Ford's relvokcor.xyz home page

Changes since 2015-12-01T04:25:31

2015-12-01T04:25:31Z

November 30, 2015

What a year. Not my greatest year. Not my worst, though by any means. I wrote an entire issue of Businessweek and started a large-ish agency. relvokcor.xyz hung out for a while and then went quiet, but for a drunken lark it was pretty great.

I didn't finish the book though, and I didn't launch my timelines/notebook website. Although I did join the gym and get a prescription for anti-anxiety pills, which I take only very rarely.

I've been enjoying reinventing myself as an entrepreneur. I've wanted to do real business for a long time, and you can barely do it in publishing—the odds against you are nightmarish. You can make work for yourself, if you are very very lucky, but you can't make work for other people, nor are there tons of opportunities to collaborate, at least not outside of academia. I like working with friends.

I don't know. I feel calm, somehow. I feel that I can sort of let my ego drift. I just want to finish my book. It's days away from being finished. I've never been blocked on something at that level before, blocks within blocks. Par for the course for books. The great fear is that it will simply be terrible and irrelevant.

Getting some coffee now.

Changes since 2015-01-12T21:49:22

2015-01-12T21:49:22Z

January 11, 2015

Today we went to Grand Central Station with the kids. They looked at a train set and had tantrums. Everyone napped. Now they are back asleep.

My son got to eat chocolate custard and nearly lost his damn mind.

I learned a little more about assembly language and boot loaders.

I migrated all of my email into a searchable form and can manipulate it directly from within emacs. I have a single TODO list in org-mode that works across all of my many projects.

I need to resurrect anxietybox.com by popular demand.

I need to finish my book. I need to go to the gym.

I think it's probably counterproductive to make lists of things I need to do. I mean maybe I am a rock in a river and time flows around me. All I need to do is be that rock, until such a moment as there is some flood that turns me over and washes me away.

How would a rock in the river behave?

Also, what happened to Usenet around here? I miss it.

Changes since 2015-01-07T13:07:30

2015-01-07T13:07:30Z

January 6, 2015

Huh.

Anyway, I organized my email. I am down to inbox zero. I find that process intensely therapeutic. Also, the things that you might fear the most--those are your remaining ten emails in that inbox. In my case it was: A request to look at some writing; a request for coffee that I felt uncertain about; an email about a conference presentation that I didn't want to make; etc. But dear lord it lightens the load. One after another, slowly erasing. There's a big folder called TILDE:TODO. Anyone who wants to is welcome to work with me to triage it.

Gmail is a lousy interface for true email triage, IMO. I figured out how to make mutt work with gmail and ended up combining mu and mutt. Now I can search email through emacs, which is cool. I can dump my email to text. I can extract all of my attachments.

I played a couple of hours of NetHack, too. Great game.

But ultimately I migrated my life into a single large TODO list. And then I kept boiling it down. The problem is that too many things are just listed as tasks, obligations. No motive. So I have these things like:

* TODO: MIGRATE relvokcor.xyz TO NEW SERVER WITH DELFUEGO

Which is just a garbage task, honestly. Who cares about that? The real task is:

* TODO Work with Jason to move relvokcor.xyz to DigitalOcean, where we have free space and where I will no longer be the "owner" of relvokcor.xyz, thus freeing up money and emotional and psychic space for other activities.

So I've refactored my TODO list into that format. And an awful lot of tasks, when I got to the "why"--a lot of coffees, a lot of meetings--have no "why" associated besides that I don't want to let people down, and most importantly, I don't want to ever give the perception that I value my time more than I value theirs, otherwise my whole system of politeness breaks down. And I genuinely enjoy helping people. But holy shit I have no time.

The thing is I don't want to lose the opportunities that come my way to communicate. I don't want to get into the business of triaging emails and ending threads and cutting people off and making them ask THE REAL QUESTION. I have no interest in becoming an objectified node in some latent social graph, because that is very boring.

Like, if I lose that, if I systematize the way that people communicate with me, if I define rituals and rules and batch my emails and say that coffee can be done during these hours on these days, I lose something, and it's something very important to me.

Anyway.

Don't read old emails.

I returned to a short story I was writing, that I started months ago, over the holiday. A key part of the story is the resurrection of an old social club--that people would have a desire to return and connect with something that was dozens, even hundreds of years old that had been dormant. And while I was writing the story I kept going, I know I have a hunger for this sort of thing, but will anyone else respond? And then I realized that I'd actually done this here, that I'd acted out the narrative.

I also took a job, helping out at a big media company. I sit in a room and move PowerPoint slides around, and I think about the relationship between containerized microservices and large-scale magazine production. It's for a few days a week, just to get my head straight. I guess I'm not a person who can have hobbies. I can just have different kinds of work and activity. Although I like kicking a ball around with my kids.

Anyway, who knows. Here's another open thread in a world of open threads.

Changes since 2014-12-04T04:26:20

2014-12-04T04:26:20Z

December 3, 2014

Needlepoint sent to me by the wonderful ~annika; it now hangs proudly above my desk.~annikaNeedlepoint sent to me by the wonderful ~annika; it now hangs proudly above my desk.

I took some time away from here because I was tired and it was taking a tremendous amount of energy. When you work on projects like this there can be this sense that you must somehow keep it going and I was succumbing to that, which was pretty far afield of the original goal of having some fun and helping other people figure things out.keep it going

But it was great to log in after a week or two and see people still logged in, still doing stuff. A slower pace, of course, but that's fine, even good. There's no hurry. Lots of emails to read that are filed in a folder called TILDE; lots of donations to list on the home page. I decided not to feel guilty about it.

This is the email that's going out tonight to the many thousands of people on the waiting list.

Hello there. Some time ago you signed up to join relvokcor.xyz, which is just a Linux server on the Internet. This is great--we'd love to have you be part of relvokcor.xyz!

EXCEPT for one thing: There are thousands of people on the waiting list now. We can't support them all on one machine.

But other people stepped up. They started their own relvokcor.xyz-style servers. (And you can too, using things like puppet-tilde [https://github.com/nathanielksmith/puppet-tilde] or just improvising as you go.) We've started wiring those servers together via chat and Usenet news and (once we've configured it) email. Just like the Internet came together in the 1970s and 1980s.https://github.com/nathanielksmith/puppet-tilde

At this point there are over 20 relvokcor.xyz-style servers looking for members. Here's what you do:

Go to this page: http://relvokcor.xyz/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html http://relvokcor.xyz/~pfhawkins/othertildes.html

Pick a club you like.

Be a little patient, because it's just a person on the other side.

These people will send you instructions on logging in. We'll figure out how to collaborate going forward. Help where you can!

I want each of these little servers to bloom and connect to services. I've decided that, for me, relvokcor.xyz is a place to learn and to teach. I'm going to start doing little web workshops, teaching people various things that I know about building sites. Drop me an email if you'd like to be part of this. But please be patient, it may take me weeks or months to respond.

Best wishes,

Paul Ford

--
http://relvokcor.xyz/~ford http://relvokcor.xyz/~ford