Category: I84D

An emoticon smile of a post

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Dear Friends,

Your blog is your avatar, not in the one-dimensional sense of a profile pic, but in the original sense of a god made flesh in terrestrial form, in the sense of Ultima IV, where your own ethics determined the outcome by presenting you dilemma’s with short and longterm consequences attached to your choices. Your blog is your avatar, a full representation of yourself, made manifest online in HTML texts. Whether you want it to be or not. Time makes it unavoidable.

— Ton Zijlstra 

He’s not wrong.

Ton’s post is a response to one Om Malik wrote titled Write like a human. The main takeaway is this: 

Be real. Write like a person. That is how your words will be unique because only you can be you.

Your writing should reflect your thinking. You don’t need to become someone else. You have to look no further than inwards to find your words and your writing style.

Your writing should have the same compassion you have when you speak and communicate with those you love and respect. Compassion always translates into civility. It shows that you care.

Which brings me to my humble site. I started “posting” in 1991 at university. By “posting” I mean status updates on my finger .plan file. Sadly I never backed it up, but little of my digital life back then still exists. With some CompuServe and other cobweb-y bits in the interim, my first real web site was on the @HOME service one of the Detroit Metro cable providers offered before they and their successor were gobbled up by Komcast. I moved to DreamHost in 2004 (!) and have been there ever since — for a while with some 10 different web sites all dedicated to a different interest of mine.

Last year I made an ill-advised upgrade to this site and lost most of the old posts. Well, they still exist in a backup. But restoring that backup has proved problematic. Next rainy weekend, other things permitting, maybe I’ll restore those old posts.

All this to say that I strongly recommend everyone have their own web presence that is a reflection of themselves, their avatar, as Ton said. My site is like someone who entered the Witness Protection program or is an undercover spy. I kind of like that, but its not a good representation of me now.

Regards,

Paul

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“We tell ourselves that we need the right setup before we finally buckle down and get serious. Or we tell ourselves that some vacation or time alone will be good for a relationship or an ailment. This is self-deceit at its finest.

It’s far better that we become pragmatic and adaptable—able to do what we need to do anywhere, anytime. The place to do your work, to live the good life, is here.”

— Excerpt From: Ryan Holiday. “The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.” | Bookshop.org | IndieBound.org | WorldCat.

Dear Friends,

This weekend I both fully embraced and completely rejected Ryan’s quoted admonition. It was a beautiful weekend here, and a tax-free weekend to boot. Tennessee allowed a bunch of item categories related to back to school to go sans sales tax (VAT for the non-U.S. readers). I took full advantage to improve my workspace for work as well as to prep for my impending return to collegiate life (I’m going back to finish my degree; more on that later).

My workspace is a cobbled together collection of my travel gear, 90’s era power strips, cardboard boxes, yogurt crocks, and broken bits of tech pressed into service with what functions still work or as stands for other, functioning kit. It all somehow worked for the first few months of quarantine. Going into month #5, it is all showing its age and ramshackle-ness. Thus, replacement! The new kit is geared toward working in-place but still augments my travel gear for the day I return to my road warrior ways. I can’t wait to show pictures once the new stuff is engaged.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been more intentionally productive over the last several weeks while relying on my jury-rigged workspace. Sure, I planned and sketched out what kit bits I’d need come the tax holiday, but I didn’t stop doing things or put anything on hold waiting for it all to come. For example, the monitors in the picture were oriented landscape – like most are. I read an article where Bhalla Kunal switched to portrait mode for his writing setup with pleasing results. Some desk cleaning and 90º rotations later and I have to say I am pleased as well. I don’t need to pivot my head to see the far edges of the screens, it’s far easier to read documents – which I do a lot, I can see my window much better, and it’s helping with my focus though I’m not sure why I think that.

If all goes well I will post post-workspace-upgrade pics with some exposition in the coming days. Enjoy!

p.s. – if anyone really wants to know the details of my current, pre-workspace-upgrade kit please do let me know. I’m not sure why one might want that, but everyone is on their own journey and this I am keen to find out.

Regards,

Paul

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Events in the News, be they Coronavirus or Black Lives Matter or unidentified federal agents running amok in Portland or … well, you get the idea … they overwhelm me. Little is within my control, and thus I choose to refocus my attention and energy to what is. Today’s Daily Stoic entry sums it up for me nicely:

“It can be so easy to get distracted by, even consumed by, horrible news from all over the world. The proper response of the Stoic to these events is not to not care, but mindless, meaningless sympathy does very little either (and comes at the cost of one’s own serenity, in most cases). If there is something you can actually do to help these suffering people, then, yes, the disturbing news (and your reaction to it) has relevance to your reasoned choice.”

Excerpt From: Ryan Holiday. “The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.” [Emphasis is mine.]

The “mindless, meaningless sympathy” section can be a post all on its own, one that I’ve been drafting in my head for years. Until that post comes to this site, keep in mind the conclusion to Holiday’s entry:

“If emoting is the end of your participation, then you ought to get back to your own individual duty—to yourself, to your family, to your country.”

Those three right there are more than enough to fill one’s day and consume one’s energy and focus.

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Gull on a Spar

I’m a gull on a spar —so much sea,
so little far

this perch is so unsteady
I wonder what my bearings are

the roll and sway and pitch,
the other gull-calls I am hearing

as ship slides into ditch of trough,
this captain must be drunk the way he’s steering

or the helmsman is asleep, his compass eye is off,
the sluggish rudder’s answer is as drawn-out as a stutter

and I’m clinging to this spar like a baby to its mother
as the sun is going down wind screams or it is singing

the moon is coming up …—the image in that mirror,
is that me or is that other?

Jim Culleny
6/24/20

Via 3 Quarks Daily

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Sushi tacos:

“Sushi tacos” sounds like something you’d only find far, far away from Japan. It’s the sort of thing you expect to find at a strange, independent fusion cafe run by a guy who’s never had the opportunity to eat authentic Japanese food, or that your semi-Japanophile college buddy would press together out of two half-eaten sets of leftovers since his palate isn’t fully adapted to Japanese flavors yet.

But as it turns out, you can get sushi tacos in Japan right now, and at one of the country’s largest kaitenzushi (conveyor belt sushi) chains, Sushiro.

My first skeptical reaction was “how can a warm dish like tacos meet a cold dish like sushi?”

My first reaction was spot on: they don’t.

It’s a hard taco, with a crunchy tortilla shell, and inside you’ll find ground beef and pork, shredded lettuce, sliced onion, cheese, and vinegared sushi rice.

No sushi to be found other than it is delivered in a sushi restaurant.

I have eaten ceviche, fresh seafood pickled or “cooked” in citrus juice, presented in a tortilla like a taco. That is as close as I’d care to come to a sushi-taco fusion dish.

This is new:

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