One of the things I enjoy about personal blogs are the stories of people wrestling with various aspects of our technologically mediated existence. And one that resonates most frequently of late is Jack Baty's.
I starred this post in NetNewsWire so I could come back to it and blog about it one day. I have the exact same problem when it comes to handwriting. I'm accustomed to "thinking" at the speed that I can type, and when I try to write in longhand, I find myself starting words without finishing the intervening ones. This was brought home to me when I was sending photo cards to my mom every day, and writing little notes in them. I had to force myself to try and slow down. My handwriting improved, but there was still this angst that the whole process was taking too long.
And I make similar mistakes when doing other things. I'll decide I want to ride my bike, but discover I need to put air in the tires. I want to get out on the road now before the sun gets too high, or traffic gets worse, but now I have to put air in the tires! Rather than focusing on the small, simple steps to get the pump out and connected to the valve stem, I'm thinking about why air constantly leaks out of tires, why the valve stem is never at the bottom of the wheel, hurrying, fumbling and tipping the bike over.
And the "still small voice" nags at me to slow down! "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."
So I bought a Makita inflator. Why meditate when you can spend money?
I'm a failure.
The notes thing kind of prompted this post. I've pretty much abandoned the idea of "taking notes." I mean, I write stuff down that I don't want to forget, or I write blog posts, but I'm frustrated by the whole concept of PKM now.
I suspect that this AI facility may be somewhat useful, or helpful in surfacing information I've saved. But I'm unpersuaded or uninspired by the concept of "information gardening."
"Garden" gardening makes sense. You're outside, in some vestige of "nature," nurturing something, a living thing that will grow and serve some purpose, be it ornamentation, or providing food for pollinators, or food for people. You're working with the plant.
I used to be enamored with the idea of PKM, or "information gardening." Not so much anymore. Basically, I want to be able to recall how to do something, like call up the maintenance menu on Olympus cameras to check shutter counts or error codes. Stuff that I've saved in hundreds of Apple Notes or downloaded PDFs that I have to fumble around to find.
Yesterday, we noticed that the golf cart charger was still running, hours after Mitzi got back from her stretch class. And the LED was blinking in a way that suggested something was wrong. I wondered if the batteries were low on water. Sure enough, they were! Added water to all of them.
Still the charger blinked. Now I need to find the manual. I know I have a PDF copy, and in a transient frenzy of "organizing," I recalled I placed the PDFs of many of the household appliances in the Home folder (which is literally about our home, not the main folder of some user account). Of course, the first several PDFs all have names like ax17000c2388ssz.pdf. I space-bar down through the list using Quicklook to id them and there it is, the third file in the listing. Remaining in Quicklook, because who has time to actually open the file in Preview? I scroll through the pages and read the LED error codes. Discover I have to reset the thing by unplugging it and waiting 10 seconds.
Suitably equipped with "knowledge," I go back to the garage and unplug the charger and wait the requisite 10 seconds, adding a few for good measure, plug it back in and the LED indicates it's charging.
This morning, the golf cart is charged and the file is still open in Quicklook in Finder. I figure I'll rename the file to Golf Cart Charger, and Finder complains that the name is already taken by another file. I look down the list and sure enough there it is, down the list, which is sorted alphabetically. Delete file ax17000c2388ssz.pdf.
Presumably, I'll soon be able to say, "Show me the golf cart charger manual," and the right pdf will appear. But who knows? Maybe it'll reply "Which one?" or "What's the magic word?"
"Please?"
These things never work the way you expect them to.
Anyway, these days I worry more about "wisdom" than "knowledge." I worry more about "knowing myself," than knowing how to craft the right prompt to get Chat GPT to tell me how to write the regex to do something I don't really need to do at all.
Does any of this matter? Is it all just an effort to flatter ourselves? I mean, the world is on fire. Democracy is on life support and we're seemingly helpless to do anything about it, or a significant proportion of our friends and neighbors think it's just fine with them!
But yeah, check out my cool graph!
This post is from a month ago, but I'm pretty sure I just saw it today. Having just returned from DC where I brought two cameras (plus my phone), I can relate.
In the shower yesterday, I thought about how "lucky" I was. My "quality of life" is better than nearly anyone's. Apart from having a court of bowers and scrapers, it's certainly better than that of medieval kings. It's ridiculous how good it is, and how little I "deserve" it.
And how soon it may all be gone.
Maybe I'll deserve that.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:07 Tuesday, 11 June 2024