July 21, 2024

Hit and Miss #359: Time outside, time well spent

Hullo!

After a full day working outside—including a while watching our neighbourhood Cooper’s hawk sunning itself on our garden bed cover—T and I took to our bikes to visit a taco food truck and get some ice cream. Good end to a good day, tiring though it all was. Loads of links, though:

• Jack Cheng’s writing on “the Paradox of Craft” really resonated with me.
  • Learning a thing gives you the knowledge to know what good looks like—but it also just increases your own awareness of the gap between your skill and what good looks like. There’s no better summary of where I’m at with woodworking these days, feeling that paradox acutely; but I’m doing my best to avoid falling into that gap, to instead just keep going.
  • Jack’s antidote sounds pretty good to me: “Ritualistic adherence to routine. Constant reminders that this, this thing I’m typing right now, is just a shitty rough draft, it’s supposed to bad, it’s more like an extended brainstorming session. And lately: Absurdly high daily word-count targets.”
• I’ve been listening to Born to Run—Springsteen’s memoir, not the album, excellent though it also is. I’m struck by just how hard he worked to make that music, whether recorded or live, extending even to his input and influence over how the band comported itself onstage. I’ve never listened to audiobooks much before, but memoir maybe in particular works quite well for the format: when read by the author, you're just listening to their story, told by them; for storytellers like Springsteen, that’s a particularly good listen. (Also, I’m listening through Libby—go libraries!)
• Last year, I did some professional development coaching through work. It was fine; I wasn’t in a great headspace at the time to take it on. The main thing we engaged with, though, was my dislike of, even aversion to, networking. Well, Mandy Brown’s along this week with a potent reframing of networking toward kinwork—a reframe that’s already had me reach out to people a bit more readily.
• As ever, Simon Collison’s photos and brief vignettes make me want to up and travel to wherever he’s been. That view through that window? Brilliant architecture, brilliant shot.
• With all the recent news from the States—the paper’s been fast to read this week, as I skip over much of the breathless American coverage—I appreciated David Moscrop’s distinction between a politics of conflict versus one of violence.

Oooookay, my energy is rapidly running out, so let’s speed run the rest of the links:

• Perilous, tedious, under-appreciated work of repairing deep-sea internet cables
• Citizen Lab on vulnerabilities in common (really common!) VPN tech
• “Serving a billion web requests with boring code”
• ”Staffed lookout towers aren’t relics from the past – they’re key to fighting today’s wildfires”
• “How the Ottawa Tool Library keeps stuff out of landfills” (they’re great, and super fun)
• “All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second” (via Sean, who’s speaking at the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates again, this Wednesday!)
• Beautiful chairs (a stunning form), enhanced by delightful carvings

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas