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|_| ...2017-01-31 |___/
The inconvenience of speaking to think
There are two ends of every spectrum, at least. When it comes to thought and
communication, there are those who tend to "think before they speak" and then
there are those who "talk before they think", I think there's a third group of
people, a group in which I belong, and that is the group of those who "talk to
think". Some times I find it a lot easier to formulate thoughts when I have to
articulate them either verbally or in writing. In writing this is no big deal,
as long as I take a short time to read over what I've written, clean up, regret
and reform sentences into something that hopefully carries some semblance to my
point; if I keep writing long enough to discover one such, that is. Talking is
another game, I talk a lot. Too much I've been told by enough people to trust it
to be the case. This talking-to-think comes with the major disadvantage of being
noisy and incoherent during the formative stages of an idea. I basically tend to
put out all the dirty, rough, not-quite-thought-through, contradicting drafts to
what usually becomes a rather clear and well-constructed idea. I'm mostly able
to control this somewhat, and use my inner dialog, but it depends on my mood and
energy how well I can think through something before I start talking. This would
be bad enough on its own, but I also misplace words and choose the wrong words
entirely, this is especially bad with the names of months, dates and numbers.
To make a long story longer, what happened today was, that I had just helped
a colleague fix something and I was happy about that. I was also not very happy
about the progress that I'd done on my own task, so I felt I was going brain
dead. Now, what I wanted to convey, was my satisfaction that I was able to help
them out, and happy knowing that I was able to figure out that thing. But what I
said was basically, that if I ever go brain-dead, then i can do their job. Now,
I'd have no problem with this if that was actually what I wanted to convey, I
mean, it's a glorious insult, one I'd have been proud to take credit for, if not
for the fact, that I did not mean that, it was not what I thought, and it was
not what I wanted to convey. But I had mixed up the streams of thought, a mental
short circuit, and out of that came a sentence that was semantically correct,
but did not carry what I meant. Being in this short-circuit state also meant
that it took me at least a second to realize what I'd actually said, and at that
point my colleague was gone. I don't know if she'd heard me, or understood it in
that way, but I felt, and still feel quite bad about having said such a horrible
thing, that I did not mean, to one of my coworkers. Maybe this kind of short-
circuit is what Tourettes syndrome feel like. Anyway, brevity is not my strong
side, and I'd not be able to convey the full message in words, I need to find
a way to distill the message down to "I didn't mean to say that, because it was
not what I meant (not because I meant it, and didn't mean to let you know)" but
that is still too verbose, and actually sounds even more suspect that a simple
"I didn't mean that", which to me sound more like "I regret having said that out
loud, and now I generically politely gesticulate just that and nothing more".
So, basically, I need to convey the idea that:
"I meant to say that I was glad I could help you because I felt frustrated with
the thing I was working on myself, but I mixed up the words." That's what
happened, so maybe I can formulate that in Danish, and explain truly that it was
a simple mistake with no bad intentions.
Almost related article
Found this interesting article about talking to think.
https://www.fastcompany.com/919234/do-you-talk-think-or-think-talk
Docker restart
I'm running my containers with restart=always, so if power goes, everything gets
back up again nicely. Well, almost, some services are a bit quick to give up,
for example, nginx is really sad if it can not find another machine on the
network, and unfortunately, none of the suggested solutions are what I'm looking
for. Another service (that I wrote myself, and could fix) will give up if the
database is not available. Well, it's a pretty general problem, and the general
solution in my case, would be to naively wait an amount of seconds (10 is fine)
and then try again, forever. This would be neat, it's not that anything bad
happens if a service fails to start, several times per minute.
Coop mainframe
The supermarket-chain coop is talking about shutting down a 49 year old
main-frame that IS STILL IN PRODUCTION TODAY, well, I'm excited, this can only
be a historically significant machine, and I'd hate to see it being taken apart
never to see the light of day again. Hopefully we have some kind of organization
that can help preserve it, but I'm ready to take matters into my own hand and
save the machine if at all possible. I'm going to call corporate headquarters
in Denmark tomorrow and see what I can do.
Web rendering
I like how my phlog looks in vim, I'm using the flattown theme, it's very nice.
I'm thinking about making a plaintext->html renderer in node, nothing fancy, no
notations. The wildest thing I'll do is make it highlight URLs as links, and
insert pictures if the URL ends in an image file. No headlines, no nothing.
I want it to render in monospace fonts, pretty much just look like it does
in vim or my gopher-browser. I'm thinking that this format serves my website
well, so maybe I will redo all the HTML in plaintext. Links might be a problem,
I do have some pages that link to files that can be downloaded. Maybe a middle-
way would be to have the webserver render HTML from plaintext, and the gopher-
server remove URLs that point to local files (files that would be present in the
gopher-index anyway). I like this idea a lot better than markdown or even worse,
the custom JSON format I was thinking about implementing. This way, no matter if
you use gopher, web or just plain html, the content will make sense.
wasdkeyboards.com
I am very happy I found this website, I found it yesterday evening after ranting
about how impossible it is to find a good keyboard. Well, i did, in USA, and it
is expensive as hell! Especially after Danish tax and toll has been applied.
But well, that's just how it's going to be, until someone in EU will start
making proper keyboards, I'll have to pay. I actually ordered the wrong keyboard
because I had not seen that they had both 104 and 105 key models, with the 105
key model having the nice ISO layout. But customer support was super helpful.
I mailed them and got them to cancel the order, and now I've ordered the right
board. It's going to be awesome! A simple black case, and blank white keys.
O ---------------------------+
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