The Personal Journal of James Vornov
A bit more conventional image of the puppy.
Operant conditioning is a powerful tool for shaping behavior. Still, much is to be gained by thinking about what the world looks like from the puppy’s point of view. Facinating how a puppy shows stress through affection, aggression and play dependiing on context. I’m learning to see through the surface appearance to see where the behavior is coming from.
From The Experimental History experiment – by Adam Mastroianni:
Last March, when I had barely begun blogging, I happened to meet a big shot author who writes pop science books, and I told him about my dreams for this blog. “Maybe this could be what I do,” I told him, hopefully.
“It’ll never work,†he said. “People want to read about what they are interested in, not what you are interested in. I’m successful because I write stuff that will sell. I don’t actually like the stuff I write about.â€
I’ve been writing here going on 25 years now. I write what I need to since this is my journal. But I’ve long been aware that my posts on photography equipment and notetaking process get the most reads via search engines. Not lots of referals from other blogs these days, just some of my old friends here. But of course, this is just my way of thinking out loud.
A new photographic workflow. I let the puppy, now 3 months old, wander about the yard, sniffing at all of the wonderous aspects of her world while I wander about the yard, enjoying my own visual feast of form and texture. If I remember to bring a camera out with me, I capture some images.
Once I had my Linux box up and running with Regolith and i3wm, I wanted to integrate it into my developing Zettelblogging workflow.
First, I explored the world of Emacs. There is a wonderful community around Emacs currently with great YouTube videos and blogs. I’d be remiss if I didnt’t mention Prot, Sachua and David who served as guides to integrating Emacs into my workflow. It took a program called SyncThing to hook the Linux box into my Apple-centric iCloud workflow efficiently although seeing folders from the Mac over my home network is pretty easy in Linux, particularly having the Gnome tools available.
In the end, Emacs, like Linux itself, is a high customizable environment that was engaging but in the end just didn’t bring that much utility to the actual work. In fact, both act as potent distractions to actual research and writing.
Next I explored LogSeq, which is one of the new generation of note taking apps like Roam, Notion and Craft. I kind of liked it and found it more straightforward in use than I had imagined with its backlinking and autotagging style. But in the end it was too much a self contained system and really not easily integrated with the Drafts/DEVONthink/text/PDF workflow I had built up over the years.
So I’m back using the tools on the Mac and iOS where each piece of software is a bit more opinionated and fits a particular use case while all working well together. Suprisingly, the Kindle Scribe is my latest useful tool, giving me a nice way of reading PDFs in depth. I’m hoping the notetaking side becomes better integrated, but for now my notebooks and fountain pens are just as good as a digital notetaking tablet. Notes are an initial step in input and my goal is working in public on that input.
It’s clear that the Linux desktop failed even as Linux became the single most widely deployed OS behind the scence. And as Linus Torvalds, the creator of the OS knows, the reason is the fragmentation of the user experience.
Even knowing this abstractly didn’t stop me for spending a good bit of the first half of 2022 building a PC and playing with Linux, I’ve built a few PC with my youngest son as gaming rigs. I fell in love with the Teenage Engineering mini-ITX case they call the “Computer-1“. So when they became available again at the beginning of last year, I bought one and then the parts to put together a Linux box. Just Intel on chip graphics since the case is too small for a high powered graphics card and I wasn’t looking to use the build for gaming or other graphics uses.
What I wanted was a fast, minimal system not filled with distractions and extras. Since Linux runs fine on hardware ranging from my Raspberry Pi to multiprocessor servers, I figured that a well configured box would be about as fast as possible on standard tasks like text editing and browsing.
My biggest motivation was to really try a tiling windows manager. One of my biggest frustrations with MacOS is how inconsistently windows are spawned and so randomly placed. Working with two large external monitors multiplies the problem. I’ve mostly dealt this this by using a utility called Magnet which quickly allows screen tiling. And the new Stage Manager OS approach actually helps a bit. But using a minimal system with a tiling WM is just another experience altogether.
So I used a Linux distro called Regolith which integrated the I3 tiling windows manager with the Gnome System Mangement tools on Ubuntu. Sounds complicated already, doesn’t it. These distros on Linux are absolutely necessary because of the complexity of putting together a full suite of system management tools. There are literally dozens of distros. I found it pretty easy to find a distro and get it loaded on my newly built machine. But when something goes wrong or you want to add a functionality and keep it updated, it starts taking time to look up how to install or change some settings file to get things right. So far from the experience of running MacOS or Windows.
I can see how if one were running a certain configuration and just wanted to maintain function, it would be a reliable way to go. But as a user, there’s just so much friction that I can see how any casual user would be detered from continuing. Lets just say that to run Linux as a user, one needs to be at “Hobbyist” level. Willing to invest time into running the machine to learn how it all works and customize an experience.
So I got my Linux machine up and running. In the end, I ended up with a full Gnome install running with I3 loaded as the window manager at startup. That was just the start of the journey though, as I spent more time after that going down the Emacs and LogSeq rabbit holes. But I think those are tales for another day.
Finished my first book of 2023, London Rules by Mick Herron. It’s the 5th book in the Slow Horses series which has been made into a series streaming at AppleTV+.
I watched the first season and was taken by the story as well as the way Gary Oldman’s brought the character of Jackson Lamb to life. As I’ve often done when given a choice between book and show, I stopped watching the show and read the source material so that I could enjoy the reading experience without having to substitute the show’s cast and choices for my own construction of the story. I think it was Game of Thrones that served as my first introduction to the problem. After watching the first season on HBO, I read through the books, only erasing with difficulty some of the actors from my mental images of the characters.
The first 4 books were a nice diversion during 2022 from my usual reading habits which haven’t included spy thrillers too often. On the other hand, after my accident, I read 6 or 7 of the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connely, all library Kindle downloads. This too was inspired the show Bosch on Amazon Prime. Now there I had already watched several seasons, well binged several seasons, and so Titus Welliver will always be my mental image of Harry Bosch.
I’ve written summaries of my Hobonichi use in some previous years: 2017, 2019, and 2020. This Japanese daily journal is a popular Instagram and Reddit subject as it’s part of the larger craft journaling scene, like the Bullet Journal.
This year my Hobonichi has served its customary purpose as the tool to plan my day every morning. I always buy the Japanese version of the planner as the layout just suits my use a bit better than the English version, even though this means that the daily quotes on each page remain mysteries to me. Each morning, I block out the day’s calls, errand times, times to fit in the daily training ride and make some notes on what really needs to get done that day.
For me it’s a planning exercise. It’s rare that I refer back to the Hobonichi after the planning is done. My work calls are driven by the Microsoft Outlook calendar and when the slots open up for the ride, errand or appointment, I’m ready for it. The next morning, I’ll glance back at the previous day for a quick assessment as to whether there’s some impact on the coming day.
I also use the monthly calendars for long term planning- particularly holidays, business trips and cycling events. Even though it’s all duplicated on the phone/iPad/PC calendars, I’ve long relied on doing the planning and thinking on paper- just because I can’t see the big picture on a computer calendar for whatever reason.
The biggest change this year has been adding more special purpose notebooks to capture reading notes. This was kind of a breakthrough for me this year, finding an efficient way to take notes on reading. As I mentioned, this was based on a reread of Ryan Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method. I now read a text straight through, then go back, skimming for the purpose of rapid logging the main points I want to record.
Since it’s now been 3 months, I think I can say I’ve added a daily Bullet Journal habit to the morming Hobonichi ritual. So at times during the day, I make some progress notes in the Bullet Journal. If I’m taking notes on a book, those go into the the same notebook.
Unfortunately, while analog note taking has been a success this year, on the digital side I’ve still not really developed a good methodology for my current needs. I’m using DEVONthink as a hub more consistently to store documents, but the input really just isn’t there- seems like too much work. So my aspirations to funnel notes into DEVONthink and then out into this website have just not panned out as hoped. I know that the key is to keep friction down and the efforts casual. I’m drawn to thinking with pen on paper, so the formalization of typing it in is the friction that holds the process back. Small steps, always just the next action and no more.
Not a puppy
I’ve gotten my big autofocus Leica SL2 out of the cabinet to photograph my little friend here. Just too hard to grab focus with my M11’s manual focus rangefinder. Classic Lab.