Author: Craig Constantine

Frustration andā€¦

Published December 16, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 16  ·  

Every once in a while, when someone finds out that Iā€™m a writer who dabbles in programming, theyā€™ll ask me: So, is programming hard? And I usually answer the same way. ā€œā€˜Hardā€™ is the wrong word,ā€ Iā€™ll say. ā€œItā€™s not so much that itā€™s hard. ā€œItā€™s that itā€™s frustrating.ā€

~ Clive Thompson from, Programming Isnā€™t Hard ā€” But Itā€™s Frustrating

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This article is sublime.

Because Thompson isn’t a professional programmer, there are two more parts to programming which he hasn’t discovered: First, that your mistakes inevitably come back to bite you in the ass. Second, you will forever face the engineering dilemma of having to wrestle with balancing good execution (does the bridge carry the weight over the river, or do people die) with project parameters (the budget is $5, it has to be shiny, and we need it next week.)

The soulā€“sucking frustration which Thompson rightly identifies is very real. Also real: Shit catching fire (literally and/or figuratively) in the wee hours of the morning requiring one to fix one’s own mistakes made, or shortcuts taken, years earlier. After a decade of that, one grows tired of explaining one’s reasons and process (not that anyone would listen.) And after a few decades of all that, one will understand why I sometimes say, as I approach losing my temper: Please do not meddle in the ways of wizards, for we are quick to anger and you are tasty with ketchup. It’s nothing you did; It’s nothing personal. It’s simply that Programming is terrible and it has broken me.

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It’s the simple things

Published December 14, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 14  ·  

Every time Iā€™ve had a low-back problem on the road, it was because I jumped right into a bend and twist activity (moving luggage, picking up a kid, once it was dragging a vacuum) without being mindful of the mechanical situation my body had just been through the last few hours. The body needs a transition zoneā€”just a little time to remind it of all the other positions it might have forgotten it could assume after repeating a single shape or pattern for an extended period of time.

~ Katy Bowman from, Travel Well

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In addition to some wonderful movements you’ll find therein, there’re endless movements you can find on your own. Movement to be found in a chair, or standing by a table, or with a lacrosse ball that you manipulate on the floor with your feetā€¦ Movement to be found hanging, or leaning, or endless inspiration in yoga and tai chiā€¦ There are so many ways you can move, but it seems to be too rare that people set aside time to experiment. “What if I laid on the floor and triedā€¦ ?” or “What if I took my shoes offā€¦” “What if I stood on one leg whileā€¦” There are just so many things to try.

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Culture, passion, curiosity

Published December 13, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 13  ·  

If culture is sufficient to establish what we eat, how we speak, and ten thousand other societal norms, why isn’t it able to teach us a process to make art? Isn’t it possible for the culture to normalize goal setting and passion and curiosity and the ability to persuade? It can. And you don’t have to wait for it to happen. You can begin now.

~ Seth Godin

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The open internet lives on

Published December 12, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 12  ·  

But, there are always tradeoffs. Relying on someone elseā€™s platform is often just much easier. It doesnā€™t involve having to maintain your own site, and itā€™s also often where the audience is. The issue with blogs is that you had to attract ā€” and then keep ā€” an audience. Tools like RSS acted as a method for keeping people coming back, butā€¦ then Google became the de facto provider of RSS reading tools, and then killed it. To this day, that move is still considered one of the defining moments in the shift from a more distributed, independent web to one that is controlled by a few large companies.

~ Mike Masnick from, The Internet Can Still Be Small And Nice, But Itā€™s On All Of Us To Make That Work

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My pull quote is really just a small side trail in the article. But I’m quoting it because it reinforces my point (possibly on purpose by the author, possibly by coincidence). Even a maneuver by the giant Google hasn’t killed blogging. Blogging continues. (Hey thanks for reading my blog!) And the same is true for everything else.

Because it all runs on the internet. The walled gardens referred to as social media? ā€¦they actually run atop the internet. The current darling-child that is Mastodon? ā€¦it uses a protocol called ActivityPub which was invented to enable federated networking of social activity. And ActivityPub runs atop the good ‘ol webā€¦ which of course runs on the internet. The true gift is the open internet.

Also: I’m on Mastodon :) just look for @craig@constantine.name to follow this blog, or you can even look for @craig@moversmindset.com to follow the Movers Mindset project.

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New York after Paris

Published December 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 11  ·  

The truth is that New York is in the throes of creation. With infinite travail it is taking on a body adequate to its needs, ā€” a feat Paris long ago accomplished. The operation necessarily involves disagreeable surprises, and the immediate result, viewed in its entirety, is, it must be confessed, much more grotesque than impressive. An orchestral performance in which each and every performer played a different tune could hardly be less prepossessing.

~ Alvan F. Sanborn from, New York After Paris

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Items from The Atlantic are appearing more often here on the ‘ol blog. My reading goes through epochs as I discover things that interest me and begin following them via RSS.

However, I landed on this article after a few clicks from another place, and that’s odd. Generally, the things I read do not contain links to other interesting-to-me things. That sounds backwards, perhaps? You see, if I find a place that has something interesting, I follow it in some form or another. So usually, any interesting links I find, point to things I already have seenā€”or if they’re very fresh, I’m already about to stumble upon shortly. I’m not sure that itself is interesting to report, but there it is.

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Assertion

Published December 10, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 10  ·  

Your spirit must constantly assert itself because your body is constantly exerting itself. As soon as you stop working at your spirit, then your body will have complete power over you.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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Breath

Published December 9, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 9  ·  

I’m gobsmacked. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on breath work. In the last few days, something new clicked into place for me. Hopefully, this saves someone somewhere some time on the learning curve:

Ashtanga yoga is about breathing. You may also notice there is some movement involved in Ashtanga; Don’t be distracted by the movement! The movement is irrelevant if you haven’t discovered the importance of the breathing.

I’ve written a lot about my personal restorative practice. Breathing and relaxing into the things I do has been an important part of it for a loong time. I cherish my 15 years of study in a style of Aikido where breath is integral to the physicality. I spent a few years regularly practicing Tai chi, and later a few years with Yinn yoga. But Ashtanga yoga never clicked for me. Sure, it’s always a great workout. But I could never really get into it as a practice. I’d bet I’ve been in hundreds of situations where someone (random warmups, movement and martial artists of every stripe, and proper yoga instructors of countless flavors) has led what has aspired to be Ashtanga yoga. Without exception, it has always been a bashing struggle for me.

Because it’s about breathing. No two people are going to have the same breathing. Absolutely, I can imagine that at advanced physical and mental levels, people could synchronize their breathing and then they could do Ashtanga yoga in sync. But that’s not me. Not me at all.

To be really clear: I’m not bashing on Ashtanga ā€” nonono. I’m freakin’ excited because now I feel like ā€¦scratch that! Now I can practice Ashtanga. I look forward to it! I’m looking forward to practicing it for a while, and then finding an instructor and taking a class to get help improving. Rather than my old, “please lead me through the sequence”, I’m looking forward to, “please help me improve my sequence”. Which I’m betting will be instruction on breath, and maybe some instruction on movements too.

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A quote I cannot find

Published December 7, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 7  ·  

I’m often pulling up quotes from my own collection. I use them for reminders and inspiration. Today, I had the thought that:

Dreams and passion get you into trouble;
Plans and hard work get you out.

I’m certain this is not a new sentiment. None the less, I couldn’t find it in my collection nor with a few minutes of searching. Does it sound familiar to you? ā€¦any idea where a more original source might be?

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It’s even better than that

Published December 5, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 5  ·  

I’ve a few readers who really enjoy the Marcus Aurelius quotes in my collection. A few initial Aurelius quotations I collected through my general reading online, before I eventually read Meditations (English translations thereof, to be fair) and pulled a bunch more quotes myself.

I’ve just spent a few hours cleaning up my Aurelius quotes. Mostly this was adding the section number from Meditations to my blog posts. It’s now easy to find the original material. Note that Wikisource has several versions of Meditations available online. But at the risk of sounding snobbish, I really like Gregory Hays’s translation which will go out of copyright (maybe) in 2102. I digress.

During my cleanup, I realized that one of my quotes, “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.” is not something Aurelius wrote. It’s something the character Marcus Aurelius said in the Movie Gladiator. But it really sounds like him; It’s a great line of dialog for a movie.

It turns out that there are two spots in Meditations which echo the often misattributed quote. In the middle of section 2.17 he writes, “[ā€¦] it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed.” which is the sentiment without the cinema flourish. It also doesn’t make perfect sense when you pull it out from its context.

Eventually, you reach the final line of section 12.36 and find, ā€œSo make your exit with grace ā€” the same grace shown to you.ā€ That’s literally the final line he wrote as a meditation to himself. Can you imagine that being the last line you wrote to yourself? And thus my title.

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Scale

Published December 4, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 4  ·  

Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earthā€™s mid-latitudes there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil ā€“ less than a teaspoonful ā€“ contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.

~ George Monbiot from, The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing ā€“ and the key to our planetā€™s future

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There’s mindā€“boggling complexity in the microscopic realm.

Here’s a quick zoom towards the macroscopic: If you imagine the Earth the size of a peppercorn, then the moon would be a pin-head about 2.5″ inches away. At this scale, the sun is an 8″ ball, sitting 14 yards from the peppercorn Earth. How far away, at this same scale, is the next closest star? It’s thousands of miles at this scale to the Centauri star system (a 4 year trip at the speed of light.) How far is it across our just-average-sized Milky Way galaxy? ā€¦and how many stars are here, with our cozy Sol? ā€¦and how far to the next galaxy? ā€¦how many galaxies? Frankly, I’m confident there’s other lifeā€”even other intelligent lifeā€”out there. But, will we ever meet each other across such vast gulfs of emptiness?

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Please be kind: Rewind

Published December 2, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 2  ·  

[We] didnā€™t discover his work in the theater, much less at Cannes. Rather, we found it at the video store, ideally one that devoted a section specifically to his workā€”or at least to his signature genre of ā€œbody horror,ā€ which his films would in any case have dominated.

~ Colin Marshall from, David Cronenberg Visits a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

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Do you remember video stores? ā€¦I mean the individual stores, from before Blockbuster came along? Sections. You had to walk to the section in the store. New releases. Maybe there was a staple employee who knew every movie. Maybe youā€”like meā€”wondered if working there meant watching each movie before putting it outā€¦ what a job that would be!! Maybe there was a hand-written sign whose perennial message stands atop this missive. Maybe family movie nights? The lottery that was the occassional “doesn’t play” tape. “Tracking”ā€”and then the magic of “Auto Tracking”. And all of that from two words: video store.

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The best of their thoughts

Published December 1, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 1  ·  

I was aware that the reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.

~ RenƩ Descartes

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You’re doing it wrong

Published November 30, 2022  ·  All posts on Nov 30  ·  

That morning, my mind spun as I tried in vain to re-create the various perceptions and emotions that had been written into Googleā€™s servers and were now abandoned to the ether. I felt a sudden sense of mourning that I still have not gotten over. And yet, to my surprise, I felt something else alongside it: a conflicting sense of relief and even levity. I would never have voluntarily deleted all of those emails, but I also canā€™t deny, not entirely, that there is something cathartic about sloughing off those thousands of accumulated disappointments and rebukes, those passionate and pathetic fights and dramas, even those insights and stirringsā€”all of those complicated yet ephemeral layers of former selves that no longer contain me. I began to accept that I would need to imagine my way back into those previous mental states if they were truly worth revisitingā€”and that if I could not, then the loss was necessarily manageable. I closed my laptop, wandered outside into the specific corner of France that my former selvesā€™ cumulative choices had led me to inhabit, and was overtaken by a sense of hope.

~ Thomas Chatterton Williams from, Whoops, I Deleted My Life

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Disclosure: I quoted the entire last paragraph. Yes, that takes the zing out of the articleā€”but I fear few of you, dear readers, will click through for somethingā€¦ this again, Craig?! ā€¦related to my opinions about email.

If you have folders (and sub-folders, and sub-sub-folders) of email, or especially if your Inbox is not empty: You are doing it wrong. Don’t save the email. Instead figure out why you feel the urge to save the email. Then fix that urge.

The real underlying problem is that systems thinking is not something everyone is accustomed to. And lest you fear that Wikipedia article, it’s really very helpful. Does this sound like something worth understanding?

Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts. It has been used as a way of exploring and developing effective action in complex contexts.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking

You’re saving that email because it has a photo attached. Saving this other email because it has the order confirmation for that thing you just orderedā€”should be fine, but every once in a while you need that email when the thing doesn’t show up, or you need to return it, or you can’t log into their online system. Saving this other email because it has the details for that thing we’re going to. And this email has a link to something your friend said to read. That email is a newsletter you really want to maybe read later some day maybe. And so on. I’m not saying it’s easy to imagine systems for all of that stuffā€” but it is possible. Pick one of those emails, and have an honest think about why you’re saving it.

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Real goodness

Published November 29, 2022  ·  All posts on Nov 29  ·  

Real goodness is not something that can be acquired in an instant, but only through constant effort, because real goodness lies in constantly striving for perfection.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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