David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #24 (February 2025)

Posted 2025-02-05 under #dispatch

We actually got some snow here in Durham, which is not something that happens every year. We took the kids out sledding, and, well, I had a good time; they’ll grow into it. Nev and I built a wagon out of scrap lumber and some casters that roll a little bit too well. We let Nev pick the paint colors and so it’s three shades of pink. We built it for her to wheel her toys around, but you know we plopped that boy in there within the first hour.

My hi-fi audio setup is complete, for now and hopefully forever. The speakers I originally ordered were way too big, so I replaced them with a pair of Polk ES15s. I built speaker stands out of plywood and some hairpin table legs, and got everything wired up. It sounds great!

I’ve been on a bit of a digital detox the last few weeks. I’ve gradually cut the big social media sites out over the last few years in favor of RSS plus a few high-quality websites. But even the indie web feels fraught right now, and I don’t have the self-discipline to avoid following links that I know are going to make me upset. So I’ve blocked off all my usual haunts. I’ll probably implement some kind of scheduled time where I can catch up (i.e. Thursdays after the kids go to bed), but for now, I’m not missing it.

I’ve been an on-and-off journaler for a long time, but the notebooks I prefer aren’t great for long-form journaling as they encourage very small handwriting. I picked up a Stalogy Editor’s Series 365Days Notebook and have written a page every night for the last several weeks. It’s been a nice way to put a bow on the day. I also picked up Twelve South HoverBar Duo, which lets me point an iPad right at the kids for FaceTime calls. It’s a nice thing, and it’s definitely encouraged more calls to grandparents and cousins.

At work, I received a promotion to VP of Development. I traveled with the leadership team down to Tampa, Florida which was … quite nice? Guess I’ve really only ever been to Miami and Orlando and didn’t leave with especially favorable impressions. Highlights included a e-boat ride and a five-mile run along the Tampa Riverwalk.

I’ve spent the last few weeks rescuing a Drupal project that’s gone off the rails. ChatGPT has been invaluable as I hack my way through an unfamiliar platform; I’m not sure how it has such good information when all the content on the web is so bad. On the flip side, I suspect that a lot of the original code was written by an LLM – it is verbose and full of subtle bugs. The AI sword cuts both ways. It’s been gratifying to help my coworkers out of a sticky spot, to be sure.

Finally, I started writing these dispatches in March of 2023, and this one represents two full years of doing these. To celebrate/commemorate, I’ve wired up a Hugo template that dumps all the content out in a printer-friendly way, and I’m going to have a hardcover book printed. A little bit vainglorious? Perhaps! But:

I will leave you with a suggested question to ask other blog writers: What will happen to your blog after you’re gone? I ask because I don’t have a good answer for this. I don’t think anything I’ve written is critical for future generations, but I’d also like my eventual great-grand-kids to be able to read a bit about how their old great-grand-dad saw the world (if they care to).

– Steven Garrity

This Month

• Adventure: solo dad (😳) while Claire goes to Mexico with some friends
• Project: crochet this fox for Nev
• Skill: take this finger drumming course – I’m doing a music retreat with a friend in June, and I’d like to improve at drum tracking and bass lines before then

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Godkiller, Hannah Kaner
• Non-fiction: Feel Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal
• Music: Dummy, Portishead (had that Sour Times on repeat in my head all month)

Links

• The Social Media Sea Change - by Anne Helen Petersen

  I’m not quitting Instagram. I may or may not add email to my phone; maybe I’ll just do it when I’m traveling, and it becomes my de facto computer. I’m not trying to convince you to do what I’ve done, and I’m not suggesting I’m a superior or more disciplined person for doing any of this. All I’m saying is: I think I’ve turned the corner. And I think a lot of you have — or are about to — too.

  More on this topic: Bad shape, What Is To Be Done?, Farewell, again…

• Departing the New York Times

  Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness, toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?

• Westley Winks :: How I journal

  I’ve tried physical notebooks, morning pages, stream-of-thought writing, bullet points, and basically everything else recommended by the journaling gurus. What finally stuck was a framework I learned from Sahil Bloom—the 1-1-1 method. I’ve adapted it for myself such that I write down five points each night (in a perfect world).

• Cancellation: a complex mix of accountability, power, justice, anger and societal change

  Driving out people can be emotionally satisfying and create a sense of justice. But is it actually making the world better?

• Offgrid internet-in-a-box project - Part one - Dom Corriveau

  For fun, I like to invent scenarios and then build a tech setup for it. One of the builds I think about a lot is having a completely offgrid (and obviously offline) portable internet-in-a-box. This is the first steps in that build, laying out the requirements and choosing the hardware.

• Sonic Pi - The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

  Experience the sound of code. Sonic Pi is your free code-based music creation and performance tool.

• I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw | The Guardian

  Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

• Some Entries from My Personal Journal // Take on Rules

  On Tuesday the 12th of November, 2024, I started what I hoped to be a new habit. That is writing a personal daily journal. Over the weeks, I expanded my aspirations to include a daily check list of activities I wanted to do. I’ve also used these journals to spin-off blog posts; such as this one. In other words, my daily journal is growing a virtuous cycle in my creative process.

• This Glorious Machine

  Riding an e-bike is like discovering a long forgotten secret of the universe or, perhaps, inventing something worthy of a heartfelt “eureka.” Look: zipping through traffic on my first e-bike, blitzing past the stuffy tin cans all around me, I’ve become master of the four winds. Now first place in a triathlon, now a mythical creature that can move at the speed of thought. Upon my trusty electric 6-gear steed I am Hermes, lord of heavenly motion.

• My Planner Setup for 2025 – Writing at Large

  It’s the beginning of 2025, so it’s time to go over my full planner setup for both work and home. None of this setup is truly new, as I’ve used much of it during part or all of 2024, but there are a few tweaks and minor adjustments that I’ll highlight. As I use a 13 week year (or a quarter) in my planner, I started Q1 of 2025 on the 29th of December and not the 1st of January.

• Three Habits Worth Keeping – Writing at Large

  This is the time of year when people set resolutions, themes, goals, intentions, words of the year, etc. Ambitions are high, intentions are good, but well before March most of these efforts will be abandoned and forgotten. I’ll be writing about my quarterly plan and my 2025 planner later on, but for now here are three habits that worth keeping in 2025 and in general, and a few tips on how to get into them and persist.