Welcome back friends to the Weekly Head Voices!
This is the 190th edition, covering the two weeks from monday February 24 to Sunday March 8, 2020.
(I had made a good start on the post on March 8, but then the work week and a bunch of homing missile deadlines hit. As I write this bit, it is Saturday March 14, 14:30 SAST.)
GOU #3 turns 4!
Our third Genetic Offspring Unit, creative named GOU #3, fairly recently completed another year of life.
She has now collected the grand total of 4.
It was a pleasure celebrating her birthday with her as it felt like this was the first time that she was intellectually fully present.
With apparent ease she even understood the sometimes tricky concept of having one’s party on a different day than one’s birthday.
For future us, I would also like to note that her pronunciation and sentence construction are growing more and more precise, sometimes even overly so, the observation of which delights me.
GOU#3, if you read this years and years in the future: We can already see that you are an amazing human being. We are deeply happy that you have come here to join our clan.
New pair of Altras acquired.
In an unexpected but quite happy turn of events, it is starting to look like I might have to take part in a trail run in July.
(Charl from the future: Only if my finicky ankles man up between now and then.)
Once I’ve actually done it, and I’m still able to tell the tale, I will surely do so.
Because I am one of the World’s Worst Trail Runners, I will definitely have to step up my training between now and then.
As with many other endeavours in life, an important component of all of this is acquiring suitable shoes.
Because my giant-toe-box-zero-drop Escalantes have been treating me very well, I had soon narrowed it down to any one of the Altra trail shoes: Superiors (minimalist), Lone Peaks (jack-of-all-trades), Timp (sightly more support) and Olympus (maximalist-ish).
After having read all of the internet regarding the different Altra trail shoes, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that none of them really knocked it out of the park.
Anyways, one Sunday I walked into our local sports super store (I’m sorry my fellow nerds), and it so happened that they had a pair of Lone Peak 4.5s in my size: GINORMOUS CLOWN SHOE SIZE.
Trying them on, I tripped and fell right into the psychological black hole of biases and instantly convinced myself that these were the shoes for me.
Fast forward a week of calling my behavioural insurer (starts with a Disco ends with a Y) every single day, and they finally managed to figure out what was wrong somewhere deep in their unfortunately quite sub-par IT systems, and flipped the Shoe Purchase Gamification switch.
In short, if you are able to activate this feature (you have to be super patient and a bit stubborn), said insurer will subsidise the purchase of a pair of running shoes based on how often you exercise every week.
This is one neat way of making your running addiction work for you, if you can somehow absorb the possibly substantial startup cost, i.e. the hours you have to spend on the phone with the friendly support agents.
Behold my beautiful new trail running shoes:
Crabby Wallet!
After years of eyeing Fido U2F and FIDO2 hardware security keys on the internet, I finally took the plunge and acquired a Yubico Security Key NFC.
Up to now I used mostly the LastPass Authenticator app and more recently Authy to generate OTPs as second factor (2FA) for most of my important accounts.
(BTW, if you’re not yet using 2FA for your important accounts, such as email, now is the best time to upgrade. I would recommend getting the Authy app because it optionally supports multi-device synchronization.)
The YubiCo hardware device is supposed to be more secure than authenticator apps due to domain hashing, and it’s pretty cool that you don’t have to copy across 6-digit codes, but what I didn’t foresee as clearly was the following simple difference:
I almost always have my phone with me. However, I don’t always have my keyring with me.
I set out to find a new wallet to replace my already pretty minimalist fake leather credit card booklet. The new wallet had to be at least as minimalist, but it had to have some sort of lanyard to which I could attach the security key.
I was delighted to discover that (of course) there’s a whole community of minimalist wallet enthusiasts on the internet.
I was even more delighted when I discovered that the Crabby Wallet C3, a second-generation product of a super successful 2015 kickstarter, was available all the way down here!
Behold the minimalist wonder that is my new Crabby Wallet:
(Charl from 6 days in the future writes: This looks like it’s going to be a keeper. It’s more compact and more secure than my previous credit card booklet, and it has become much more ergonomic after the initial break-in period.)
The end of this post.
Thank you for connecting with me here!
Remember, it’s now Saturday March 14, 15:26 SAST, but this post will forever act like it finds itself on Sunday March 8.
I hope that tomorrow I can write WHV #191, a less complicated post that will come into being not too far away from the moment that is its observation point.
P.S.
Do you feel like you have an observation point, a specific location that is your momentary source of perception and thought?
I’ve been getting back into the Waking Up guide, and there are some truly delightful exercises of the all-encompassing consciousness.
Remember: There is no observation point!
