Still working through a backlog of vacation snapshots. This labyrinth on Bainbridge Island is perfect. A slow walk in the woods, a quiet nod to a stranger, and suddenly the world feels calmer than before.
Airbnb, brought to you by Palmolive.
So many treasures.
It’s that way.
Fourth door for the library. I’m getting better and building these. This time I added an hook and loop catch. If this fails I might need to look at new hinges.
Ongoing Little Library drama. Some savage snapped the new door off. Back to the shop.
I didn’t brew the beers I planned so I’m catching up. Last week was a winter warmer, moved to secondary fermentation. This week, Octoberfest, just in time for April. Protip: a TimeTimer makes an excellent boil timer. #homebrew
Winter storms ripped the door off of our little library. This weekend I rebuilt it, this time I went with a single door using dowels to join the frame. 🤞
It is a shame to see a tree like this poisoned.
For the first time in almost 2 years, I’m working from an office. I’m doing a month trial of a co-working space in my neighborhood, 10 days a month at a floating desk. The bakery downstairs might be dangerous. Surprisingly, I’m nervous being around real humans again.
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The microcosm echos the macrocosm. - Advice Not Given
In the recent winter storm the door was ripped off my little library. I replaced it with two doors, both using cabinet hinges. 🤞
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Stone cold, no joke, at the airport. Dude next to me orders a cup of chili with a single scoop of vanilla ice cream on it. Please remember. We are all surrounded by monsters.
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As a fan of LucasArts adventure games, I’ve been really enjoying Thimbleweed Park on iOS. It’s the perfect mix of funny, weird, and creepy.
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known_host due to a fingerprint change it’s a bit hidden. When you launch blink you’ll see the bare bones shell with the prompt what you need to do is treat it like an actual Unix system. There is a .ssh/known_hosts file. You won’t have vi or any other editor available as far as I can tell, but you can remove the file and create a new connection to your reused host.
blink> rm -rf ~/.ssh/known_hosts
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I decided it was time to buy book versions of my day one journal. Super happy with the process and I’m getting 3 - 400 page books covering the last 7 years.
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Parenting Achievment Unlocked. The 5 yo thinks the Ramones are excellent.
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After almost six weeks of IT band troubles I was able to do an easy 4 mile run without pain. In the end PT and time were the only things that worked. 
🏻♂️
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I’m a sucker for tutorials that show you how to build a whole thing. it might be time to build a Watch app.
How we lost our ability to mend is such a good post. It’s a story filled with pictures, the one of prince Charles is my favorite. I wonder if climate change will drive us back to caring for our things before we wipe ourselves out.
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Why I grabbed it: Don’t remember | Genre: Essay Collection | Recommended: Nope
I have no idea why I put this collection of essays on my reading list but it was ok. There were a handful of stories that were phoned in, ‘Lost in the Mail’ comes to mind and I guess I forgot the others. I found the first three compelling though. ‘My Fathers Brain’, which can be found online, pulled me in and just made me sympathize with the author and his mother. ‘Imperial Bedroom’ is now dated as hell but in the face of the Mueller report there is a stark contrast. I was surprised how well it held up on the face of today’s privacy landscape. ‘Why Bother?’ starts and and holds a whining, lamenting, and grumpy survey of the novels place in the modern world of media. Even though it rambles there were spots that made me perk up, touching on diversity, cross pollination of ideas, and the common threads that make us readers. It was more interesting than unfocused. If you have time I’d pick at the first three essays, but the whole book might not be worth your time.
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Why I grabbed it: Obama | Genre: Autobiography | Recommended: Yes
Educated came up on the best books of 2018. I think after I saw it on Obama’s list I added it to good reads and placed a hold at the library. Fast forward 6 months and it shows up in my kindle. Initially, I was a little soured on the ‘rags to riches’ summary but I started in right away as it was a decent sized book and I only had 3 weeks to finish it. The first chapter hooked me. Although there are many stories of a kind, medical accidents, ranting religious father, crazy dangerous work, and abusive family members, I found myself drawn in. At times, it’s a bit like watching a slow motion car accident. I found about halfway through, the perspective of Tara changed. She went from being a somewhat objective viewer of her past to being the main character. The situations were closer to home and she had less objective perspective on what was happening. For the last third of the book I had a knot in my stomach. I’m not sure I enjoyed the story, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the point. The memoir itself was striking and is firmly lodged in my mind. The writing though. The writing is excellent. Tara is clear, descriptive, wistful, and engaging. It’s worth the time to read it.
I will say, whoever chose the keyboard shortcuts for the gmail on the iPad is a sadist.
It’s been a month since I fired up micro.blog. It’s nice to dip my toe back in.
Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper
Why I grabbed it: Library | Genre: YA Fantasy | Recommended: Yes
I got all 5 books as a set from the scholastic book order form in elementary school. I remember because my mom never let me do that. Somehow though, despite getting through the Narnia books, Tolkien, and countless others, I never finished this series. I adored ‘The Dark is Rising’ as a kid and when I came across these books at the library, decided it was time to find out. I started over from the beginning and found to my surprise that ‘Over Sea, Under Stone’ was my favorite in the series. The Drew children were more interesting that Will by far. The long and the short is, the series was good, it’s young adult fantasy, and it’s not dystopian. The ending is strong and I look forward to reading these with my little ones.
GROTH: [laughs] Can’t say I blame you.
EASTMAN: At least I’ve learned something, Goddammit. All right?
The Kevin Eastman Interview
Incredibly long, but an interesting ride.
We Don’t Do That Here - Aja Hammerly:
It turns out talking about diversity, inclusion, and even just basic civil behavior can be controversial in technical spaces. I don’t think it should be, but I don’t get to make the rules. When I’m able I’d much rather spend the time to educate someone about diversity and inclusion issues and see if I can change how they see the world a bit. But I don’t always have the time and energy to do that. And sometimes, even if I did have the time, the person involved doesn’t want to be educated. n
This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. n
I like this approach to setting culture. Particularly if you have no other tool available or your wits aren’t about you.
Ok. If you whisper to Alexa she’ll whisper back. It’s … creepy.
Discipline comes from the joy of being yoked to something that is both of yourself and beyond yourself. Once we realize that the common denominator of this equation is ourselves, we can see that we come first.
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And, just in case you think you can blow off the universe the way you did when you were in your twenties and she whispered, “Pay attention,” or when you were in your early thirties and she whispered, “Slow down,” I assure you that she’s much more dogged in midlife. When I tried to ignore her, she made herself very clear: “There are consequences for squandering your gifts. There are penalties for leaving big pieces of your life unlived. You’re halfway to dead. Get a move on.”
The Midlife Unraveling | Brené Brown
This entire piece wrapped me up and carried me along with it. I’m 39 now and I’m feeling the strain of getting through life. I can already tell that leaning into it and trying to tough it out will break me. Brené has a wonderful voice and the thought of relaxing into life resonates with me.
I bought myself a box of Blackwing pencils and a proper sharpener at the start of the year. The entire experience of writing with them is extremely satisfying.
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It turns out, certain things humans can only do well if they do it slowly. Eating, cooking, reflecting, thinking, loving: These are the things we need to pace and pause. Culture needs that slowness and reflection. Politics needs it especially.
Lawrence Lessig via Sameer Vasta
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“It never gets easier; you just go faster.”
— Greg LeMond
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================================================================== https://keybase.io/mattfinlayson ——————————————————————–
I hereby claim:
To do so, I am signing this object:
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which yields the signature:
—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—– Version: Keybase OpenPGP v2.0.80 Comment: https://keybase.io/crypto
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And finally, I am proving ownership of this host by posting or appending to this document.
View my publicly-auditable identity here: https://keybase.io/mattfinlayson
==================================================================
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Amit Gawande kindly put together a post on how to enable webmentions for blot.im. As I was following along at home, I found that there were some steps that took me a while to figure out. I’m capturing those here in case anyone else has the same issues.
First, create a new theme based on whichever theme you’re currently using. In my case, this is default. In the dashboard for blot.im go to:
Settings -> Template -> New
Name: partially
Clone the Default theme
Create themeI find it easier to have the theme source synced to my Blot directory.
Edit partially
Local editing
Switch to local editingThis will create the directory Apps/Blog/Templates/partially in your dropbox folder. Now, you can make any changes you need there.
Following along with Amit’s post from here. I went on to edit Apps/Blot/Templates/partial/head.html and added the following identifying references. For right now, the important part is github or email as you’ll use one of those to auth against Webmention.io in the next step.
<link rel=“me” href=“https://twitter.com/savagegus" />
<link rel=“me” href=“https://github.com/mattfinlayson" />
<link rel=“me” href=“mailto:mattfinlayson@matt />
<link rel=“pgpkey” href=“https://keybase.io/mattfinlayson/pgp_keys.asc?fingerprint=7be1bc3df69382336164d9833f115ccef135125c" />I then took the additional step of going to both Twitter and Github and adding my domain to my profile. I verified the references were showing up on my site and that the links back from my services were also correct using indiewebify.me.
Now that you can Auth against your own site setup an account with Webmention.io. At first, none of this was working for me still though. After a bit of poking around I realized I had never included jQuery and the custom script.js was never running. To fix this I went back to Apps/Blot/Templates/partial/head.html and added the following line, before .
<script src=“https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js">script>I also found the the CSS Amit provided was a little bare bones. This is not my forte, but I was able to get things looking close enough to how a wanted with the following changes.
.post-mentions {
padding-top: 15px;
margin-top: 10px;
font-size: 16px;
}
.post-mentions ul {
list-style:none;
padding:0;
margin-left: 0;
}
.mention {
font-size: 16px;
margin: 10px 0 20px
}
.mention-author {
text-transform: lowercase;
}
.mention-social {
color: #666;
padding-bottom: 10px;
border-bottom: 1px #ddd solid
}
.mention-text p {
margin-top: 10px;
margin-bottom: 2px
}
img.u-photo {
padding-right: 10px;
}
.mention-text a {
text-transform: lowercase;
}
a.time {
font-size: 13px;
font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
color: #999;
font-weight: 500;
}
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Austin Kleon did a wonderful post about his son learning to draw. He mentioned a prime show called Super Simple Draw, which my daughter and I totally enjoyed.
The logo for China’s space agency (CNSA) looks suspiciously like the logo for the United Federation of Planets …
Pothole falls from our nature walk yesterday at Lacamas Park.
New year, new blog. First post on my theme for 2019. Choose how you spend your time 
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Enduring and optimizing is the rhythm of making - the pattern of ups and downs that every journey takes you through.
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“The reason the Russians were able to abuse these platforms, so much. This wasn’t hacking, this wasn’t some secret, nefarious Russian plot to sneak into Facebook and glom itself onto their servers. They were customers of Facebook, they were customers of Twitter, they were customers of YouTube. They used the systems as they were designed.”
Kara Swisher - Stay Tuned with Preet
Playing Stephenson’s Rocket at the lucky lab with friends for the first time in a year. (Also losing).
Awww man. Sure enough, the Apple Music skill doesn’t work on Sonos speakers.
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It’s nice to be back in Portland, Chicago is too big for me. It was great to visit though and I enjoyed getting back to public speaking again.
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Required PDX pre-flight photo.
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I have badges turned on in my sonos app so I know when there are firmware updates. It really grinds my gears to get a notification and it’s for an ad for a pink version of the speaker I already own.
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Streaks has been really helpful lately as I try to get back to practicing the habits I value. It integrates with HealthKit to complete tasks for me (like mindfulness meditation). The watch complication makes logging completions easy. Don’t break the chain. It’s worth the $5.
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4yo is trying to figure out knock knock jokes. The results are bizarre and pretty funny the first time.
Knock knock! Who’s there? Watermelon! Watermelon who? Car!
My wife gave me time for a walk alone this morning. I happened to listen to Don’t Underestimate the Power of Appreciation . It was a good reminder of the positive impact of saying thank you, for the giver and the receiver. Thank you.
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What distributed systems theory should a distributed systems engineer know?
Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems Engineer
I’ve been using the iPad Pro as my primary computer for a few months now, but Matthew Cassinelli’s video Six gestures you should know still taught me a couple tricks. 🤯
Smashing pumpkin’s new album is taking me right back to 1993.
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Roadmaps are not a panacea, but without some future direction, expect the classic problems of failing to plan: missed deadlines, working weekends, shipping unfinished work, political infighting, and ultimately, lost opportunity.
On Writing Product Roadmaps
My Micro Monday suggestion is @chrisreed he posts some solid beers and his blog helped me a bunch in setting up my own Wordpress install it covers verifing wordpress, real-time posting notifications, theming mods, and posting options.
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“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Is it bad I’m already whistful for the summer?
Just got my new iPad Pro. First hot take, I am going lose this pencil. My first gen case made it simple to always have the pencil around and although the magnet is an improvement, it’s not better than what I had with that case.
Gearing up for a family breakfast.
Bikes 1 - Cars 340,000,000
Sure.
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A diaspora of scrabble pieces.
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“Hundreds of daily activities that used to be performed in separate locations, with different gestures, and through a range of intra-personal interactions have now all been collapsed into the smartphone. There has literally never been a device that is so relevant to executing our goals so much of the time. And because of this, our brains have been trained to allot a substantive portion of our ‘automatic attention’ to our smartphones.”
Hurry Slowly - Living Life on Auto-Pilot
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If you use Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, or Sites, here’s a tip. Just enter doc.new, sheet.new, etc. into your browser and it will instantly create a new, blank version. 🤯
I worked for IBM for nearly 8 years and was cautiously optimistic when I heard about the RedHat acquisition. In IBM’s Old Playbook Ben Thomson picks apart IBMs motivation and why it’s a position of weakness in a lost battle.
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From my run on Saturday.
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At this point I’m running off one screen of frequent apps and 2 folders. Games is full of … games because I’ll browse them. Stuff is everything else. I launch things from the main screen or from search.
Spring in portland. Drizzling and everything is blooming at once.
In the 20th century, the US passed laws that outlawed lead in paint and gasoline, that defined how much privacy a landlord needs to give his tenants, and that determined how much a phone company can surveil its customers. We can decide how we want to handle digital surveillance, attention-channeling, harassment, data collection, and algorithmic decisionmaking. We just need to start the discussion.
Wired: It’s the Golden Age of Free Speech
Kids with terminal cancer share what gives life meaning.
I’m a sucker for those 5 morning habit listicles that seem to fill medium. Of all of them I think this is the only one of real substance. Wake early, meaningfully invest in yourself, and spend the time to reflect on it.
Whistling in the dark.
Watching Meet the Press this Morning, I found myself wishing that they gave background on what a “meeting about Russian orphans” means. If you’re a podcast person listen to The Death of Sergei Magnitsky, for long form try Bill Browder, Putin Enemy No. 1
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It’s nice to see strava give a rational and empathetic response to the heatmap story that’s been going around. I’ve always thought their privacy options were well thought out and appropriate.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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