2024 is at and end and I thought I would sit and write, stream of consciousness-style, about things that I remember. Some of this is going to be pretty raw emotion and if you’re not up for that, please tap out now.
Overall it’s been a pretty good year. I’ve been at peace on a great many things and struggling with others. Technology-wise I am still rolling with four main devices: An M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32gb of RAM (Devika), an iPhone 16 Pro 1TB (downsized from a 15 Pro Max and don’t miss the size one bit), an Apple Watch S10 (gave my Ultra 1 to my middle daughter who frustratingly doesn’t use it… I should have just traded it in), and an M4 iPad Pro that I absolutely adore and am forcing myself to use more often. I’m trying to understand the decisions and trade offs that were made with iPadOS and lean into them rather than letting my old age muscle memory take over. I find myself asking questions like… “do I really NEED a professional file manager or should I just let the apps take over their space and manage files on the apps themselves?” That seems like the way Apple wanted it. I’m trying to adapt. I very much love the focus afforded by the device and opportunities for creativity.
A long time ago I decided to stop making New Year’s resolutions. I instead made goals. I felt like this was more attainable and a better fit for the human condition. I didn’t punish myself for missing a goal, I just readjusted until I tried to attain them.
2023 ended and I found that I wasn’t even thinking about goals for next year. I do have a physical goal of losing weight and getting more fit, but I’m not going to put metrics around it. I just want to generally feel better. Aside from that, I didn’t even think about what other goals I should have in 2024.
It’s the day after Christmas 2023 and I’m trying to wind down for the year. I’ve been reflecting on 2023 and all of its glory and horror. My morning reading started with this fine article:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/its-all-bullshit-tan
While I don’t work at Google (and never aspire to), I identified with many things in this article. It seems that over the past 20 years we’ve really lost something… a lot of things, actually. I’m not able to pinpoint what all of them are, but I guess I could sum it up as innocence.
Hello again. Nice to see you. It’s almost been a year.
I was supposed to do better on maintaining this site during 2023, but I didn’t really meet that goal. Some of the reasons were that I was tired and didn’t have much to say, but some of the reasons were largely technical.
As you can see, I’ve moved on from hosting this site at Medium. To keep a long opinion short, Medium has graduated into a clickbaity toxic mess of garbage. I’ve gotten to the point where I cringe anytime I’m directed to Medium by a search engine. I was subscribing to Medium for $5 a month and intended to build an audience there and write for pennies. That didn’t happen because using Medium has been challenging. Writing on it was painful, responding to some of the ridiculous comments was even more painful, and I just decided I wasn’t enjoying it any longer.
If you hired a cloud consultant that heartily recommends a “lift and shift” migration and they assure you that everything will be fine…
Fire them.
It won’t be fine.
My love affair with blogging has significantly diminished over the years, as I’m sure you can tell by the lack of activity on my blogs. WordPress was quite busy while I slept. They created and updated the Jetpack plugin and released a desktop editor that is actually quite nice. I like how it aggregates all of the useful features of any WordPress site that I run into a single window.
I was talking to a friend earlier today about video chats and why they don’t work. She said she really didn’t like to do video chats. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t really know many people that like to video chat.
I am a refugee of Generation X. I don’t know anyone in GenX that actually enjoys video chatting. Face time is irreplaceable. I mean time that is spent face-to-face, not Apple’s FaceTime. I’ve often thought about why I don’t like to video chat and I think it comes down to one simple thing. You can’t properly make eye contact.
This morning, my terminal cow had to remind me of something fundamental.
I can hardly believe it, but this blog is six years old. That’s pretty crazy. I suppose one of my New Year’s resolutions should be to blog more… but we all know how that goes. I will promise to try. How about that?
Tonight the Christmas tree was finally put back in the shed. While the wife and I were shifting the dining room table back into place, I muttered, “Another Christmas come and gone.” Quite a cheesy, cliche line if I do say so myself. Obviously I am becoming an old fart.
It suddenly occurred to me that 2010 had flown past. I know I was getting all pensive about this earlier, but the other day I was looking over this blog and I noticed that I made ONE WHOLE POST in the entire year of 2010. That one whole post was in June, where I ran across this website (like it was some foreign thing) and noticed that I really should post more often. The problem is that I remember writing that post and I SWEAR TO @DEITY there is NO WAY IN HELL that I wrote that post in June. I wrote it in November or December. There’s no way I wrote that in June.
