Welcome back everyone!
This edition of the WHV, #181, looks back at the period of time from Monday October 7 to Sunday October 13, 2019.
Alternative WHV notification modalities.
Shortly after publishing WHV #180, I decided (bolstered by the advice of my, err, advisor) to return to announcing new WHVs on Facebook and perhaps even on Twitter, in spite of TwiFRaF-YT.
For the past months, the only place where you could opt in to be notified of new WHVs was on the mailing list. (Well, that and RSS, which seems to be becoming more niche with every passing day.)
Although the mailing list works for a number of people, I am interested in adding other options that would make sense for WHV readers.
Readers, where else would be a good place to keep you up to date about new WHV posts, should you like to be kept up to date?
What I did in week 41.
This was a great week for social events.
It was not the best week for avoiding amazing craft beer and even more amazing wine.
(I knew what I was getting into when the week started. I committed to it.)
On Tuesday evening, I really enjoyed our local Helderberg business and nerdery meetup.
Two “lightning” talks were given: The first on getting your podcasting game on (microphones, syndication, oh my!), and the second on personal knowledge management, based on the recently published note-taking post on this blog.
Craft beer was enjoyed.
The next day, at a regular(ish) Top Secret Business Meeting (at the Thirsty Scarecrow), I made use of the opportunity to drink my favourite IPA of all time (so far), a beer which goes by the name of WARLORD, and a beer that has been documented before on these pages.
As the tasting ceremony started, I was greeted by this portentous sign:
Coincidence? I think not.
On Friday, we had lunch with friends from the Netherlands at the newly re-opened Long Table restaurant at Haskell Winery.
The view from one’s lunch table looked something like this:
As if that was not enough, we had the exquisite pleasure of making the acquaintance of the Haskell Anvil 2018, probably the best Chardonnay I have ever tasted.
Running with fluids and fuel. 12/10 going to do again.
On Sunday, I went out on a long run, partly to atone for my sins but mostly just because I really like going on long runs.
What was special about this run, is that I took along extra fluids for the first time ever.
Weekend runs these days are mostly longer than an hour.
After an hour of running on a sunny day down here, one loses quite an amount of moisture. If this moisture is not replenished, one’s running equipment starts to malfunction.
To prevent this situation, I recently acquired a Camelbak Circuit 1.5l Hydration vest.
On Sunday, I took this vest out for its maiden voyage. It had about a litre of Game (local cheap isotonic drink) in the bladder, and two bananas stuffed in the front pockets.
Subjectively, the run went better than usual and I was able to increase my distance by a little, but gratifying, bit.
However, next time I’m filling that bladder to capacity.
The angst-inducing sound which that thing makes when you suck out the last few drops of drink with some distance still left to go is not something I want to hear again soon.
Solar
For the first time since our house was solarized, this thing happened on Saturday morning at 7:18:
The house’s batteries were still at 24%, but the sun was already high enough to meet our modest energy demands at that point.
In other words, for the first time, we had stored enough solar power the previous day to get us 100% through the night and back into solar, without us having to dip into the grid.
(The inverter is programmed not to let the lithium batteries discharge below 20%, in order to further increase their lifespan. When there’s a real power outage, it will go down to 10%.)
This should happen more often now that the days are getting longer.
I derive a substantial amount of pleasure from every single kilowatt-hour of sunbeam-powered electricity that we generate and use.
First rule of blogging: You don’t blog about blogging.
According to this Guardian article, blogging turned 25 on Monday, October 7, 2019.
They define the start of blogging as the birth of Dave Winer’s first blog post in 1994. It turns out that Winer has posted to his blog on every single day since that very first year.
I like how the Guardian article juxtaposes blogging with modern social media.
Of course the truth is more complicated, but generally blogging is more about the content, and the reasoning, albeit just as opinionated, behind it, whereas social media is all about emotion-driven engagement and extremely short-term gratification-analogues of some kind or another.
The Slow Ones.
Complementing ABC, I feel another (old) theme brewing amongst the voices…
Deliberate, deep and slow thinking and doing, is an additional antidote to the all-encompassing AI-optimised immediate gratification information environment that we live in, and to humankind’s concomitant addiction to all that is instant.
In a science fiction world, we’re going to end up with yet another schism between humans.
There will be those who will hold conversations with ten others at the same time, data streams coming in from twenty more sources in the background, processing-processing-processing.
There will be a far smaller group of folks who still command the almost forgotten art of focusing intently on a single thing for hours on end, without swiping in any direction.
Communication between the two groups will become increasingly difficult.
Will this remain the stuff of fiction?