We’re getting back on track with the WHVs friends!

In the hardly started tradition of writing blog posts in music-backed focus blocks, I have my “upbeat thinking” playlist teed up and ready to go. The outline of this post formed itself as a Real Bullet List(tm) in my Emacs about an hour ago.

Let’s go.

They grow up so fast

Theory of Mind, or ToM, is an important mental capability that we use to model and predict the thoughts and desires of fellow humans.

Just the other day, as we were going through our school morning ritual of the offspring units eating breakfast together and the adults self-administering the correct number of espressos required for normal functioning, GOU#3 calmly informed me from her mother’s lap:

Daddy, mommy would like another biscuit with her coffee.

Genetic Offspring Unit #3 only very recently turned 2.

With this request, she demonstrated surprising levels of ToM and planning ability. She inferred, entirely correctly,  what her parental unit required at that moment, and performed exactly the correct action (delegation, yikes!) to satisfy that requirement.

I am still suitably impressed.

Sketchnote your life

Sketchotes refer to a type of hand-written notes that employs both writing and drawing techniques. Here’s an example by Emacs guru and famous internet person Sacha Chua:

I’m trying to spend more time dedicated to thinking and so-called conceptualising. Sketchnotes seems like a good tool to use during these thinking sessions, so last week this formed the ideal excuse to go out and acquire a new large Moleskine with blank pages (I used to use Moleskines for all my note-taking before going digital), and a whole bunch of sketchnote-recommended pens (Pilot Hi-TecPoint 0.5 which I already had one of; Pilot G-TEC-C4 for super fine drawing, pen also turned out to have best handling of the lot despite its simplicity; Pentel Energel 0.7mm).

My first session was spent sketching out my current life landscape (thank you KvG for this tip years ago), including work, side-projects and a bunch of developing and potential opportunities, as well as the links between them.

I can report that drawing like this is a great trick to keep one’s attention glued to the page, and hence to the chosen focus, whilst at the same time maintaining sufficient mental distance to process the more substantial  thoughts and all of their interactions.

Telegram has the public group chat market cornered

For private messaging, I have a strong preference for Signal, especially over WhatsApp.

Besides the dubious future of WhatsApp’s privacy (Founder #1 Jan Koum is planning to leave while Founder #2 Brian Acton recently donated 50 million dollars to Signal), the WhatsApp web-app is more irritation than it’s worth. The fact that I have to keep my phone awake and connected to the network is a silly constraint which even the far more secure Signal desktop app does not require.

Anyways, I digress.

This section is about Telegram, another messaging app with dubious security that at least does not belong to Facebook.

Besides all of its stickers, animated gifs, and (non-)useful bots everywhere, Telegram has two additional features which are quiet compelling:

Although it requires a telephone number to be setup, you can configure a username which you can give out to people instead of your telephone number to have them contact you. This adds an extra layer of privacy which is sometimes useful.

More interestingly, Telegram has the concept of “supergroups”. These are public groups which can be joined by anyone if they have the name, and support up to 10000 (yes ten thousand) users.

This is ideal for easily starting special interest groups, and can be seen as a modern and mobile-first form of IRC. The mobile apps are generally really fast and full featured.

Anyways, on a lark we created one such group, called ZA Tech Light, for tech people (aka nerds) in ZA. If you are such a person, or you just like chatting with nerds in ZA, feel free to drop in at @zatechlight. Although primarily lark-based, this could be seen as a sort of splinter group of the much larger (because older) Slack group called ZA Tech.

Running update

Yesterday, I did my second 10km+ run in the Lunas, bringing total sandal running distance to 107km.

I am now back up to my pre-sandal standard running route distance.

That being said, my calf muscles are still complaining quite loudly after every run. The recovery perioud seems to be shortening however, and the calf muscle complaints are less convincing every time.

All of THAT being said, running barefoot- aka primitive-style feels amazing, so much so that although one does keep an eye on things, one does not perceive the above-mentioned muscle discomfort as an issue at all.

Furthermore, the patella strap I previously had to wear during running, to prevent knee pain, has been lying in my cupboard, unused for the past 107km.

The side-project dilemma

Most nerds I know have side-projects.

It’s how we learn new things and keep ourselves constructively entertained.

Up to now, I’ve usually chosen my side-projects not only on the basis of learning, but also based on their business potential. Some of them have indirectly led to revenue, partially through the business-relevance check, but so far never directly. That is, I’ve never brought a side-project to market.

This weekend I had an idea for a pretty obscure side-project. In terms of creativity and learning, and of passion and brain-fit, it scores highly, but in terms of direct business potential quite the opposite.

I’m probably at least going to start, because it’s too much fun not to.

What is your approach in situations like this? Do side-projects have to satisfy any kind of utility requirement? Which criteria do you use to select your next side-project?

Bhayi bhayi

Thanks for reading this far peeps! I hope you have a beautiful week, and that we might meet again at the end.