Dan J’s Website

I never remember what plastics I can recycle and what I can’t; this is a handy reminder.

I’m a huge fan of people who dive into arbitrary corners of pop culture in insane amounts of detail.

Therefore, I couldn’t be happier to have found this deep dive into the ending of The Sopranos, inspired by the discussion of the scene found in episode 462 of The Incomparable podcast.

Bless all these nerds. ❤️

This is cool. Coming to you from The Village. 😎

Direct link to scalable image

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

our lives are
held together with
thoughts of where
we might be tomorrow.
And of disappointed
yesterdays.

(via Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter)

I've been looking for guides for how to do .NET development in Vim, because Vim has long appealed to me for a variety of reasons too esoteric to get into right now. And, despite it being what I'm using to write this post, I'm hungry to get away from Visual Studio Code and its "I'm secretly Javascript running on Chrome don't tell anybody"; I mean, I've used WAY worse web-simulacra-of-native-apps (I'm glaring at you, Descript), but still. Code is a little janky (for some reason, File > New Window doesn't seem to work anymore) and I don't need my text editor to swallow 2GB of RAM when I'm not using it.

ANYWAY, I'm bookmarking this article because it looks helpful. Actually, Rudism.com just looks all over like the kind of site I want to have. So, also bookmarked for inspiration.

Someday. Yes, someday. Someday I'm going to spend a lot of money on a mechanical keyboard. ...Probably this one. This guide is a good quick-reference that summarizes some of the many, many, ridiculous number of options available. 😂

Great little essay by Patrick Rhone, making the argument against relying on a piece of software to hold your journal:

The history of computing has copious evidence to back me up on that bold statement. The evidence shows that Day One (who I will note bills themselves as a “journal for life”) will likely be long gone in 20 years (Go ahead and bookmark this post and come see me then if I’m wrong).

Maybe when the company dies they’ll give you an exit plan to save your work or maybe they won’t.

Day One is a great app, but I've been wanting to move away from it for a long time. Partly to get out from under one more silo—right now, my journal is in their app, on their servers... it doesn't feel under my control.

I'd rather have whatever I write be in plain text—like the source of this post that you're reading. Even then, being able to read write I wrote decades from now depends on the bits that make up this post persisting, being available, being readable... and the history of computing has not borne out the likelihood of that.

Couple things I don't have an obvious replacement for:

• Ease of putting photos into Day One entries
• Geolocation - I like knowing where I was when I wrote something down

Neither of those are insurmountable, even in a hardcopy journal! The lure of convenience keeps me tied to an app. Hopefully not until it's too late to leave.

I've added this to my workouts to start building the strength and stability I'll need to do full overhead presses eventually. Bookmarking for ease of reference.

Love this brief post from Rick LePage, especially the bit from Seinfeld. And the bit about the work being hard, and that being by necessity and design. It goes with something I've been thinking a lot lately: that my mood and self-image and maybe mental health in general improve a lot when I do the work and degrade rapidly when I don't.

Also, an apparently-different recent interview with Seinfeld (guess he's being interviewed a lot recently?) produced this, quoted in James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter for April 23: "The right way is the hard way."

Sein knows what's up.

(via Daring Fireball)

I always try to do sudo cd /some/restricted/dir and it doesn’t work and I always forget why.

sudo cd won't work because the cd command is built into the shell. So you are saying become root and then run this command. You become root and then the command after sudo is searched for but there is no cd command to find.

The method to use is to switch to the user that owns the directory. Permission 700 is meant as "owner can read, write and execute".

So if root owns the directory sudo -i, password and then cd {dir} is the only correct method. If someone else owns the directory you can still use the 1st method but can also change to that user with su {username} and then use cd as that user.

In summary: cd isn’t a “command”, so you can’t pass it to sudo. Instead, use su to become an appropriate user and then use the shell to change directories.

OMG, you guys… MegaZeux still exists!

I used to fool around with this ASCII-art game/game editor 25 years ago! It was a new, more-advanced version of ZZT, which might technically still exist, too.

A week off + quarantine has made me nostalgic for the games of my youth, and today I remembered MZX… and found it. 🤯🤓

I feel like I "should" be making things instead of consuming them. At least playing old Nintendo games makes me itch to try developing my own, instead of just sinking hours into the couch.

We'll see if that itch leads anywhere.

Nice collection by James Clear. Reading material.

...Point off for incorrectly hyphenating "all time" in the title, though. 😏

Highlights/Notes:

After I wrote the item “do something nice for a friend” – because being a good friend and having good friends is important to me. I completed the pair with the item, “do something nice for myself”. A secondary thought, but still, a thought.

This understanding started reading Burnout (a book that affected me so profoundly I have lost track of the number of women I have bought it for). Burnout is a symptom of the patriarchy.

I wonder where that conclusion comes from (not that I think she’s wrong). Guess I should read Burnout... 🤔

A lot of good potential resources for IndieWeb/decentralized/non-siloed social media tools in here.

Everything he says about what it's like to be brought up male—the lack of connection with our own emotions, the devaluing¹ of femininity, both in ourselves and in women—it all strikes a chord with me.

Like in most other areas of my life, I've been privileged to come at the question of body weight without undue stress or anxiety: I'm male, and naturally skinny, so "lose weight" has never been a thing I felt the need to do.

Having good problems isn't the same as not having problems, however, and my problem has always been the opposite: I've always felt too skinny, not strong enough, and had the various other ailments that accompany that, like a rounded upper back (and generally bad posture)¹.

Lifting weights has a made a big difference to me, and this article explains why.

I have been in a healthy weight range all my life, and had this exact problem: I felt that I looked overweight, I hated how my body looked and more importantly felt like I didn’t understand why it did anything it did. I felt like if I ate even a little bit more than barely any food, I gained like three pounds each time. I only seemed to get fatter if I ate how much a normal person was supposed to, yet no one was about to help me with the weight loss I felt like I desperately needed to pursue.

Reverse all of the quantities in that statement (over with under, a little bit with a lot, fatter with thinner, loss with gain) and I could have written it.

My frustration was, even after I started lifting weights in university, I never really knew what I was doing. I eventually found a program² a few years ago which made the difference by being one of the few resources I've ever seen actually geared towards the skinny guy who wants to gain in a healthy way³. Quoting from the article again:

Lifting weights was a fit for me because it makes resting and recovering equally as important as training. It lays extremely bare for people like me, who struggle to grasp what my body even might be for other than “constant source of resentment," how it all works. Moving and feeling mobile, capable, and energetic is life-changing to me, and these feelings are supported by lifting and getting stronger; getting stronger is supported by eating and resting as well as actually lifting.

Once I had the experience of following a lifting program, with feedback, and measuring how many calories and macronutrients I was taking in, I could move my feelings about my body from vague "this sucks I hate it" to an experimental mindset: "uhoh, I've stopped gaining weight. Let me try adding another 250 calories to my diet."

Regardless of our feelings of inadequacy, we are all, by being human, inheritors of athletic potential. Put another way, we were built for strenuous exercise, and, for most of us, when we feel bad about how our bodies look and function, some combination of exercise and mental work (e.g. therapy) is the answer.

I always find Seth's posts insightful. And he posts so many of them, and they're so concise... that basically he's a walking example of why writing and publishing every day is the only way to get great at being a writer and a publisher.

This post captures so well why "just try harder not to make mistakes" is a dead end that I just want to quote all of it, but since that's not really how I want the web to work, just a couple highlights before you go read the rest (it's only 416 words):

It seems ridiculous that a surgeon needs to write her name (with a Sharpie) on the limb that she’s about to operate on, but this simple system adjustment means that errors involving working on the wrong limb will go to zero.

In school, we harangue kids to be more careful, and spend approximately zero time teaching them to build better systems instead. We ignore checklists and processes because we’ve been taught that they’re beneath us.

The ego that makes us think we're "above" simple systems for eliminating mistakes is as hardwired a part of our humanity as the imperfect memory.

Letting go of the one lets us solve for the other.

This is an excellent—and harrowing—look at the downsides that come with being well-known.

Various measures of "success" in today's world seem to bring some measure of fame along with them—insofar as you have to create content to get people's attention, for a lot of small creators especially, that attention is focused on you.

This quote (and the quotes it includes) sums up how I feel about fame:

During my college years, one of my dorm mate’s dads was a famous Hollywood producer. He once said to me, “You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face.”

Taking it a step further, we could quote Bill Murray:

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.

Being rich would suit me fine. Being rich and famous would be obnoxious, as per Mr. Murray. The worst thing, reading Tim's article, would be being famous without being rich (emphasis mine):

If you don’t have your own ammo, [extortion] can be catastrophic. In other words, if you have more fame than resources, you paint yourself into a vulnerable corner. If you have fewer options and fewer allies, you’ll be attractive to predators.

You might think, "how likely is it that I would be famous at all?" But if you're building an audience on the internet in order to, for example, build an online business... well, this article will tell you about the inevitable downsides that come with an audience that climbs up beyond "tribe" size to "city" size.

I'm going to meditate on this one on the regular, as I try to build any sort of business or brand for myself.

A couple tactical notes:

• If you run an email list, using something like ConvertKit or Mailchimp, you have probably needed to provide an address; emails from mailing lists need to contain a postal address for the business as an anti-spam measure (I don't know the source of that specific requirement). Don't use your home address for this. Even if you have a tiny mailing list... all it takes is one unsavoury person signing up. Rent a P.O. Box, if at all possible, or some similar thing in your own jurisdiction.
• I've been meaning to get a "virtual" phone number (or more than one), and use it in places that require a phone number instead of my actual mobile. Again, if you catch any level of fame, this becomes far more important. You don't want your contact info logged somewhere that people from the internet can find it, and our existing institutions are notoriously bad at keeping personal info like this private. Best to keep your real information behind a smoke screen as much as possible.

It's a stunning thought, to the point of vertigo, how much time and energy and sweat and blood we invest in a life we don't actually want.

[...]

It is no surprise that the people we admire took alternate paths.

Both Coulton and the sadly-defunct The Last Psychiatrist blog were essential inspirations for the extremely gradual path I've been taking from the life I somewhat-blindly entered after university to the life I actually want. I'm pinning—and sharing—this post as a reminder. ❤️

I have really mixed feelings about this massive article, which I'm bookmarking because I'm only part way through it.

The good: it's full of extremely tactical actions you can take right now, while you're reading it.

The bad: it's on Medium 😛; the writer is, um, rather pretentious and self-satisfied; the constant appeals to personal longevity are, I think, off the mark. If you're going to change a bunch of settings to reclaim your time and attention, a la Digital Minimalism, do it because it improves the quality of your life and your interactions with others and the world around you. The idea that you should set your wallpaper to a picture of your pet because there's some statistical correlation between looking at a dog and having 10% less chance to die of a heart attack (paraphrasing :P) is so... I don't know, it's kind of everything that makes me roll my eyes about the tech-yuppie-utopian-immortality set. Like, sure, do whatever you can to preserve your physical health, but maybe that could be lower on your list of priorities (i.e. choose quality over quantity).

Still. An article I want to refer back to. Probably.