Weeknotes 42

I made no notes this week.

Andrew Helwer’s “Taking my home work setup seriously” is making me reconsider the suitability of my Magic Trackpad especially given that I’ve developed some sort of callus between my palm and my wrist.

Then again:

Inside us all there is a void. People want to complete themselves and fill this void with spirituality, or hedonistic pursuits, or material things. If you’ll indulge a metaphor, this is not a void that can be filled - its nature is more akin to a black hole of the cosmic variety. Feeding it things - for example, expensive ergonomic equipment - will simply add to its mass and pull. Only if left alone might it slowly evaporate. You must learn to live with it.

stephanie’s “tech brain” provoked discussion among myself and some fellow software developers.

what is tech brain? there are lots of things to point to, but if i had to come up with a thesis it would be that tech brain is a sort of constant willful reductionism: an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity.

Like others, I found myself nodding along but Maciej asked an interesting question: how much of this is Twitter brain rather than being specific to the tech industry?

I’m currently running a full backup of my laptop with SuperDuper!. Next week, in a ritual to mark moving on from a client I’ve been working with since March, I’ll wipe my computer clean and start afresh.

C’s current favourite activity is to prop himself up on a bookshelf and systematically pull all of the books onto the floor.

Sometimes he wants to read them (or, in the case of certain pop-up books, attempt to decapitate as many cardboard dogs as possible) and sometimes he just wants to see the world burn the shelf emptied.