Talking about quitting things is sapping my energy.

There are of course valid reasons to stop using a service, platform, or company. I’ve deleted Facebook and LinkedIn and have stopped posting to Instagram and Twitter for many of these same reasons.

While I wouldn’t ask anyone to not tell people they’ve moved on from a social network¹, I would like to see less about why they’ve quit and more about what they will do instead.

Most articles I’ve read about quitting are 90% rationale and 10% about what’s next. I’d prefer to see that reversed. Something like…

So, now that I’ve deleted Facebook…
 
[2,000 words about what I’m doing instead]

Make it about starting something rather than about quitting. I think that would be better.

I’m no fan of Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. I don’t agree with how he’s handled the many serious issues plaguing Twitter, but my opinion of him doesn’t border on the hysterical. I think he’s a flawed person with an impossible job. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have the same reaction to the Huffington Post Interview as so many others did.

Bias is powerful, and when you’re predisposed to dislike someone, it’s easy to want to give a high five and say “Sick Burn, Ashley!” after reading the interview.

I was ready to do the same thing, but I didn’t see it. The interview feels like she’s waiting to yell “Neener neener, I got ya!” the whole time and that’s disappointing.

I like that she tried to get Jack to talk specifics, I just don’t like how she did it.

“Don’t @ me”

I’d been fighting with what I thought was a bug in easy-hugo, but when I stopped posting with Hugo I sort of forgot about it.

Now that I’m back I finally dug in and tried solving the problem.

The solution was simple but took me hours to find. I had put the following in my config.toml file…

newContentEditor = "vim"

Posting with Emacs/easy-hugo would obviously (in hindsight) not care for that. I removed the setting and I’m off and running with easy-hugo.

Here’s my config, fwiw…

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;; Hugo config

;; This fixes an easy-hugo error when switching publish directories
;; when there are many
(setq max-specpdl-size 10000)
(setq max-lisp-eval-depth 10000)

(use-package easy-hugo
  :ensure t
  :init
  (setq easy-hugo-basedir "~/Dropbox/sites/blog/")
  (setq easy-hugo-url "https://www.baty.net")
  (setq easy-hugo-image-directory "img/2019")
  (setq easy-hugo-postdir "content/post/2019")
  (setq easy-hugo-previewtime "300")
  (setq easy-hugo-preview-url "http://localhost:1313/")
  (setq easy-hugo-bloglist
	;; blog2 setting
	'(((easy-hugo-basedir . "~/Desktop/quickstart/")
	(easy-hugo-url . "http://example2.com")
	(easy-hugo-sshdomain . "myblogdomain")))))

I’ve been trying to use Lightroom CC exclusively for managing and editing photos. The intention was to go all-in for a while and determine if I could live there.

I don’t think I can.

This is me just thinking out loud after a few weeks of giving Lightroom a fair shake.

Overall, Lightroom CC is fine. It’s missing some “power user” features from things like Lightroom Classic or Capture One Pro, but it’s easy to use, fairly powerful, and “nice”. I love being able to view and edit photos on any device at any time. That alone is what lead me to try this experiment. I like that it’s pared down and simple. I like that it now has Faces and “Sensei” for searches. The cloud has some magic features, certainly.

But the magic of the cloud is also the dealbreaker. I just can’t get past the thought of having all my photos managed and hosted by Adobe…basically forever. I don’t like that I can’t even look at my photos without using Lightroom. I don’t like that I can’t manage file names. I don’t like that there’s still no “trash” and if I were to fumble-finger a deletion I could lose photos permanently.

It feels unsafe for me to trust my library to Adobe’s cloud. I’ve got nothing against Adobe, and their software subscription plans are fair and a good value. Storage plans, on the other hand, could get steep, and that’s only going to get worse as my library grows.

I’m learning (or possibly confirming) that I’m lost without a “Reveal in Finder” option. I don’t like not having control over the underlying files.

This experiment may be drawing to a close. I may have to crawl back and beg Capture One Pro to take me back.

Wiki note

After meaning to read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land for years I made the mistake of actually doing it. I tried, but couldn’t make it more than about half-way before giving up.

Does this mean I lose my sci-fi fan club membership?

Well this was a terrible idea.

I learned a lot, but, with apologies to Emacs purists, there’s just no way using Emacs keybindings makes sense for me as long as Evil-mode is available. I’m hardwired for modal, Vim-like editing, and can imagine no benefit that would make it worth the necessary rewiring needed in order to switch.

But, I don’t want to go all the way back to Spacemacs so I’m once again giving Doom-emacs a shot.

Doom feels lighter, faster, and easier to configure and customize so I’m running with it.

Jean MacDonald invited me to be on the Micro Monday podcast recently. It was fun. We talked about blogging, of course, and at one point I said something like “My goal in life is to have only one blog”. We both got a chuckle out of that, because we both knew I’m practically riddled with blogs.

Not anymore.

Today, I burned down my WordPress blog at jack.baty.net and my Blot.im blog at baty.blog. Normally, I leave things where they are and just stop posting to them. This time, however, I moved the content to baty.net, set up domain redirects, and deleted them. This means I’m no longer tempated to post elsewhere, nor do I have to think about “which blog should this go on?”. Radical.

This leaves me with…

• baty.net - now known as “My blog”
• micro.baty.net - my micro.blog hosted microblog
• rudimentarylathe.org - my wiki

How long will this last? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Long, repeating story short, I’m also busy at rudimentarylathe.org.

I’m nothing if not inconsistent.

I recently had an epiphany about Emacs key bindings…

The most compelling reason I’ve found yet for switching to the “normal” Emacs keybindings is that many of the same bindings work everywhere on a Mac. This just occurred to me and now I have to decide if I want to lose weeks of my life to making the switch.

So now I’m re-reading Mastering Emacs with the goal of building everything from scratch and learning the “Emacs Way” of doing things.

My entry into Emacs was via Spacemacs and evil-mode so I have many old habits to break.

I guess I’ll be losing those weeks after all.

For years I’ve written dates using the One True Date Format, YYYY-MM-DD, but that may be about to change.

I’m thinking of changing it to YYYY.MM.DD.

I tend to prefix everything with a date and the dotted notation results in a narrower date (when using proportional fonts) and makes it easiest to scan. “2019.01.09” looks like a single text object, while “2019-01-09” looks like three things, hyphenated. It’s hard to explain, but given its space-saving and list-scanning properties, I’m going to try the dotted notation for a while.