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Life
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- PUBLISHED Self-hosted weather station
Thoughts
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Life @life

PUBLISHED Campaigning

CLOSED: [2017-10-27]

Campaigning has been a very interesting trip. The most memoroable aspect of running for select board so far has been finding people standing up along side me and asking how they can help me gain a seat at the table. Mostly, that's because I tend to think of myself as a relatively unimportant person. And I am, even now. Yet my desire to serve the town intersects with a lot of other folks' desires for their town, and I'm amazed that they see me as someone who can help them.

Mostly, what that means to me is that this has become a responsibility. Not that I didn't already know that to a certain degree, but extent to which service is really responsiblity has fully dawned on me now.

PUBLISHED Coaching soccer

CLOSED: [2017-09-26]

This is my second year coaching the middle school soccer team here in Castine. Each year I am filled with apprehension about the make up of the team, and wether coaching is actually something I can do. All those kids, just looking at you to say something, anything really, so long as it relates to soccer.

And yet here I am. My second year of telling kids what to do. Interestingly, what's most stood out from year to year is the growth of the players. Fifth graders last year who had trouble paying attention and looked at me like I was speaking Greek when I told them to hustle to the ball, have become easily motivated. Older players seem almost excited to step into leadership roles, whether in the goal or taking a midfield position with lots of running.

Really, it's the same as watching my own kids grow up. The miracle of humanity is how we grow and develop our own personality quirks and motivations which are at once totally our own, and also clearly cobbled together by experiences we've shared. For my part, I love it.

PUBLISHED Leadership

CLOSED: [2017-07-26]

An interesting discussion occurred at work today where I was forced to put into words some thoughts I've been kicking around for a while on the nature of leadership. None of my thoughts are original, mind you. This one was cribbed from a blog post about leading without authority. I'll drop the link when I find it. The long and the short of that post was that leadership has only the loosest relationship with authority. In fact, it's often a sign of dysfunctional leadership which depends on having someone give you authority.

In the world of power, authority is one of the most difficult types to wield, because it generally means someone has placed an expectation on you. You will be forced to live up to those expectations or be cut down from your place of authority quickly. Meanwhile, leadership is not actually a type of power, but a behavior. This alone should be mind-blowing if you're actually following along at home.

You can lead without authority. You can lead with authority. You can actually lead without saying a thing. This is key tenant in modern stoicism, actually. Don't tell, do. And so it is in leadership as well. Don't tell people what to do, show them what is effective, and empathize with their plight.

One of the more disappointing interactions I had recently was when a co-worker expressed a lack of joy in his work. It struck a nerve with me, in that I had felt many of the same things. And our lead engineer, who tends to lead through authority rather than trust, kind, sort of, well … blew us off. I really didn't see that coming, and it's forced me to take a step back and realize that I need to do a better job of leading without authority. Of building trust amongst my co-workers so that when the need arises, I can step up.

PUBLISHED Off days

CLOSED: [2017-09-23]

We're all entitled to having off days, but it doesn't make them any easier to work around. I woke up today without much ambition, despite the fact that we have chickens that need to be slaughtered. To add insult to injury, after we decided not to worry about slaughter, I went downstairs to discover that the toilet is not filling. There's simply no water in the supply line. To make things weirder, the sink that's on the same line works fine. We've been working thorugh issues with sediment in our well water, and it seems like this is probably related. But we really have no idea.

Yesterday was a funny day too where matters beyond my control led to me not being very responsive at work. That carries it's own stress as deadlines loom and people expect a certain result and you have to explain why the result is not there yet. Effectively, today is a day where the rug feels slightly frayed around the edges. Life is hardly falling apart, but things are just starting to slip a little bit.

We're all entitled to days like these, but it doesn't make it any easier to weather, especially when working on remainig stoic about life, it can feel like a setback. That said, the feeling of discouragment is really pride. Pride that you thought you had things under control, when in reality you were never in control of the things around you, but simply your respones to the things around you. Centering in these moments involves acknowledging that all you can do is control your response and actions, and doing your best to return to those

PUBLISHED On the ballot

CLOSED: [2017-09-18]

I'm officially going to be on the ballot in Castine for selectmen this year!

Turned in my nomination papers, and, pending a review of the voter signature, I will be on the ballot along with Patrick Haugen and Buzz Layton. It was a lot of fun talking to folks about the town while collecting signature, and I'm feeling really blessed to be in a community that not only provides me the opportunity to run for public office, but one where my friends and neighbors are actively enthuiastic about my campaign.

Next stop, election day!

PUBLISHED Monarchs

CLOSED: [2017-09-16]

I knew that monarch butterflies were born somewhere in the north and then migrated to Mexico for the winter. But today on a hike on Sears Island we got to see a field of wildflowers, predominently milkweed, that was set aside specifically for monarchs to develop in.

Indeed, we saw a few monarch caterpillers, which interesting actually share a color pattern with their flying form.

Our enthusiasm was dampened slightly when the flying insects came out. They specifically seemed to want our lunch and recent traumatic events involving ground hornets meant we had to make a hasty retreat.

The hike ended up being almost two miles and was through some really pretty paths. I would definitely enjoy hiking on Sears Island again.

Self-hosting :@selfhosting

PUBLISHED Self-hosted weather station

CLOSED: [2023-01-24 Tue 12:06]

For a few years now, I've had a cobbled together weather station using Ecowitt sensors that one can readily buy on Amazon, and the fantastic open source tool `WeeWx`. I really don't think I can sign the praises of WeeWx loudly enough.

The components of the setup:

Ecowitt GW3000 "gateway"
Ecowitt XXXX temperature sensor
Ecowitt rain guage
Ecowitt anemometer
FreeBSD jail (or any unix-like 24-7 server, an RPi would be fine here)

Ecowitt is better know in the agricultural community for making very expensive, very high performing sensors for farms. But thankfully they've dipped their toes in the commercial waters and provided a highly cost-effective way to build a home weather station cluster, without dropping hundreds of dollars on a Davis instrument (and then being locked into their ecosystem).

See, the real beauty of Ecowitt is that all the sensor communicate with the gateway over a 900Mhz channel which the GW listens for, parses and then transmits to a given IP address on the local network. The recipient of the gateway's communication is supposed to be a super janky phone app. But we can do one better and send it all to WeeWx!

WeeWx handles a lot of different sensors. So you could probably replace everything I just said above with plugging in a $3 Davis weather station and use that with WeeWx. But your mileage will vary depending on model numbers and firmware and honestly, nobody got time for that. Instead, we'll use the Ecowitt plugin in WeeWx to intercept the gateway's messages, store them in a sqlite database and let WeeWx generate a really nice HTML page for our weather station (demo of mine here: https://wx.unbl.ink).

Of course, now all that fine weather data is parsed and stuffed ina SQL data store, so you can also re-process it to a heavier weight DB engine, like postgres and go nuts. At least, that's what I've done. Having raw, time-based data from sensors on your own property gives you a chance to run historical calculations of specific events, and it also allows me to pull local data into other projects, so my run tracker doesn't get data from the airport 90 miles from my house, but can use super local weather data.

Thoughts @thoughts

PUBLISHED Why are we grateful? gratefulness

CLOSED: [2017-09-19]

I just finished the book The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and was struck by a line at the beginning of his acknowledgment section. Relaying what a graduate student once taught him he explains that we do not express gratitude to settle debts or sow the ground for favors. We give our gratitude out to make stronger relationships.

I was struck by what a simple, yet profound thought that was. Gratefulness is not a selfish tool we wield to get the upper hand. Humans, while highly rational about a great many things, operate more like bees in a hive than most would give us credit for. Hives need cohesion. Strong relationships breed cohesion. The process is so clear.

Do you imagine that chimps can express their gratitude to one another?

PUBLISHED Are you like me? uu

CLOSED: [2017-09-20]

One of the aspects of my faith that I have the most difficulty with is accepting other people regardless of where they are. As a human, I like to hang with people like me. This is understandable, as tribalism exists in the world as an artifact of the world we have lived in for the last 10,000 years.

And yet, UUism calls me to be accepting of others and to encourage others in their spiritual growth. How can I be tribal and accepting of others at the same time? I think a big part of that practice is being honest with yourself about the biases you may have. I value thoughtfulness and intelligence highly. I do not place as much value on art and entertainment. It is not that I don't like those things, but someone who orients their life around art make it immediately more difficult for me to find similarities and to enjoy their company.

The best thing I've found in these situations is to keep plumbing for commonality. As awkward as tribalism can be, it's also a fantastic tool to build affinity for other people. If you can intentionally try to build a tribe with strangers, before you know it they are no longer a stranger and instead part of a new tribe that you just created. Maybe they have kids. I have kids and know that world all too well. Perhaps they have a Mormon grandmother who is difficult to be around :) Yet another opportunity to build the community that was missing before.

The trick is not to disavow the aspects of our human psychology that make us able to accept others, but use them to our advantage to grow our tribe larger, or at least increase the number of small tribes we're a part of.

PUBLISHED Finding meaning

CLOSED: [2017-09-27]

What does it mean to encourage others towards spiritual growth? At a recent board meeting, which included a fairly contentious issue, a number of friends and myself certainly did not encourage anyone towards spiritual growth. The root of the problem, as with many problems, lies with differences; differences of opinion, experience, and expectations. As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we espouse the seven principles, which are as close to dogma as you're likely to see in UUism. One of these seven "pillars" of behavior as a UU calls us to accept others and help them towards spiritual growth. How can we do that when we're so different?

I'm repeating myself here, but repetition is the best way to learn anything, so let's go again. Difference tends to cause us to build walls. Often we do not do so intentionally, but humans are animals, and there is a base tribalness to much of what animals do. It should not surprise us that we like to be with our own kind, to have our ideas reinforced, to spend time with those we've shared experiences. But that gets to the crux of it. Share experiences with other people. Embrace our tribalness to create connections with people who are currently strangers. This is not radical acceptance. If you believe that abortion is a sin against your chosen diety, that is not a good place to begin acceptance. Rather, why not talk about youre experience with your children? Talk about sports, the weather, and begin to ask questions.

Do you know where the members on your board were born? Where they were raised? What they personally believe? The stand out experiences in their lives? Their favorite books? Movies? What they love? What drives them crazy? These are not retorical questions. Nor are they questions that I have asked yet. So no need to feel bad. Being an accepting and welcoming human being is difficult preciscely because of our earlier manifestation as uncooperative animals. But by some miracle have developed the skills of discernment and cooperation, and we should perform social exercises to keep our open-ness well conditioned.

PUBLISHED Free and Responsible religion uu

CLOSED: [2017-09-28]

The way I was raised, certain people were simply wrong. If they didn't share the same enthusiasm for science, they were incorrect. If they believed in a benevolent (or even malevolent) Christian god, they were wrong. There was very little gray in many of the positions that were espoused to me. One of the great aspects of humanity is that we are given the opportunity to raise our children with our values and beliefs. But, of course, there are responsibilities there too.

It almost seems absurd to say this, but I don't think I was always responsibly educated. Absurd, because that's a high bar and I'm not sure anyone can ever claim to have been educated under the perfect paradigm. But to the extent that it took me many years to understand what it means to pursue a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I think there could have been more openess to what I was exposed to. The Christian Bible is an amazing book. The Bhagavad Gita is absolutely beautiful. Darwin had his doubts about the extent to which evolution allows us to understand life. Newton was downright crazy half the time.

The source of responsibility in our lives is humbleness. When we say we are responsible for our children, that does not mean if we fail to teach them the right things we have failed. It means if we fail to listen to them, and discern what they need based on what we understand about them and what they tell us, we have failed them. There is no test for responsible parenthood, just as there is no test of responsible searching for meaning in our lives. When we have the freedom to search for truth and meaning, we must use discernment and listening as our foundation for responsibility. Listen first, think second, act last.

PUBLISHED Intentions intention

CLOSED: [2018-08-19]

The idea here, cribbed from Bryan Cantrill's talk on oral traditions in software development, is the importance of making as clear as possible your intentions when you do things. Often I feel as though intention gets a bad rap. The road to hell, and what-not. But the reality is that, if you are doing something, it is best to do it with intention. God help us the things we do impulsively or emotionally. Sometimes they work out alright, but it's usually best to go back and see if we can learn why it happened. That's still applicable when doing things intentionally, but because there was forethought, we are already a step ahead.

Of course, what this really means is that we also need to make sure we document our intentions. This is where we come back to Bryan's talk. It's not enough to solve a problem, or build a product. You have to document the process that got you there. In software, you leave your intentions via comments, documentation, blog posts, podcasts, talks, or just conversations with co-workers and friends. But one way or another, you should document what you set out to do and whether you accomplished it. In the absence of this, we are really just throwing darts. I'd wager dollars to donuts that few significant works were created by throwing darts.

I'm currently reading the book Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesymn Ward. The most disturbing aspect of one of the characters in Ward's brilliant story is the complete lack of intention in her actions. Her internal governor appears to be fueled entirely by impulse and emotion, leaving those around her hurt, confused, angry and afraid. When humans act without intention, the results tend to appear brutally selfish, even if the underlying logic is not. When we impulsively shoot off an email, we have, by definition, not given it any thought. The repercussions of such an action are hard to understand.

Thus, while the road to hell may indeed be paved with good intentions, it's probably better than the road that's paved with impulsive and emotional outbursts.

PUBLISHED Running Tired running

CLOSED: [2018-08-20]

After an angsty 25+ years of my life, I've come around to love running. This is obvious to anyone who knows me. I discovered it as a great hobby when you live in a rural area and can't get together on a regular basis to play sports. Combined with the ability to track running with technology, it has become a hobby that at this point I would even if I couldn't track, or had access to regular sports events. I just love being out on the road, listening to nature (or music) and feeling the air and precipitation.

But that's not what this is about. This post is about when I'm less than joyful on a run. A big part of running is making it a habit so that it isn't a struggle. The hope is that you can condition yourself to be able to use relatively little effort to get out there. That's the goal. Of course, reality being what it is, running it not always effortless.

The last few weeks I've changed my diet and had an explosion of personal and professional commitments. The changes in routine have led to runs that have been crammed in my schedule sideways and at times that are not my favorite. Which ultimately has led to runs that would normally be close to effortless, requiring more effort. But there's an opportunity here too. The opportunity is to toughten my mental state to run while under effort. Even when things don't go right, we have to practice a combination of mindfulness and grounding in your ability to push through, while still listening to your body and not pushing too hard.

PUBLISHED Nethack

CLOSED: [2019-01-13 Sun 22:45]

I discovered Nethack for the first time this weekend. Well, I knew it existed for a while, but I had always sort of poked around at it, generally unimpressed. But on Friday there was a lobste.rs post about a speedrun of nethack that totally captured my attention. The runners used the inventory at the start of a randomly generated map to determine which seed was used by the RNG to build the dungeon. From there, they had a general sense of what would work. This resulted in an ascension, as victories are called, of sub 8 minutes. The previous best on the most popular nethack server, nethack.alt.org, was more than 90 minutes. Crazy.

All that to say that reading about their speedrun made me realized how much more there was in nethack. Much more. And now I'm hooked. I also joined the IRC channel for NAO and with IRCCloud I get notifications when I'm done with a game with my final score. It's actually kind of delightful. Now I need to stop wasting time with it :)

PUBLISHED Trompe l'oeil empathy running

CLOSED: [2019-05-24 Fri 15:16]

When running, you will sometimes come to a path that, for whatever reason, is difficult to read. While the incline may go up, your eye and, subsequently your mind, says it's going down. Such visual tricks are called trompe l'oeils, literally "trick of the eye" in French.

Personally, these tricks often have the effect of letting me run harder uphill than I otherwise would, revealing the incredible amount of mental power that goes into distance running. If my mind does not believe I'm going uphill, I run faster, even if I am in fact going uphill. Most people would consider this a cool trick to get you to run faster. Unless you didn't want to run faster.

In a race, such tricks would be welcome. I am going all-out, pushing myself to the limit to achieve a personal record, or, in rare cases, to actually win the race outright. But in training, such exertions are often unwelcome. Outside of races, pushing yourself as hard as you can go is generally frowned upon. There is no use destroying your capacity to run tomorrow with a hard training run today. Training theory says you should lay down a base of solid, slower running, and save faster, max-heartrate runs for the occasional intense workout.

This, it occurs to me, is a perfect analogy for how we use our ability to reason, and to conversely to simply react. Danny Kahneman would have called this fast thinking and slow thinking. You would expect that in most cases, having a "gut feeling" about something would be great. But in practice, such impulsive decision making often gets us into trouble. Our slow thinking – our ability to reason – ought to be a our base, slow training thinking. This sort of thinking prepares us for moments where we need our fast thinking, or our reactionary thought.

This has sweeping implications for all sorts of personal interactions. I'm quite interested in how this plays into Nate Walker's ideas of "moral imagination" and radical empathy. You see, most of us are actually not every good at empathyzing. Sympathy comes naturally to a great many people. We can imagine the pain, or anger someone is feeling when we are in the presence of it. But empathy asks us not just to feel someone's emotional state, but to understand them.

The problem, as I see it, is that, like with running, there are trompe l'oeils all around us. Places where we think we understand why someone is acting the way they are.

"She's just pissed because I forgot to call last night."

"He's still frustrated because he didn't have time to get coffee this morning"

On the face of it, those very well might be true. Or they might not. When do we know we're running hard up hill? In most places in life, this is completely unimportant to quickly address someone's emotional state. Far more important is to be patient, and understanding without necessarily assuming that we can know right now what's bothering someone, or why they're doing what they're doing.

"She struggles with abandonment issues since her father left when she was 8, and while you didn't call, what upset her most was feeling alone."

"He was up really late last night stressing about work that was supposed to be done. Not getting cofffee made things worse, but were hardly what cause his foul mood."

In both of these cases, there are underlying mental states. It requires imagination and trust in our fellow humans to truly empathize in these circumstances. While the road appeared to go down hill, and we were all into bombing down it, the reality is that we burned ourselves out on a training run that tricked us into going up hill. We would have been better served to hold our judgment for a little longer, and asked more questions, and listened more closely. Rarely do we need to exercise empathy quickly, and applying Walker's "moral imagination" can get us a lot closer to understanding a lot more people, and making all our lives a lot easier.

PUBLISHED Equity uu christianity

CLOSED: [2017-09-19 Fri 15:16]

The gospel of Matthew suggests that Christ's heaven is an equal opportunity saver. That is, it is not a place where those who worked the hardest receive the best, or those who took and never gave suffer. The parable of the vineyard laborers more or less spells out a universal salvation message for those who would be willing to work, not for how much they work. And, as a parable, that means that those who come to find love and compassion late in life are no less entitled to salvation than anyone else.

In Unitarian Universalism, this reflects very accurately what we mean in our second principle. We affirm justice, equity and compassion in human relations. Note, carefully, that we do not include equality in what we affirm. Equality is a difficult concept for humans to hold in their minds, because it suggests that everyone needs the same thing. Instead, let us focus our energy on providing justice and equity. Because the abused child may need more love and patient understanding than the child raised in a loving home. The diversity and color of conditions that humans live in exclude the possibility of anything ever being equal when it comes to love.

Instead let us strive for equity and considered justice, ensuring that needs are being met and that we are working towards making everyone whole. Indeed, laborers who did not have the advantage of being there at the start of the day deserve their full payment all the same.

PUBLISHED Imagining yourself doing running habits bestself

CLOSED: [2019-11-26 Tue 11:06]

When people say "I can't do that" most of the time, they're actually saying "I can't see myself doing that." When I started running, a lot of people said they didn't know how I could run so far, or that they could never do that.

When I started, I didn't imagine I'd run marathons. I just started with 1 or 2 mile runs. Those 2-mile runs were hard, and sometimes they still are.

Yet being out on the road gets you up on that hill where you have a better view of your future self. One day I saw myself going farther, and then I went farther.

What do you see yourself doing? What steps can you take to get a better vantage point of where you could be? Little steps is all it takes.

PUBLISHED Distraction free notifications intention

CLOSED: [2019-11-27 Wed 09:48]

I try to keep notifications in my life to a bare minimum. I get tips from friends or co-workers about making sure notifications on my phone are disabled while I sleep. I disable them all the time. The one thing I allow are text messages to vibrate my Garmin watch, and I'm on the fence as to whether this is truly necessary.

There are people who's professions wont allow this. I get that. But I also know that most people build narratives about getting a late night text about the health of a loved one to justify always getting pinged when Facebook needs your attention, or a new email comes in. These are largely untrue, or at least building a process into your life for events that may never happen.

Instead I've made distractions I encounter my own fault. I can't blame Facebook for pinging me in the middle of focused work. I took control of what I could and my responsibility now is to check for messages when I need to. I check slack quite often, after each chunk of work, emails a few times a day, and social media rarely.

Have you ever thought about the value of all the different notifications in your life? If it not, it may be worthwile to audit all the things that vie for your time. It is your time after all, and with ownership comes responsibility.

PUBLISHED In Pursuit of Flow

CLOSED: [2019-12-02 Mon 14:02]

I don't make a habit of watch the Olympics. But I remember a moment back in 2018 when I happened to turn on coverage just as they were televising a gold-winning snowboard cross run by Red Gerard¹. He blew out all the other riders in his group to take the gold. Silver was significantly behind him. What stood out to me watching him ride, however, was how keyed in he was to the whole thing.

I don't know how much snowboarders are allowed to practice the cross course before the event, but given that he was on the hill with 9 other riders who didn't look nearly as keyed in meant there was likely more to what was going on than simple familiarity with a series of cuts, jumps and bombs.

What Gerard was, of course, was in flow. I am not sure if you've ever experienced flow, but beyond snowboarder cross, the state of mind is also illustrated in Zhuang Zhou's philosophical writing from 4th century BCE China. In his seminal work, Zhuang discusses a butcher who, having so mastered his craft, he is not cutting into an animal, but rather his motion guides the blade of the knife through the various cuts he needs to make to perfectly separate the carcass.

Life, it seems to me, is the pursuit of flow. In flow, everything goes from one to the next without deliberate thought of how to achieve a specific end. There is no value judgment on the task achieved. Flow is not about good or bad, it is about the accomplishment of a given task. There is different work to be done to assess value, but once value has been assessed and it's time to work, we all seek flow, that place where don't need to know we're our best selves, but where we simply are our best selves and are doing what we set out to do with as little thought as possible.

PUBLISHED Creation and Learning learning create mindset

CLOSED: [2019-12-18 Wed 11:00]

I recently embarked on a plan to learn to draw. I've done this a few times, in a few different ways. This time feels different. The lessons I've begun start with some very basic ideas, no home run or get rich quick schemes here. Rather, I have a daily exercise of drawing basic shapes, holding the pencil, and just getting experience trying to see what I want on the paper before I touch the pencil down.

This has been a revelation to me, not least of which because I like these sorts of small habit methods for kickstarting new skills. But the other part that has been interesting is seeing how things change when I start creating things. I often consider learning something new to come with consumption. I read a book, watch a video or get instruction from someone else. In this new pattern, learning comes from experimentation, comes from creation.

There's something to this, and I think it's related to other discussions about closed versus open mindsets. A consumption mindset intrinsically comes from a belief that what will help you be your best self comes from outside of you. But experimentation and creation comes from a belief that the help you need is already inside of you, you just need room to play with an idea.

This creation can come from writing, drawing, painting, software development, sculpture, music composition, active conversations with others, and a myriad other places. But the important part is that you give yourself room to experiment with what's in your own head. So often we fall into the trap of looking for something outside us to kick us into a new mindset, but often nurturing the creative spirit can have a much greater effect.

One last observation, most of the disciplines I rattled off above fall into the realm of art at some level. There's truth there too. The thing that sets us free as humans and helps us to be our best self is often the exploration of the edges where mundane day-to-day life interacts with what we humans call art.

Create more art. Explore your mind. Explore your world. Watch your creativity and ability to learn blossom. Then, perhaps most importantly, spend some time helping someone else discover the magic of creation.

DRAFT Mindset and gratitude gratitude mindset

Most of the time, when you're having a down day and someone tries to remind you to be grateful it takes effort not to punch them in the face, or at the very least to glare reproachfully. Which is unfortunate, because it's in those moments that we most need the perspective that comes with gratitude.

DRAFT Planting seeds ideas plant consquences

Warren Buffet once said, "if we can't tolerate a possible consequence, remote though it may be, we steer clear of planting its seeds." What consequences might he have been thinking about? Given his position as a savvy investor, it's tempting to think he was talking about financial returns and, effectively gambling. Stated another way, don't gamble with anything you can't afford to lose.

But he used a planting metaphor. Last time I checked few people consider gambling a form of seed planting. There's an inherent risk to gambling that I don't think Buffet was after. No, I don't think that's what he had in mind.

Buffet is warning about the long-term. Seeds are inherently strategic. When you choose to plant half an acre of corn and 400 yards of tomatoes, you're committing that much land to those crops for the bulk of the year. In most of North America that's a huge time and space commitment. Nothing else will be able to grow there until the harvest comes in.

So what about Buffet's metaphor now?

DRAFT [#B] Blog post on how to dream big and then aggressively de-scope onec

When you're starting a new project you should harness your enthusiasm to talk through (or write down) all the awesome things you could do with the new feature or tool.

Once you've laid out the big dream, you have to "de-scope" the project to break it into pieces that can actually be completed. You could call this the MVP process, and I suppose it is, but I've not heard it explained in quite this way before.

Dream big, out loud

Start the project either with your team, or by yourself, of writing down and turning over in your head all the awesome things you could do with this new functionality. Map it all out, and get a good sense of how it will solve the customer's need, whether you're a startup and have early adopters, or this is to scratch your own itch.

Work hard to find the limits of the value of the various features. The value proposition will be worth it's weight in gold in the next step

Break it down

Common traps

The idea here would be to avoid trying to break the big dream into resource pieces. It's tempting to think in a sort of Kanban manner of saying, well if backend can deliver this piece first, then frontend can come in and add our killer UI in the next step. In order to deliver value early and often, you have to de-scope without breaking the project into non-functional pieces, or at least, limited-functionality pieces.

DRAFT In Our Own Head

Des Linden, finishing the Boston Marathon this year in a horizontal rain when it was eight degrees above freezing was more than just finishing a race. In fact, everyone who finished the race this year deserves major credit for pushing themselves. And yet, Linden did it while running faster than everyone else. I remember watching her take the lead around the 20th mile. She made her move and the previous first place racer didn't even try to keep up. Linden appeared to have hit a gear no one else had on that chilly, Boston morning.

Thinking about her run after the fact, I am humbled by the fact that no one knows what stories of adversity and struggle lead people success. Occasionally someone is famous enough to have a story told in public, but more often than not, struggles are private, even kept to oneself. While it was possible to watch Linden struggle with horizontal rain, who knows what physical barriers others are pushing through every day.

DRAFT The Dark Hypothesis consequences

The lack of other life forms in our observable universe prompts us to ask a lot of questions. Carl Sagan was optimistic that the lack of evidence in such an expanse was not cause for alarm that we are alone. And yet, the absence of current life anywhere remotely close to us, despite increasing archaeological evidence of ancient life on Mars begins to paint a picture that life does, find a way, but may be rare, indeed.

So here's my dark hypothesis. COVID19 was inevitable. So was COVID20, 21 and all future pandemics.

Emacs @emacs

PUBLISHED Theme overload emacs themes moetheme

CLOSED: [2023-03-22 Wed 16:13]

When there's nothing left to tweak, you have to tweak your Emacs theme!

That said, when is there ever nothing to tweak? 🃏 Of course, there are days where we're not motivated to tweak anything, and those days are prime candiates for exploring the deep, deep well that is themeing your tools. I love looking at new themes, playing with them, seeing what makes them different than another one and settling down to learn a new one. But it's also one of those things than can easily cause overload.

This post was inspired by the idea of theme overload, in point of fact. The Doom Emacs project is blessed with some really high quality themes in it's theme pack and I have explored them all. Purple is a particular favorite. But I've also discovered that a lot of the time themes are designed for a particular use case. A theme that works great on a sunny day working at the kitchen table, is less helpful when hacking late night on something in a dark room.

With Emacs, there even more variables to consider because we have this wonderful opportunity to use our editor either in a full-color system window OR a shell. Such flexibility remains one of my favorite parts of editors like Emacs and Vim. But it also means that a theme that looks great in a system window might look like trash (or just be unsuable) in a terminal, or vice versa.

Enter the moe theme! Looking beautiful in a system window, the theme was designed with only 256 colors in mind, so it makes the jump beautifully to a terminal shell as well. I know I could just switch themes, but it's one less thing to do when you fire up Emacs in a terminal, and I love that. I highly recommend taking moe themes for a ride. I usually use the dark variant, but light is solid as well.

PUBLISHED Reading Lists spacemacs tools

CLOSED: [2018-08-20 Mon 22:06]

Oh Goodreads. Your website is a cluttered mess. Your UX hasn't been improved in years. The only value I derive from keeping my reading list on you is that my friends can see what I'm reading. Which is a neat trick, but since I've mostly given up on Facebook too, it not really enough to keep me.

I was an early adopter of Goodreads, but my life has taken a turn towards the personal and the text-based. I use Emacs (via [spacemacs](spacemacs.org)) as much as I can. Org-mode might be the single most impressive IDEA rendered into software I've ever seen. It simply makes the things I use on a regular basis more powerful and expressive, which is not something I can say for Word, Twitter, or Chrome. Those are merely tools. They don't amplify my ability to document and create.

Really the post [Leaving Goodreads](https://lepisma.github.io/2017/06/29/leaving-goodreads/index.html) is what convinced me to go, one more time, back to my reading list in org mode. But the killer feature this time around was [ox-hugo](https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/), which allows me to easily dump Org-mode subtrees into a hugo-powered blog directory. A simple rsync later and I can publish random subtrees, including book reviews!

The whole thing is so elegant, I couldn't have dreamed up the process if I had tried. The whole thing was truly an evolution of tools, and one that was only possible because each tool, Emacs, spacemacs, org-mode, hugo, ox-hugo, does it's job so elegantly.

PUBLISHED Spacemacs spacemacs tools

Emacs is very powerful. Amazingly so. But it's so arcane, the keystrokes could take you years to master. So what's a developer to do?

Enter spacemacs. I honestly don't know where this idea came from, and my brain is structured in such a way that I could have ever pulled it off myself. But an emacs configured like Vim (thank you evil mode) with discoverable keystrokes … I am always flabergasted.

Tonight I discovered how to open the kill ring. While it sounds aggressive, it's really just Emacs version of a clipboard. Anything you cut or copy ends up on the kill ring. For so long I treated it like the opaque clipboard on so many operating systems. The last thing I cut is the only thing I have access to. And God help me if I cut something else, because I'll lose the last thing to oblivion.

But not anymore, baby. With an interactive kill ring (SPC-r-y for those of you following along at home) you get a searchable compendium of everything you've cut or copied in the current session. Absolutely brilliant.

PUBLISHED Another Engine hugo tools

CLOSED: [2018-08-18 Sat 01:01]

Once, I used Jekyll. Then I switched to Pelican. I'm finally here on Hugo, and hoping that this will make it easier to keep things updated. The eternal question when chosing a method to publish a blog is, why publish a blog. I don't really have an answer for that yet. I wish I did. Honestly, I do. You don't have to believe me, because I believe in myself, and if this is all one big simulation, you don't matter anyway.

Incidentally, perhaps the best part of this transition is the [ox-hugo](https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/) plugin, which makes writing new posts and publishing them a dream. Now, instead of some complicated cocktail of adding a new file with the write filename and proper metadata, I can just org-mode capture the thing. The more I use emacs (and specifically [spacemacs](http://spacemacs.org)), the more in love I am.

PUBLISHED Doomed Emacs tools doom_emacs

CLOSED: [2018-10-31 Wed 09:27]

After a year or so of dedicating myself to getting Spacemacs setup just right, I made a pretty substanial jump a few weeks ago. I'm now running doom-emacs which provides fewer nice surprises (missing evil-surround shortcuts by default) than spacemacs, but loads much … much faster. The other day I found myself coding while sharing my screen on Zoom and is was painfully obvious what price I was paying for spacemacs not cleaning up after itself and generally lazy loading things leading to less than fast context switching.

I was willing to struggle through some the slower operations for my own sake, but getting caught with other people watching as my editor on a brand new computer struggled to do basic things like searching for symbols in the codebase was embarrassing.

I'm not done with Spacemacs. I still love the idea, and I also believe that half the problem was likely the way I was using it and configuring it. But part of the appeal of spacemacs are the defaults. And it was the defaults that was making it hard to use it on a daily basis.

Another nice aspect of Doom Emacs is that aside from a handful of evil-mode shortcuts, a lot of what you're encouraged to use are stock emacs keystrokes. That means that I'm not learning some cryptic layer on org mode when I use emacs, I using the default keystrokes that I will find in vanilla emacs. That's very useful and will hopefully make me a more respectable member of the emacs community, rather than a vim outcast.

PUBLISHED Continuous tool improvement tools

CLOSED: [2018-08-25]

I was reviewing the feeds I subscribe to in elfeed this evening when it occurred to me that a lot of my feeds have to do with Emacs. I will often blow through updates on feeds, making sure to only pickup things that are truly useful. But I discovered an amazingly high signal to noise ratio regarding tips for using Emacs more effectively. This got me thinking about how I couldn't possible remember all this stuff, so I tossed some of the things I was learning in my learnings.org file to review later. At that point, it dawned on my how important tool choice is, and how important it is to learn how to use your tools effectively and be receptive to learning new things about them.

This could apply equally to any well made tool for any discipline (woodworking, drawing, research), but for me that means Emacs. Not everyone is going to ever need to touch Emacs. For me, I can't imagine not having it, and everytime I learn something new, I get a little more effective with it.

For reference, tonight I learned how to make all URLs, regardless of buffer, clickable I also learned how to break an org-mode block in two with a single keystroke to insert a comment.

PUBLISHED Email in Emacs tools notmuch email

CLOSED: [2018-11-28 Wed 11:00]

I really did try mu4e. Really. But the setup required a custom emacs build on macos, and I am unfortunately constrained to Macs for work at the moment, so it was kind of a non-starter to jump through so many hoops to get it working. And of course, I also highly value resilience, and nothing says unresilient than not being able to successfully build a crucial feature like mail handling into your editor of choice.

So that occassioned a turn towards notmuch. Oh my, how delightful. At it's simplest, notmuch is just a xapian-powered tag database for your email. Imagine that, no crazy indexers or long-polling to check for new email. Notmuch just tags and allows you to search your email.

Combined with isync's mbsync and msmtp, I now have a really functional and resilient email seutp in Emacs. Even more delightful is looking through my tag database and realizing that if I tag things effectively, finding all those board agenda emails for church are just a tag search away.

Of course, such things were always available in Gmail or a mail client. But I was always unimpressed with how slow Thunderbird or Mail.app got with lots of messages. And Google is reading all my messages, so that sucks too.

Combine the ease of syncing and tagging messages, and the fact that they exist in a directory on my computer, synced via Dropbox to all my other computers and my email suddenly mine again, not living on an IMAP server that I hope doesn't fail me.

PUBLISHED Why Emacs? onec emacs

CLOSED: [2020-01-21 Tue 11:45]

There's an argument to be made for ease of use in software. The epiphany with Apple software in the early part of the 21st century was that most users had tasks they wanted done. They did not want to use a computer to do them, per se. But if a computer could do them, that was okay.

The problem with this perspective is that it assumes a certain amount of laziness—or perhaps lack of discrimination‒on the part of the user. There are some excellent times to be lazy, but choice of tools is not one of them. Ask any accomplished carpenter if the Home Depot plane and the Lee Nielson plane is the same tool. They are not. But let us explore this analogy a bit more. It's actually damned appropriate.

If a computer and the software running on it are tools, then, like a carpenter, an experienced computer user should be discriminating in their tools. This perspective took me a long time to arrive at. I enjoy learning about my tools. And yet, I have watched a number of highly productive software developers not give a second thought to their tools. Perhaps it's more fair to say they do not give a thought to how their tools work.

This lack of curiosity in the things that enable their work means they will always suffer when their tool breaks. At some fundamental level they do not know how they are doing what they're doing. Any furniture maker knows at a basic level how a table planer works. Do you understand your linter works? How about the request and response cycle in your browser? The algorithm that kicks out the most appropriate answer on StackOverflow? I hope you've answered yes to at least one of those. But what about how a compiler works? A JIT scripting language compiler? These are all the tools of our trade.

In the case of software there's an even worse fate. What happens when your tool doesn't even allow you to be curious about it? Closed source software, or even just limited access to the source means you are working with a black box. You couldn't learn how it worked even if you wanted to. I can think of a worse fate for someone who does something professionally.

All this is a round about way to explain why I am drawn to Emacs and tools like it. Popular open source tools that have survived, at this point literally, for generations of builders. There will always be a new and shiny thing. But I have made an intentional effort to lean into the open source tools that have served the curious among us for a long time now.

I encourage you to find some part of the software stack that allows you to do work and lean into it. Learn why it exists, how it is built, the people who built it, and maybe even how you can help build it in the future.

PUBLISHED Email in Emacs Redux tools email notmuch

CLOSED: [2019-12-04 Wed 11:33]

I have moved to reading and responding to all my email in Emacs. I honestly didn't think I would ever be able to make this jump because of silly things like signatures, HTML email and my address book. But the reality of how I actually use email on a day to day basis is a big part of why this was possible.

As it happens, most of my email work is replying to other people. As an engineer on a product team I start very few email threads, and even fewer with people outside the organization. Thus, the lack of the company standard HTML signature in my outgoing emails is rarely a problem. On the once or twice a month occurrence of needing to send an external-facing email, I can pop open Gmail in a browser and take care of it.

But for quickly replying to folks, parsing tasks into my daypage (more on this later) and saving content to read later, Notmuch has been a dream.

So the cat's out of the bag. As in my last post about email in Emacs, I use Notmuch along with mbsync for getting email and msmtp to send email. I also host my own email server on a Digital Ocean VPS running mailinabox ¹. This makes the configuration with mbsync and msmtp pretty painless.

The other important discovery I made is muchsync ². This allows me to run the mbsync task for looking for new email on a server in the house that's always on. Then each other device I want to read and respond to email just runs a `muchsync` task that hits up that server and syncs the state of the notmuch tag database.

The result is delightful. I can clear out my inbox on one machine and find it all cleared up on all the others. Combine that with the ability to quickly respond to email within Emacs, copy links to specific messages and capture them to Org Mode, and archive things I don't care about, the whole thing is really effective.

One aspect of this is that I have my email setup to default to showing the plaintext version, with a tab-able HTML view powered by eww. This works surprisingly well. As usual, my configuration is in my dotfiles, specifically my `+mail.el` ³ configuration in Doom Emacs.

Check it out and I hope you can get a handle on your email.

DRAFT Getting things done with Emacs onec emacs

I've gone back and forth a few times with trying to use Org Mode to manage my :w

DRAFT [#A] Blog post on leaving LSP behind in favor of eglot onec

Upshot here is that LSP is pretty cumbersome with different packages for different languages and having the kitchen sink enabled by default. Eglot has a very simple interface and is pretty easy to reason about. I value being able to reason about things, as it's generally a good litmus test for design quailty and also means that while I don't comprehend everything about how LSP interaction with Emacs is implemented, I could if I wanted to.

https://mailinabox.email

http://www.muchsync.org

https://git.unbl.ink/secstate/dotfiles/src/branch/master/emacs/.config/doom/+mail.el

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