From the Front Door
08:01 Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 51.12°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 8.3mphWords: 352
Photo doesn't do it justice. Sun's breaking behind the hill out back, illuminating the hill in front of us, while the hills on the other side of the lake are shaded by broken clouds.
It's about the only thing that's keeping me sane.
It feels, I don't know, callous maybe, blogging about UIs and text fetishes with all the crap going down in Washington and Chicago.
I follow The Bulwark on YouTube, I'm a paying member. I can't watch every video because who has the time? And it often makes me sick. But I watched Tim Miller's video from last night's Nicole Wallace hit. He says that he thinks that someday, some of these people (ICE) will be ashamed.
Well, not really. Defensive, yes. In denial, yes. Rationalization and justification will make up a lot of their internal monologue, and external dialogue if they're ever confronted about it.
But feeling shame? Many people, mostly men, can't name their feelings. They have them, and they often act out from them, but they don't really know what they are. They lack the tools of introspection. So, they may feel shame, but they won't know that's what they're feeling. It'll be an uncomfortable feeling, and all those usually lead to a feeling they do know: Anger.
Which usually compels them to lean in on whatever is causing the discomfort.
There was a documentary, not too long ago, interviewing former Nazis, some former SS officers. Some of them were self-aware. But some were still committed. I don't know if the commitment was due to the cause (National Socialism), or just a self-protective action to rationalize their history.
But I don't think that very many of these ICE thugs will ever feel shame for what they're doing. If you're the kind of person that can do these things, then you're probably not very self-aware in the first place. They're probably just really happy to have a job that allows them to act out their anger and their fear while getting paid for it.
In America.
It's sad and frightening.
We're a very sick society.
✍️ Reply by emailUI Means "User Interface"
06:25 Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 51.4°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 6.53mph
Words: 263
Except at Apple, where it means "Palette for prima donna esthetes to manifest their superior taste and sophistication to the poor, benighted masses."
Unlike Manuel, I do complain just because things are different.
Because whenever it's different, then all the habits of use I've developed get fouled up. I stumble and waste time. The interface gets in the way of whatever it was I was trying to accomplish with no thought given to the interface because it's so familiar, it's habituated.
I used to read all the Apple corporate bloggers, Gruber, Snell, Sparky, Hackett, et al regularly. Partly because I was interested in Apple and what they were doing.
These days, I'm afraid of what Apple is doing. And I don't really want to know, because I've got enough shit to worry about.
It's a horrible company that has lost sight of what made it "different."
Most of the changes I've seen in iOS have not made anything better for the user. I can't tell how I'm doing against my brother in Quartiles anymore. The giant checkmark still seems way too large. This bullshit with the tabs Manuel mentions is spot-on and I've stumbled over that time and time again.
I may have been unfair characterizing the kinds of people who come up with these changes that don't help the user. They may not be self-superior esthetes, they may just be corporate drones struggling to justify their existence in a job increasingly at risk to replacement by AI. But if the AI respected the "U" in UI, that'd be an improvement.
✍️ Reply by emailPlainer Than Plain
06:19 Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 51.42°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 6.53mph
Words: 34
The other day I mentioned clay tablets as an alternative to "plain text" (Unicode or ASCII?).
Turns out, you can learn to write in Cuneiform.
Make a note of that.
(I crack myself up.)
✍️ Reply by emailBullshit
10:35 Tuesday, 7 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 65.95°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 8.3mph
Words: 78
For whatever it is worth, which is probably nothing, we need a new science of "public mental health."
We need a new practice of "social hygiene," to complement "personal hygiene."
We need an internet infrastructure that routes sewage away and processes it into something somewhat less toxic.
Social media is the equivalent of hundreds of people crowding into tenements with inadequate ventilation, fresh water, sanitation, and daylight.
Frustrating. It's all right before our eyes.
✍️ Reply by emailGrinding
09:01 Tuesday, 7 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 66.04°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 9.4mph
Words: 595
We got the pod (Pack-Rat container) unloaded yesterday. Two guys, took them about an hour. They even loaded some stuff in their truck and helped us move stuff down to storage. Nice guys.
They got the 700 pound workbench/toolbox into the garage. It was a bit of an ordeal pushing it over the gravel in the driveway, but they got it done.
The worst ordeal yesterday was assembling the sectional couch. The movers put it all together with no problem, but we had a small section still in storage that we decided would fit in this place. So we brought it back up with us after we dropped a bunch of stuff off at the storage unit.
We've struggled with this couch before. We removed that small piece in Florida in preparation for putting the house up for sale, and getting it apart and back together was a bear. Same problem this time, putting it back in. What I think we've learned is that the way the mechanical connections work mandates that it goes together and comes apart in a specific sequence.
Nice to know.
Now.
The second part of the ordeal was figuring out how to connect all the plugs to power. (It's a powered recliner sectional.) Fortunately, the cords are all really long. It seems like it's kind of intended to go against a wall, because it's difficult to conceal the power strip beneath one of the sections. I got it done, but had to route the cord from the strip through the frame of two of the sections, because I couldn't get the plug to fit beneath the frame. Yeesh.
I had Mitzi operate the two sections with the cord running through them to see if they would pinch or cut the cord and they all looked clear. Still bugs me. Should be okay. Probably should inspect it periodically.
Took a long break in the late afternoon. Working on getting all those cords connected had me lying on my side on the tile floor, scooting around threading the cords beneath the sections. Those plugs all fit because they're only two-prong plugs, the power strip's plug is grounded, so it was too thick to fit. Had to use a wire coat hanger to help fish them around the legs. What would we do without wire coat hangers?
Spent some time yesterday evening in the garage after I'd removed all of the framed artwork from the workbench. Took the opportunity to reorganize everything. I'm not certain that I'm finished with that effort, I've got some other tools and devices I need to put in it, but it's better than in was.
We dropped the price of the house another $10K, hoping to get some interest. It's shocking and depressing how inert the Florida real estate market is. Home sales in St Johns County are at the lowest rate since 2017, with the highest inventory ever. People are taking their houses off the market. To do what, I don't know.
I wonder how many people want to leave Florida but are stuck because of this market? We're in a marginally better position because we had a place to move into. We didn't have to sell first. But I'm stuck paying a mortgage and HOA fees on a house we don't live in anymore. It's not putting us into financial straits, but it is very depressing. I'd hoped to be saving that money for the new house, instead of just hemorrhaging it.
But, I guess it could be worse.
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailSynchronicity
06:58 Sunday, 5 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 55.24°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 6.38mph
Words: 410
Everything is connected.
I've read two blog posts in the past 24 hours that dealt with "failure." The first was by young person, the other by a guy my age.
In between, I responded to Noahie in an email. Then I read John Weiss' post.
Seems like I'm supposed to blog about failure.
With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.
Here's how I started my email to Noahie,
Success and failure are a contingent binary construct created to serve our socio-economic system, and it has intruded into our culture as well. It serves nothing but the system, which has embraced competition as its central organizing principle, rather than collaboration or cooperation.
(Feels kind of weird block-quoting myself.)
This is not a new idea, but for some reason it remains a persistent illusion. Maybe it's a category error.
Materials can "fail." People can't.
That label is assigned by a socio-economic system that we have internalized to represent some model of how the world works.
It doesn't work that way.
John Weiss' "failure," is perhaps one of poor word choice. The choice didn't "fail," it just became clear that it no longer served his needs. And when something no longer serves you, you should probably let it go.
That's not "failure."
"Success" can fail you. You learn nothing from success. Worse, you will probably learn all the wrong lessons.
People said Jimmy Carter had a "failed presidency."
He did not. He just had a presidency.
There are some people today who will tell you that Trump is having a very successful presidency. They are positively delighted to genuinely believe so.
In Buddhism, it's "non-attachment to results." In the groundhog's burrow we say, "Do your best. The rest isn't up to you." And "the rest" is as much responsible for "success" or "failure" as whatever your effort might have been.
In Taoism, I'd leave you with the parable of the Chinese farmer, since success and failure are as much due to "good fortune" and "bad fortune" as anything else.
The Stoics had a lot to say about it as well.
Yet we persist in applying "success" and "failure" labels to people and their lives because that serves "the system." Do this and succeed. Do that and fail.
Control. Influence. Manipulation. Or just lazy thinking.
It's bullshit.
Here endeth the lesson.
The beat that can be counted is not the beat.
✍️ Reply by emailA Blinding Glimpse of The Obvious
14:50 Saturday, 4 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 79.59°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 44% Wind: 3.09mph
Words: 957
I'm getting old(er), so perhaps that's why some things seem to annoy me that other people don't even seem to notice.
One way to deal with annoyances is to simply avoid them. But when they're present within a certain idea-space, or community of practice that I usually enjoy thinking and reading about, they come up constantly.
One of those annoyances is markdown and the precious authenticity and virtue of "plain text." (Unicode or ASCII? Which is "plainer"? Perhaps we should revert to clay tablets. They seem to last a long time.) I pretty much scratched that particular itch back in June.
Today's particular irritant is about note-taking and "knowledge." Specifically, the value or utility of "atomicity," another concept that promises to unlock the secrets of the universe!
"Why should you care about atomicity?"
Understanding Atomicity will help you understand the nature of knowledge. There is a lot to know about knowledge and the various methods to build and work with it. Knowledge work is a craft. You can learn it and you can train it.
Roll those sentences around in your head for a while. Let me know if you can figure out what it means.
"There is a lot to know about knowledge."
Especially the nature of knowledge! Oooh, it's giving me chills just thinking about it!
Better make a note of that!
Oy!
But that's only one of the reasons. Click through for the rest.
"Knowledge" is like "inconceivable."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm not inclined to go into a long thing about epistemology here. I lack the knowledge. I know just enough to be dangerous.
Or confused.
Probably both.
Anyway, here's my beef, apart from the hype.
Show me a particular new insight (knowledge) that came about as a result of a particular a note-taking practice. People like to talk about Niklas Luhmann and his amazing Zettelkasten. Do we remember Luhmann for some particular discovery? Insight?
I don't think so. Maybe some people do. It's possible, I suppose.
Mostly we seem to remember him for his phenomenal productivity. He produced a lot of papers, and there may be reasons for that that are unrelated to his magical Zettels. Like, he had a lot of time on his hands.
Not to pick on Luhmann, though.
If all these note-taking practices were so valuable, so effective, so useful, where are all the testimonies of the new insights, the new knowledge that these practices revealed!
Exposed.
Illuminated.
I don't know. I hang around this space a lot, and I don't recall anyone offering such an endorsement.
I don't think they exist, like rodents of unusual size.
Things like markdown and this fetish for note-taking are products (or "emergent properties") of this economic environment at this point in time. We live in an attention economy, and everyone is competing in it. Some just for the dopamine hit, others are selling something. Sascha is selling something.
Which is fine. We all have to make a living.
But, you know...
Bullshit.
Markdown, links, "the graph," and Zettelkasten. Useful things in certain roles and contexts, but elevated by means of bullshit to offering intellectual superpowers, if only you embrace the faith!
To be clear, some of these things might make you more productive. You can probably write better reports, more quickly, with well-organized notes; and links might help you keep your train of thought, or expose weaknesses in your argument, but is that "knowledge," let alone "new knowledge"?
Are we talking memorization here? Experience and familiarity with the material, the knowledge, that others created?
Sure.
By all means. Take good notes.
But "understanding the nature of knowledge"? Unless your notes are part of a study of epistemology, I don't think so.
It really helps to have a question.
What is the matrix?
I think new insights come from a lot reading and a lot of reflection. Notes might help in recall. But insight takes place somewhere inside the brain, below the level of consciousness, until it emerges, often in the act of writing.
Writing that is the result of reflection, not argument. Not having an opinion and assembling a vast array of references and links that seem to support that opinion. (If such a body of work already exists, you've not uncovered some unique insight.)
Where is the fan club for taking a walk? Why is that not promoted as the secret to "know about knowledge"?
Or taking a shower, for that matter.
It's irritating.
We can't have meaningful discussions about how we might think more productively because someone will inevitably see a business opportunity and try to monetize it, or elevate it to the status of religion, and it will then be buried by bullshit.
Read.
Reflect.
Read some more.
Reflect some more.
Write about what you think. Argue with yourself.
Reflect some more.
Write some more.
Who knows? Maybe you'll come up with an insight you hadn't had before. Something that wasn't articulated in all the material you read.
It's when the knowledge and ideas of others try to find their place in your own interiority, in your experience, that you may find something new.
Notes might help, but they're no substitute for reading, reflection and writing.
And searching for the ideal way to take notes, for the appropriate level of atomicity, for the relevant linkage, all carefully crafted in markdown is almost certainly a distraction at best, or an outright theft of your time and capacity to genuinely think.
But, the standard disclaimer applies: I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You're strongly encouraged to do your own thinking.
I'm just a grumpy old man.
✍️ Reply by emailA Walk In The Park
09:05 Saturday, 4 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 60.15°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 3.44mphWords: 1119
It's been a bit busy around here lately.
Charlie came by on Tuesday, as mentioned, and pretty much sold us on getting a Generac whole-home backup system. It would run on propane, and they don't provide the tank. So before we wrote the check for the deposit, we had to try to find a tank. Then we learned they run around $700.
During Charlie's visit, he asked if we were going to have a separate meter for the new house. It turns out that we don't have to. I'm not sure about the advantages or disadvantages of doing so. It didn't click for me right then, or we wouldn't have been so close to pulling the trigger.
If we got a generator for this house, then we'd have to get another one for the new house.
Or, we could get one generator sized to run both houses. That would push it up into the 26kW range, which is liquid-cooled and much more expensive. But probably less expensive than two smaller generators, and obviously not something we can do this year.
Sigh.
So, we're going to try to gut it out this winter. I'm going to look into having an electrician we've worked with before put a generator connection to the power panel in the utility room. These have a mechanical interlock that requires you to open the grid breaker before you close the generator breaker so you can't try to power the whole neighborhood. Bad for your generator or battery.
We're looking at something like an EcoFlow Delta Pro 3, which has 4kWh of storage and a 240v output inverter, so we could connect it to the generator connection and power 220v loads. That would allow us to run the well pump, the mini-split and the stove, along with some 110v loads like the fridge. 4kWh isn't a large amount of storage, but we could add an expansion battery for some additional power before having to recharge.
I'm betting that last year's 30-hour outage will be an outlier. There hadn't been a heavy snowfall like that in some years, so I'm guessing that nearly every weak tree or branch has been taken off the board. Not all of them by any means, but enough that the utility company won't be dealing with so many line problems and therefore power won't be out for so long.
We also had some pretty powerful thunderstorms this summer, which brought down a bunch of other marginal trees and limbs. And I don't think we experienced an outage during that episode, so that kind of reinforces the idea that the vulnerability has been diminished somewhat.
EcoFlow makes a generator that can connect to the battery for automatic recharging. That's nice, but probably not super viable for our situation. What I'm more inclined to do is buy a small generator like a Honda or something and take the battery offline for recharging outside if we need to. We can tolerate a couple of hours without backup power, and I've got some other batteries for 110v loads.
Had a bit of excitement yesterday that kind of relates to the backup power challenge.
I went to change the sediment filter on the water softener because it seemed like we were having less water pressure. Did it once before, knew the basic procedure, should have been no big deal.
Once we removed the old filter and dumped the water from the housing, we could see there was still a lot of sediment in the housing. So I went out to the garage, which has its own well connection, and rinsed out the housing. Came back in the house and put the new filter in and connected it to the system. Turned the water on and water sprayed everywhere!
Doh!
I'll spare you the other failed efforts to address the issue before I called the company that installed it.
They had to give me a call-back when the service desk was free, but it wasn't too long. Long story short, technician says to look in the bucket where we dumped the water from the housing when we removed the filter and see if the o-ring fell out.
O-ring?
Of course! The o-ring!
Nope, not in the bucket.
Kept him on the line while I went out to the garage and looked at where I'd rinsed the housing.
There was the o-ring.
He said not to feel bad, it happens all the time.
So once we got everything back online and not leaking, I wrote down a procedure, printed it and taped it to the wall next to the water softener.
We'll need the same thing for the battery.
Once we open the grid breaker, we need to open every breaker in the panel. Then we can connect the battery and power it on. It should see no load.
Then we'll close the "vital load" breakers in sequence, starting with the well pump since it probably has the highest surge current. Then the mini-split. Then the stove. Then the 110v breaker for the fridge and maybe some lighting.
The battery is only good for 4kW output, but it'll surge to 7kW for a few seconds, which should be adequate for our needs.
Anyway, still thinking about it.
Our "pod" arrived on Friday and showed up at noon, which was a much better experience than the first time. Everything survived, except a detergent container leaked. Didn't get on anything important, but required a bit of clean-up. We've offloaded about a third of it and taken some items down to storage. (No new rats sighted.)
Mitzi has sold the living room set that was in here before, to make room for our sectional couch, so we're not doing much TV-watching in the living room for the time being.
We've got a couple of movers coming on Monday to offload the heavy stuff. We'll stage the things that are going into storage in the garage until Mitzi and I can run them down there. We can do a little at a time, and all the really heavy stuff is going in the house or the garage, so it's just a matter of a lot of boxes of books and such and we can kind of do that at our own pace.
We took a walk down at Taughannock State Park yesterday, to get out of the house for a little while. Color change is well underway, though not spectacular this year. Not quite peak yet, but soon.
I guess we're headed down to a fall festival in Montour Falls this morning, so I'd better wrap this up.
The beat goes on...
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