Three weeks since my last Now entry. Tired, busy and last weekend I’d done the Bendigo to Adelaide trip in 3 days. For those overseas, it’s about 615km and 8 hours driving each way.
Today’s post is an experiment in format. I’m going to structure it around the Landscapes in my Digital garden.
Expand my Way of Being
I’m reading Listening for Candor which draws heavily on the same material as The Ontology of the Human Observer. The ideas around levels of trust in conversations are interesting and how the power-balance means we will engage in pretence, certainty, discovery or intimacy (upward sliding scale). Reflecting on the conversations I take part in at work I see clear cases where pretence and certainty are the prevailing mode. I’ll be curious to observe how I act or contribute to others acting at that level.
There is a conscious effort to improve my writing. I recognised a pattern of putting down a sentence on paper and then starting the next with one of ‘it,’ ‘this,’ ‘that,’ etc. The prose was lazy. Instead, I’m choosing different words and have pleasantly found my writing more expansive. Alongside the change in sentence structure I am slowing up and re-reading what I write before sending it to wherever it is destined to go. Yeah, imagine that!
Productive Laziness
I transferred my browsing from Vivaldi back to Firefox. Small things such as Vivaldi prompting for websites I’d visited once and then requiring me to delete the bulk of the suggested line became too annoying to put up with. Firefox also better protects me against Facebook tracking across sites and that is important to me. So much so, that I kept firing up Firefox whenever I needed to access Facebook or Messenger.
Hobby Together
Finish one book and start another. For eyes-on-the-page reading I’ve finished The Last Graduate which is the second of Naomi Novik’s series about a school for magicians. Despite a little too much teenage angst for my liking, the series is progressing well and I’m looking forward to the next book. Next in line is A Conjuring of Light by V. E. Schwab and it is screaming along.
My ears have been treated to the end of Otherland: Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams and the first few hours of Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett. Discworld audiobooks have become a staple of our car trips to Adelaide as they are books both my wife and I enjoy. Since there is no trip planned for a while, I’ve started Dawnshard, book 3.5 in The Stormlight Archive.
Gaming has me at the start of A Plague Tale: Requiem. The first game was amazing and I’m looking forward to how this story develops.
The Garden Shed
Lots going on here. Firstly, I am in the process of securing my home network. The router and one switch have been replaced. Next I have to gird my loins for the creation of VLANS to separate internal data from the ever increasing number of Internet of Things devices in our home.
A digital garden must be tended to like a real garden and along with new notes added today I’ve made a few small changes on the site.
- Removed the Graph view due to a bug causing it to display nothing until the page is refreshed.
- Corrected the list of recently updated notes to consider
datetimeandupdateddates. - Some style changes to force column widths and reduce unnecessary wrapping. The Blog page yearly sections are now each formatted the same as a result. I know this is not 100% good web design—fluid design is preferred—yet in this case I think it adds to readability.