posts

It strikes me that it is better to sit and think about what you need to do, rather than endless try out new tools and hoping you end up with a use for them. I’m not saying that innovation is bad, or that you shouldn’t stretch yourself into some new spot once in a while, but you will become more valuable to others if you can identify what it is you are supposed to be doing and then use your existing skills to get that job done. Don’t go looking at galleries of tools and techniques in service of finding something to do. Trust me, I know from experience that it is a great way to spend a hell of a lot of time not getting anywhere in particular.

So today my random album script picked out “Bright Lights” by Ellie Goulding, an album I wasn’t sure I’ve ever listened to. I looked in my music library and there it was! As a result this is not so much an album revisit as an album visit.

I’m a massive fan of hot chocolate. Recently a friend recommended M&S hot chocolate flakes. Thanks to a promotion it was about half the price of the Montezuma’s hot chocolate discs that we usually buy. The Montezuma’s ones are lush (that’s official hot chocolate tasting terminology) but in this economy anything that saves a bit of money has got to be good right?

This is one of my more played Fabric mix CDs so I decided to go for it when my random prompter plumped for this earlier today. One constraint of these posts was to write it in roughly the amount of time it takes to listen to it. You’d think that for a mix CD that would be ok. After all, this mix is a full CD and 74 minutes long.

I’ve managed to extract my music library, including all the albums I’ve added to streaming, as a CSV file and write a routine in R to select an album at random. The plan is to write about that album for the blog in roughly the time that it takes to listen to that album all the way through. I already did this yesterday for Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry.

This is the first in an unplanned series of album revisits, I will write a post explaining the process soon.

White rabbits and all that.

I gave up writing reviews of movies because:

A set of rules for living from now on (in no particular order):

I think there’s a sense of safety when putting energy into something that’s latent and/or hidden as it immediately makes it low stakes. Other more open routes to success contain fear of failure, but also a fear of going after something that won’t give you the same buzz or edge. There’s a thrill seeking element but it’s also about containing and confining it to a success zone. Keeping this success zone private also means that there’s no risk that someone might try and take it away from you. There’s so much risk in putting any kind of desire or chance for failure out into the public domain.

Because I am bored of forgetting what’s in my website’s Rakefile, I thought I’d write a list. Also, as I’m probably going to move over to a node based approach soon, it’s a handy wish list for my package.json file when the time comes.

As with most years, I had hoped to start off 2023 with a flurry of new blog posts. Instead I caught Covid, which knocked me out for most of ‘betweenmas’ and put paid to my hopes for a productive start to the year. At the time of writing this post, I only just feel like I have begun to get back to ’normal’, or at least as normal as things have been since 2020.