Oddments of High Unimportance

The Updates

Backups Update

The Time Machine backups to the Time Capsule are running flawlessly. I manually run the backup every Sunday morning.

The Backblaze initial backup is still running. I blame our lousy <1Mbps upload speed; also, I only run it full out when we're not here. So it's only running maybe 12 hours a day. Still, progress is progress.

The 5+ year old Western Digital 2TB drive is still connected to this Mac and it appears to still work, but I should just unplug it and recycle it. I should set up the newer 4TB drive, partition it, have Time Machine running continuously in one portion and set up a Carbon Copy Clone in the other partition. 

I should, but I haven't.

At this time, I have no interest in spending time and money on a NAS device, though that seems the way of the future for file hoarders like myself.

Diet Update

I'm hovering at 210 lbs., neither gaining nor losing. I'm not practicing any particular eating strategy, apart from starting my 8-hour eating window at about 1:30 or 2 pm, and fasting once or twice a week.

I will try another stab at a full 3-day Potato Hack next week. Can I break through my 1.5-day limit?

CriticalMAS, in his post celebrating a full year of being 25 lbs. lighter, turned me on to the book Volumetrics. I have placed a hold at the library for this. I also like his Peasant Diet idea. 

Last week, I went back to my old Slow Carb lunch meals of chicken breast, lentils, and veg (splashed with apple cider vinegar, Tabasco, and seasonings). I found adding more chicken to the lunch kept me satisfied through the afternoon, with no crashing and no cravings. So my partial success with this lunch last year may have been due to not eating enough protein.

Fitness Update

Not walking 10,000 steps/day, not even close, some days not even half that. The nicer weather makes walking around the lake at work more attractive. My current audiobook is Mrs. Dalloway and that would go nicely with a walk.

Still alternating the kettlebell routines my coach mapped out for me, two or three times a week. Have been using the 35-lb. bell and that's a workout; still not bored with it yet, still requires my full attention.

On Sunday, I did the 7-Minute workout (I use the Johnson & Johnson iOS app) just to vary my routine and see how I'd do. My goal was to do 2 sets of the workout, but I crapped out about a third of the way into the second set. This short, simple, high-intensity workout kicked my ass. My muscles are still sore.

What does this tell me? I'm not as fit as I'd like to think. (I'm fitter than I would be if I didn't do all this stuff, though.) Adding the 7-minute workout to my regular kettlebell workouts to vary the conditioning is a good idea.

I realized recently with a shock that I've not been to a yoga class in maybe 10+ years. I need to get back to that; my muscles and posture would love me for it. 

Productivity Update

We met with a financial planner recently and I was shocked at how ill-prepared I was in pulling my info together.

To pull together what I needed for the meeting, I emptied my paper inbox into various piles on the floor and it was shameful, SHAMEFUL, a floor full of shame for me and me alone. Piles of paper. Months of postponed decisions. A midden of trapped energy. Sorting through all that paper, finding homes for everything, setting up some simple filing or even paperless systems so I feel on top of what's coming in -- that needs to go on my Now page.

Speaking of my Now page: I've stalled on the video editing project. My inspiration for it is not high right now. I could attack it from a point of low inspiration, but based on my experience with the last video, I know I'd have to redo it all and start over. I will wait for the carousel to circle back and then jump on the horse when my mood about the project is higher.

Diarizing Update

Still writing the 5-lines-a-day for our weekend exploits, but not bothering to record daily stuff.

Not using the 1-second daily video capture. Though I probably will when we go on vacation -- that would be a neat souvenir.

Up till yesterday I had a pretty good record of blogging daily. But lately I've been splashing in the shallows, reposting links or adding to the Commmonplace Book quotes, settling for the good-enough post. (Lowering your standards is an underrated strategy.) 

We were so tired from our busy weekend that I decided to relax my self-imposed daily-blogging rule and think about what I wanted to do next with the blog.

Hence, the swivel.

The Swivel

The definition I like is that a swivel is omnidirectional, whereas a pivot is one-dimensional.

One of the Now page items I don't refer to much in this blog is the Three Principles. The Principles are a form of spiritual psychology I've been reading and thinking about for the past 5 years or so.

I was thinking of starting an anonymous blog to do a bit of writing about the Principles. But to make the most of my Now goals of blogging daily and continuing my Principles self-study, I will start bringing the spiritual side of my life and thought to this blog.

I am frankly uncomfortable about this because I feel I can barely articulate my thoughts and feelings on this topic. I had a coach a few years ago give me the homework to "write something someone might criticize." Spirituality is that topic for me. 

The blog will still feature ephemera and whatever catches my fleeting attention, it will still be a logbook and catch-all, but it will also start reflecting other interests and become a little more personal.

They [Tristram Shandy and The Anatomy of Melancholy] are reminders that weirdness, unconventionality, iconoclasm is not contemporary but wholly human, that the books and writers I am looking for are the ones who make it up (as we all must) as they go along.

If you don’t happen to live near a college or a bookstore, if your relatives aren’t bookish, the public library is literary culture in its entirety.

Steven Kurutz's longish memory piece (about 12-15 minutes to read) is a love letter to his small-town Pennsylvania library and how it made him the person and writer he became. 

The first public library I remember visiting was the one-room Garner Public Library on Main Street, with I think a smallish room to the side where the magazines were. I remember it as large, though that is probably childhood memory playing a trick.

I remember first seeing The Maltese Falcon at a movie night there, with one of those loud reel-to-reel monstrosities on a small white screen. It was wonderful. When I got into the Doc Savage pulp adventure novels in my early teens, this little library -- incredibly -- had Philip Jose Farmer's strangely uber-serious fictional biography of Doc Savage. How did those small-town librarians know what I wanted when I wanted it?

A tiny place, but a dear one. They moved into a much nicer metal-and-glass building beside Town Hall, with more room for more books and a community room, and it became a place for the bookish and introverted among us to hang out. But it was never as cozy. 

Susan Weinschenk's talk at TriUXPA the other night on the future of human-technology interaction surfaced some intoxicating ideas.

One of them was that, as humans, we anthropomorphize our devices and machines. We build relationships with them (i.e., Eliza), even name them. As Alexa and Siri devices proliferate, we should expect devices to encourage more relationship-building. (We should also expect voice-control to be the interface of the near-future, so start practicing now.)

The technology will get better at anticipating or reacting to human expressions and actions. But as these devices get better, we can expect those people who have difficulty maintaining person-to-person relationships to prefer programmed familiarity.

Susan demoed the video for Qoobo -- "the headless robotic cat pillow" -- that I hope is an evolutionary path leading off a high cliff and deep into a bottomless crater of dark. It is one of the most horrific things I've ever seen -- surely its makers are having a laugh?

I shared this Verge article with Liz, who said this about the video: 

Love that they say “hate the unconditional love?” - there's irony for you. Also, I can’t fathom why they couldn't have included a head too. Creepy and unnatural! 

Ars Technica displays an animated GIF composed of still images collected from the Rosetta's orbit around a comet. The universe is big and unknowable, but we get brief glimpses behind the curtain every now and then.

On my way to tonight's TriUXPA event, I grabbed an early supper at my favorite place to eat in Raleigh: the one and only K&W Cafeteria in Cameron Village. There are other K&Ws around, but this one is the homiest and the sweetest. Look at those choices -- what's not to like??

With the network problems seemingly taken care, we were still plagued with occasional, maddening slowdowns when watching Netflix or even just browsing on our devices.

But when I shut down the iMac or put it to sleep, the network would suddenly leap to life or become more stable. Hmmm.

I've been running Backblaze since mid-January and it's still doing its initial backup, so it says. I noticed I had its performance to Faster Backup, which meant a slower network. My ignorance of Backblaze preference settings comes to the fore. Some Googling around clued me in to what I needed to do so the uploads would not affect us while we are trying to get stuff done online.

So I have set Backblaze to back up from 11pm-6am, when we're sleeping. And while it's backing up, I set it to perform faster backups -- this will saturate our little DSL line but that's OK, we're not using it at night. We have a minuscule upload rate, but I'm hoping these new settings help finish the job while not inconveniencing us.

References

• Why I Switched to Backblaze from CrashPlan
• Backblaze Help: Baclblaze seems to be slowing down my other web applications
• Backblaze Help: Why is my backup slow?
• Backblaze Help: Backblaze Performance Settings (Mac)

All of which is a reminder of how odd it is that we think of time using spatial metaphors at all – indeed, that it seems virtually impossible not to. Ask me about the coming month and I can’t help picturing a sequence of little boxes, like a calendar; ask me what I did yesterday and my eyes shoot upwards, as I consult a “space” somewhere behind my head. Your specific images may not match mine, but anthropologists suggest that the basic metaphor – “time is space” – is a cultural universal. Which is a pity, in a way, because I’m pretty sure it makes our experience of time more anguished than it needs to be.

Mark Forster wrote in one of his books about "spaciousness" being a quality of life he valued. When talking of how we move through the day, "spaciousness" evokes a different feeling than "cramped."

As Burkeman says, time as space is a useful metaphor. Time is money, is another. An academic uses time the way a sculptor uses clay is another metaphor I've heard.

At this point in my development, metaphors are useful until they're not. They're fun to talk about and they can lead to insights sometimes, but it's useful also to know when to let them go. And to know that they're momentary thoughts.

"Time" does not really exist, the way trees and cars and physical bodies do. It's a concept humans have made up because it's useful to keep the trains running and we know when to celebrate birthdays, but time and its passing is a thought we create for ourselves. The way time can pass quickly or slowly to us -- and differently for someone else in the same circumstance -- is a clue that time is a thought we're paying attention to (or not) in the moment.

As the mystics tell us, there is no past and no future. There is only now. What happens to the time-management industrial complex when there is only now? As someone for whom time management has been my shadow religion for nearly 30 years, this is something I'm pondering quite a bit.

The Two Cents column on emergency funds has the good, standard advice offered by financial planners and investors. 

There's a 1-3-6 guideline for deciding how much to save, with a link on the page to a different article offering a 3-6-9 guideline. 

Of course, this assumes you have enough money to squirrel away to being with. Most of my adult life was spent at interesting but lower-paying jobs and paying off credit card debt racked up during periods of unemployment. If I had enough cash to contribute to my 401K and cover my bills, anything extra went to paying off the credit card.

It is only fairly recently that I reached a certain comfort level with how much I have in the bank, but I will always feel I started too late and saved too little.

The YNAB blog has its own take on do you really need an emergency fund. YNAB, an online budgeting application, stands for "You Need a Budget"; I started using it about 1.5 years ago and wish I'd known about it years earlier. It changed my financial life (but that's a story for another blog post).

I thought the YNAB article more applicable to my situation than the Two Cents piece. As the YNAB writer notes, and I've seen in my own finances, the more I'm tuned in to my priorities and budget categories, the less need I have of a line item for emergencies. 

If an emergency car repair or dermatology visit results in a surprise bill in the hundreds of dollars, I now have enough saved in those categories to cover the expense.  So emergencies are covered by my "true expenses" categories, where expenses are variable, hard to predict, but tend to be outsized.

Having enough money to cover an unexpected expense is a good feeling, one I've not had for most of my adult life, and I savor it.

Over the years, I have set a few mental triggers for myself that let me know my thinking is revved up and running away with me. 

One of them is when I notice I'm talking to myself, either letting my in-my-head voice loose or carrying on my side of an argument that either has happened or has yet to happen.

Another is when I hear myself say "I need to figure that out..." This is usually a signal to me that I am in my head, my thinking is revved up, and I need to take a step back from the situation.

Saying "I need to figure it out" is like saying "I need to think about it more," which is usually the last thing I need to do. When my mood is low, thinking about the problem just makes me feel worse. In fact, my feelings are an indicator that I should avoid actively thinking about the problem. 

I like the description of thinking as a power tool, like a drill. A drill is useful for specific tasks, but it's not something to be used every day, as we would use a hammer or a screwdriver. Thinking is useful for planning a trip, troubleshooting a DSL connection -- practical stuff. But thinking about concepts like my career, my life, my place in the world -- the thinking there gets dicey and not to be trusted. 

Now, when I hear myself say that trigger phrase, it's my cue to stand up, walk around, breathe deeply, get some blood flowing, change up what I'm focusing on -- distract myself, in other words. Later on, an insight or next step may pop into my head when there is less thinking on my mind, and then I'm over the hump. 

Update: Dr. Amy Johnson, author of The Little Book of Big Change, posted a video circling around this question of "figuring things out."  

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3j6w0ZqeoM&w=854&h=480]