I finished my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I need to keep it closer to hand for next year. I struggled to find it earlier.
My quarterly Field Notes subscription arrived today. This “Vintage” edition is rather regal, with a deep red cover and gold ink.
As always, my wife quickly nabbed the Field Notes pen for herself. She keeps a little stash of them for work. 🙂
Does it still feel like Christmas?
My wife mentioned that our oldest was talking to her in the car, and he said that it didn’t feel like Christmas.
I get that he’s older, practically a man, but even in my late teens and twenties and before my wife and I started our family, Christmas always felt like Christmas. It’s a chance to indulge, purchase gifts for loved ones, visit the Christmas markets, watch Christmas movies at home, or even go to the cinema and see the latest blockbuster release. My wife and I have always enjoyed Christmas, and there’s not been a year where we’ve had a less-than-enjoyable Christmas.
My wife and I agree with our oldest. This year, it doesn’t feel like Christmas. The tree is up, we’ve got our usual decorations up, and we’re looking forward to a few days of chilling at home. However, something is missing this year, and we can’t quite put our finger on what it is.
I’m still looking forward to Christmas day, and I’m sure it will be a great day, but the build-up to it hasn’t been the same. I’m hoping it’s just a one-off this year.
No Wi-Fi, no problem
It’s day 2 of no Wi-Fi in the house after a complication occurred yesterday when a new fibre line was being installed. In the meantime, I’m using my mobile phone data to connect to work, and the big yin is using his mobile phone data to finish his college work.
Don’t get me wrong—last night was great. With no Wi-Fi, everyone had to resort to alternative forms of entertainment, but it was a rather relaxing night. A few things were a nuisance to overcome, but at the end of the day, that’s what they were. A nuisance.
I’d be pretty happy to have more days like yesterday.
I managed a respectable 17 out of 30 on my team’s Christmas quiz, but more importantly, I introduced some team members from Spain to Irn-Bru.
Side-projects have taken a back seat over the next couple of weeks with the run up to Christmas. Looking forward to getting back to these over the holidays.
I downloaded Glass after seeing it mentioned in my Micro.blog timeline. I like what I see so far, so I will give it a go over the next few weeks and see if it’s something I want to keep going long-term. I do enjoy taking pictures and posting them online.
Me and wee yin out on the course today. It’s the best I’ve seen him play all year. I can’t wait to see his handicap fall next year!
I finally sorted out a dark version of my blog.
It’s not adjustable with the system theme yet, but I liked it so much that I’ve left it on as the default.
Thanks to Toby on CodePen for sharing the Christmas lights!
I managed to migrate a few older photos into my blog archive. Barring one rogue post, 2020 is now complete. I will try to finish 2019 in the next couple of weeks.
Blogging is back, again
Joel Gascoigne on the resurgence of blogging. Did it ever leave?
It feels like blogging and personal websites are back. And tinkering and sharing experiments, too.
I suspect this never actually went away, but I think in the absence of a social network based on open standards, it became less interconnected.
It’s wonderful to have a broader gathering place again.
Like Joel says, I am glad to see blogs and personal websites gaining more exposure again and, more importantly, that we’re gathering in places to share our blogs as well. We’re reconnecting with other bloggers once again. We have more places to meet, not just the one.
These days, BlueSky, Micro.blog, and Mastodon are my regular hangout places. They are open meeting places in that they either employ open standards or create open standards to improve social media decentralisation. They have chronological timelines, don’t do ads, and all support RSS feeds.
I’m more than happy to share on these platforms, and I hope that others will continue to as well.
Trying out TickTick
For the last weeks, I’ve been back to using bullet journaling. It works well, especially for my day job, for which I use a separate notebook. For everything else outside of work, though, it’s been working okay, but I feel I still need something digital-based for long-running projects.
Keeping a long list of tasks in a notebook is fine if you have one or two long-running projects, but I have a couple of web applications to keep track of and a growing project that now requires multiple lists.
I’ve tried almost every known task manager, and none of them has worked. Every task manager is different, so they usually don’t work out for me for various reasons. One task manager I haven’t tried though is TickTick.
First impressions are good. Tasks can be put into lists and even folders. They can also be tagged so that they can be filtered. A couple of extras I didn’t expect to see are the baked-in Pomodoro timer, an excellent addition to a task manager, and the ability to track habits.
It’s still early days, but it’s clear to me now that I need a digital task manager to keep track of these long-running projects. We’ll see how TickTick works out in the long term.
Tonight, the Lang household is celebrating Thanksgiving with the usual twist: a little turkey, roast vegetables, and Yorkshire puddings. We’ve settled down for the night with the NFL on.
Finally, I did it—deleted my Twitter account. It started out as such a fun and exciting place on the web, and it hasn’t been like that for me for a few years now. I’m glad I pulled the plug on it.
Considering cancelling my NYT subscription
My NYT subscription ended its introductory offer of £6 and is now £12 per month. I’m finding it hard to justify the cost now. I rarely read much of the news from the NYT these days, and I have also deleted their games app from my phone.
I enjoy the sports coverage on The Athletic and read some articles from there every day. The Wirecutter is also a good read, but to continue these subscriptions individually is almost as much as the full NYT subscription itself.
I might wait and see if a Black Friday offer can bring the subscription back down. If not, then I think it’s time to cancel the whole subscription. I’ll find coverage of the NFL elsewhere; that won’t be a problem. And there have to be good alternatives to the Wirecutter as well out there; I just need to find them.