An Unsent News letter: D&F 5/19/24
Apparently I never sent this, so here’s a bonus email from the past
It was a long week for this newsletterist. Between waking up for a commute, and an offsite with 100 coworkers from around the world, my body and brain are shot. I cancelled therapy, and skipped bike rides from Tuesday through Thursday. Fortunately next weekend is long, and I’m likely due for a vacation. Imagine going into an office every day? What a nightmare! You can’t even cook your own meals! On the upside I got to see a few old friends and many acquaintances, and eat some hot pot.
Snorri is still mad at me for the week and his vet checkup. The indignity.
Links
“We find the most valuable meetings have a clear, previously agreed upon purpose and end after that purpose has been achieved, rather than extending to the full 30 minutes or one hour default.”
- During the pandemic, my company was one of many to challenge the meeting overload. While we’re far from having a meeting agenda or clear purpose for every time block, we do have less meetings broadly. I’m surprised how often our ability to work asynchronously lags behind our tooling though. There’s a tendency to DM people about work discussions instead of using public channels that leave a record and provide clarity for other teams that I want to change. Even managing only two teams I find it pretty hard to keep up with what is going on without a lot of check-ins and triangulation.
- Years ago, with a dream of going to Japan, I read blogs and stories from Tokyo and other cities from strange foreigners like me. The Shõwa era provided a seemingly endless supply of alleys, yokochos, and strange perversions, and I wanted to see them all. My guidebook was Tokyo Damage Report, and I miss the worlds it described. With COVID and the olympics, Japan chose to clean up and remove some of the terribly and dark corners, but there are still adventures left to be had.
- A friend recently visited my house and paid me the best compliment, “your apartment looks the most like the inside of someone’s head I’ve ever seen.” I spent the past five years nesting and building out my home to match my interests and create the kind of environment I really want to spend time in, and sometimes that means clutter. I loved minimalism in the past, and still do for many things, but my ideal space is lived-in, and warm. If you have hobbies like mine (cycling, reading, music) you’re for sure going to have a lot of accoutrements.
- Watch Sugar. It’s really something.
Closing
News is picking back up again and I’m trying to collect as many links as I can during the week, so I’ll try to send another newsletter this month. I picked-up a new iPad Pro, and also plan to write about it, but perhaps not until the new OS in the summer. Beyond that, I’m still enjoying the sun, and I hope you are too. Happy spring, space cowgirls~