Weeknotes 2024 W02: No no no notifications

January 8​–​14, 2024
1500 words

I’ve been embracing Luddism.

My journaling, I do by hand. I have tried journaling apps in the past,1 but the only thing that really works is pen and paper, with no technology around to distract me. I am purely in the moment of writing.

My grocery list is on paper. Being able to add something to the grocery list without having to unlock a screen or open an app is fantastic. It’s so easy.

Want to go window shopping? Take €100 in cash with you, and leave all other payment methods (credit card, mobile phone, etc) at home. This way, you’ve forced yourself into a budget and you know you can afford it because you took out the cash first.

Low-tech solutions can work really, really well.

I talked about product tiers last week,2 but the list of top-tier products I gave wasn’t complete. This list of delightful products includes Buttondown and Omni­Graffle as well. A lot of the stuff in my Uses is, in fact.

I’d love to work on products like these — products with a genuine purpose beyond making money. But the problem is: how do you find opportunities around products like these? Many companies will claim, during the interview process, that their product is the main focus, that everything revolves around their product. It most often is not — at all — and then you end up working on a product that is much more bottom-tier than promised.

Perhaps looking for employment around such products isn’t the way to go, and it’d be worth for me to consider going indie. I’ve got heaps of product ideas, along with the experience in software development and product management to bring these ideas to fruition. I am lacking time and energy, though — perhaps enough for prototyping, but not much more.

Most of the businesses that I’ve worked for have thoroughly felt like their primary goal was to increase the wealth of its shareholders.3 Companies never acknowledge this explicitly, and often coat this with a sickening amount of sugar. This, however, does not apply to all companies: there are some that I’ve worked for that felt like they genuinely were invested in providing something meaningful. Those workplaces are few and far between, but they do exist. I just need to find them.4

Meeting notifications are still broken on my work laptop, but I have new insights.

In Microsoft Outlook, the meeting organizer defines what reminders the meeting should have. As a result, some meetings have reminders 15 minutes before, some have reminders 5 minutes before, some have reminders at the start of meetings, and some have no reminders at all. What a mess.

Only the meeting organizer can configure reminders. This, in my opinion, is backwards. Do the people who build Outlook use their own software at all? Because surely someone would have flagged this as a problem.

This explains some of the problems with notifications, but not all. It does not explain why I sometimes get meeting notifications with an hour-and-a-half delay. This situation is infuriating, and the numerous hours spent troubleshooting have led nowhere.

The only way that I can get notifications to show up on time is to keep Microsoft Outlook open and visible all the time on the calendar tab. (Keeping it open on the email tab is not enough.) But then, what is the point in having meeting reminders when you have your calendar visible all day anyway?

I cannot wait to stop using Microsoft Outlook.

The English language is so peculiar at times.

Take the word “beautiful.” It has its origin in French: there is the adjective beau, which got turned into the noun beauté (beauty), which in English got turned into the adjective “beautiful.”

We could’ve had “beau” as an adjective! Not the abomination that is “beautiful.” It is like having the word “slownessful” instead of just… “slow”. Can we start using “beau,” just like that? After all, language must serve communication. Can we fix this wart?

Another silly word is “cherry,” which also comes from French: “cherise.” The trailing s felt like a plural in English, so it was dropped. The true singular, therefore, is cherries (with the plural being “cherrieses” I suppose).

So, instead of “what a beautiful cherry,” we should really be saying “what a beau cherries.”

Make it happen, everyone. I will not be taking questions.

Quick bits:

Entertainment:

Links:

Tech links:

  1. Coincidentally, my iPhone got an OS update recently, which puts the new Journal app prominently on the screen. I’m ignoring it. ↩︎

  2. See Week­notes 2024 W01: Product tiers. ↩︎

  3. This is the Friedman doctrine, also known as the shareholder theory. ↩︎

  4. There’s always my CV and my contact page. ↩︎

  5. Firefly, written and directed by Joss Whedon (Mutant Enemy Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, 2002). ↩︎

  6. Ravenous Devils (Bad Vices Games, April 29, 2022), published by Bad Vices Games. ↩︎

  7. Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015), published by Bethesda Softworks. ↩︎

  8. “Blood and gore and limbs everywhere” is in keeping with the Fallout theme, so yes, “so far so good.” Deal with it. ↩︎

  9. Starfield (Bethesda Game Studios, 2023), published by Bethesda Softworks. ↩︎

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Incoming links: Gremlins, Weeknotes 2024 W04: End of work.