Logbook

network downtime 2024-01-26 -- ATT Fiber, some selected routes through Chicago

check the usual suspects for outage news on a Friday night:

Reddit: "Very specific routing issue for fiber customers" https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/1ac00cc/very_specific_routing_issue_for_fiber_customers/

puck "outages" list: "AT&T Fiber Partial Outage" https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2024-January/014983.html

"Down Detector", ATT shows issues at 10x baseline at 1000p Eastern on 2024-01-26. https://downdetector.com/status/att/

It's a good night to have a VPN option available to you, an even better night to have several VPNs on tap to figure out which one routes around the damage.

wandering through the entire alphabet in non-alphabetical order, as a pangrammatic search strategy

Instead of always looking for inspiration at the beginning of the alphabet, pick some other collection of letters to iterate through that gets you from A to Z eventually but that wanders a bit along the way.

"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" - good, old school

"Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." - better, mysterious

If you take the second of these as inspiration then you should start your search at "s" not at "a", and end with "w" not "z".

More at wikipedia, "pangram" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram

"Maria", a generative AI for composing correspondence

Take a letter, Maria. Address it to... Send a copy to...

Maria is the prototypical stenographic robot. She - and definitely gendered is she - knows how to compose business correspondence.

In an advanced household, there's a corresponding secretary who handles the mails. Many tasks do not need the attention of the head of the household, yet need doing. The secretary answers the incoming, but does not initiate outbound.

The Maria interface handles outbound correspondence, not inbound. Maria has to project authority and agency, though she does not have it herself. There are many ritualized communications strategies. Maria knows them all, and how to prompt her mistress to conform to protocol.

How many ways can you express a common sentiment? Maria reads greeting cards in her spare time.

(Hall)Mark is the male voice of the same system.

The challenge is to appear fresh, even if you are dull and hackneyed. Dull, hackneyed, pedestrian, and trite.

[written in 2016 at the People's Food Coop, Ann Arbor]

personal blogs vs AI

"I'm thankful for personal blogs today. In a sea of AI-generated keyword bullshit, real original content stands out like a lighthouse." Max Böck, writing on Mastodon at https://front-end.social/@mxbck/111783003459044788

working from the attic, again

As soon as it was possible to move my Covid-era office out of the attic, I did so. Now I'm back up there every so often, and it's a lot more enjoyable.

The first pass of attic-as-office was hastily during Covid, when the place was full of junk and I could barely wedge myself in. There wasn't space to move, which made it hard to clean, and there never seemed to be enough time to do anything other than work. And it was cold, bitter cold.

Since then, things have gotten better. I never take work up here anymore (there's a separate place for that) so that attic is reverted to home lab / radio shack status. It's a lot more pleasant for that, much more the "I am up here because I want to be" rather than "back to the salt mines" feeling. We've done some insulation in the house, and so it's not feeling as cold as it did before.

There are more radios up here than there used to be. An ADS-B antenna looks for aircraft traffic; it's propped up next to the window, and the Pi 3 it's plugged into isn't terribly fast. A somewhat faster Pi 400 controls an Airspy HF+ SDR and a Youloop antenna, serving up bits of the spectrum using OpenWebRX+ at https://rx.dunker-pentatonic.ts.net . And a Pi Zero runs pi-star, which serves as a gateway for my DMR radios. An old Kenwood R-2000 shortwave receiver rounds out the collection (oh, there's also a Sony ICF-2010 not currently running).

The biggest improvement is that I've changed the desk I'm using. I'm not as close to the window, so it's warmer. A decade-old MacBook Air is the shack computer - it's currently tuned to FT8 on 40 meters and those eerie tones. I had never previously figured out how to really get a second screen plugged into the various systems I had been using, but with a little extra space and time and some thoughtful acquisitions of cables several monitors that were paperweights are now usable.

The biggest radio improvement happened just tonight. I have my stepdad's Kenwood R-2000 shortwave radio from the 1980s, a sturdy solid state "communications receiver" which I repaired a few years back when the fuse for the antenna failed. Tonight's improvement was getting the antenna - a long wire stretched out as best you can - away from all of the computer noise sources it had been next to. Voila! With the help of my OpenWebRX+ to zero in on what frequencies have interesting stations, now I am listening to weekend evening programming on WRMI Radio Miami International which has a series of music programs featured.

Focus on what gets done, not the queue of undone things

I'm trying to focus on "what I got done" as opposed to "what just landed in the inbox" or "what's just stewing on the todo list incomplete".

The biggest bonus of this is that the count of things that are done if you count carefully is a number that keeps going up and up, in a good way! ↗ ↗ ↗ Compare that with inbox size (number goes up, in a bad way) or size of todo list (up and down, hard to draw conclusions).

The second biggest bonus of the focus on finishing tasks is a list of things that were accomplished - to brag about, or to review from the previous day to see to it that everyone who needs to know about what's been done gets the word.

How this works out in practice

I'm currently using gitea as a personal issue tracker. It's a self-hosted software development environment and "git forge" along the lines of Github or Codeberg. Currently it's running on a private network with just me as the only user. https://about.gitea.com/products/gitea

My personal todo list is implemented as issues in gitea, so that it's easy to count the number of open issues as the "size of the todo list". It's similarly easy for me to count the number of messages in my Gmail inbox as "inbox size". My experience tracking both of those numbers is unsatisfying - they go up almost solely in response to external inputs like people sending me mail or work around the house making itself obvious. Reducing the inbox size by increasing the size of the todo list doesn't feel like anything's getting done (and it's not).

gitea helpfully also counts the number of closed issues, which I'm now also tracking as the count of "things that are done". Unlike the other two numbers, that tally simply goes up and up. Tracking numbers that only go up and where all increases are good news is satisfying, in the way that "inbox zero" measures are never satisfying. Occasionally an issue gets closed because I'm not going to do it after all - that's a success as well.

gitea also helpfully lets you sort issues by "maximum number of comments". If I look at the pool of stuff to do, and sort it so that the ones I have the most commentary or notes on are at the top, perhaps these are the ones closest to being "done", or "done enough" to warrant closing.

To keep track of successes, I have an "inbox abatement" issue which I post to tallying things that are complete with one-line descriptions of the completeness. I'm not completely satisfied with that part of the success-tracking yet -- it might be that better belongs in a markdown file somewhere - but at least I have it noted somewhere I can then reuse it or bask in the reflected glory of a job well done.

Never carry a bad pen

I'm taking a written inventory of all of the things in my backpack that I haul around with me all the time. This backpack goes everywhere so it's important to keep it well-stocked and also not overstuffed with heavy things. Writing things down helps me remember what I have, and importantly reminds me what I don't need to have.

My postcard game is pretty good (picture cards, QSL cards, forever stamps) but it could be better. I'm writing down postal addresses in an address book (Field Notes Brand, from Upper Peninsula Supply Co.), so that I have a tangible reminder of people I want to correspond with when I'm away from the net. I reuse a nearly indestructible takeout tub from CuBE Packaging Solutions Inc. to keep everything together and dry. Also: send more cards in 2024.

I can probably carry around 30% less in the way of computer cables and trinkets, which would leave space for a few cables I could really use. (C to C, C to HDMI, C to ethernet). A pair of zippered microphone pouches from Audio-Technica and Shure Incorporated keep things neat. The written inventory I keep here is a bit more detailed, often reminding me of circumstances where I have needed to borrow something in a pinch.

The backpack often has a 2 meter HT ham radio antenna poking out the top, so that if I happen to find myself on a bike ride I can stop at a park and see who is on the air. I wish more ham radios had USB-C charging built in, that would simplify the power situation a lot.

Never carry a bad pen.

Also posted to LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7147814974256521216/ for a few comments.