Weeknote 0020

  • Eurovision was last weekend.
    • I’ve always liked Eurovision, both in execution and in concept. Many people seemed unhappy with the result, but isn’t it wonderful to see so many people enjoying and feeling a passion for a single event.
    • Livetweeting Eurovision used to be a fun thing, up until probably about five years ago. Livetooting on Mastodon recaptures some of that. I also learned a lot more about administering an instance from the more technical perspective. My little instance was slowing down ingesting toots from other instances, to the point where ‘new’ tweets were posted about 20 minutes ago. I probably wouldn’t have noticed unless Eurovision was on. Everyone seemed to be talking about the song three countries back. Anyway, feels like a good thing to understand that better.
  • I bought a big suitcase—easily the biggest I’ve ever bought—ahead of going away soon.
    • I’m not going to tell you when, in case you try and break into my house and steal my stuff. Fortunately, the case is big enough to take all my stuff with me, plus myself and a few of my friends. It’s so big that I’m worried the Just Stop Oil protestors will lie down in front of it.
    • Anyway, I am going away next month and I can’t wait.
  • I had a pitch win, and it’s important to take a moment to enjoy that before starting the work. Almost immediately I started working on preparing for another pitch.
  • For years, I’ve been bouncing around from one email solution to the next. But I’m finding Fastmail to be better than anything else I’ve tried, and I regret not moving to there sooner. I was seduced by the spam-control of Gmail, then Gsuite, then seduced again by hydro-powered servers running in privacy-focussed juristictions. I’ve tried all sorts of filtering and management solutions that sit on top. But it turns out all I really need is a system that eventually deletes boring emails.
  • I love fig rolls. They’ve been hard to get hold of on Brexit Island. I like them so much that my birthday present was a wholesale batch-load of Brexit-defeating fig rolls. Presumably they were smuggled in, or something. Perhaps that created demand because fig rolls were back on the shelves this week. And now they’re in my belly.
  • New Zelda is out and consuming a lot of time in this household. It’s not a leap forward, like the last one, but it is certainly a refinement.
  • Some of the most valuable things I’ve ever learned came straight out of Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator. The thing I keep coming back to is simply that negotiation isn’t about beating someone. Negotiation is making sure everyone feels that they won.

Bass notes

[In which Mo learns the bass guitar]

  • I’ve been waking up too early so practicing the bass first thing. It’s good discipline but it sure as hell gives me day-long earworms. And that’s on top of all the Eurovision earworms.
  • Technique still patchy. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, not sure what is behind one or the other.