Back in the 80s one of my first jobs out of university was working downtown Toronto. One of my coworkers was this effervescent woman of Japanese-Canadian descent.

She would talk about what it was like meeting guys in clubs.

“So, where are you from?”

“Scarborough”

“Uh… no, I mean where are you originally from?”

(feigning an “oh I getcha now” moment) “Ohh okay, yeah… Saskatchewan”, since that’s where she really was from, previously.

2 years later, somewhere in their sales and marketing departments:

“Hey, you know what would make us even more money?”

“No, but do tell”

“Advertising”

“Genius - how is it nobody has ever thought of this before?”

Roku somehow thinking that the Ferengi rules of acquisition was a how-to guide book.

Jeff Geerling discusses having done the same, in one of his videos.

Knew it would be NJB before clicking :D

• JJ Jameson

Let me preface this by saying that I’m old. 

I was out for a long run yesterday. Playing the Hype Running List on Spotify. Enjoying most of the songs/artists being played thwre, eg, RATM, Beastie Boys, even some older stuff.

One song I was a bit meh about was The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzie. But this time, the lyrics made me stop and have a wtf moment. Here’s what I’m referring to:

You know that chick that used to dance a lot Every night she’d be on the floor, shakin’ what she’s got Man, when I tell you she was cool, she was red-hot I mean, she was steamin’

And that time over at Johnny’s place Well, this chick got up and she slapped Johnny’s face Man, we just fell about the place If that chick don’t wanna know, forget her

And I was like “hold up, are they saying what I think they’re saying?” Like, why would she slap his face? And why would you guys be dismissive of her and cool with Johnny?

Being hot/attractive doesn’t give you license to assault someone. So fuck off with that shit.

I have a friend who is graphic designer for a small shop. Customers drop off work at the front desk, and depending on how much effort it works out to be, it can land on his desk.

Some customers insist on explaining to “the designer directly”. They get told/warned that it’s more expensive (hourly) and that the clock starts as soon as he walks up to the counter. And some customers agree to these terms.

It’s always entertaining to hear his stories.

I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.

That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.

Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Socs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.

I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.

I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)

Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.

Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.

I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.

Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.

I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.

Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.

As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.

Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.

In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.

What sort of cabling, do you suppose?

Strong Cable Support Infrastructure?

Instructions unclear:

Ersatz-Bumi drops massive rock on self

Just fly it outside the environment

Wild. It was only just yesterday that I’d learned of the phrase “caused me to stumble” within a religious context, courtesy of the “in my super-fundamentalist church back in the nineties” guy on IG.

“This here’s the Lockpocking Lawyer, and today we’re going to take a closer look at the Flipper Zero….”

If you hit an icy patch on a winding road, I recommend not closing your eyes.

Me: hmm, random

leaves thread, scrolls down

Holy shit. Literally 2 posts down. Wtaf

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Now that’s a pretty cool bit of news :)

“If Johnny has 3 apples, and Jane takes 1 apple, how many apples does Johnny have?”