoff, and I got several things "out of the way" in a relatively short time. It felt great.

  • As of 23h I have moved to bed early due to increasing back pain. I think my back needs rest/inactivity.

2023-11-24

  • Read: [[Doughnut Economics]]

  • Reflecting back and seeing them published on my website, I realise my work notes each day are a little mundane.

    • I imagine most people aren't that interested to see them.
    • But, I do like the fact that they stimulate me to publish to the garden even on days where outside of work I have little time for it.
    • And I find them a helpful piece of reflection.
    • So I think I'll experiment with putting them off in links from the main journal post. So people can read them if they want, but they won't be right up in your face with visual noise.
  • Watched: [[Isle of Dogs]]

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-23]]

2023-11-23

  • Reading: [[Doughnut Economics]]

    • I like the emphasis on an economics that is distributive by design and regenerative by design.
    • Also like the occasional references to [[biomimicry]]. Not convinced yet how applicable to economics it is - but I just have a general interest in it from [[Evolutionary and adaptive systems]] days.
  • Listened: [[Hotel Bar Sessions: Late Capitalism]]

  • Today at work I:

    • Responded to a personal message from a community member.
      • We have a community and friends within it, and sometimes personal messages come via my work channels.
    • Scheduled in some things for when I'm away.
    • Did the daily inbox trawl.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-22]]

2023-11-22

  • [[Perceptions of degrowth in the European Parliament]]

    • Looks good. Only skimmed it, but they mention [[ecosocialism]] as one of the positions held.
  • Today at work I:

    • Did the daily inbox trawl.
      • A lot of the emails are automatic alerts that take up a lot of my time checking. I kind of need to see them though.
      • I wonder if there's a way of flipping it so I only see them if something has gone wrong.
      • The trouble then, though, is you don't realise if the alert itself has stopped sending.
    • Responded to questions from the team on Slack.
      • Schedule tasks/actions in as a result.
      • Either as 'unplanned' work for the day if it needed doing today.
      • Or for a future date if not urgent.
    • Quickly added a cache around a slow endpoint.
      • It was (a) meaning some automatic tests were very slow to run.
      • (b) possibly crashing the app when the tests were running.
      • I patched it quickly in on live (naughty, but needed) and now need to properly add it into the repo.
    • Tested app-to-app connection between app and WP site API as part of migration tests.
      • I always app-to-app connections and APIs. Prefer them to user interfaces :D
    • Attended team meeting.
    • Did some layout/content tweaks to our main website.
      • Fiddling around with CSS and layout is not top on my list of fun things to do. Always takes longer than you expect.
      • Some yak shaving to be done based on npm install failing. Haven't got the time to shave that yak right now.
    • Do some quick estimates of how long potential pieces of work should take.
    • Cross-posted a social post on Mastodon.
    • Kicked off a new sprint in Jira (late, as I was off on leave when it technically started).
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-21]]
  • Last day of [[vacation]]; tomorrow I go back to work.
    • My mum leaves today. It was very nice seeing her on both ends of my travel!
    • We played [[Rummy]] and had beautiful conversations. We also played with [[Lady Burup]].
  • [[done]]
    • Yesterday I paid [[bills]].
    • I pushed [[async agora]] to production, meaning anagora.org, and it's holding up quite well! I notice an improvement in speed, which I know is only partially there -- nodes load as slowly as ever on a cache miss, but the fact that the UI doesn't block on it really helps. I can start reading wikipedia or move on to a web search before the node fully loads. It just feels more responsive.

2023-11-21

  • Today at work I:

    • Did the usual inbox trawls and day planning.
      • Day planning I do with org-mode, org-agenda and org-timeline.
    • Prepped for the meetings for the day.
      • Mostly with mindmaps.
    • Did some strategic planning for next year.
      • Mindmaps and freeform writing.
    • Some rote work
      • processing incoming applications for things, updating website accordingly
      • always good to think with this stuff how processes could be streamlined
    • Minor website content change.
      • Minor change, but thinking about the UX of it is always interesting.
      • And how it affects client agreements/expectations, too.
    • Planning and assigning work for my team.
      • Bit of mindmapping combined with going through Jira.
    • Reviewing new features.
      • Code and functionality. Code review is in Github.
      • Testing I tend to build the feature branch locally.
    • Meetings.
      • Sometimes I jot things down on mindmap.
      • Somethings I record things straight into knowledge base.
      • Sometimes I log things straight into org as TODOs.
      • It's a bit haphazard to he honest. Could be improved.
    • Emailing external partners.
      • Always interesting the amount of work that goes into crafting an email to get across all the nuances of your position on something.
    • Distracting myself with Slack threads not really related to what I'm doing.
  • When I'm working, I don't log a lot in the journal, I noticed.

    • So experimenting with logging thoughts on work activities.
    • Not much detail on specifics, more reflections on activities and process.
    • I quite enjoy it so far. Useful to reflect.
  • Listened: [[Hotel Bar Sessions: Revolutionary Mathematics]]

    • So far, discussing frequentism and Bayesianism schools of thought in probability.
  • Patient privacy fears as US spy tech firm Palantir wins Β£330m NHS contract | …

    • Absolutely gutted by this. Despite all the campaigning by Foxglove and Just Treatment, fucking [[Palantir]] still awarded the contract with the NHS.
    • Makes me sick. This is not the kind of organisation our health service should be in partnership with.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-20]]
  • [[EC]]
    • Conoce a una persona que se llama [[Leo]] porque lee mucho.

2023-11-20

  • At work today I:
    • Trawled through inboxes after a week away.
    • Reviewed some code (Laravel/Vue).
    • Tested some functionality changes.
    • Made a little tweak to a WordPress component, with a lot of yak shaving to get my local environment up to speed.
    • Thought about UX of a couple of things.
    • Other general bits and bobs.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-19]]

2023-11-19

  • We had another play of [[Space Cats Fight Fascism]] today.

  • We spend a not insignificant chunk of our lives just on the upkeep of our household.

    • If it was a system, how would you describe it?
    • What are the stocks and flows? What are the processes? What system archetypes does it exhibit and what are the leverage points to make it function better?
    • I feel like ours has a few too many input flows of things and a blockage at the output which mean it gets easily cluttered.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-18]]

2023-11-18

  • Been enjoying [[Superstore]] of late.

    • Often very funny. And also plenty of digs at corporate anti-worker practices and the tactics of [[worker exploitation]]. The staff attempt [[unionisation]]. ICE detains an undocumented worker. etc.
  • We played the [[Rise Up]] board game tonight.

    • You work cooperatively as part of a movement to fight the system.
    • A lot of fun. I like the fact that they include a storytelling element to it - certain cards get you to think of an accompanying story to the system.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-17]]

2023-11-17

  • Think I might play with annotating items in my garden in a more relational way.
    • So rather than objects with properties, more like things in relationship to each other.
    • e.g. rather than annotating a podcast with a 'Series' attribute, call it 'Part of'. Let the entity at the other end of the link tell you what it is.
    • i.e. try a more [[relational ontology]]. I don't think this will have much practical technical benefit - it is more of a way of exploring a relational mindset. Ontology informs polity.
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-16]]

2023-11-16

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-15]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-14]]

2023-11-14

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-13]]

2023-11-13

  • Enjoying the [[This Machine Kills]] podcast.

    • All the episodes I've listened to have been excellent discussions on socialism and digital technologies so far.
  • Having another attempt at getting RSS feed publishing working for commonplace. This time without trying to use a tempdir, caused too many problems last time.

  • Listened: [[Kill the Ecomodernist in Your Head]]

  • Listened: [[No King But Ludd (ft. Brian Merchant)]]

  • org-roam on the mobile with Termux is going well. Using it regularly.

  • Going to start posting my daily journal/log in the stream as well. So it's a bit more discoverable/subscribeable.

  • Been reading through [[Doughnut Economics]] again. Appreciating the chapter on [[systems thinking]].

  • [[Hugo Blanco]] passed away.

  • Watching [[Captain Fantastic]]. A lot of fun. Points out the problems of American (Western) society. Is what they have in the woods any better though?

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-12]]

2023-11-12

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-10]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-09]]

2023-11-09

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-08]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-07]]

2023-11-07

  • It's quiet in the Agora right now. But I'm sure peeps will be back.

  • I basically never write code anymore for work purposes. I guess I'm OK with that right now. But I feel one day soon the pendulum will swing back from lead to coder again.

  • I'm perhaps less interested in code for code's sake these days, and more interested in the design of systems.

πŸ“… day [[2023-11-06]]
πŸ“… day [[2023-11-05]]
  • 'RICE', or Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort is a [[prioritization]] tool for project [[management]].
    • Reach: how many people with this touch within a specific [[time]] frame? collapsed:: true
      • Number of people/events per time period
    • Impact: how much will this [[change]] someone if it touches them? collapsed:: true
      • Measured between 3 and 0, where .25 is 'almost none' and 3 is 'massive'.
    • Confidence: probability of reach & impact.
    • Effort: how much [[time]] it will take each individual in the team.

2023-11-05