How lame am I that less than a week after canceling/deleting my Fastmail account I got them to recover it and am setting everything back up? 😂 Just love this service too much to split it up into multiple others even if they are free.
Wow Adobe co-founder John Warnock dead at 82.
Claims that Threads is opening up their web version this week.
Interesting. Brave Search has an ad-free tier for $3/month. Really like the summarizer feature they’ve got. Results pretty good so far too.
Weekly Recap - 8/19/2023
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.
Waiting for the show to start…
Taking a social media break for the weekend starting tonight. Have a great weekend all!
Once again I’m amazed at the stuff you can find on the Internet. Found the set list for a Chicago (the band) concert I went to in 1987!
Other social media sites need to copy the “leave this conversation” feature on Twitter. I don’t remember that one from the last time I was on there.
They’ve arrived! I paid for a quarterly subscription to get the red ones. Probably needed some new notebooks anyhow… (I didn’t)
Bit of a bittersweet day as I took the last of my kids’ “first day of school” pictures. Have one each year for my son from Kindergarten thru today, his senior year of HS (minus 2020 because of COVID).
Both Readwise Reader and Omnivore are truly terrible at saving webpages. Both fail regularly saving pages and I end up having to go to the website anyhow. Have given both more than a fair shake and it’s time to move on.
I hate to say this but since rejoining Twitter and not getting involved with the outrage machine I’m not seeing any of the outrage machine. This is not what I expected. I have had nothing in my timeline other than stuff I’m interested in.
Hillary Clinton being on MSNBC the night that the Georgia indictments are coming out is just delicious serendipity.
While Americans broadly support renewable energy, polls show, they are less enthusiastic about having it in their backyard. One survey from 2021 found that only 24 percent of Americans were willing to live within a mile of a solar farm; the number dropped to 17 percent for wind farms.
This is stupid and irrelevant. Most people aren’t going to be living close to something like this because they need to be in places with enough open land. Not like they’re going to plunk down a wind farm in the suburbs of some major metro.
Because it’s like 65 here and raining and feels a bit like Fall. And because I can… 🍺
At the beginning of the year I bought the domain jasonkratz.ws from namesilo.com because it was the cheapest registrar I could find for .ws domains. Just getting around to using it and it is the worst admin website I have ever used for domains bar none.
It’s official, I have canceled my Fastmail account.
My energy level is pretty low today, in part because of lack of sleep, and in part because of the amount of stress I was under last week. I’m slowly learning that it’s important to listen to that and not worry so much about the to-do list. That stuff isn’t going away.
Weekly Recap - 8/12/2023
This week I got back to blogging (yet again 😳) on micro.blog and started getting all the bits and bobs going:
- My Now page
- My omg.lol profile and now page got updated
- Started tying together my various social media stuff
I’ve got a lot of work to do but at the very least I’ve got a list of stuff I need to do. Starting to tackle the About page is next. Some theme tweaking is also in order. One thing I find odd is that nobody I follow on micro.blog who actually uses micro.blog as the blogging platform seems to use a header image on their site and none of the themes I’ve seen support that. I need to fix that; I love header images.
What I wrote
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About starting over and why I am back in a relationship with Ulysses.
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I’m tweaking how I view the week and work vs. personal time. This is about Saturday.
What I read
Spent a bunch of time reading blogs from Anna Havron and Derek Sivers.
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Part of what gave me a bit of hope in starting up this blog again was Anna’s post about being a person online, specifically this passage:
Recently, I came across an online conversation where a blogger wondered what he was even doing online; wondered if it mattered that he posted observations about his life, and took photos of his neighborhood.
Why did he bother?
Was he providing any value?
Did his web presence matter?
YES.
Yes, it does. It matters to me, because I enjoy reading what he writes and posts; it gives me a glimpse into a different life.
I see great value in sites that post personal observations. They do what novels do: they help us grow in empathy and imagination. They help us to see one another as full human beings rather than objects, roles, or labels.
Reading this was immensely helpful. Please read the rest of that piece. It has some very good thinking and guidelines about being a good person online.
Also this piece, Warning Lights, about the importance of creating a personal framework for your life. I will be spending more time studying this and thinking about it.
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I suspect many in the blogging community know who Derek Sivers is. I’ve read his stuff in the past but was intrigued about reading more about the Now page, how he uses his About page, and what the difference is after deciding to start this blog up again. Derek has done a lot in his life and has a very interesting perspective on things. Particularly interesting to me was his writing on how he approaches learning new things. Read his About page and you’ll probably find it as motivational as I did!