I no longer post here. The action is all over there. Goodbye, LiveJournal! I'll never forget you.
What is depression? What causes it? Why am I so worked up? Why can’t I see an obvious way out of this?
In trying to articulate it today, I had an epiphany. If we are social beings, then our sense of identity: of who we are, is shaped by our social interactions: of how others react to us.
You will agree that you expect to have this sense of social standing, of balance, in all your interactions with fellow humans. You will be polite to the senior and at ease with the peer. You will size up every person who appears in your field of vision to decide how to react. You will do this unconsciously. When someone fails the unconscious classification, or if recent events have led you to believe there is more than meets the eye, you will become attentive and careful.
These interactions over an extended period define your social standing. They become you. You may have trouble articulating this definition, perhaps no better than the crude wording in the Objective paragraph of your resumé, but it doesn’t matter because this all works without thinking. You instinctively know who you are, and all is good.
And what greater source of identity could there be than your daily routine? The place where you work everyday, the things you do there, the people you hang out with after? What more common disruption could you have than to change all these at short notice? Common, yet devastating?
I no longer write here. Twitter doesn’t let me say it like it is. The people I work with have changed. The work has changed. The people I hung out with have moved on. There are new people, nice people, but as yet unfamiliar people.
For long months I wondered what worried me so. Now I know.
This is a quick marker post before I return to more mundane surroundings.
Is there a Linux-based audio player that can browse DAAP shares and redirect audio to an Airport Express? DAAP support seems common enough, but AE integration not.
I’m trying to choose between the ASUS Eee PC and HCL MiLeap Y. Both are compelling choices even if not exactly in the same category. Here is my comparison chart.
Update: I got an Eee PC.
If you have a Mac and aren’t on Leopard yet, do yourself a huge favour and upgrade. If you don’t have a Mac, do yourself a huge favour and get one.
Man, this has got to be the best OS upgrade ever.
My E61i died in the middle of a firmware upgrade. A friend in Nokia confirmed fixing it will only take fifteen minutes given the appropriate adapter (apparently they don’t do it over USB like end users do), but the service centre wanted fifteen days! So I walked into the nearest mobile shop and bought the cheapest phone they had to serve in the interim. A Nokia 1200.
In half a day using it, I’ve confirmed something long suspected: I’m actually faster on T9 than on a QWERTY keypad. The only time T9 slows me down is when typing a word that’s not in the dictionary or a word interlaced with punctuation or numbers.
Maybe for my next phone I’ll look for something with a better camera, connectivity and responsiveness than a messagepad form factor.
When I was a print journalist, our lives revolved around the next month's issue. All the dates we dealt with had to do with some or the other deadline for the next month. It used to be so intense that we always got the current month wrong. Today was in November, not October, unless reminded that it was actually still October.
I can imagine it must be the same for print journalists with daily newspapers: they’re forever living in the tomorrow.
After all these years, I still write on paper. A lot. I just wrote four A4-sized pages of outline for a presentation next week. It took over an hour.
I find that the low speed and physical difficulty of writing helps me focus my thought process. There are no toolbars of formatting buttons demanding they be used too. If I recall something and go off on a tangent, drawing an arrow to the breakoff point for later reconsideration is natural and effortless. Paper also works better than just thinking and memorising because with that I tend to think in circles, constantly re-analysing what I'm already comfortable with. Paper forces closing a line of thought and moving on.
This blog post, oddly enough, was written and posted from a mobile phone, as has been pretty much every post I've made in the past year or so.
They have the talent and the enthusiasm. It’s tedious work and takes considerable time away from existing preoccupations, but it’s so much fun!
And then comes the time for the second iteration, and with it the memories of the sacrifices made. Long working hours. Weekends consumed. Hobbies neglected. If only there were more hours to a day. Besides, did anyone really care that last time? What difference did it make to the world anyway? The hill looms.
A one hit wonder isn’t always for the lack of ability.
There is such a thing as reading a book too early. I have much to re-read.
That applies too to the book I'm currently reading, Albert O Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States . It is easily the most insightful book I've read this year, perhaps a bit too much given my current sketchy understanding of economics, and certainly too much for my current state of distractedness.
Hirschman makes my world so much saner. I will have to give him the respect of a second read to catch all that I will miss this first pass.
Does LiveJournal throw a HTTP login box at you when visiting some journals? Twice per page? I’ve been hit by it the last month or so. Cancelling login doesn’t seem to affect the page at all. I’ve seen it on others’ screens too.