This is an experiment in creating a place to keep my collected quotes. I used to have a label named ‘quotes’ in Google Keep, but once a quote is snipped and labeled – what do I do with it?
I considered deleting the notes, but then wondered about why I snipped them in the first place?
Maybe I just need a place to store them?
In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done. Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. […]
Hence, plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
– Fred Brooks – The Mythical Man Month
What transforms the tool into the outcome is the person who wields it.
Through practice. Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
Every day.
Even when there’s no one on social media to observe and praise.
We do this for ourselves, to write the story of our own life page by page; chapter by chapter.
It’s not the notebook that makes the book. It’s the author.
Whisper it, shout it, write it: I am the author of my life.
“…many horror fans see themselves as outsiders and feel they exist on the periphery of society—a place from which it can often be difficult or intimidating to seek help. What if there were a book that used something familiar and comforting – horror films – to open the door to a journey of self-improvement and could serve as the first stepping stone on a journey to getting help for those who need it?”
Horror Movies are good for you
People say “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
That’s bullshit.
What doesn’t kill you just makes you angry and sad.
What makes you stronger is cultivating an environment of acceptance and kindness.
Be cool to people and drop stupid grudges.
Let go of poisonous relationships and make sure you let people know when you think they’re awesome.
That’s what makes you stronger.
Halloween: a day when we get it right.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Strangers come to us,
beautiful, ugly, odd or scary,
and we accept them all without question,
Compliment them,
treat them kindly,
and give them good things.
Why don’t we live like that?
WE LIVE IN A WORLD THAT is trying to kill us. We are the weakest link. Take away our technology and our weapons, and what do we have? Nothing. Our teeth aren’t sharp, we don’t have claws, and most of us can’t outrun anything that has four legs. We can’t even hide. Nobody is naturally camouflaged, and we’re very noisy.
101 Books to Read Before You’re Murdered – Part IV. Natural Order Horror
Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present.
Derek Sivers – The Past is Not True
Once you go sweet, you can’t go meat.
My daughter, describing why dessert comes after the meal
This job has no consistency. You can be sitting and twiddling your thumbs for 2 weeks with nothing to do, and the next thing you know, you are woken up at 3am, and it turns into a major project that you end up working on for 3 weeks straight 12 hours a day.
But if you are always busy due to something breaking, you are not doing your job right. Companies know that, that’s why most admins are salary. It’s much easier for them to pay your salary and have you sit on your ass when everything is working, rather than paying hourly and overtime when you have to fix something 24×7.
[…] You get what you pay for, especially in this business. Good guys are not cheap. 1 expensive, but solid admin is better than 3 cheap ones without any experience.
What is the optimum number of admins to server?
No-one else appeared to hear my project unraveling, the sound of unmet expectations crashing to the floor. The gulf between what I expected of myself and my perception of what others expected of me widened, until eventually I was unable to function at all as a musician.
Bill Bruford – Doing It Well Enough
…most people wake up and immediately check their phone or email. In spare seconds, we hop on Facebook and check the newsfeed. We’ve become addicted to input. Or in other words, we’ve become addicted to reactively being guided by other people’s agendas.
Why Keeping a Daily Journal Could Change Your Life
Writing your thoughts and feelings down is liberating. You can tell the pages what you won’t say to anyone else. Get it all off your chest – make those dirty jokes, wonder about weird stuff, contemplate difficult victories, complain about pain, describe daily trials and tribulations, and lament the state of the world. Do it in a diary so the rest of society doesn’t have to deal with just how petty, miserable, and insecure you really are, and, most importantly so that you don’t become a prisoner to those emotions.
Writing in a journal is good for you – and so is throwing it out
My personal hunch (and I’ve said this for as long as I can remember) is that indefinite ketosis is unnecessary and perhaps even undesirable for most healthy people, and that occasional, even regular dips into ketosis (through fasting, very low-carb cycles, intense exercise) are preferable and sufficient. That way, you get the benefits of cyclical infusions of BHB and other ketones without running afoul of any potential unforeseen negative effects.
Mark’s Daily Apple – Is Constant Ketosis Necessary – Or Even Desirable?
It’s important to have an uncluttered brain. A cluttered brain is full of distractions that prevent you from staying focused. You’re going to learn to use external storage for anything you aren’t focused on right now.
Time Management for System Administrators, by Thomas A. Limoncelli
Don’t take it personally, but your brain isn’t as good at recalling things as a piece of paper or a computer. Don’t use your brain to track tasks or appointments. Use your organizer, a request-tracking database, a Wiki, or anything other than your brain.
It comes and goes. Some people have it for five seconds. Some their whole lives. He’s a receiver now. Everything’s coming in. He can’t stop it, he can’t slow it down, he can’t even figure it out. It’s like he’s in a tunnel with a flashlight. But the light only comes on every once in a while. He gets a glimpse of something, but not enough to know what it is. Just enough to know it’s there.
Neil the cop, Stir of Echoes
Whilst writing stuff down in project notebooks is great, finding it afterwards can be difficult. Keeping everything online, in one text file, makes finding things just so much easier.
Living in a single text file – William Hern
There are only a few things I miss from working at RRD:
rali: 1:27 PM
— Pointy Haired Boss (from Slack)
Every time I have to call USAA I want to cockpunch the fucking shithead who programs their IVR until his balls are paste
An argument against too many notes…
…you get to keep as many notes as you can physically produce; the system limits are pretty much beyond your reach. There will be practical limits, however – once you get to (say) 50,000 notes, Finagle’s law will probably kick in.
You won’t remember that you already made a note of that recipe / those instructions / that receipt, so you’ll note it again. Then you won’t be able to find your note because you forget the title, or misspelt the keyword you’re searching for. And every search you make will give you 1,000 hits – or none at all.
How many notes can I keep in Google Keep?
Why Take Notes?
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [ … ] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible… no matter how internal processes are implemented […you…] need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.”
Levy, Neil. 2011. “Neuroethics and the Extended Mind.” In Judy Illes and B. J. Sahakian (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, 285-94, Oxford University Press.
Up until the mid 2000s or so, it felt like the collective goal of software and the internet was to create digital versions of all the stuff that worked well in real life …
Alex Danco Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours
But for the last ten years, we’ve been undoing all of that. The constraints of mobile, plus a new generation of users that’ve never really known life without the internet, meant the benefits of skeuomorphism were no longer worth the cost. Ditching it as a philosophy, both in design and in function, freed us to go out and reinvent everything as a service.
Failing up is a very real thing. Typical tactic for shitty managers actually. They’ll come into a new workplace, undermine senior employees who know what they’re doing, pick fights with people who aren’t 100% confident about their abilities, and after destroying the work flow and fucking up the business, then they’ll let everything slowly start getting back to the way things were before they fucked with it. Finally, they present the eventual return to normalcy as a success story despite the fact that it never needed to happen in the first place and could have been avoided completely if they had just shut the fuck up and learned what the business does and how the employees operate before destroying everything.
Reddit comment on “Trump’s Evil Is Contagious: The president has shown us exactly what happens when good people do nothing”
“First do it, then do it right, then do it better.”
Addy Osmani
“Insulin inhibits lipolysis because you just consumed nutrients, specifically carbohydrates and/or protein. And it’s more efficient for your body to use those incoming nutrients for energy than to liberate stored nutrients for energy.
Carbs, insulin, and weight loss: What REALLY matters for getting the results you want
Think of it this way: If you have $100 in your pocket, and you want to buy $25 in groceries, you wouldn’t go to the ATM for more cash. You’d use the money already in your pocket.”
If 100 people see / read / use the thing you made, and 90% of the people absolutely love it… you’re still likely to hear more negative feedback about it than positive. Just the way it works. Anyone who’s read the comment section of a YouTube video knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Brian Lunduke, The Negativity Bias
Robert Pirsig’s Zettelkasten?
“Now the main purpose of the slips was not to help him remember anything. It was to help him to forget it. That sounded contradictory but the purpose was to keep his head empty, to put all his ideas of the past four years on that pilot berth where he didn’t have to think of them. That was what he wanted.”
Robert Pirsig, Lila
Everything is Nothing
Found somewhere on the internet
Nothing is Everything
Something is not Everything
Nor is Something Nothing
And Everything is 1/2 off on Fridays
If something is a tool it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting, patiently.
Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma
If something is not a tool it’s demanding things from you.
It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants things from you.
We’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment.
That’s what’s changed. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals. It has its own needs of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.
When we industrialized food production we all started eating too much and too shitty and now practically all of us have overweight and unhealthy bodies. Feeds, push notifications, aggregators, to-do apps, notes apps, etc are all artifacts of the exact same process happening to our minds. It is so incredibly easy, so trivially easy, to spend 15 minutes on the internet and locate an effectively infinite amount of high-quality shit to read or watch or listen to. There’s really too much for us to handle, so we build tools and services to help us manage all that information streaming towards us. But what we’ve forgotten is that we don’t need to manage all the information out in the world, all we need to manage is however much we can ingest and digest. The bottleneck in our informational lives is absolutely not inventory management, it’s the bandwidth between our ears, which is the same is it’s always been.
Hacker News
“The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads — they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”
Grace, to Mr. Rooney, in reference to Ferris Beuller. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
QDB: Quote #244321
<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.
The developers who seem to have all the answers?
Twitter
They aren’t smarter than you.
They’ve just seen that before.
Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.
Doug Gwyn
As Trump recovers from coronavirus, Michael Che likens it to a car crash in which the “only survivor is the drunk driver.” Because Trump seems to have learned nothing from his experience, Colin Jost likens it to “a guy smoking through a hole in his neck.”
SNL Weekend Update 2020-10-10 https://www.vulture.com/article/snl-season-46-episode-2-saturday-night-live-bill-burr-hosts.html
What is that ugly, yet strangely compelling device, I wondered, and most importantly, do I need one? The answer is always yes.
Alphasmart Neo2 Review: The Joy of Distraction-Free Writing!
Productivity Pron, or Temptation of new tools.
“While you’re learning to use a new tool, there’s no expectation of getting anything done. It’s a way to take a break from whatever’s blocking your ability to work while making you feel like you’re working. And playing with something new can help you to figure out new and better systems. It’s not wasted time, but you need to be mindful of what you’re doing (and not doing) when you pivot to exploring something new. The line between exploration and procrastination is razor-thin.”
What’s the Best Productivity App? Your Own Personal System
On a good day, it’s like watching a train whizz past you while you’re trying to read the text on the side and make out faces in the windows. On a bad, a bird might land in front of you. Curious, you pull out your phone, Google the bird and get stuck in a “pigeons of the world” vortex. You discover cassowary eggs are bright green and in 2005, UK police found a leg of swan in the Queen’s Master of Music’s freezer. Two terrine recipes later, the train has long passed and night has fallen. Dazed, you sink under a dark cloud of self-loathing, lamenting another lost day. You don’t remember what kind of bird it was.
The lost girls: ‘Chaotic and curious, women with ADHD all have missed red flags that haunt us’ | Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder | The Guardian
I, the undersigned, shall forfeit all rights, privileges, and licenses herein and herein contained, et cetera, et cetera…
Willy Wonka
fax mentis incendium gloria cultum, et cetera, et cetera…
MEMO BIS PUNITOR DELICATUM!
It’s all there! Black and white, clear as crystal! […]
You get NOTHING!
YOU LOSE!
GOOD DAY, SIR!
“That’s February for you. It is bleak, it is honest, and it just tells you the way it really is,” he said, before recalling the wise words of his dad. “My father used to have a saying that if you can live through February, you’ll live another year.”
Reporter’s Resurfaced Deadpan Analysis of February Goes Viral
Me again. Ragman.
Well, the song remains the same.
Total conflict. Them against us.
I can’t believe they canceled the Halloween concert…
It’s like you say, rock’s chosen warriors will rule the apocalypse.
Airheads and brain-deads are everywhere. Who needs them? What have they got that I need?
Okay. Just one thing: Leslie.
Sometimes–actually alot lately–I think about some pretty radical things.
I mean, I have thoughts in my head that only you could understand.
Why not just end it, be done with it all?
Death.
Gone.
But you know something?
The only thing that holds me together is you.
You.
You get it, man. You went to this fucking school, and you rose above it.
And now you’re on top. And you can look down at the anthill and smile.
I gotta go.
Your friend forever…Ragman.
Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer’s letter to his idol Sammi Curr, Trick or Treat (1986)