Category: field notes

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ I love when you Shazam the music in a movie and it tells you the name of the cue in the score

▰ Based on recent personal experience, I would not recommend putting your AirPods case next to your Tic Tacs

▰ Been playing “dual Oblique Strategies” cards each morning. Here’s a sample set:

“Distorting time”

“The inconsistency principle”

▰ When the cover of the ancient paperback you’re reading begins to flake apart, you can make a bookmark of the piece that fell off

▰ A very San Francisco combination of speech-to-text and autocorrect: say “onigiri”; receive “on Geary”

▰ This is the third or fourth year I’ve done the n+1 “bookmatch” reading list questionnaire, and for the first time I received in my “personalized booklist” a book I’ve already read (in fact: two)

▰ I was reading way too many books at the same time, which is how I managed to finish three in one week: Rudy Rucker’s Software (a re-read for something I’m working on), Elmer Kelton’s The Good Old Boys (my second Kelton western this year), and David Greenberg’s biography of John Lewis.

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Overheard this week on the street in Manhattan, which is a living, breathing Don DeLillo novel:

“The bank really wants to know where the money is.”

“Before the solution you were spending more, and now you are spending less.”

▰ On the airplane home, I was using headphones with noise cancellation, so I was confused when I could suddenly hear the sounds of the airplane, including the voices of flight attendants. Then I recognized it was from the TV series I was watching (The Asset, originally Legenden).

▰ Something’s up with my redirect plug-in, so if short links on disquiet.com aren’t working, like the four-digit ones for Junto projects, sorry about that.

▰ One of my first jobs, while in high school, was working a slide projector at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I’d been warned of James Watson’s temper but, frankly, putting a slide in upside down was entirely my fault.

A friend joked, in reply, on social media: “Is a double-helix different upside down?”

▰ I may, for the first time in a long time, have my MP3 scenario set. By typing these words, I’ll probably cause my Mac mini, which serves as my server, to go wonky. Until that happens, Plex is my local/remote base of operations. Apple Music (née iTunes) is useful, via USB sync, when I’m out and about and want to quickly add files to my iPhone. I spent too much time figuring out how to remotely save files to my Mac mini while away from home, and while it works, the slowness has been thankless. I’m probably doing it wrong, but that’s OK.

▰ Put different text-to-speech apps on your phone, laptop, and tablet to see how they handle the same spoken words. Go for a walk with earbuds on “transparency” and listen for what’s amplified. Play the last song on several favorite albums. And have a good weekend. See you Monday, or maybe Tuesday.