I have a very manual photo backup process. It involves:
Carefully going through different devices and merging their photo streams into a folder,
Running some scripts to organise these neatly by year/month/date, and
rsyncing this to different places.
The trouble with a system like this is that if you go through something traumatic, it’s really hard to sift through the memories of the period and complete the backup. So I sort of just stopped doing it in late 2019 — when I was told my marriage was ending. For over three years now, I’ve been operating mostly backup free. Memories of the kids, little moments around my life, … all just a busted phone away from being lost.
I decided to change that today. I blared a lot of music from my youth, made a whole pot of tea and spent the evening powering through the system. I now have a complete (redundant) backup of all my photos until today.
This is a relief.
But more than that, it feels like an expression of healing, as I didn’t feel anything negative. Just happy nostalgia for when the kids were younger.
I’ve managed to write on average a couple of pages a day for every day this year. I feel like I’m making real progress with figuring out some stuff about me.
As part of this recent focus on my self-hosted sites, I tried benchmarking some of them to see how well they perform under load.
It turns out that with caching, WordPress performs comparably well to my static website. And each of these options can handle several hundred requests (with 100 concurrently) and return responses in under a second.
I often run into people (especially those early in their learning journeys) who suffer from massive imposter syndrome and feelings of being mediocre. I find myself giving the same versions of the following advice, so I thought I’d take the time to write it down with a bit more coherency in one place.
There is no great shortcut to getting good at something. You need to work hard at it, make a ton of mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. That’s it, this is the entire playbook.
But this playbook is really hard to follow for one very specific reason. And this is that your ability to critique things is vastly better than your ability to create things. It’s easy to gauge your early work as mediocre, get dejected and quit. Ira Glass expresses this beautifully in the following video.
Ira Glass on the creative process.
The way around this conundrum is to truly internalise a couple of facts.
The first of these is that you are not especially mediocre (even though it can often feel this way when you compare yourself to others). Most people are pretty mediocre at most things and literally everything you see around you was made up by someone no smarter or capable than you. You can create and improve upon anything.
Steve Jobs’ secrets of life.
The second thing — and this is perhaps more important — is that experiencing failures as you try and giving your brain time to learn from them is the only way to mastery. I’m not saying this in some philosophical sense, I am expressing this as a scientific fact. Research indicates that experiencing errors trigger neuroplasticity. i.e. they trigger chemicals that inform your neural circuitry that they have to change.
Huberman Lab Podcast episode talking about using failures to learn faster.
So summarising these two facts, my advice to you is this. Instead of comparing yourself to others and thinking of them as exceptional (and yourself as mediocre), use them as an existence proof to see that if they can do it, so can you. Then, try to cast experiencing (many, many) failures as a positive part of your learning journey. This will keep you going as you get better and better at whatever you are attempting.
Don’t let your fear of being imperfect stop you from getting good at things you care about.
As part of writing more, I’ve decided to begin more of my journalling on paper this year. So I went to my stationery cabinet and pulled out the prettiest notebook I could find.
I’m intending on writing more frequently on the journal after a hiatus of over 10 years. A lot has changed in my life in the interim, and I thought I’d get you up to speed.
Personally, I met someone and lived with her for a few years in Oslo. Then, we got married. Then we moved to London. Then we had a baby boy. Then we went through four miscarriages. Then we had another baby boy. Then we bought a home. And around 10 years in, our marriage fell apart. I’ve healed from this and am a happy part time single father now. I have a ton of fun with the boys.
Professionally, I don’t do applied-mathsy things at universities anymore. I work entirely on the web. I helped start and run a fintech startup. It’s been alive for over 9 years and doing pretty well now!
I’ve always been a little wary of proprietary social media. And true to form, like over a decade ago, I was active on a free and open source Twitter-like thing called identi.ca. I was happy there with all the other neck-beards. And, of course, I cross-posted and stored my interactions on this very blog.
Then one day it died, so I reluctantly joined Twitter… and I loved it! Nothing fit my brain like Twitter, and I was happy being silly on there. Basking in likes and retweets for my stupid non-sequiturs. I loved it so much that I stopped tending to this blog or any of my other sites.
But it turns out that identi.ca didn’t die. The dude who made it kept chipping away at it. First rebranding it to StatusNet, then pump.io, while simultaneously iterating on the underlying ideas until it became a protocol specification called ActivityStreams. This in turn was streamlined and evolved into a specification called ActivityPump, which was later renamed ActivityPub. In 2018, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published this as a recommended standard for decentralised social networking.
Now in 2022, when a right-leaning, anti-trans, trolling-happy billionaire took over Twitter, I started to look for more free alternatives. And all signs pointed to Mastodon. So I decided to try it.
2008 me was so focussed on the free and open source nature of identi.ca, that I failed to see that the key point of all of this was its decentralised nature. I understand this now, so here I am today on Mastadon. It’s easy to get setup. It’s easy to move your presence between servers. It’s got all the decentralisation benefits of web3, without the climate destroying shared-blockchain-as-a-db.
So I was out having a drink with some friends this evening. And as the evening progressed our group began to disperse while the bar got more crowded. Anyway, at some point only one of my friends remained, a classically attractive blonde woman.
We were catching up and talking about different things, when the empty spaces around our table was filled by a bunch of twenty-two year old women on a night out. This resulted in two parallel sets of conversations going on, until my friend needed to go to the toilet. I was tooling around on my phone when first one of the young women engaged me in conversation. Asking about my friend. Asking if she was my girlfriend. Asking if I wished she was my girlfriend. How did we meet.
I slowly explained that we met on Twitter, and that we have a lot of common interests and so bond over that. And no, I’m not interested in her being my girlfriend. And then I did something that she could not process. I explained that I’m married. To someone else. I have two young kids. I am just hanging out meeting a friend talking about things we care about.
This drew the confused ire of the entire flock of twenty-two year olds.
How is it possible you care about the same things? That’s so wonderful! How can you find her interesting and not want her to be your girlfriend. We’ve never met anyone from Twitter or Tinder (sic). Does your wife know you’re out with her? How could you do this to your wife?
This went on and on and I was super patiently trying to reiterate the same story until my friend returned to join us. We managed to get them to a place where they exclaimed “it’s really cool… as long as your wife knows you’re out with her.”
I think we just blew the minds of three young women from Northampton. And recalled how stupid twenty-two year olds are.
The web has changed a lot since the early days of this journal. And in many ways, I miss the way things used to be. I guess it’s that nostalgia that brings me here today.
A lot too has happened in my life since I stopped updating the journal regularly, but here are a couple of the highlights. First, I got engaged to Stacy,
and I am to be married later in the year!
Second, I quit my job late last year to try and make it on my own. I was quite brave and sure of myself when I first quit, but after a couple of months of making little progress on my ideas, I’m starting to get a little antsy.
I guess that’s how it is with life. It’s trivially easy to keep things emphatically static. Change, on the other hand, takes serious effort and is as daunting as it is exciting.
Oddly enough, I have a feeling it’s all going to work out just fine.
A few months ago, there was a wonderful episode of This American Life—#454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory—in which the show featured the experiences of one Mike Daisey’s visit to an Apple contractor in China. The show was an emotionally super-charged look at the deplorable conditions that workers in electronics factories endure every day, to produce the shiny gadgets that you and I enjoy Angry Birds on.
Recently, This American Life released another wonderful episode—#460: Retraction—after discovering that Mr. Daisey had fabricated many of the details making up the heart of the previous piece. This episode, rife with awkward pauses, attempted to separate fact from fiction as the host and correspondents of the show confronted Mr. Daisey.
Huzzah for journalistic integrity, if that is something you care about. But that’s not how we roll here on actuality.log, where the story is always more important than the facts.
I leave you with a select quote from Mr. Daisey that adequately captures my feelings on the matter:
“I think I was terrified that if I untied these things, that the work that I know is really good and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care, that it would come apart in a way where it would ruin everything.”
A lot has been going on in my life but I’m finding it difficult getting motivated enough to write about things. After mulling over this for some time, I’ve now decided try my hand at publishing over at Google+ for a while. I’m hoping that the change of scenery will give me the motivation I need to write. I am not sure if it’s worth giving up the anonymity of this journal, but I plan on experimenting anyway.
If you’re interested in following further happenings in my life, add me to your circles on Google+. If you aren’t on the network and would like to get in, here’s an invitation.
Happy stalking!
I am fine and was at home during the blast in Oslo. I felt/heard it happen, but all the damage was localised to about a km away from here.
I have a trillion neurons firing in my brain. Why should I have a single, fixed personality?
Imitation is the sincerest form of creative bankruptcy.
