David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #12 (February 2024)

Posted 2024-02-04 under #dispatch

We spent MLK weekend with my folks in the Shenandoah Valley, and visited Luray Caverns, something I’d done as a kid and still rips 30 years later. Neat place, highly recommended if you’re ever in that area. We also got some snow at our cabin, which was pretty fun for Nev.

I signed up for the Wrightsville Beach Valentine Run 10K in early February, which has added a little bit of focus to my running without the commitment of half-marathon training and gives us a good excuse to spend a weekend with Claire’s sister in Wilmington. Might try to keep that going, finding organized 10Ks in places we want to visit.

I stumbled on this article (via) about an iOS feature that periodically updates your lock screen to a random photo of a selected person. It is … delightful.

Here’s a new track called “Altocumulus”:

I really set out to make a track that didn’t have a bass hit on one and three and snare on two and four, but some things you just can’t resist, though you can tell I tried for the first 90 or so seconds.

Also! My buddy Ken, who’s been the major source of inspiration and encouragement as I work on this stuff, recorded some percussion tracks for the song I recorded last month, “Orographic”:

I also found a really nice app for practicing scales. Apple catches a lot of shit for its app store policies – perhaps deservedly so – but as a consumer, it’s hard to complain. I traded a couple emails with my buddy Prayash. He’s a super talented musician (among other things) and has a new track out called “Weightless” that’s worth a listen. He also put a video on Instagram of his production process which is neat.

I installed these crossbars on our car in the hopes that we can avoid replacing it with something bigger for a while longer. I get a real kick out of DIY upgrades and fixes like this – using your brain and hands to adapt the things you have to better suit your needs is so, so satisfying. Fellow Durham blogger Christopher Butler put up a good post that speaks to this same idea:

One thing I hope my children learn is to nurture the balance of curiosity, creativity, and willingness to mess-up that is needed to make the world your own while you’re here.

Couple security updates: my favorite TOTP app, Raivo, got bought up by a shady-looking company, so I switched over to to 2FAS. Super smooth onboarding experience, and I actually prefer its authentication flow (browser plugin ➡️ push notification ➡️ Face ID ➡️ “Approve” ➡️ autofill). Also, I listened to a podcast some months back that described the damage a thief can do with a stolen iPhone, so when I learned about this new Stolen Device Protection feature, I enabled it immediately.

I finished Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales and decided to stay on the short fiction train with Story of Your Life and Others. I’m abler to engage with short stories containing topics I find unpleasant in long-form fiction, maybe because I’m less invested in the characters – I loved “Story of Your Life,” but I’ve absolutely no desire to watch Arrival, the movie it inspired.

Finally, I made a pair of updates to the website:

• I make plaintext backups of the things I link to on this site, at least the text-heavy stuff I might want to refer to later (you can see them down below in the “references” section). I’d been using Lynx to get the text, but I wasn’t super happy with some of the results, so I switched over to w3m after finding the right command-line flag¹ to include link URLs in the output. I’ve got some ideas around building a more robust archiving solution but I’m gonna let it marinate for a bit.

• This site previously featured high-res photos of my family, but this post made me reconsider putting images of Nev online (I don’t know what someone might do with them, and frankly, ignorance is bliss). After a late night of coding, all images are now encrypted on disk, and then decrypted, resized, and dithered as part of the deploy process. I really like the visual effect, as well as how it balances documenting our life and keeping our privacy safe. It’s technically pretty neat how it all works – definitely worth a follow-on post (update: here’s the post).

This month:

• Adventure: head down to Wilmington for the aforementioned 10K, otherwise laying pretty low – big stuff coming in the next few months
• Project: gonna keep this music/hobby table on here until I actually get it done (gear acquisition pause still in effect); I’m also delinquent on an art table for Nev
• Skill: practice scales on my Arturia (15 minutes × 15 times)

Reading:

• Fiction: Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
• Non-fiction: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott (recommended here and here)

Links:

• I Made This

  I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I think I’m getting closer to the right question. It’s a question I think we’re all going to encounter a lot more frequently in the future: Who made this?

• The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

  To move forward, we must step away from Drucker’s commitment to total autonomy—allowing for freedom in how we execute tasks without also allowing for chaos in how these tasks are assigned. We must, in other words, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to get things done.

• Cold-blooded software (via)

  Some projects are different. You work alone, make some changes when you’re inspired, and then don’t touch it again for another year, or two, or three. You can’t run something like that as a warm-blooded project. There’s not enough activity to keep the temperature up.

• How I Pocket Notebook (via)

  Though we exist in an age where technology has wrested the “frictionless and ubiquitous” narrative away from analog tools, I maintain that the old ways can be the best ones in this case. Enter the pocket notebook.

  This inspired me to start carrying a Field Notes in my sling bag; see also: Tom MacWright, Tim Hårek.

• Work hard and take everything really seriously

  You can burn out by going too fast, or your flame can dim because you don’t let yourself spend silly amounts of time on silly projects to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Beware of both outcomes: cultivate your enthusiasm for the things you want to hang onto.