Lifestream

The COVID-19 pandemic put a cramp in my travel habits, as it did with everyone. The last overseas trip that Evelyn and I went on was to Poland in 2016 for a wedding and the last one that we actually planned was to Greece in 2015 (and, my God, it's hard for me to accept that Greece 9 years ago). We've been to a handful of relatively local destinations in the interim (Vancouver, New York, PEI) but nothing particularly foreign.

And while I do remain part of an increasingly small minority of people who still thinks about the pandemic in the present tense, I also wanted to finally visit someplace a bit more exotic.

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Evelyn and I took a 10 day trip to Spain in September 2024.

Barcelona: Noisy, gritty, vibrant. Surprisingly many vermouterias. Seville: Beautiful, charming, fun. Surprisingly few barbers.

There is a glut of vermouterias in Barcelona, many of them with their own house blends and...I kind of love it?

Yes, I know that the word "chai" literally just means "tea" in Hindi (and other languages) and that the term "chai tea" is therefore technically redundant. I don't care. I will still occasionally say "chai tea" and I don't feel like I'm committing some kind of linguistic sin by doing so.

The English translation of "chai" is, of course, "tea" and it refers to a very generic category of usually hot and often caffeinated beverages made from steeping various kinds of leaves. On the other hand, the word "chai" in English usually refers to a very specific kind of spiced tea, often taken with milk, that Westerners typically associate with the culinary tradition of South Asia. One would not normally use the word "chai" in English to refer to the bog standard Orange Pekoe that one might drink for a caffeine fix in the morning before work.

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I mean...not quite everyone is welcome, right? Man, solicitors get no respect!

About five years ago, in early 2019, I stumbled upon the IndieWeb, a movement and community dedicated to modernizing the personal website. I quickly became enamoured with its ideas and spent the next year revamping my website and blog to make it more compliant with their standards.

I've written about the IndieWeb before but if you're just tuning in, there are several dimensions to it:

I pretty much went whole hog here; my website and publishing workflow supports all of the above, and link previews to boot. Not particularly well, mind you, but that's a different conversation.

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My annoyance at the vandalism is tempered somewhat by my admiration for what I can only imagine was an impressive feat of derring-do.

Oh man, Daniel Dennet died? He's my first introduction to the philosophy of consciousness. I found he struck a good balance between scientific realism and the desire to preserve the reality of our personal conscious experience.

Weird how I literally just learned that I apparently share a birthday with both Emily Dickinson and...Ada Lovelace?

Hopes and dreams

Texture

It's safe to say that The Wheel of Time TV series, streaming on Amazon Prime, has divided fans of the source material, namely Robert Jordan's enormous, sprawling, epic book series of the same name, spanning 14 door-stopping volumes published over a period of 24 years (1989-2013).

I would not call myself a great connoisseur of fantasy, but I do know something about these particular books, having been introduced to them as a teenager by a high school friend in the early nineties. I have warm memories of the series, and less warm memories of the tense, multi-year waits in between installments.

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In general, I take a dim view of graffiti. This, however, makes me smile.

Buildings like this fascinate me for reasons I can't fully articulate. I guess, to my eyes, it just feels like it has a story to tell, like a grizzled chess player in the park.

To some extent, the contrast between the IndieWeb and standard social networks mirrors the contrast between Linux and, say, Windows or MacOS. People keep asking when the former will become mainstream and it's kind of the wrong question to ask, because going mainstream was never the goal. The masses were never the target audience.

I'm kind of impressed with Github Actions. Easy to use, very composable.

So, I've ditched Netlify, opting instead for a raw nginx on a relatively modest VPS. I had heard some horror stories of people being charged thousands of dollars over a denial of service attack.

So far so good. I no longer have to worry about running out of build minutes either.

I recently finished watching Bodies on Netflix and the concept of free will comes up a fair bit given that the show involves a predestination paradox. One of the characters voices the opinion that "free will is an illusion" (his words) because human choices are ultimately the result of physics and biology. Human choices, in other words, are predetermined, and that means that free will doesn't exist.

The character in question is acting as a mouthpiece for the notion of incompatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive concepts. It's the most common way that the free will debate is framed. If you accept the idea of incompatibilism, then you can either believe in determinism (usually considered the rational choice) or you can believe in free will (usually considered the irrational or emotional choice). But you can't believe in both. The character, being a scientist, believes in determinism, hence his assertion that free will is an illusion.

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I stumbled on a vaguely ghetto-like enclave in Saint-Henri, Montreal.

7 photos

Annual Christmas tree snap

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with productivity systems. I usually don't bother with them but on those infrequent occasions when my life gets a bit hectic, I will sometimes make use of one. When that happens I always fall back to David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). I read his book a long time ago and, at the time, found myself impressed.

The fundamental feature of the system is that it downplays the classic, detailed, prioritized to-do list in favour of the so-called next action list. When considering a particular goal, instead of allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with all the myriad things you know you need to do in service of that goal, you instead focus only on the very next thing you can do to move closer to your goal. The end result is an unsorted list of things you can do "in the moment", across all the various goals in your life at the moment.

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TIL that the maxim "My country, right or wrong" has a second part: "If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"

Beautiful day. Beautiful flower.

My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.

The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.

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