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Nov 06 2014 I am feeling guilty about not updating my page here. See previous entry of Oct 9.
Oct 26 2014 I am in the Hamptons.
Oct 09 2014 As I'm walking around the city--on the way to work, or back from lunch--my mind is always swimming with new projects I'd like to undertake.
Wouldn't it be great if I could just start waking up earlier in the morning, without hitting snooze five times. Maybe work out or meditate. Get into a routine. I should really eat better--maybe try sticking to eating vegetarian for breakfast and lunch. I should learn Javascript--I could probably even get work to pay for it! Or, wow, I can't believe I can only speak English. How can I go through this life on only one linguistic plane of existence? If I really worked at it, I could do it. I could learn Mandarin or Spanish. I should be writing more--just a little bit every day. It would be so easy! Wouldn't it be great to start boxing again--the six months or so that I boxed I felt for the first time that my body was actually changing (improving) on account of regular physical excercise. I want that again!
And so forth. And none of it ever happens. It's pretty much a constant disappointment to me that I can't impose more of a system on my life. I think this is probably what being human is all about for many people, but I was explaining this to Molly last night in the terms of addiction--I'd never thought of it that way, but I think it makes sense. Some mornings I can be laying in bed for my customary 15-30 (ahem, or more) minutes, wanting to get up and start the day, but finding myself unable. The enjoyment I'm deriving from continuing to lie there has long since gone away. It's no longer fun or good in any way, and I want to get up and start getting ready. But I can't.
In short I have a strong mental addiction to a certain lack of self-discipline. It works in a completely irrational way, like every bad addiction. Thank you for joining me as I complete step one, publicly admitting I am powerless over my lack of self-discipline. I am going to take up cigarettes and bad coffee as I continue through the steps here on my tilde.
Oct 08 2014 This tilde is designed and built with a mobile-first philosophy.
Oct 03 2014 This weekend I am going to Atlantic City, NJ and Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, NJ, so this may be my final tilde.club update. Thanks for reading everyone. The last Wikipedia page I read before my death was that of Richard Stallman :( Actually no, today I did some reading about the Maersk Triple E class container ships.
Oct 02 2014 This morning's subway Wikipedia article was Richard Stallman, next in the "internet with a human face" etc. chain. Richard Stallman made the window in which I'm typing these letters, and played a significant role in creating the software that is running inside one of millions of virtual machines in the Amazon cloud, serving this selection of words and pictures to you right now. He also surfs the web entirely through wget:
For personal reasons, he generally does not browse the web with an active connection on his personal computer; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox, claiming to limit direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF
These are the people that made these things.
This is turning into a ripoff of Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club, btw. I have enjoyed reading wikipedia articles on the subway yesterday and today, that's why. Plus, CFWC is on Facebook and I don't really like to go there.
Oct 01 2014 I am writing entry number one from a free terminal app for iOS on a retina iPad mini. I left my laptop at work and Molly is asleep in the room with my other computer, so this is what's left. Editing a text document via nano via ssh on a capacitive touch screen keyboard. I have had a few beers. It's working OK.
Is there something about touching the plumbing and the raw materials of the web that transcends nostaligia? I'm 31, born in 1982, and the Internet was a Thing for me in middle school. I can remember, foggily, life without the internet. But my first website was composed inside the Geocities sitebuilder, not a command line prompt. This is exciting for me in a way that's partially about the old days in Geocities sitebuilder, but also about something new. To move the cursor inside of nano iniside of my iPad ssh app, i must use the app's own arrow keys. Tapping and holding and dragging places a cursor, but the terminal couldn't care less.
I read the wikipedia page for emacs on the subway this morning. It is a human story. I am such a sucker for even the most obvious reminders of the internet's inherent humanity.
I really hope this is the last major edit to this file that I make on an iPad. Especially because I'm jealous of Paul's nice Georgia line-height CSS and I want to copy it.