Weeknotes 2022 W09: Viral

My goodness, I am out of energy. On one day this week at 11:30, I felt like I was ready to go back to sleep. At least I took Friday off, and will be out on Monday and Tuesday as well. Tuesday is International Women’s Day, an official holiday in Berlin!

I suspect that this week’s week­notes will be shorter than usual. Or not. They always end up being longer than I anticipated!

I donated €450 to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), on top of the €20 I have been donating monthly. I’ve also updated the Contributing page on the Nanoc web site to point to IRC as well.

Tyler invited me to his birthday dinner, but I chickened out. In part, that’s because I still am uncomfortable meeting up with a group of people indoors (e.g. in restaurants) in time of a pandemic. More importantly though, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on my social anxiety, and I’m going to need some time to adjust to meeting groups of people again.

Spring and summer should create plenty of opportunity to safely meet up with people outside. I’m looking forward to the first park picnics this year; it’s not quite the weather for them yet though.

A few weeks ago, after I lost all my work notes (see Week­notes 2022 W06: Technical failure), I started a plain-text file in which I keep my daily notes. In there, I stick important events, to-do items and other notes that I want to keep track of. I only use it for work — for now, at least — but if I were to use it for personal stuff, it’d look like this:

2022-03-08 Tuesday
  o Holiday

2022-03-07 Monday
  o Vacation

---

2022-03-06 Sunday
  • Publish week­notes

2022-03-05 Saturday
  x Draft week­notes
  - That C tweet sure went viral
  • Groceries

This is quite similar to the approach I used with physical notebooks in the past, but I found that physical notebooks are clunky and get in the way. Also, my handwriting is pretty terrible.

I’ve written up some more detail on My plaintext logging approach.

It feels quite nice to be writing in plain text. Coincidentally, Derek Sivers wrote about writing plain text files earlier this week.

In other work news, I finished my first on-call shift with no incidents.

The macOS notification problems remain a mystery. Notifications mostly work, but not quite — I have once again missed even more meetings this week. I’ve already spent considerable effort on fixing my notifications setup, but apparently not enough.

The journaling approach I mentioned earlier helps somewhat. I write down the important events for the day in the journal. This helps me remember what is coming up, making it less likely that I miss something. But it’s not infallible.

Only three more months until I have to start paying for my Google (Workspaces) account, or abandon it altogether. I’m planning for the latter.

I started using a new Google account, but I forgot how much I lost in the process. For example, contactless payments with Google Pay stopped working, because the new Google account wasn’t linked to my VISA card. That lead to a few awkward moments where I couldn’t pay, though luckily I still had the physical bank cards on my person.

Earlier this year, I was thinking that I don’t really need to bring my wallet anymore grocery shopping. I’m glad I didn’t follow that thought through — it would’ve not ended well.

I have also become more understanding of why people in Berlin carry so much cash all the time.

I made a tweet that went viral earlier this week.

I had no idea people’s attention span could be so short that they don’t even read the entire tweet (2–3 lines) before replying.

I watched Doctor Who season 12 this week. I had some catching up to do! I still quite enjoy it: the way the episodes are largely self-contained but still constitute an overall plot, the way it ties in with real-world historical characters (somewhat silly yet honest), the way the suspense builds up, and the sense of mystery that fortunately never quite goes away.

The tension in the last few episodes of Snowpiercer has gone down a little. It was quite intense for a while, and I needed the breathing room.

I finished Cyberpunk 2077 and I’m not impressed. The vast amount of bugs, including quest-breaking ones, is making it particularly tough to get any sense of immersion. I also found it difficult to relate to any character in the game at all, and quite struggled to make my Cyberpunk 2077 character look anything like I wanted it to.

Finally, Wordle is still good. My solution to the puzzle a few days ago was the shape of a lighthouse, next to the salty sea. Very on point.