Making lists

Dad made lists. Lots of them. I have Emacs org mode.

Making lists is part of the story I tell myself about how I’m working on the right things and getting them done.

Try writing more, you'll worry less

The past couple weeks, I’ve intentionally cut the phone out my morning routine. I was already writing a daily journal (on paper), about a page or two a day. I’ve always found that to be cathartic, as well as a good way to organize my thoughts and do some day-to-day planning. Now I’m writing two daily journals.

mornings without the phone (regaining my mind)

Believe it or not, you will be OK if you don’t use your “smart”-phone to look up everything the minute you think of it, if you don’t have it by your bed at night and you don’t turn it on for a few hours. You might even regain a less-addicted, more thoughtful “smart”-you.

Death, Taxes, and Job

Today I’m going to pay my taxes, work on updating my living will and health care power of attorney, telling others when I want doctors to pull the plug if I can’t make that decision myself.

Death and taxes. You can’t live with them, and they get you in the end.

When discussing death, taxes, and “I know I’m right, why is all this bad stuff happening to me?”, there’s no better place to turn than Job…

Generation P

I think I’m a member of “Gen-P”, the “Peter Pan” generation who grew up in the shadow of the 1953 Disney production that touted the idea that we never have to grow up.

Successful?

In http://curious.galthub.com/blog/2022-12-25/ I said

Bruce moved on from there to be VP of MSN at Microsoft for a while. Arguably a “Highly Successful Person”

Which, of course, begs (assumes, cedes) the question:

What is success?

Bruce embraced the management track. I’ve fairly consistently and actively dodged it, ironically after Bruce promoted me to my first supervisory role … managing the development of a web-page creation tool for CompuServe’s “MySpace”-like web page publishing system … from there I took a hard career turn into the security world focusing on Internet security, routers, linux/unix, etc. For me, that’s been a resounding success. Just no direct reports, budgets or Microsoft Windows, which were anti-goals for me. I’ve focused on front-line, hands-on doing.

The unnumbered habits of a questionably effective person

This is two part rant on planning with (and without) Emacs Org Mode, shoved together into one post in much the same way as Lennon-McCartney songs were shoved together from musical scraps they had laying around. My Frankenstein post will probably have less impact and reach than “A Day In The Life”, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

Mark Twain quote on cryptocurrency (via ChatGPT)

make up a mak twain quote about crypocurrency

Here is a possible quote that Mark Twain might have said about cryptocurrency:

“The only thing more elusive than the value of cryptocurrency is the person who invented it. They must be a master of misdirection, for they have managed to convince the world that a string of numbers and letters has worth.”

A poem about Pete Rose? A LATIN poem about Pete Rose? A bash script to search files and contents? Advice on investing beat the market and inflation? How to pack for a week long backpacking trip?

Why do we hack?

Why do we hack? Because we enjoy it? Because we want others to use our work? Because we get paid?

EmacsConf 2022 - Day 1

So, day 1 of EmacsConf 2022 is in the books. Another eclectic mash up of everything from the “Emacs Buddy Initiative” to a geeky dive on how to Edit live Jupyter notebook cells with Emacs (no, really, I like editing everything in browser text boxes … not!) to a serious proposal for a new economic model for software: Maintaining the Maintainers: Attribution as an Economic Model for Open Source