An anxious election day to you too. A follow-up from my last newsletter, Morgan and I closed on our home towards the end of this past month, and we couldn’t be happier.
Standing in front of our new home
The whole process has been a whirlwind. I have a ton of notes that I will eventually put into a blog-style post. Hopefully, after we wrap up the chaos of moving.
A neighbor dropped off a welcome card
We are starting to feel the neighborhood spirit. One of the big conversations I had with Morgan is finally having a place of belonging. I have moved 5 times in the last 5 years, and frankly I’ve had enough. And every place I’ve moved to, the neighbors sure haven’t been too friendly or chatty. In the last apartment, there are familiar faces, but most leave before making a long impression. With this card, we are hoping to be friends with some of our neighbors.
An autumn Yuzu pose 🍂
The cold air is finally here in the Bay Area. And with that, I leave you with our little puppy.
📍 Location: In transit between Redwood City and San Jose riding the Caltrain
Current Media
Currently reading: The Golden Thread - How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Claire
I cannot recommend this book more. It’s an interesting look at fabrics that frankly I didn’t know I would enjoy. But, having read Kassia St. Claire’s other book about color, I knew I was in good hands.
Personal News
We bought a house! I have a note about the home buying process I want to blog about at some point. My latest newsletter talks more about this.
There’s been a flurry of projects I want to get off the ground. They have been paused by the home buying and moving projects. It’s looking like 2025 is going to be a big year.
Election Woes
Everyone is feeling depression from the election. The sweep of bad outcomes and polarization of the country really make me feel depressed. I’m sick of hearing the reasons people feel one way over another. I can feel my rigid thinking defaulting the election decision of keep calm and carry on vs chaos. We elected turbulence, and for selfish reasons. In my mind, America would rather favor personal gain over keeping with the status quo, which is not what either party stood for. Instead the fractured feeling I have is one of unhopeful malaise when it comes to civics.
On the opposite end, this is another awakening for personal and collective calling for creating a better life, despite civil unrest. Yes, our rights are being stripped from us. But it takes resilience and a calling of refuting the next establishment to make a life we all want. And sometimes, that means reaching across the aisle, not despite of it.
I think revisiting Vi Hart’s video post-2016 election is important.
Then, there’s this video from Adam Conover about why he isn’t worried about the election.
I have some conflicting emotions about the message. Part of it certainly feels right where the change we make with others is more important than who we elect while acknowledging the harm the Republican ticket has. Yet, there’s also the changes we have seen as a response to the upset, like the sweeping changes of the 2018 election. While I foster a lot of hate for the president-elect’s racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-democratic, and violent rhetoric, of which there is a lot, there is a path of moving forward and carrying on, despite the setbacks.
What we know is, things will get absolutely worse, especially for women and minority communities. We know the little things we say in public can be overblown on the National stage. We know we need to be nicer to one another and foster humility, like being able to point the finger back at ourselves.
This long rant just to say, while I don’t think things around us are going to get any better for the foreseeable future, we are the ones who will make an impact. There’s enough hate in the world, and I would like to think there’s some glimmer of hope in the future. For everything else, it’s up to us. If Victor Frankl’s taught us anything, we need to think of how the future can be better in order to survive the perils of today.
I never received a mailed, annual Christmas letter. For the unreceived, these are letters you receive from friends or family who send out a letter of how the year went.
I feel like it’s a feat to wrap up the year. When done right, the letter should evoke good feelings of the highs and lows, while inspiring the reader to reflect on their own year. When done wrong, it sounds like a rambling, incoherent confession. The emails I would send out prior to my (now defunct) holiday cards was my own version of an annual Christmas letter.
I read end-of-year newsletters with envy. Authors would rattle off their big accomplishments or mistakes. They would share their favorite things of this year.
Hallmark recently released a movie about crafting an end-of-year annual Christmas letter. In the movie, the main character and matriarch Settie Rose wants to win her town’s holiday writing contest. She’s struggling to put her year in words that will melt the hearts of all in her town. So she does what any sensible person does — she hires a writer, Juan, to write the letter for her. This is as middle of the road Hallmark story structure, and I can’t say I would recommend it, but it did hit a nerve.
I put too much emphasis on the prep work. The annual review is where you write down everything significant that happened that year. Then you go through your new years resolution and check off what worked and didn’t work. I fall flat with this task because when I really think back to it, it feels like a heavy lift. I would go through my calendar, note the significant items. I would skip the resolutions — I’ve replaced them with quarterly goals. And I lament the fact that I haven’t done any weekly or monthly reviews, so I would get discouraged to look back.
Then again, that’s steering away from the main point. The Christmas letter doesn’t care if you did that work or not. It’s a comfort letter that you send out to remind people you are still thinking about them. Of course instead of sending out a letter, I could instead have 50 conversations with 50 people that are important in my life. And maybe that’s a nice thing to do at a future date. For now, writing this is my compromise. We have put up our Christmas tree, we are drinking hot cocoa, and we are watching more middle of the road Hallmark movies.
Happy Holidays everyone!
P.S
Thanks for reading my little rant about letter writing. Let me share with you my end of year music playlist! Here it is on Spotify and YouTube!
Practice = Purpose + Frictionless Systems + Consistency
— Source Unknown
Last week felt weird. Like a strange Halloween that was misplaced. I was heavily distracted by election news this week and have been putting off the previous week’s notes.
I’m continuing the week notes format like I did last week with topic-based notes. It seems to be helping me get acclimated to stop organizing everything.
Expect more election news next week as I get caught up.
We address four major areas of cultured meat research and development: establishing cell lines, cell culture media design, microscopy and image analysis, and bioprocessing and food processing optimization.
Progress is good, but progress slowed around 1970. Nobody knows why, but theories include shifting social attitudes, over-regulation, or exhausting the potential in a few big inventions like electricity and mass production. This slowing was a great historical tragedy.
I changed up the format last week. In a way, it’s a little more freeing because I don’t have to group everything with like things, necessarily. Plus, it gives me a chance to play around with looser organization.
With everything we have to move, most of my time and efforts at home at spent on that and not on the blog. Which makes sense - life sometimes has other priorities.
My general rule is to go to one in-person conference a year, if possible. I’ve certainly met my quota this year with !!Con. There are some I think I want to go to next year if possible, but of course, travel is a lot of work too.
This came up because there’s this YouTube channel I started exploring about going to speed running every BART station stop. The current time to beat is 5 hrs 10 mins. I created my own wiki page to see how crazy this is and where people have attempted these riding challenges. Turns out, there are so many. Also, this book is a reminder in creating challenges for ourselves.
Time tends to move both fast and slow as you are purchasing a home. This is our first home, and I can tell it’s been a whirlwind of emotions all around. When there’s a serious need to provide documentation, we have been on top of things. When it’s on the other end, waiting for the loan officer or underwriters, it feels like a snail crawl. That said, yesterday, we closed on our home. We got the keys handed over to us. It’s an exciting landmark moment. And I wasn’t expecting to be this tired. But here we are, and life’s moments got in the way of releasing any week notes.
With that reflection, it may be time to pair this down quite a bit. I loved the past year of sharing an incredible amount of links, reflecting on the week, giving my daily notes to breathe back into me. Too often, we are tirelessly scrolling through an endless feed of passive, yet wanton, feed that fuels the monkey brain. It’s as if we can’t turn off the addiction to our devices and has an incredible pull for us. We can’t go to the restroom without our devices. We can’t sleep without them. The always-on nature of it makes it incredibly hard to listen to our natural circadian rhythms.
I’m not saying let’s return back. I’m not sure we can. We let the genie out of the bottle, and I don’t think there’s going back. But what does forward look like? I’d like to craft a space where forward are the things that matter the most. With that, here are hand-picked items that I’ve run across this past week, and are worthy of putting in the “read later” category, and stick to it that later means concentrated, but still passive, consumption.
They are in research phase. To Be Born in a Bag. It’s crazy stories like this that make me wonder how did we get here and when will it be available. And also, the biomedical side of my brain runs through all the risks and challenges you must pass through.
Home Buying Process
Mortgages have been on the mind. And Freddie Mae has caught me up in mortgage rate trends over the past few decades.
Also, we learned the Underwriting process is essentially to QA everything. Check out the leins on a home and rectify them.
Hurricane Milton
The unbelievable nature of disasters strike close to home again where my in-laws live. The New York Times reporting Fears of Hurricane Milton Drive Millions From Their Homes in Florida. It did make landfall and did cause havoc. Thankfully, my in-laws are okay, and the state had to reel from two major hurricanes in the span of two. That’s unbelievable.
It’s made me think back to the article earlier this year about loneliness and the amount of work it takes to keep up friendships in the US. The lack of third places and the way we treat community feels more of a reciprocal give and take.
The tool should confirm to your workflow, not the otherway around.
When you let the tool dictate your workflow, you disrupt your own flow.
Tools can teach us about new workflows, but it’s up to our own judgment if that works for or against us.
Tools are not panaceas. They cannot solve all of our problems. The corollary advice about tools is when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
A good tool is one that can do one thing very good. A multi-tool is great if you know it can do each task very well. When it fails at one of those things, you know it’s not a great tool, and you may need to make other tools interoperable with one another. Sometimes, your tools don’t play well. Don’t try to make them interoperable if they have no means to. These tools were never the solution to your problem in the first place.
This was the second week of 100 days of note-taking, and it’s been taking time to loosen up my writing. I’ve been mulling over personal problems to global ones. Otherwise, I wrote a newsletter, which has more personal updates.
I find it difficult to get started with writing. It is easier for me to give up on writing if I’ve lost a streak. The cadence of the monthly writing rhythm can be easily knocked off balance with any size excuse. I’m reminded of Simon Willison’s idea of escalating streaks, meaning improvement with each iteration. I’d like to think that I can write a better newsletter for every issue and it is about something bigger. Therein lies the Sisyphean lie for writing. The best thing to do is to just start.
The tardiness of this newsletter comes from purchasing our first home. Morgan and I seriously started looking at the beginning of September, and last week, we got an accepted offer. It’s been a whirlwind of emotions. We lost the first offer being outbid by 8 other prospect home owners. 5 of those 8 bids were asking 20% over. We have our fingers crossed the we will get through closing without any hitches.
Otherwise, beyond chugging away at work, I’ve finished two books this month.
I mentioned this one on my blog at the beginning of the year. Deb Chandra’s newsletter, MetaFoundry, has been a favorite of mine for years. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon it. It reminds me of the Engineering classes I wanted to take, mixed with my interest in Civil Engineering and public infrastructure. The book is a welcoming compliment to those ideas, going deeper into the ideas of networks and introducing the social and political structures around infrastructure.
As a fan and donating member of Gastropod for years, this book is a deeper dive into a topic than a typical podcast episode. This well-researched book is an examination of an aspect of food overlooked — freezing food. While this appears commonplace now, that wasn’t the case a century ago. Going deep into the cryosphere, Nicola Twilley examines the history and relationships we have with storing our food in the cold climate. Strange fun fact: some people working in large refrigeration plants develop illnesses at the beginning before their body acclimates. Sometimes, when they are driving home, they blast the AC since they are so accustomed to the cold.
The idea of summarizing books annoys me. I want these elegant book notes like summaries and lessons learned. The ability to distill knowledge into bite-sized tips or notes sounds appealing, yet I know it takes a lot of work.
This issue was inspired by Celine Nguyen’s newsletter, “Personal Canon” where in her latest issue, she also addresses the large task of summarizing books. I’m neither as eloquent nor comprehensive with book summaries nor do I think that’s my strength. Are you a huge book note-taker? Do you have a system? If you are, Jillian Hess’ Noted newsletter might be right up your alley.
Last week, I deployed a website called Make 50 Things. I’m proud of taking the first step, but there’s so much more to do on this website, including adding webmentions, adding my own 50 projects, making it open for others to add their own 50 things, and to make a linkroll of all of the 50 projects other people have created.
I took the HTML 2024 survey and learned a bunch of things, like the File System Access API and forms within dialogs
I finally setup Hyperkey. I didn’t realize they had a setting called “quick tap” option that re-maps it to escape. Finally can open up opportunities in keyboard shortcuts!
It sounds like I should use AI with my obsidian vault. Or the very least with a notion so that I can find things that I couldn’t find years ago. Samantha search versus AI search seems to be the differentiator.
the new model could work its way to a correct (and well-written) solution if provided a lot of hints and prodding, but did not generate the key conceptual ideas on its own, and did make some non-trivial mistakes.
In my last newsletter, I talked about seasonal playlists playlist. Pair that with the Commonplace Book Club from the Noted Substack and you get this habit of collecting tiny details. I’ve kept a continuous journal habit for over a decade and love to collect quotes, song lists, moments, stickers, and so much more.
“Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later.”
— Kevin Kelly
Margin and buffer
Margin, ownership, and boundaries
Buffer is making sure there is overflow. It’s like redundancy, although it doesn’t have to be necessarily overflow.
Margin is more about the bandwidth. You give yourself enough to recover from. Buffer is for stock. Margin is the space you make mentally, although the definition is typically around the edge of a boundary.
Latticework is a system that unifies annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking. It allows users to fluidly move between “foraging” through source documents and “sensemaking” in a working document, with interchangeable highlights, copied snippets, marginalia, and textual elaborations. Latticework uses a pane-based layout with bidirectional navigation and previews to help combat disorientation, and provides collapsible snippet links to manage working memory overload.
Adjust your voice: Take a deep breath or two to drop your voice down from the squeak of social anxiety to its normal, wonderful, natural register. Your voice doesn’t start in your head, as we might imagine, it starts down between your gut and your heart with the pull of your diaphragm.
Adjust your body language: Roll your shoulders back to pull your frame upwards and raise your gaze. This will shift your posture from the shape of a question mark to an upside-down exclamation point. You want to your spine look like (¡) not (?).
Relax your face: Relax your face. You don’t have to smile if your mood doesn’t match it—a fake smile erodes trust—instead, just relax away your leftover facial tensions so you don’t accidentally send an expression of hate or worry or disdain to a person you haven’t yet met.
Start adjusting before you speak: “Hello” happens long before you speak. We can tell from across the room when a salutation might soon occur. Start your hello adjustments (mind, body, voice, attention) sooner than later. A challenge: can you walk into the room already adjusted?
Speak with curiosity: You can uncover something interesting about nearly anyone if you converse with curiosity instead of apathy, greed, mistrust, or resignation.
Respond with an “I believe” statement: If someone asks you “what do you do?” resist the temptation to respond with your job title. Instead, respond with an “I believe” statement. Example:
“So, Jim, What do you do?”
” I believe story, art, and design can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, and I try to bring that into everything I do: from movies to startups to paintings to books and to ballets.”
Make eye contact: When you greet someone, look at the other person’s eyes. Do not look at their feet or your feet or the ceiling or the person behind them or your phone or your watch or your elbow or anywhere else. Eyes to Eyes.
Ask questions and listen: After you introduce yourself, ask a question. Listen to their response carefully and ask a question that allows them to develop their idea further. You already know your own ideas, so why not focus on theirs? The conversation will be more fun if you uncover interesting ideas hidden behind the foreheads of others.
Remember details for next time: Once someone does tell you something, store it away in your mind for the next time you meet. When you see that person again… a day, a week, a year from now… bring it up—so how was that trip to Spain? I remember it sounded wonderful… And weren’t you about to do something interesting at your Tunnel Drilling Startup?
Costco has hacked the psyche of the American consumer, appealing to both the responsible-shopping superego (“Twelve cans of tuna for $18!”) and the buy-it-now id (“I deserve that 98-inch flat screen”).
Ostensibly, Costco is a discount store, a place to save money and stretch your grocery dollar, but it is also an aspirational shopping experience, feeding that most American of appetites: conspicuous consumption.
Costco is revered for its high wages, attentive customer service and “deep commitment to integrity,” said Jeremy Smith, the president of Launchpad, an Oregon-based food brand incubator that specializes in placing products at Costco.
Over the past weekend, I went to !!Con 2024 in UC Santa Cruz. I always feel each talk, while 10 minutes, has. a lot to digest. I decided to pick back up my pen and paper journal, the Lecturrum 1910 and Uniball pen. The end of these niche conferences signals a sadness inside, and I hope to fill that void with something else beautiful. Also noted, this was the same week XOXO held its last conference.
I’m fairly late this week when it comes to going through the notes from the previous week. Labor day came and went, and I wanted to focus on other things beyond the computer work.
Around the technosphere
DIY Methods 2024 - A Mostly Screen-Free, Zine-Full, Remote-Participation Conference on Experimental Methods for Research and Research Exchange
I read through Hypermedia Systems in two sittings, and found the approach of htmx to be an interesting update to the earlier web days. While it doesn’t lean fully into Jeremy Keith’s idea of progressive enhancement, it lends itself towards that goal.
From the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, they had on Jill Lapore who is a historian and professor at Harvard. She mentioned how political conventions in the 19th and early 20th century looked a lot different. They would pick candidates by rallying others to vote on their candidate of choice. And the chosen candidate didn’t make appearances. It wasn’t until FDR that changed
This was in the 70s, and also this to a Trump campaigner now that RFK jr has officially endorsed him
The candidate you’re campaigning for, in whose administration you apparently intend to serve, wants our laws rewritten so that drug dealers, particularly those who sell narcotics, face capital punishment. Given that you sold cocaine in your youth, how do you feel about his advocacy of a regime that might have resulted in your own execution at age 19?
I’ve been a fan of making seasonal music playlists for more than a decade. I started in iTunes, making new music and fitting them into playlists for road trips on my iPod. Looking back, these playlists feel like a snapshot of my life and where I was. It evokes specific memories of who I was with and where I felt I was at that time of my life.
There was this time when my friend Teagan and I were road-tripping through the coast of the Pacific Northwest while listening to a song Moby made as part of NPR’s “Project Music” called Gone to Sleep. While on the narrow highway amidst windy roads cliffside, as well as the void of light through the redwood forests during the nighttime, I had an eerie, yet hopeful mood. There’s a video game called Pacific Drive that I haven’t played, but I must wonder if it captures a similar mood in its soundtrack.
In the late 90’s at the supermarket checkout aisle, I remember looking at the back cover of “Now That’s What I Call Music” compilation CDs. The curator took the billboard’s top 20 list and burned them onto a CD. I remember challenging myself to make a more personal CD for the music I was listening to and started ripping them and putting them into my CD player. It was always a challenge trying to fit the 70-minute form factor. The result was always a mishmash of the music I was listening to at the time. Whether it was rediscovering rock bands of the 70s, or new pop hits, it all got smashed together unordered. And inevitably, I would hit skip on songs I knew didn’t fit after the 10th listen-through.
Much later, I found myself in the Metafilter community where I would participate in a seasonal CD swap. An organizer would connect a small group and you. Each swap had a catchy title, usually alluding to a song, like “Swap Me Maybe”, “The Songbird Swap”, and “Swap Battle”. I loved taking a walk with my music player and strolling to someone else’s curation. As one of those people who have said “I listen to a little of everything”, the eclectic range appealed to me. It might have been a warm surprise from Ray LaMontagne, or an electronica beat of Phantogram.
I feel like the tides changed when I converted to a streaming service. I know the argument sounds like a broken record about not owning a physical copy of the music. Beyond that, the playlists that have been curated for me don’t feel as personal as receiving a mixtape cassette. The Algorithm supposedly knows my tastes and creates a warm echo chamber of what’s come before. But if I’ve learned anything from different music eras, disruption is required to challenge the listener. We need Stravinky’s The Rite of Spring to drive into our brains atonality. Or Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica to challenge our ears with discordant rhythms and motifs. I would like to think the Algorithm works by keeping you in the echo chamber long enough that everything starts to sound the same, and the potential for a playlist to be great becomes mediocre.
With the advent of short video platforms like TikTok, Vine (RIP), Instagram Reels, Snapchat, and so many others, the music that plays along is the sound bites. You can’t fit an album into that form factor, and the music industry has transformed with it. Add to that the oddly structured price per stream and you get a mix of more singles that can hit viral numbers. I’m not interested in dissecting if that’s good or bad for the industry. I’m more interested in how that affects my personal music listening habits. The streaming giants have created music ecosystems around machine-learned playlist creations based on what is similar and viral, and rewarding those who have figured that formula out with the biggest payouts. All of this said, this also feeds into the Algorithm’s playlist selection.
With our current modes of listening to playlists, I have to wonder, where can I fit my voice in playlist curation? I haven’t changed my habit of making seasonal playlists, but the ways I discover music have.
There’s an idealized version of the playlist creation process I have in mind. I would take the time to listen to dozens of albums end to end and pick and choose the handfuls of songs that have resonated with me. But more and more, the Algorithm prevails. I try hard to go with a select few curators who have great tastes. Or radio stations that still employ DJs to spin their favorite tunes.
My friend D and I created an end-of-year playlist that has rules. The songs chosen must have been released that year, is something we find has resonated most with us that year and must fit on a 70-minute CD. It mixes what I felt in those seasonal playlists and puts my thinking cap on what is worthwhile to include. Since space is limited, you can’t put all of the year’s hits. I find creativity in these constraints and mindfully listen to that playlist over and over until it feels right. That’s what I think makes a great curated mixtape. And it gets to be saved and listened to whenever, like a few months from now, or listened to a decade later as a retrospective. Let’s bring back the era of mixtapes.
Last week, I finished Burn Book, which I ahem burned through. I found myself wanting to read faster when I borrow the book from the library. Shout out to Libby! The book introduced me to a play from Spalding Gray called “Interviewing the Audience” that I would love to watch a recording of, if they exist.
Ultimately, we want to maximize quality time spent reading long-form documents, not substitute for it.
Daniel Doyon, Readwise July 2024 Updates
Do The Hard Work That’s Required - AI is not a shortcut. Do the reading. Do the things required. Don’t think that AI will just make something great.
AI tools should help you do the hard work that’s required to make something great; AI tools should not replace the hard work that’s required to make something great.
Harvesting problems have straightforward solutions and no shortcuts: You just get a big basket and pick every damn strawberry in the field. You solve these problems with pure perseverance, slogging away for weeks, months, or years until they are done.
Some problems are like fishing. You know that there are fish out there in the ocean, but you don’t know exactly where. If a great fisherman knows where the hungriest fish are and how to set their lines just right, they might catch everything that they need in a few hours. Fishing problems can sometimes be solved shockingly fast by motivated teams with a bit of luck.
Some problems are like panning for gold - going out to a river or stream where there might be gold, getting your pan out, and seeing if you can find traces of the shiny stuff in the sediment. If you find gold, you can become generationally successful - think of the massive moats created by Google Search or the AirBnB network.
Select | Dasel - CLI tool for selecting and updating JSON, CSV, and other one file data files
I feel like creating a page that collects these book collections.
Around the World
Collab Fund - Fill The Bathtub - With all of the BS we are fed today, we want to get the facts and for politicians to tell it straight. Hence the term, “Fill the Bathtub”.
I was listening to the Good Food podcast, and I am frankly appalled there’s a scalping market for restaurants. But of course, it’s not a black and white issue. But still, this shouldn’t be the case.
If you haven’t heard, Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain died within. a week of each other after both being acquitted from fraud charges. The coincidence is telling but also tragic.
