Busy week behind me. It was back-to-school week here and my son started his Senior year of high school. As I wrote it was bittersweet. I’m proud of him, a bit sad even now that he’ll be leaving for college next summer, and amazed at how fast the time has gone by since his first day of Kindergarten . As always, also amazed at how fast the summer has flown by. Halloween candy is out in the stores and pumpkin spice is making its comeback already. Rumor has it that the Pumpkin Spice Latte is even making its return next week.

The folks at Field Notes released a beautiful new set of notebooks called “Foiled Again” for their Fall offering and I couldn’t resist buying the quarterly subscription for a year because I really wanted the red set that came with the notebooks. I love their notebooks but they’re so beautifully crafted I never want to write in the things. Given that I now will be getting 4 shipments I might want to get over that 😂

I haven’t written about it yet but I started up an experiment to try out some new tools. I’m a tinkerer and love to fiddle with new applications and ways of working. I also feel guilty when I do thinking that I should just settle down and get work done and stop with the fiddling. This experiment is an excuse to try some new things, learn some tools I already paid for, and see if they’re helpful.

I’ve got a couple of updates on my social media use:

  • I rejoined X/Twitter during the week. I even paid for a month of Blue to experiment with it. I do not intend to keep paying but they’ve added some nice things since I tried Blue before and I want to try again. I think the people I told that I rejoined Twitter think I’m nuts. Maybe I am nuts. My intent though was to stay out of the outrage machine. Lots of bad things being said about Twitter in the tech press and by many on other websites, rightfully so. The simple truth however is it’s still the best place for news and updates for things I’m interested in. Until Threads has hashtags and search that works it is not a replacement for Twitter. Mastodon won’t be a replacement either for other reasons.
  • I am using Mastodon/social.lol again quite a bit. Yes, Mastodon won’t be a replacement for Twitter anytime soon, if ever, but there is a nice community over at social.lol that is worth engaging with. There is a lot of cross-over with the micro.blog community and a very similar ethos. I’m enjoying the time I’m spending there.

One thing I am finding though is that I really need to police my social media use. I am the type of person that has a tendency to overdo it and spend way too much time scrolling. By the end of this week I found that it was affecting my mental state and it was time to take a break so I did that this weekend.

My wife and I went to a concert today at Bennett Gordon Hall at Ravinia in Highland Park. It’s interesting seeing musicians trained in one genre (in this case classical/opera) sing in a totally different genre (jazz standards). The show was fun and some of the performers really knocked it out of the park (pun intended as Ravinia is literally a park). The ones that were good know that a performance isn’t just about singing, it’s about presence on stage. Some of them had that in spades. Great fun to watch!

What I wrote

Not much this week other than micro posts. I’ve got a few things I’m planning on writing, including about the experiment that I mentioned above.

What I read

A lot this week as I’m trying to catch up with my reading in Readwise Reader. One piece that I had in the backlog that gave me pause to think a bit was Return of the Lazy Billionaire from CJ Chilvers. Interesting piece and I don’t agree with his framing of the idea of a “second brain” as discussed in Building a Second Brain from Tiago Forte. I’ll be writing more about this later.