Hello friends!
Weekly Head Voices #197 looks back at the week from Monday June 1 to Sunday June 7.
Figure 1: Weekend morning runs are generally great, but this Saturday morning run was particularly perfect.
Work-work is quite high intensity at the moment.
I really would not mind a bit of respite any time soon now.
In the meantime, let me look back, and by the crazy laws of metaphysics also inwards, at the previous week:
On slipping and shipping a side-project
I have written before about nerds and their side-projects.
You might recall that I said that they mostly don’t ever see the light of day, although they still have indirect benefits.
In any case, the two I linked to above both failed, so at least that’s nice for consistency.
However, on Friday I went and bucked the trend ever so slightly by soft-launching the Lazar Focus app and website distraction blocker for Windows.
I mentioned LF last week, but it now has a website, called lazarfocused.com, and it has a product page on gumroad.
It has a substantially smaller number of bugs thanks to brilliant beta testing by multi-modal medical visualization expert and productivity app connoisseuse Noeska.
If you’re on Windows, this is exactly the little app you need to block distractions, only when you say so of course, so that you can focus on all of The Important Stuff™ you undoubtedly would rather get done, so that you can get back to goofing off.
AMIRITE?!
If you’re one of those people who don’t need any help to help focusing and to stay in the zone, but you work with people who might, the philosophy behind Lazar Focus blog post is a good introduction to share with them. (Also, could I interview you? :)
Dry January finally ends (or maybe not) with Rochefort
This year, I started Experiment Alcohol Zero (EAZ) on January 6.
I’m happy to report that this was interrupted only once for a superb glass of my favourite Chardonnay (that’s the Haskell Anvil, see WHV #181 for the first encounter) with besties, right at the source.
Other than that, I remained in EAZ until Saturday, June 6, when the St Bernhardus Abt 12 and the Trappistes Rochefort #8 and #10 that a friend had brought for me all the way from The Netherlands and that had been waiting patiently for me in the cupboard, had just been sitting there waiting for long enough.
(By the way, the St Bernhardus Abt 12 is a taste clone of the Westvleteren, the pretty expensive king of the Trappist beers, as a drunk gentleman once explained to me in the Doerak in Delft late one evening. He was right, as my companion and I subsequently confirmed when we acquired both beers for a comparative tasting on the spot.)
The time, but far more pertinently the opportunity, had come to end (or was it merely to interrupt…) EAZ 2020.
Friends, that Rochefort is simply packed with a multitude of sweet, warm memories of days and evenings in my other home, with my other family.
Figure 2: Just in case you needed reminding, the Rochefort 8 looks like this. Memories of a lifetime not pictured.
(Going even further back, I have mentioned before that this blog contains a written record of my very first encounter with Rochefort, all the way back in 2003, right in the town of La Roche-en-Ardenna, about 30 minutes away from Rochefort itself. Reading that post now, it really was a sort of WHV avant la lettre!)
The last bit
Ok folks, it is now 22:17 on Thursday evening, and I’m at that super difficult “HOW IN THOR’S NAME DO I CONCLUDE THIS THING?!"-stage, a problem which I seem to be solving with the “I KNOW LET’S BREAK THE FOURTH WALL / SIMPLY TALK ABOUT HOW WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO END THIS THING”-manoeuvre.
On the bright side, I think we did just make the deadline with this edition of the WHV, narrowly avoiding postponement and a larger-than-normal next post.
Have a brilliant rest of the week and weekend. I look forward to seeing you again, here and anywhere!
P.S. I still don’t know how to ship side-projects.