Weeknotes – post-Thanksgiving edition

Going to try this weeknotes thing, at least on a trial basis, for the rest of 2018. Let’s just dive in and see how it goes. It’s longer than I wanted it to be, but despite the holiday it was a busy week last week.

NEW WORKFLOWS. Now’s about the time of year when I start playing with changes to various workflows, testing them before I bring them into the New Year. I do it to fight my tendency to cling to ways of working that have started to create more problems than were solved. And so for a month or two, I run short PDSA cycles. This year, it’s about how I sync my stuff.

Since I don’t pay for Dropbox I can’t really kvetch much about how their decision to stop supporting any Linux system not run on a clean ext4 drive (my Ubuntu partition on my ThinkPad is encrypted with ecryptfs, which is a no go now) has really fucked up my work. See, I’ve prided myself on being software and OS agnostic when it comes to my daily computing. Plain text files written with text editors, and synced to Dropbox. And if that text needs to go somewhere–Wordpress, an email, LibreOffice, whatever–copy/paste is my friend. But it offered me more or less the ultimate distraction free writing environment, or a platform where I could take quick notes.

This week, I’ve been running experiments to see how far I manage going all in on teh Googles–Keep and Docs, mostly–for writing and life management. And after that, I’m going to follow up on a recommendation to try the AWS Free Tier. In the meantime, though, it’s been going really well. I’ve been finding how it’s made me leverage my tablet more effectively, with the help of a portable Bluetooth keyboard. Of course, this new workflow slightly intensifies the pain of being without internet, but I’m really at no more risk than I was before.

PROJECTS. I migrated two projects in particular from my Dropbox folder into Google Drive: a comic script I’ve been tinkering with and a short story edit.

READING. Once again, a couple of books have managed to jump their place in my backlog queue.

  • DEAR AMERICA: NOTES FROM AN UNDOCUMENTED CITIZEN by Jose Antonio Vargas. I got about a quarter of the way through it when by chance I happened to notice an interview on BookTV’s AFTER WORDS the other night.
  • THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DIANE WILLIAMS. Yeah, I had no clue this was coming out. So much for my so-called friends who should’ve told me. C’mon now, you all know better!

VIEWING

  • CASTLEVANIA. I binged all of Season 2 on Netflix over a couple of days. I loves me some Warren Ellis.
  • THE ENDLESS (2017). I’m writing up a review. Loved it!
  • KIM’S CONVENIENCE. I have thoughts about this I need to write up, too!

IN THE WILD. I’m not sure how a mailbox ends up at a bus stop, but…