Weeknotes 2025 W10: Master procrastinator

March 3​–​9, 2025
2300 words

Quick bits:

At work, it is review week, where everyone writes feedback for their peers.

I loathe the process (and have moral objections to the whole concept), and find myself procrastinating like my life depends on it. It is truly mind-boggling how my brain refuses to spend time on this, despite knowing it’s not optional.3

Even though I had put in several one-hour meeting blockers in my calendar specifically dedicated to writing feedback, I found myself cleaning the kitchen, replacing the bedsheets, going grocery shopping, playing solitaire, baking bread, vacuuming, taking walks, having coffee with friends, visiting museums, taking bike tours, and diving in Bali.4

I genuinely don’t do this on purpose. I cannot help it. Maybe I need to talk to my therapist about it.

Most strikingly, I found myself instead designing the cover of a fake experimental techno EP. In my defense, I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, though I rather like the outcome:

A square cover for an EP, with half concentric circles on a cold black background. The artist (“Branach/Finch”) and EP title (“Inversion EP”) are in a stylish uppercase monospaced font.

I truly am a master procrastinator.

Occasionally I wonder: why do I do the creative things I do? What’s the point? Why not enjoy life more?

That last question is nonsensical: I get enjoyment out of the creative things I do. In fact, a lot of the enjoyment in life I get out of my creative side projects in the first place:

I have had other side projects in the past, too. I was not bad at photography (check out my long-abandoned Flickr page with photos that were even used in newspapers and magazines and by Cory Doctorow — yay Creative Commons). I have long been tempted to get a XY plotter. I made music (check out my SoundCloud playlist with my ancient music and some more recent experiments), I have DJed at parties, and have played Javanese Gamelan for a while. I’ve not lost interest in any of this, but it is either too hard to make time for it, or I no longer have the equipment or opportunity for it.

But I keep coming back to the question: Why do I do all of these things? Who am I doing this for? What do I gain from it — or what would I lose if I were to stop? I have a few hypotheses:7

These are the reasons that are top of mind right now (but there are probably more).

I sometimes dream of having a day job where I can work on genuinely interesting creative projects, but I don’t think that this is a realistic desire:

For me, a good day job is a job where I can have that self-expression on occasion, where there are problems that require genuine creativity, and where creative energy can be put towards reducing tech debt and coming up with good solutions.

No job will ever be able to fully cover the three needs mentioned above. But how close can I get? Is a good job simply a job that still allows me to pursue my creative dreams? Or is there a job for me out there that genuinely fits my needs?

I’m really just thinking out loud here. But that’s really what my week­notes are anyway!

I like my Kinesis Freestyle Pro keyboard, but the “macro” functionality bothers me. Once in a while, I trigger it by accident.

Earlier this week was the worst: I accidentally turned on the “record” mode, accidentally keylogged myself and then somehow remapped the volume-up button to be “replay everything.” On a Discord server, I accidentally sent everything I typed in the last hour or so. In a panic, I yanked out the keyboard from the USB hug, which made it stop, but in my desperation to increase the volume of the music I was playing, I did it again.

One of the things that got recorded and replayed is my (login) password a few times.12 After all, the keylogging is done inside the memory of the keyboard, not the laptop. So now everyone on that (private) Discord server knows my login password, which is not great. At least I don’t use that password anywhere else. What do I do now? Change it… I guess?13

All in all, this could’ve ended worse. There could’ve been genuinely private conversations dumped into that Discord server. I could’ve shared sensitive stuff I typed on my work laptop (because I use the same keyboard). Yikes.

I need to turn off this functionality on my Freestyle Pro keyboard. I’ve tried and could not figure out how. Help?

This keyboard story made me realize how adversarial hardware can be.

MacOS has a feature called Secure Keyboard Entry which prevents passwords and other sensitive data from being read by other applications.

That is all good and well, but it does absolutely nothing against an (accidental) hardware keylogger. Anyway, would you kindly type your password onto my keyboard? It’s absolutely fine. Nothing to worry about at all.

Don’t trust devices that you don’t own.

Entertainment:

Links:

Tech links:

  1. Pedantry is a sport! My manager said “you’ve got new hair” and I responded WELL ACTUALLY IT’S THE SAME HAIR JUST SHORTER. ↩︎

  2. But I like the stuff I wear, and changing one’s style is incredibly expensive. ↩︎

  3. It is a consistent phenomenon with me. I wrote about this before in Week­notes 2023 W03: Review week. ↩︎

  4. Only half of these things are lies. ↩︎

  5. I’m not done with Nanoc yet. I keep thinking about what Nanoc 5 would be, and the challenges I want to solve in that future version. But it might not be named “Nanoc” at all, because I want to have the freedom to experiment, to prototype radically new approaches to building (static) web sites. ↩︎

  6. It is very easy to start, and very hard to finish anything. The evidence for that is clearly available on my secret Fiction page. ↩︎

  7. No, I don’t have a theory. A theory is grounded in fact. A hypothesis is an assumption, a guess, a prediction. The different is important! How are we going to understand each other if we keep mis — oh, you understood me anyway? Oh. Okay. Well then. ↩︎

  8. This is not always necessarily a good thing. For example, when collaborating on a writing project, you likely want the whole project to have a consistent voice rather than being clearly written by multiple authors. But I am mature enough to know when that self-expression is helpful and when it is not. ↩︎

  9. At a previous employer, another team was short-staffed and pulled me in to do a particular piece of work. This required some creative problem-solving that I enjoyed, but the solution I eventually came up with was rejected, quite to my surprise. The reason given was that a solution had to look like it was written by someone on the team; my solution was deemed too advanced and nobody on the team would’ve been able to come up with it — they said. I was required to do less-good work. Absurd. ↩︎

  10. I am fully aware that some of the projects I maintain — Nanoc as the prime example — are used by other people, teams and companies that depend on it, which comes with some responsibilities from my side. But those projects are rather low maintenance these days, and have been around for a long time and are not going away anytime soon. ↩︎

  11. At my previous employer, I created a tool to automate the developer environment setup. I lost access to it when I left that company — it was that company’s IP, after all — but because it was such a tremendously useful tool, I reimplemented the idea into ddenv, a tool I use on a near-daily basis. ↩︎

  12. Multiple times, because my MacBook Pro had two kernel panics, and after starting up, you need to enter the full password and can’t use Touch ID. ↩︎

  13. Changing passwords is hard. I am terrified of picking a new sign-in password for my laptop and then forgetting the password. A disaster, it would be. ↩︎

  14. Factorio (Wube Software, 2020), published by Wube Software. ↩︎

You can reply to this weeknotes entry by email. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
If you like what I write, stick your email address below and subscribe. I send out my weeknotes every Sunday morning. Alternatively, subscribe to the web feed.
Incoming links: Weeknotes 2025 W11: Rotten.