Weeknotes 2024W39

It’s been a pretty quiet week from tedious work tasks and being stuck on some personal projects.

Updated and added to my website

I made a few changes this week. The most fun of which is I added some 88x31 buttons to the colophon section on my home page! These are relics from the old web that have always intrigued me. They are small images or gifs (88 pixels by 31 pixels, to be exact) that link to other websites. Visual hyperlinks.

They remind me a lot of my button and pin collection that I have in real life. They are badges that hold a story or make a personal statement about who I am. That is what I would like to go for with my online buttons, too. They tell people I am part of certain communities or state that I’m the kind of person with an RSS feed.

That’s an excellent segue into the second change. I finally added an RSS feed. It fell to the wayside in my recent makeover and hadn’t gotten around to rebuilding it until now. For now, I decided to dump all of my posts into one feed instead of splitting it up by collection (i.e. one feed for books, one for weeknotes, etc.). I did limit the feed to only have my two most recent weeknotes so those don’t flood the thing as they are much more frequent than other types of posts.

Lastly, I revisited and refined my value statements. I recently read an article about values that went pretty heavy into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In this, they see values as behaviors, things you actually do and that really resonated with me. My value statements are now a verb followed by an adverb that answer the following:

• What would you be doing if you were living meaningfully? (verb)
• How do you want to show up to whatever you’re doing? (adverb)

This framing has been really helpful in using my values as filters for how I act and the goals that I set. After a lot of deliberation with myself, I came up with the following (read more about what they mean at the bottom of the home page):

• Learning humbly
• Serving compassionately and reliably
• Connecting authentically

Bits and Bobs

• Finished reading Content Design by Sarah Winters and Rachel Edwards. It was good but not what I was expecting and not what I needed right now. I did get some useful tidbits, though, and it was short.
• Read about and have been experimenting with encryption. Kryptor is super simple to use and I used it this week to encrypt a small remote backup. Cyber-security and computer science in general is wildly fascinating. Computers just do math and look at all the cool stuff we can do with that. It’s mind-boggling.
• Went on a sci-fi movie binge. I don’t normally watch TV or movies but a friend inspired me to watch Interstellar because it’s his favorite movie. It was a good movie but not great. I wouldn’t write a letter home about it. Two days later, I got an urge to watch The Matrix. Now that is a great movie.

Links

• Between queer and LGBTQIA+ by Andrea Vos at Pronouns.page. Queer means so much more than “not heterosexual and not cisgender.” It’s an anti-assimilation, intersectional, patriarchal subversion movement.
• Metric-Less Success by Lawrence Yeo at More to That. Important things in life that are the real goalposts usually can’t be measured by an external number. Treating people with compassion can’t be measured. Living with integrity can’t be put into a number.
• Social rules by Recurse Center. Social rules that “create a friendly, intellectual environment.” I wished there were framed as things you should do rather than what not to do but useful nonetheless.

  1. No well-actually’s
  2. No feigned surprise
  3. No backseat driving
  4. No subtle -isms

• Pause at the top of the slide by Annie Mueller. Stop and start difficult things when they are not difficult. There is less resistance to starting again and you immediately build momentum.
• Privacy Guides. Lots of knowledge and recommendations for online privacy.
• From Jason, personal website of Jason Velazquez. Really wonderful website to explore.

Created: 2024-09-29

Last modified: 2024-09-29