Craig Constantine

Programming is terrible, part 2

Published May 26, 2021 · All posts on May 26

Three years ago I posted, Programming is terrible. These days? …yeah, exactly the same, but now I find I’m staring suspiciously at, basically, everything thinking: I’m about to do something which, as soon as I completely forget the details, (in the too-near future,) I’m going to be left with something that irritates me. A mess of my own making, as it were.

I’ve been on a bender for decades—which clearly means I’ve not been succeeding, right? I’ve been on a bender to simplify things as much as I can. A lot of progress can be made in that direction simply by removing goals: If I can delete the goal of, “make this thing be successful,” then that might make it possible to simply enjoy the thing. Normal people would just call that “a hobby” and wouldn’t need a paragraph to unpack the idea.

Rock climbing falls into this “hobby” category. I’m a poor, (as in skill,) climber, but since I don’t have any goals related to climbing, it’s just, “any day at the crag.” (And the, “…is better than any other day,” is left unsaid.) That’s literally my mantra. (Somebody should find me a sticker that says that for the top of my climbing helmet.) Some days I climb a bunch of stuff. Some days I fall off a bunch of stuff. Some days it’s glorious weather. Some days it’s tics, snakes and poison ivy. I’ve climbed a bunch of stuff already. There’s a bunch more stuff to climb.

The rolling hills of Pennsylvania

Published May 25, 2021 · All posts on May 25

The other day, in the glorious sun and breeze, I got an irresistible urge to get in some single-track miles. I grabbed ‘B’ off the hook and went somewhere I’ve never been.

CREATE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS — “Add padding to everything. Do half of what you imagine you can do. What would it be like if we did less?” ~ Leo Babauta

Intention

Published May 23, 2021 · All posts on May 23

One of the toughest parts of coming to grips with how we communicate is being really honest with ourselves about our default intentions.
~ Angie Flynn-McIver from, Being honest about what we’re thinking

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Angie makes a good point. Go read her post while it’s top-of-your-mind. (It’s short. I’ll wait here for you…)

I have this perennial itch to try to teach people how to use the tools I’m using to wrestle the Internet into being a source of wonder, inspiration and knowledge about our universe. But for the life of me I can never figure out a good way to do it. I feel like I should be able to take 30+ years of learning and futzing with computers and the Internet, and generate some manageably-sized chunks of learning that others could use. I’ve an Internet tech tag that, I suppose, is me doing my best.

What’s that? …what does that paragraph have to do with that quote? Oh, right, sorry…

I enjoy being able to notice when Angie writes, and I appreciate that I get exposed to what she writes when it works for me. That’s thanks to my use of RSS tools.

Numbered days

Published May 22, 2021 · All posts on May 22 ·

Try this: Hop over to https://wolframalpha.com and type in the following using your birthday…

how many days between m/d/yyyy and today

Study that number while looking for some perspective. Don’t tip into the yawing chasm of self-doubt, but rather strut towards the fertile plain of , “I’m awesome.” Finally, read this:

For this reason philosophers exhort us not to be contented with mere learning, but to add practice also, and then training. For we have long been accustomed to do the opposite of what we should, and the opinions that we hold and apply are the opposite of the correct ones. If, therefore, we do not also adopt and apply the correct opinions, we shall be nothing more than interpreters of the judgements of others.
~ Epictetus

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…circa 700,000 days ago.

Forget all that

Published May 20, 2021 · All posts on May 20

I get it. This might all seem like a bit much. I was intimidated by journaling too. And people, I find, tend to intimidate themselves about it: What’s the best way to do it? What’s the best journal? What time? How much?
Man, forget all that. There’s no right way to do it.
~ Ryan Holiday from, This Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do Each Morning

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We all try to share things with others—hey look! Blogging. We share stories, books, images, music, songs, and suggestions, (where to go, what to do, etc.,) hoping, if I can be so generous, that what we share will provide some guidance, enjoyment, hope, or what else we know not. Whether or not the things we share land… whether they stick, have the desired affect, or any positive affect at all… we’ve no way to know that.

But what might happen if we tried to share things with our future selves?

Faith

Published May 19, 2021 · All posts on May 19 ·

The first thing you need to know is that individuals have far more power than ever before in history. […] The second thing you need to know is that the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: Lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it’s worth doing. Faith that failure won’t destroy you.
~ Seth Godin

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I continue to enjoy the Movers Mindset project for many reasons. In recent months, I’ve been stepping back from the body of work and I keep having the same thought: I think this is really great, but I feel there should be something more useful as a result of all the work. (Useful specifically for me, I mean.) I’m convinced that there are lessons that I’ve missed, or not managed to hold onto; Insights that can only be seen from a perspective that is not within one particular conversation.

So I’ve been tinkering on creating, well, something. I don’t know what it is yet, or how to describe it either. But I have faith that it’s worth trying to create something which enables something new to be extracted from all the conversations I’ve captured.

Some days, I have far more questions than answers to share.

It’s all about energy

Published May 17, 2021 · All posts on May 17

The economy runs on energy, far more than it operates on growing debt. Our energy problems don’t appear to be fixable in the near term, such as six months or a year. Instead, the economy seems to be headed for a collapse of its debt bubble. Eventually, we may see a reset of the world financial system leading to fewer interchangeable currencies, far less international trade and falling production of goods and services. Some governments may collapse.
~ Gail Tverberg from, Headed for a Collapsing Debt Bubble

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I’ve been reading, and tagging here on my blog, Tverberg’s commentary for years. I don’t link to these things because I fancy myself Chicken Little. Rather, I link because she has really interesting and insightful things to say about energy.

Deciding is the easy part

Published May 16, 2021 · All posts on May 16

So recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use it less. About how to get the benefits from the technology without all the downsides.
~ Ryan Holiday from, A Radical Guide to Spending Less Time on Your Phone

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Hey, thanks for deciding to receive this not-so-little email from me each week.

Did you notice how easy it was to decide to get this additional, new interruption? My web site is friendly, the form is friendly, dear Friend all you have to do is put your email in this form . . . But if you decide to leave this weekly email? Well, first you have to have one of the emails in front of you, then scroll down and find the unsubscribe link at the bottom, click that, etc. It’s not much harder than joining, but it is just a little bit harder.

Let’s say you decide—after reading Holiday’s post or this post or that post—to clear the home screen of your phone, (not the lock screen, but the first screen you see after unlocking.) Have you tried to do that? It’s difficult. First you have to manually move those apps, one by one, to other pages… Then you have to keep up with that if your phone throws new apps on that nice clean screen. You have to change how you launch apps; If you simply swipe and find the app, well, that’s going to become a new default habit: Unlock-phone-and-swipe-right will be muscle-memory in a day. To make the blank home-screen useful, you have to also get in the habit of using your phone’s search to launch exactly the app you opened the phone for in the first place. But that is quickly learned by your phone. You have to go in and adjust search settings so that when the search input is blank, it doesn’t suggest the apps you often use. Otherwise the search screen will become just another screen of app icons you’ll tap on via muscle-memory. The phone is designed to try to help, so it’ll feed you a new habit. Then a notification pops up. And you want to disable those, so you have to dive into settings… And get used to telling apps, “no notifications” when they first ask. And then something will break… like suddenly Google Maps can’t use “Siri” so it doesn’t work in Car Play. (Me: “Wait. Wat?”)

It’s not just with fiddly phones. Decide you don’t want to watch Netflix. …but, movie date-night with the spouse is a legit thing we want to do now and then. Decide you want to only own one car. Decide you want to grow some food in a garden. Decide you want to make a few new friends. Decide you don’t want your phone ringing.

My friends, deciding is the easy part. The hard part is doing the really complicated, detail-oriented, 57-step planning, and 2 hours of fiddling, (or days of labor or thousands of dollars in expense,) figuring out how to make the change, how to keep the change in place, and even how to figure out in advance what things depend on the thing you’re deciding to change.

Math

Published May 14, 2021 · All posts on May 14

Predicting the behaviour of a sigmoid-like process is not fitting the parameters of a logistic curve. Instead, it’s trying to estimate the strength of the dampening term – a term that might be actually invisible in the initial data.
~ Stuart Armstrong from, Why sigmoids are so hard to predict

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Wait! Don’t flee!

It’s a great explanation of sigmoids—you know what those are, but you [probably] didn’t know they have a general name. People toss up sigmoid curves as explanations and evidence all. the. time.

Ever make that slightly squinting face? The one where you turn your head slightly to one side and look dubiously, literally askance at someone? …that face that says, “you keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.” After you read that little article about sigmoids, you’re going to make that face every time some talking-head tosses up a sigmoid as evidence for a prediction.

Anything of consequence

Published May 13, 2021 · All posts on May 13 ·

Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work. At the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much. But with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other. Whether it’s a book or a business or an anthill or a stalagmite, from humble beginnings come impressive outcomes.
~ Ryan Holiday

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Sometimes I manage to remember that lesson.

…usually that my remembering happens during my morning routine. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but: I regularly read things which spur the sorts of thinking I’d like to do more of; I spend time writing in, and re-reading, my journals; time reading good-old printed-on-dead-trees books; time thinking about how to create some thing I’m building; lots of thinking and jotting in outlines.

Things take me vastly more time and work than it appears from the outside.

Lifelong learning

Published May 11, 2021 · All posts on May 11

Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.
~ Shane Parrish

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That quote from, https://fs.blog/2015/11/lifelong-learning/ , is one of the too-rare times when, upon reading something, I want to leap to my feet knocking my chair over behind me while shouting, “Hear! Hear!”

It’s true that there is some learning which I prefer to observe, rather than directly experience. In such cases “conceptual” learning, rather than experiential learning, is just fine by me. (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtF0UlznC8 )

In general however, ain’t nothing finer than reading something, making a new connection, writing a blog post about that… or spending weeks figuring out how to bend some javascript-DOM-AJAX thing to do what I want… digging in the innards of an automobile to make a new stereo-unit work… digesting some tome from the anti-library… running a year-plus experiment just to see what happens… just generally being all like, “I’m wondering . . .” And then find out where that curiosity leads.

What’ve you been up to in the learning department lately?

Tranquility

Published May 10, 2021 · All posts on May 10

Of course, Odysseus isn’t unique. He is us. He’s the human condition in a nutshell. As Blaise Pascal put it, “all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.” Because we cannot be happy, because we can’t just be, we waste years of our life.
~ Ryan Holiday from, Can You Be Still?

Holiday puts forward an interesting theory, (and, in my opinion a correct one,) that Odysseus is a tragic figure. Odysseus is doomed by his inability to see his own fatal flaw.

Given that I can be tenacious when tenacity seems needed… Enduring when endurance seems needed… Focused… I’ve been wondering: Can I be still? Quiescent? Tranquil, even, when those would be appropriate?

That escalated quickly

Published May 8, 2021 · All posts on May 8

At a 2.3% growth rate in energy, within 1000 years, assuming all energy is consumed on Earth, the temperature of Earth’s surface will have to become equal to Sun’s surface temperature.
~ Paras Chopra from, Can an economy keep on growing?

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Wait. wat?

It’s often really helpful to look at things from a different perspective. (Granted, “from the surface of the sun,” is not a perspective I would like to see from.) This little article is a fun read. It’s got a bunch of small, clear statements, some vertiginous graphs, a few videos—which, mind you, I didn’t look at all… caveat emptor there. Reading it would be like playing hopscotch where someone hid an alligator in the last square. As the Talking Heads put it, “Well? How did I get here? (chorus) Letting the days go by!”

Something sustainable

Published May 7, 2021 · All posts on May 7

What we need is something sustainable. Something balanced. Something deliberate without being forced. Purposeful without being obsessed with productivity. We need something like a great Saturday—or one of those Mondays where you’re not sure if it’s part of a three-day weekend, resulting in just enough work that it’s productive, but not so much that it’s a chore.
~ Ryan Holiday from, You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow.

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Sustainable. Yeah, I’ve no idea what that means.

It occurs to me to make a note to have, “…but holy crap did he get a lot done!” put on my tombstone.

And I’m instantly reminded of my favorite de-motivational poster: “It could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.”

The challenge

Published May 5, 2021 · All posts on May 5 ·

The process isn’t overly complicated or hard. The challenge becomes moving through it at the right pace in a way that aligns with your principles.
~ Shane Parrish from, How People Make Big Decisions

This is the exceedingly rare case where what I really want to quote is a small graphic from the site, and I simply don’t feel like copying the image and uploading it, just to include it here. (You’ll have to click over.)

I found myself thinking about the little graphic, which has an outer circle describing a process for change. Starting at the here-and-now called, “doing,” forward over a “Rubicon” and then full circle to a new here-and-now of “doing.” There are several ways to fail at changing, by short-circuiting through self-defeating statements. And that’s what I’m thinking about today.

What self-defeating stories am I telling myself? Why?

Mind your own

Published May 4, 2021 · All posts on May 4 ·

Not to support this side or that in chariot-racing, this fighter or that in the games. To put up with discomfort and not make demands. To do my own work, mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers.
~ Marcus Aurelius

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I recently had a run-in— well, to be accurate, I drove off the road… But I’ll call it a “run-in” with reality. (No injuries, no serious damage, just a bit of unexpected adventure in what should have been a boring car ride.)

First, as I touch-typed that previous sentence, I ended that parenthetical note by typing, “…a boring car die.)” If that’s not a Freudian slip, (where you mean one thing but say your mother,) I don’t know what it is. I stared at it for a moment and then corrected it, as it now appears above. Driving off the road didn’t scare me, but it has clearly been rattling around my thoughts recently.

Second, after more thought in the days after: Yeah, I’m ok with what I’m up to these days. Doing my own work. Working on minding my own business. Not making demands. Putting up with discomfort. …and that last one is not a passive-aggressive, “that’s ok I’ll just sit here in the dark.” (How many grandmothers does it take to change a light bulb? in case you didn’t catch that.) I mean simply putting up with discomfort; it’s hot, I’m sweaty and the gnats are annoying, sort of discomfort.

Anyway, I’ve just added this wonderful reminder from Aurelius to my collection of daily reflection prompts. There were 57, and now there are 58. It also becomes quote number 652 in my growing collection. If you’re curious about how these posts are created, it’s a mixture of scheduled posts and daily writing. Instead of scheduling this one out somewhere in the future—which does have the advantage of surprising me when they do pop out… Instead, I’m opting to drop it here to give me some room for more thoughts.

Rolling up, clues, and glue

Published May 2, 2021 · All posts on May 2

Sometimes I find things and I don’t know what to do with them. Here, for example…

https://a9.io/glue-comic/

Turns out I’m not the only one who obsesses over how to improve text-based communication. There’s a lot of context that we often infer, on-the-fly as we’re communicating with asynchronous messaging. Rolling that up (hiding it from sight) and down (revealing it) is not done by any current system that I know of.

World class or bust

Published May 1, 2021 · All posts on May 1 ·

Gillard had a very simple ethos: “If your stuff isn’t world-class, you’re not going to make it”.
~ Hugh MacLeod from, «https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2021/03/19/world-class-or-bust/»

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The other day I was in a Zoom break-out room with a few other podcasters. I was talking about how for 2021 I’m focusing on doing in-person interviews. How being a slave to a weekly schedule was (is, would continue to be,) putting pressure on creating podcast episodes. Most podcasters—well, every single one that I know of, but there must be some out there who aren’t, so I’m writing “most”… Most podcasters are willing to (happy to?) record virtually as that enables them to stay on their weekly production schedules.

Aside: Everyone believes that regular production is critical for podcast success. I disagree. “What’s one important truth that most people would disagree with you about?” is a good question, and this is currently the best answer that I have.

There are millions of podcast shows and many more millions of episodes. I don’t want to make a single episode of Movers Mindset unless it has some particular value or is special in some way; The human race doesn’t need simply, “one more podcast episode.” I believe that in-person, with the right guest, and with me doing my best work I can co-create something of value to humanity.

And “do it every week” doesn’t figure into that formula at all.

The idea of trying to do something at a world-class-or-bust level is a fairly new one for me. I have lots of hobbies and mostly I don’t care about being world class. But I do care about the Movers Mindset podcast being world class.

Do you have anything you’re intentionally pushing to that level?

Music or no?

Published April 29, 2021 · All posts on Apr 29

Music and exercise were inseparable for me. That is, until this past year. I can’t remember the last time I had music playing in the background while I exercised. And, strangely enough, I’m digging the silence. Here’s why you might hit the off button on your audio player too.
~ Brett McKay from, The Case for Not Listening to Music When You Work Out

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Two years ago I nearly became a runner. I was starting to run short distances pretty often. And I was always running with a specific music playlist.

But that’s the only activity I do with music— hiking, biking, rock-climbing… no music. Parkour? Absolutely not, because I need to hear the noises I’m making as part of the feedback. (Am I landing softly? What rhythms am I generating? How’s my breathing? AM I breathing?)

These days I’m doing everything—including driving long distances—in silence.

It’s vastly more complicated

Published April 28, 2021 · All posts on Apr 28

Most modeling efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic have sought to address urgent practical concerns. But some groups aim to bolster the theoretical underpinnings of that work instead.
~ Jon Fox, from Chasing the Elusive Numbers That Define Epidemics

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Setting aside the specifics of 2020 and the pandemic, the human race is taking enormous strides forward in biology, virology, epidemiology, and a couple other -ologies I’ve not bothered to look up. Also, Quanta Magazine consistently hits it out of the park with article after article like this one—deep dives on all sorts of science and mathematics topics.