Garret mentions he doesn't have an "inner voice." I've only learned of this fairly recently, within the past few years, I think. Bix Frankonis is also not "neuro-typical." It's very interesting to me to learn of the varieties of internal experience people have.

The Guardian piece Garret linked to, likewise linked to a test to evaluate the "vividness" of your "mind's eye." I took it.

I was "hyperphantasic." I can picture all of those scenes, in great detail. It's always frustrated me, greatly, that I can't draw them on a piece of paper!

Likewise my "inner voice" is a virtual chatterbox, though I've learned not to take everything it says seriously.

May go some way toward explaining why I like photography and writing so much?

Now, I don't have a "photographic" memory. I can picture scenes or things I'm familiar with in great detail. If I've only seen something once, I can only recall specific things if those things are characteristics I've seen before. A "blue" car, or a "Ford." If it was a "blue Mustang," I could recall that, picture that. But I couldn't recall enough details at a glance to identify the year, or what type of wheels it had.

And my experience is such that it seems almost impossible to me to conceive of an internal experience without them. I don't know what particular use there might be to be able to picture things vividly, other than to recall things that were pleasant or welcome. Or if I had any artistic ability, perhaps to render them in some way.

That said, I "hear" myself writing as I write and I'm aware that I have no idea where the words are actually coming from. That is, "hearing myself" is integral to my writing process, but it's the "still, small voice" that is the actual author.

Anyway, one of the cool things about blogging. Finding out about other people.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:41 Monday, 26 February 2024

This morning I saw a little alert that I'd been "mentioned" on Mastodon. I checked, and Phil Nunnally had "tooted" (it still feels weird, hence the scare quotes) "That was a fun meetup today!" with a link to his blog.

I think this illustrates one of the differences, and advantages, of "traditional" blogs versus the social media silos. I replied on Mastodon, but it was just to acknowledge that I'd seen the toot, and subscribed to his RSS feed. The real reply is here, where I have some time and a different environment, and different cues to compose it.

In composing this post, the image of the human "energy farms" from The Matrix came to mind. That's kind of how I regard social media companies. And the "matrix" is the "content" of social media apps:

It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

The "content" that we keep making, to keep getting likes, to keep us coming back. "Reality" is a hall of mirrors, funhouse mirrors at that.

There is no urgency to blogging. There can be a rhythm, a pace, and it can vary and often does. But if it feels "urgent," take a breath. Feelings pass.

The message may be urgent. Or not. Doesn't have to be urgent. Could just be a "cheese sandwich" post. But the point is, in general, I'm writing here from a place where I'm less reactive. Where I'm not looking for a reward, I'm looking to "see what I think," and share that.

And I'm not making anybody any money doing so. The only people whose paychecks may in some insignificant way depend on the marmot is the hosting company and Mark Bernstein. There is no financial dimension to this "conversation," because it's not a market. It's my backyard. And Phil's in his backyard, and we're just yakking over the fence.

We don't have to stay in the claustrophobic silos of endless provocation and outrage and churn to serve the interests and ideologies of the billionaire class.

We can return to the shire.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:12 Sunday, 25 February 2024

The navy operates a lot of complicated, expensive machinery. If you don't do it right, things can break or people can get hurt. I think the idea originated in Rickover's nuclear power program. They came up with an "operational sequencing system" to bring a reactor online and operate it safely.

It was later used in conventional engineering plants with 1200 psi steam, which can kill you pretty dead. It was personnel safety that drove the adoption in the conventional (fossil fuel) surface navy. It was later adopted for combat systems, as they became more integrated and automated. The intent is to ensure that everything that needs to be done is done in the proper order. It's part of the navy's culture now.

So I exercised MOSS this morning, the "marmot operational sequencing system." Sounds complicated, but it's not really. It's necessary, I think, to keep iCloud from screwing me up.

I turned on "Close windows when quitting an application" in the Windows pane of the Desktop and Dock Settings of System Settings. I trust this informs iCloud that a document isn't currently open in an app anywhere (if you do this on all machines logged into iCloud), so it should be in a "closed" state (probably not the correct technical term) in iCloud Documents.

I believe that setting should also have the effect of not having an app open all the windows that were open when it was last quit, since they all should have been closed. But I'm not sure about that, so that's another risk I address in this sequence.

So I quit Tinderbox, Automator, Script Debugger and Whisk on the MBP, which closed all their windows.

Over here on the iMac, I didn't launch Tinderbox from the Dock, where it has a permanent presence. Instead, I double-clicked the marmot from the Documents folder in iCloud. Presumably, this downloaded the latest version, which had been closed on the MBP.

It was interesting, because the "Date Modified" time in Finder was "Today 00:34," and I'd been in bed for more than a couple of hours by then, and the MBP was closed and presumably sleeping too.

And now here I am, on the big screen.

I think what used to happen, before I was this careful, was that I'd quit Tinderbox on either the iMac of the MBP, thinking that I couldn't have the marmot open on two different instances of Tinderbox on two different machines without iCloud getting confused.

But since I didn't "Close all windows when quitting applications," I'd launch Tinderbox on whichever machine I was switching to, and it'd load a locally stored version. (All versions are only stored locally.) That version would be out of sync with the iCloud document, but since the document contains code that runs in Tinderbox, as soon as it launches, it updates the "Modified" state with a later time than the one in iCloud, that becomes the canonical version that iCloud happily uses to replace the one in iCloud, and data is lost and no "version" or Time Machine backup is going to restore it.

I don't know what would happen if I didn't "Close all windows when quitting" and then double-clicked on an iCloud document causing Tinderbox to launch, and it tried to re-open all the windows (documents) that were open when it last quit. Would the user be alerted to a conflict? I'm not going to try and find out.

I have no idea if that's what actually happens, it's just a guess. I can't imagine that apps on launch query iCloud to see if the modified date of a locally stored version is earlier than the modified date in iCloud and download the latest version. I don't think iCloud sends a signal to a launching app that, "New shit has come to light, man," in the parlance of our times. (It makes sense if you're an Urban Achiever.)

But I think this will allow me to switch between machines without losing data. I have recreated posts from the html export data before, but that's a bit of a pain. I know I let a couple of posts just disappear a few times,"deathless prose" notwithstanding.

Anyway, it's nice to be back on the big screen. I can blog without my glasses on the iMac. The screen is too far away on the MBP, especially in the recliner! But it's nice to know I could take the marmot outside if I wanted to, or take it on the road, without having to futz with the thumb drive. That poses its own issues, copying files back and forth, not losing the little thumb drive, etc.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:18 Sunday, 25 February 2024

Well, it wasn't a long walk. I noticed the cars lining the road and folks gathering in a driveway. I saw my neighbor Tracy and asked, "Another party I wasn't invited to?" (Facetiously.)

Not a party. Kind of a wake for a neighbor who'd recently passed. Her daughter was here from Oregon and wanted to have a get-together. I barely knew the woman, having met her only once.

So I turned around and went home. At least she has a lovely day for it.

Here's the kind of blog post I enjoy. My daughter has a fear of flying, though I don't think it's as intense as James'. But dig this:

Thought cannot fix thought. This was my magnificent revelation at 35,000 feet, which I now realize is the point of everything from Zen to stoicism to the power of now. But I need to learn my lessons the hard way.

That's what blogging's about. Or should be, anyway.

You too have a complicated interior life that deserves to be explored and shared.

The meetup went really well I thought. I saw James Fallows in the audience briefly. I guess he didn't stick around though, alas.

There were some good questions, and a couple of them actually dealt with issues I wrote about in a previous post today, so I'm glad I gave that some thought on the walk this morning.

Jack was dazzling with his facility with Tinderbox. I'm going to be picking his brain going forward.

The one photo demo I thought I had sorted yesterday failed again. I'll be working on that too.

I did miss the iMac's 27" screen. The Zoom interface takes up a lot of real estate when you're sharing your screen, which entails a certain amount of fumbling around moving windows and so on.

There are pretty fair number of details you kind of have to get tied down to begin blogging with Tinderbox; but they're fairly comprehensible and once you have them set up, it's pretty much just a turnkey operation after that.

Someone asked if I know if anyone's reading the marmot. Well, I do. I don't know how many or how often, but I do know it shows up in folks' RSS feeds. I see mentions from time to time, I get occasional feedback on Mastodon.

But that's not really the point. I don't write the marmot to get attention. I write the marmot to "see what I think." I know it has to compete with a million other things for others' attention, and that can be a pretty steep barrier. But it doesn't matter if I don't need to get over it, if I don't need what's on the other side.

Those are the kinds of blogs I enjoy reading. You can smell someone promoting their "personal brand" from a mile away. I just want to know how my neighbors are doing. What's going on in their neck of the woods.

I was glad to see Loren Webster posting again. I had made a mental note to mention Loren in the meetup, but I remembered that after the meeting. Loren's 83 and still blogging, and he goes back to the early days, in the very early 00s, maybe before.

Anyway, it's a beautiful day out there. Think I'm going to go take another walk.

We're an hour away from the meetup, so I'm still screwing around with this thing. Heh.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:05 Saturday, 24 February 2024

Today is the Blogging With Tinderbox meetup, so that's foremost on my mind this morning. I don't want to embarrass myself or bore my audience. Fortunately, Jack will be there too, and Mark Bernstein and Michael Becker, so there's little chance for any "dead air." (How long before no one remembers what "dead air" refers to? Soon, I guess.)

Anyway, I wanted to jot down some things I thought about on my walk this morning.

I genuinely do want to encourage more people to blog, and I'm only half-kidding when I say "You too have a complicated interior life that deserves to be explored and shared." Because it's true.

But I also wanted to make sure I didn't forget this, or "remember it later" than might be useful.

A personal blog, that consists of little more than static html files is perhaps the best way to undertake such an exploration. No lines of javascript that measure "engagement," how many page views you got, no "likes." That stuff will steal your soul.

I got started blogging pretty much the same way I got into personal computing. I could see my words on a screen! In this case, the screen was a window on something called "the worldwide web." My early stuff was link-blogging to science and technology pieces in the news, with some commentary.

As my marriage fell apart, and I got into therapy, it became a much more introspective vehicle. But not to the exclusion of everything else.

Mark Bernstein offered some early advice for bloggers, something along the lines of "cultivate good enemies." It affords the opportunity to for an energetic exchange, a lively narrative. For much of my blogging "career" my "enemies" were the Cluetrain crowd, the internet triumphalists, the guys (and they were almost exclusively (now) old white guys, who asserted without evidence that "this changes everything!" Presumably for the better.

Some things just grated me to the point of being offended. "Markets are conversations," a pernicious construction and a misapprehension of both. It conflates the commercial and the social and thereby established a business model that the leaders of which businesses are routinely called to testify before Congress. It was coined by a nice guy, Doc Searls, who was, naturally, a marketer.

Then there was Dave Weinberger and his assertion that "networks subvert hierarchy," and "everything is miscellaneous." Neither of which is true, and believing things that aren't true isn't helpful for anyone except the guy selling the book. Anther of his one-off aphorisms about the web and blogging in particular was "We're writing ourselves into existence."

Bullshit. Existence precedes narrative. All narratives are artifacts. Works of fiction. The inner voice is an unreliable narrator.

We weren't writing ourselves into existence, we were painting ourselves into corners.

Especially in "social media." The "conversation" that has been monetized by making us the product.

Blogs, especially quiet little, static html blogs subvert that.

It wasn't long after the first flourishing of the "blogosphere" before someone invented Technorati, an early effort to profit from the work of others, to monetize the conversations taking place in the blogosphere. Before that, Dave Winer hosted a blogging service called editthispage.com, which saw a pretty substantial uptake. I started out there. But it wasn't long before Dave had a page the showed how many "hits" each blog received every day.

As humans, social animals, we're very sensitive to rank, to popularity. These indicators aren't helpful in a social context. In a commercial one, they're gold.

Consider how one might go about training an animal. One popular method, because it works, is to ignore the behavior you don't want and reward the behavior you do want.

Same thing with "social media."

We post something on Facebook or Twitter, it gets a few likes. We post something else, it gets nothing. We post something else, it gets a lot of likes. We get a dopamine rush. We try to post something like that again. Pictures always get likes. Text, not so much. So everything devolved down into "memes," pics with snarky text. (I generalize here, but I hope you get the point.)

I found this happening to me on Twitter. At the end, I had a little over a thousand followers. Most of them were probably bots. But I found that I could get more likes and replies and re-tweets from a certain kind of mean and snarky post, so I found myself writing more mean and snarky tweets! Toward the end, I didn't much care for who it seemed I was.

So the combination of Twitter becoming a platform for fascists, and its corrosive effect on my self-perception compelled me to "delete my account."

Sure, I'm mean and snarky here from time to time, but I don't do it as an unconscious, involuntary conditioned behavior. It's not reward-seeking in terms of external rewards. It's the kind of writing that entertains me, not some audience whose approval I crave.

I think static html blogs facilitate a more humane online conversation. There's enough friction that we don't get the reflexive toxic reply or ego-boost. Posts never "go viral," at least not the way they do on social media platforms.

We're not painting ourselves into corners, finding that we have to maintain a certain kind of online persona in order to keep the ad rates up. We don't get distorted perceptions of ourselves in the funhouse mirror of social media.

I would genuinely like to see more people blog.

Tinderbox can help you do that with simple, static html.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:55 Saturday, 24 February 2024

Sorta kinda works.

The problem right now is that the folder the image is moved to is hard-coded in the Automator action. I started futzing with Hazel and then went back to Automator. The AppleScript it ran was just to set the file path for the Images folder by constructing it with the current year from the computer's clock.

If I just select the folder as I'm building the Automator action, there's no problem with it being in iCloud.

I'll figure it out later. For now, it works well enough to demo if I need to tomorrow.

Okay, the basic export and sync work. Huzzah! I had to delete my "favorite" sync setup in Forklift 4, because I've moved the files into Documents. The fact that they're in iCloud didn't seem to bother it.

I may abandon the AppleScript piece of the Automator app and see if I can accomplish the same thing with Hazel.

In other Apple frustrations, I thought I set up Apple Music to store my library on the SSD in the MBP. By which I mean, I thought it would go ahead and download all my music. It hasn't, so I spent some number of frustrating and wasted minutes looking for a command somewhere to tell Music to download all my music, which doesn't seem to exist. So I've just been tapping on nearly invisible down arrows on images of Albums.

I don't know why anyone would love Apple anymore. They're just another greedy corporation that doesn't really care about the people using their products.

Now to futz about with Hazel. Wish me luck.

Test post from the 14" M3 MBP. I already know I have a problem with my Automator application that handles the photo export.

I decided to try something different in order to make the switch between the iMac and the MBP easier. I set applications to close windows when quitting. I'm using iCloud for my Documents folder on both the iMac and MBP. The iMac has "Optimize Storage" turned on, since it only has a 1TB SSD. The MBP has a 2TB SSD, so I'm not turning that on.

Prior to this, I'd had the Marmot TBX located outside of Documents on the iMac, along with the Nice Marmot Exports folder (which gets sync'ed to the server). These folders were automatically sync'ed to a 64GB thumb drive (far larger than necessary). The idea was I'd just pull the thumb drive and plug it into the MBP and then mirror the same setup here.

Then I thought I'd just try and used Documents in iCloud as it's kind of intended to be used.

So I got all my scripts and automation set up over here and tried to post a photo from Photos to the marmot. The Photos to TBX part works, but the actual image export to the Images folder in the 2024 archive failed, because the file path is obviously different now that I'm using iCloud instead of a dedicated folder outside of Documents.

I've been futzing with trying to get that portion of the Automator application working. It requires running a little AppleScript that moves the image from the one place that you can use Automator to export from Photos to (a new folder each time in your Pictures folder in your User directory).

Apparently there's some secret incantation to get AppleScript to talk to a Documents folder in iCloud.

Why can't anything be easy? Isn't it Apple's job to simply abstract all these details away? Shouldn't a folder just be a folder, whether it's in iCloud or on my SSD? One of the reasons why I sometimes don't enjoy trying to automate things, "program" my computer.

Anyway, I'm taking a break from scratching my head about that and this is to just see if the vanilla export and sync works.

Keep your fingers crossed. 🤞

Jack's worried he hasn't prepared adequately for the meetup on Saturday. He shouldn't, it's more a conversation than a tutorial. "Why to," rather than "how to." We'll offer some of our experiences on how to, but mostly it's about why Tinderbox makes for a great blogging platform.

I think Jack's experience with other platforms especially complements the discussion. I know nothing about so many of the other platforms and applications I read about, but it'll be great to give the audience some different perspectives.

I, myself, feel a bit delinquent. I've run out of gas a bit on new marmot features. I mentioned that I'd bumped into the past president of the photography club, and he'd invited me to come to a meeting. Well, that was yesterday afternoon and I did go. It's a small group, but I enjoyed the presentation and they seem to have some interesting activities. They have a monthly theme and next month's is storytelling, images that, uh, tell a story. You don't have to take them during the month, you can pull from your library. This month's was motion, and there was a presentation of the submissions depicting motion.

And I spent this afternoon, so far, tweaking the 14" M3 MBP so I'll have all the apps I need up and running for the meetup. For some reason, I can't seem to share my screen from the iMac. I am able to do it from the MBP, so that's what I'll be using. I had to enter a bunch of registration codes, buy a couple of licenses and so on.

I have an idea I'm going to test either today or tomorrow getting the marmot up and running on the MBP, with the Photos script installed. Once I verify I can post from the MBP, I'll spend some time configuring windows and tabs so I can illustrate the various activities smoothly. I shouldn't have too much anxiety Friday night.

Mitzi tried calling a repair guy for the fridge. Earliest they could get here is Saturday, and that's problematic from a food storage point of view, to say nothing of me blathering on about Tinderbox on a zoom call while someone's horsing the fridge about.

So I said, "Let me try something," to Mitzi. I went out to the circuit breaker panel and cycled power to the fridge.

It's working now.

I suspect, because we'd blocked some of the vents in the fridge (too much food with a house guest, I guess), the machine was working too hard and perhaps the logic got fouled up. Maybe it was trying to protect the compressor or something. There are no error codes on the front panel. So I figured there was nothing to lose just rebooting the thing.

Got a PO (power outage?) alert on the front panel. Acknowledged it. Set it to Max Cool and let it do its thing. All is well now. Ice is being made. It would have been $125 for the tech to show up and "diagnose" the issue.

I was a hero.

Funny story. The other day, Mitzi was mopping the floor and she came by the cave to tell me we were almost out of floor cleaner (it's a Bissell power mop of some kind), and asked me to order some more. I rogered up for it.

So she's mopping the floor again yesterday and I decided I'd better order that detergent. I ordered some lens pens and other stuff as well. This morning, Amazon shows up and drops off the package. I tell her, "Your soap is here," and she sees the lens pens in the box. She says something like, "Wow, I've never seen Amazon do that before."

I'm like, "What? Put two products in a box? They'll put as many as they can fit in one."

She says, "No, put my order in with your order."

"But, this is my order. You said to order detergent, I ordered detergent."

"I ordered detergent! I figured you'd forgotten."

"Honey, I never forget. I just remember later sometimes."

Which Mitzi and her sister thought was hysterical.

I'm here all week.

Her detergent just arrived, btw.

My sister-in-law is recovering nicely from her fractured pelvis. Her comfort and mobility have improved such that she ventured to sleep in the guest room last night to allow me to, "Return to your marital bed." That cracked me up.

She's a New Yorker, having an apartment on Central Park West. There's always a bit of discussion about what movie to watch, and I sometimes leave them to their own choices as my taste in movies often doesn't align with theirs. I was happy to discover I actually had a movie she hadn't seen, 1990's Quick Change, starring Bill Murray, Geena Davis, Randy Quaid and Jason Robards, and appearances by Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub (hysterical).

The uncredited antagonist of the film is New York City.

It's a piece of fluff, and mostly a star turn for Murray who essentially plays himself. But it's funny and diverting. She enjoyed it.

In other news, the refrigerator appears to be on the blink.

Le sigh.

Built-in browser translation services make blogging accessible internationally. Here's some advice from Belgium:

I am very often asked for advice to start blogging. The most important thing I give is always to blog for yourself. Not to think about what you think that could please your audience, but to publish. To publish what you have yourself in your guts.

I can relate to this entire post (or "billet"). I do most of my blogging first thing in the morning. I'm less inclined to over-think things, more inclined to write what's on my mind.

In the marmot's archives are lean years where I didn't blog very much. That's because I was on Twitter, or Facebook or some other platform. Those words are, if not "gone," no longer accessible on the web. Not that they deserved to be considered "deathless prose" by any means.

Having your own blog, keeping it simple, and not focusing on metrics are the keys to happiness, if not necessarily "success" in blogging.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:41 Thursday, 22 February 2024

Jacksonville, Florida is the largest city near me. As a "consolidated government," it's all of Duval county, which is only a few miles from here. But it's 35 to 40 minutes to downtown, which is true for pretty much anyplace from Nocatee. ("30 minutes from anyplace you'd actually really rather be.")

The city has a rich history, and it straddles the wide and lazy St Johns River. It has a lot of things going for it that should make it one of the premiere cities in Florida, even the nation.

But it's saddled with an insular, self-interested, selfish ruling class that keeps it perpetually mired in mediocrity.

The status quo was upset recently when an inspiring local figure, a true "daughter of Jacksonville," became mayor, Democrat Donna Deegan. She's burdened by a super-majority Republican city council; and it's pretty clear that a majority of its members believe their highest priority is to ensure she isn't too successful. They don't want folks to get the wrong idea about who runs this town.

Donna's a bright spot in an otherwise depressing story. The good news is, she's a brilliant communicator and can speak truth to power. More often than not, while the "good ol' boys" might slow her down, they'll be embarrassing themselves in the process. Not that they care. They're shameless in that regard. Or oblivious.

Could be both.

It's probably both.

Anyway, I read this today, and it's another example of the wonderful history of Jacksonville. To be sure, there's a lot of history here that isn't so wonderful, as is the case in all of the former Confederacy. But there are bright spots that deserve to be better known. If you like baseball, or Hank Aaron, this is one of them.

Now, I think I have to qualify this, because we live in this time when people are quick to find fault with anything, no matter how well-intentioned. (Many members of Jacksonville City Council are decidedly not well-intentioned; and, if anything, people are too slow to find fault with their faithless, feckless presence. I digress.) Yes, this story is about the white manager, Ben Geraghty, more so than it is about Hank Aaron. And maybe people think we shouldn't be elevating white people during Black History Month.

But I think there's something inspiring about Ben Geraghty's story. Something that shines more brightly in February. Shines more brightly in a state where more than a generation of one-party "conservative" rule, and an ambitious, autocratic governor have emboldened racists and bigots to feel as though their moment has returned.

So I was happy to read something good this morning, as the legislature is in session and there's always something bad to read about.

Mitzi dropped by the Command Cave as I was writing the previous post and mentioned she was getting ready to clean the kitchen floor, and I hadn't had breakfast yet! So I begged her indulgence to finish the post and make myself a quick breakfast, which she granted.

Anyway, more than the usual number of errors in the previous post. I think I've fixed most of them. But one error was different.

I mentioned that I'd been creating "year" containers since 2013. That's not the case. Actually, the marmot was just a fairly flat list of only month containers. It was getting pretty long and unwieldy.

At some point, and since I don't maintain a "change log" here I can't put my finger on exactly when yet, I decided reorganize the basic structure of the marmot into an Archive that contained Years, which contained each month's posts for a given month. In the process, I managed to lose a lot of photos, since I had only one Images folder for the whole blog. Now each year has an Images folder.

But the gist is correct. I used to just manually copy and paste and then edit all the code that goes into a monthly container, along with the other attributes that are necessary for export. Nearly all of that is automated now, and I'm working on getting all of it automated. Creating the list of archived pages in the Archives (plural) page is a manual effort right now. I'd like to automate that.

Anyway, apologies for the incomprehensible text if you happened along before I fixed it. (If micro.blog grabbed the RSS feed before I updated, it's likely all still in that post.)

Time to walk.

One of the reservations the Tinderbox-curious sometimes express is that it looks complicated, or intimidating. That is often the way things that are unfamiliar appear. And we have a tendency to impose expectations on something that we decide that something unfamiliar might be, and then get upset when it doesn't match those expectations.

Tinderbox is pretty unique, but it has some features that may make it appear to be one thing or another, when it's usually both, or neither. So it's probably best to just kind of let go of your expectations and explore the app and ignore the feelings that come up when your "monkey-brain" keeps insisting, "Oh! It's an outliner," or "Oh! It's a mind-map!" Just let it go and keep exploring.

The marketing slogan is that it's "The tool for notes," and we all think we know what a "note" is.

Well, I hope I'm not adding to the confusion, but it's more like, "The tool for nodes." A note is the fundamental unit of Tinderbox, and it has a flexible facility for adding attributes to a note. Even the text of the note is an attribute, and it's called $Text.

Agents are notes that can find and collect other notes, based on a query regarding attributes. The marmot's home page is created by an Agent that collects all the posts I write today, because the Agent compares today's date with the $PublicationDate of the post. It's an ephemeral construct. All the posts I write this month really live in a container note (node), called February 2024, which, while not inert, is nevertheless fixed in terms of its location in the hierarchy, which happens to be a chronological structure in the context of a blog, and all it does is look after its children.

Agents are fundamentally different than a "note," in that their essence is to work with other notes. It doesn't have children of its own, but it does gather other notes' children for the whatever the author's purposes may be. In my case, to have the most the day's posts on the most recent day I've blogged, appear as the home page at the marmot.

That's why I like to think of the fundamental unit as a "node." A node is "a point at which lines or pathways intersect or branch; a central or connecting point." Since each note has a location, be it in a map or in a hierarchy of notes, in relation to other notes, and that location is merely another attribute, it maybe helpful to think of the fundamental unit as a "node," and perhaps that will help reduce the burden of expectations for a "notes app."

"February 2024" is merely a container in the Tinderbox document (TBX) that is the marmot. It is a child of the container "2024," which is in turn a child of the container "Archive." All these containers have a job to perform, and it involves having "children" and looking after them to see that they have all the "attributes" necessary to be productive elements of the marmot (or society).

"Archive" is the senior member of the clan. It mostly sits there, quietly, observing its children. But it does know the time. Specifically, the year. In an attribute called an "Edict" is a bit of "Action code," that looks at today's year, and then looks at its children and makes sure there's a child called 2024. If there is, it just sits and waits.

At some moment, early on the 1st of January 2024, Archive noticed that there wasn't a child called "2024," so it created one. Archive only creates one "kind" of child, a container whose name is the current year. It creates that specific kind of container from a "Prototype." A Prototype is a note with a given set of attributes, among which is the Action code that allows it to perform its function with its children.

So, Archive begat 2024. 2024 opened its eyes, noted the date and discovered that it had no children! In an Edict in the year prototype (called "p_Year" in the marmot), is the code that tells a newborn year to be fruitful and multiply. The Edict says that if you have no child named (current month) 2024, then create one! In another attribute within 2024, inherited from p_Year, is a bit of code in an attribute called "OnAdd." The Edict attribute of note 2024 created January 2024, the OnAdd attribute assigned its prototype, "p_Month."

Archive begat 2024, 2024 begat January 2024, and February 2024 and in 8 days will create March 2024.

I felt very clever when I built this into the marmot late last year.

For every year prior to 2024, since 2013, at the end of the year I manually created a new year container, then also manually created a new month container, and manually copied and pasted all the code necessary for a month container's OnAdd action, also manually editing that code to reflect the current month and year. This sometimes resulted in typographical errors that, temporarily, "broke" the marmot.

Well, computers don't make typographical errors. So I learned how to tell Tinderbox to do all that infrastructure stuff.

Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, so imagine my distress when 2023 went on creating January 2024 as one of its children! "You're only supposed to have twelve! At the most!"

So I had to look at the code in the p_Year Edict and see why it was doing 2024's job. 2024 was doing fine at the time, but it would have acted just like 2023 at the end of the year.

Well, p_Year knows the date, and it knows to look at its children and make sure it has one for the current month. On January 1, 2024, 2023 looked at its children and noticed it was missing a January 2024! So it created one. Argh!

At first I thought I had to figure out some way to tell it to stop after 12 months. Notes can count their children.

Then I had another thought. I'd make having children conditional. An "if" statement was necessary. Something that said if your name is 2023, then don't make any children with 2024 in the name. So that was a bit of a head-scratcher, since I don't do this often.

I knew I had to wrap the code in the Edict in a set of curly braces so that it would only fire if the conditional were true. Or false. Something. So what would my conditional statement be? My default setting is to look at note names, but the $Name is just one of many attributes, and I was dealing with dates anyway, not names.

A note knows when it was created. It's automatically populated in the $Created attribute. And a note knows what date and time it is at every moment. So I figured I had to write a statement that said something like "If today's year is not equal to the year you were created, then don't create any children."

This was the wrong approach, but I learned something fumbling around with it. The "equals" value comparison operator is "==", to set an attribute value you use "=". So I figured "not equals" as a comparison would be "!==" where "!" negates the equality comparison.

Well, no. That "doesn't equal" comparison operator is really "!=". Details matter.

Anyway, it dawned on me that I was making it too complicated. I only wanted the Edict to fire if the current year was the same as the year it was created.

That looks like this:

if($Created.year == date("today").year)

Then there's the existing code, now wrapped in curly braces:

{

$MyDate="today";

$MyString=$MyDate.format("MM y");

create($MyString);

}

So the 2023 year container knows it's 2024. It knows it was created in 2023. The comparison fails, so it doesn't carry out the rest of the code.

Now, I can't tell you, step by step, how I figured all this out. I tried, but there was a fair amount of trial and error, some frustration, and a walk in all this. But I did figure it out. Maybe that's a product of 10,000 hours of futzing.

I am struggling with trying to figure out an "On this day..." Agent. But I'll noodle around with it some more, and if I can't figure it out, I'll ask at the forum.

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying, "If I can figure this stuff out, you can too."

I mean, I went to a trade school, so...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:11 Wednesday, 21 February 2024

I had another blog post in mind, but I couldn't find the quote I was looking for, so this will do.

Once again, Jack Baty provides the inspiration. Perhaps because this upcoming meetup is on the top of my mental stack for the moment. Not to worry, we're not going to exhaust the set of possible things to talk about during the meetup.

They all depend on a pile of custom templates, scripts, and sloppily-documented setup. They work, but what if they don't? I'm not always in the mood for fixing things that break when I touch them wrong.

This resonated with me, because I have two ideas I want to implement in the marmot, and I've been finding ways to not do it because I'm not looking forward to the futzing part. And that feeling of "not looking forward," is part of a deeper feeling that is one of, if not "failure," then perhaps just "inadequacy."

Now, it'd be easy to get the wrong idea. I love Tinderbox, and I love blogging, ergo I love blogging with Tinderbox. But there is the attraction of the seemingly limitless toolset at my disposal within the app. And I should be able to figure this stuff out. But it does take a certain kind of mental energy to summon the courage to "break stuff."

And I've broken the marmot before.

"I've always wanted to learn to play the piano."

No, in fact, you didn't. If you did, you'd have done so. These superficial, unfulfilled desires seem to be a part of our "imagined" self.

Things that you genuinely want to do are the things that you spend your time on. I've probably spent more than 10,000 hours taking pictures. I can't find it now, but there was this curve that described the interior experience many people have when undertaking a new thing. They learn a bunch of new stuff early on and are filled with a profound sense of competence and confidence, which they are all too eager to share with anyone who'll listen.

If they stick with the thing, they eventually learn that they don't know nearly what they thought they knew, and that their practice of the thing is really not very good.

This is the valley of depression. "I suck."

But if they stick with it, the gradually learn more and get better and if they're really committed, 10,000 hours later, they don't suck.

I don't call myself a photographer because I feel as though that establishes a set of expectations in someone that I probably can't, or don't want to, meet. I ran into a neighbor the other day who was the past president of the photography club. We chatted for a while and I offered this disclaimer when I gave him the link to my flickr account. He texted me back later and kindly said, "I'd say you are a Photographer." Nice of him to say so, but the nature of ignorance is that we don't know what we don't know, and what I don't know about photography could fill volumes.

That said, I'm happy to think that sometimes I don't suck.

I've been fascinated by computers, and by programming, since the Apple II. I had a bad experience at the Naval Academy in a freshman course, "Calculus With Computers." Two five-hour D's will do that to you. But ever since the advent of personal computing, I've had this attraction to computing or programming. But I suck at it. It's hard.

Part of the problem with mastering it has been the dynamic nature of the field. If we were all still using Apple IIs, I'd probably be a whiz. The principles are all the same, mostly. But the implementations differ, and in programming, details matter. And I'm not very good at mastering details.

When I've broken the marmot, it's often because of a detail. Sometimes it was because I fundamentally misunderstood something, but mostly it's a detail. Especially in html, but often in action code and export code.

Now, I know that the way to master those details is to just work with them a lot. Break the marmot and fix it, over and over again. And there are plenty of resources for help. I have emailed Mark Bernstein many times, and more than once sent him either the marmot or its predecessor, Groundhog Day, and had him resuscitate it. So there should be little fear in undertaking an effort like this.

But there's this little feeling of failure, or inadequacy, when it breaks or doesn't work the way I thought it would. That's a personal problem. And part of the energy budget must go to overcoming this internal friction or inertia. (Pick an analogy already, Rogers!)

But, I want to kind of illustrate or demonstrate how wonderful Tinderbox is for creating and maintain a weblog, so I guess I'm just going to have to go ahead and break stuff. I know there are people who will help me put it back together. And if I do this often enough, maybe I'll master those details one day and it'll be less like futzing and more like dancing.

I should probably stop there, but I'll make another comparison to photography. It's not the camera, it's the person behind the camera. Gear-heads love the artifact. I've been shooting with one brand of camera for 16 years, and that's because details matter. And different camera manufacturers implement those details in different ways. It's easier to stay within one brand of camera so you can pay attention to what you're seeing instead of operating the camera.

But if you just like to play with cameras, that's cool. No judgment from me. But I'm not sure it's photography. Photography may provide the context, or the justification; but the reward isn't the image, it's playing with the gear. And that's fine too. People experience joy in many different ways, and tools offer tactile experiences, visual appeal, novel features that can offer joy in their discovery. I get that. There's a reason I own an absurd number of cameras, all but two of which are from Olympus or its successor OM Digital Solutions. I like playing with the gear too.

But I like taking pictures more.

And I guess I'd say I like blogging more than I like playing with Tinderbox. But blogging gives me the reason to play with Tinderbox too. If I can master Tinderbox through blogging, then maybe I'll use Tinderbox for more than just blogging. A virtuous cycle.

Anyway, Blogging With Tinderbox. Check it out.

"You too have a complicated interior life that deserves to be explored and shared!"

I wrote that somewhere, apparently not here, in connection with the upcoming meetup. One of the things I enjoy about blogs is that it often gives a glimpse into the thoughts and feelings, the "interior life," of others. Here's a post from Jack Baty that illustrates what I'm writing about.

Now, I'm retired and nearly all of my time is my own. I seldom feel as though I have "too much," though I usually have nothing to do.

People say, nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. Winnie-the-Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Here's another example from The Online Photographer.

It is possible to over-think things. But my experience has been that writing about these recursive ruminations often offers a way out of the labyrinth, if only temporarily.

We all have opinions, and there are (too) many outlets for sharing those. But by sharing some aspect of the way we experience our lives, I think, can be healing, while sharing opinions can be divisive. Now, it is risky. Especially if your personal interior experience isn't solidly in the middle of the Bell Curve. If you're not a cis-gendered, neurotypical member of the majority class, chances are pretty good that some people will feel as though your interior experience is wrong. It even happens to those comfortably on the middle-curve, but it's especially likely where those experiences may make a reader uncomfortable.

I would say it's worthwhile for anyone to blog about their life, but it can make you vulnerable, and it's definitely not for everyone.

The fact that blogs are kind of passé appeals to me. They are enjoying something of a renaissance, to be sure; but I don't think they'll ever become the kind of hot new medium that attracts ambitious attention-seekers, would-be influencers. To my mind, they're more like the "back fence" of this worldwide "neighborhood" on the web.

The days of creating a new InstaPundit, by way of a blog, are happily over.

Nowadays, it's more "just us chickens."

Not all blogs are "personal" of course. Many focus on hobbies, activities, issues and so on, often to the exclusion of anything personal. Those can be helpful and entertaining, but I enjoy the ones where people share something about themselves, along with their hobbies, activities, issues and so on.

James Reeves' Atlas Minor is a favorite of mine. The writing is sharp, the posts are brief, there's an atmosphere in them. Not all of them, but most of them. John P. Weiss is another. You can exercise your photography and writing skills while telling stories that made meaning in your life. That's John's blog.

I've never "met" anyone I read "IRL." (I get to use scare quotes because I'm old and past my cool kid sell-by date.) But I feel as though I know something about them. I know it's a curated, carefully edited version, but don't we all want to put our best face forward? I met Jack, virtually, for the first time getting ready for the meetup. He seemed just like he is in his blog, authentic.

So there's value in blogging. For the blogger and the reader. Risk too.

But we're all in this together, and none of us is getting out of here alive.

Thanks for dropping by.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:46 Monday, 19 February 2024

A week from today there will be a virtual Tinderbox meet-up (Note: Calendar times are Pacific Time.) where the topic of discussion will be "Blogging With Tinderbox." It won't be an in-the-weeds tutorial, though you will likely get many good ideas and some inspiration.

Preparing for that event, I made a Tinderbox outline of some of the topics we might discuss and one of them included bits of "friction" with Tinderbox as a blogging tool, and Mark Bernstein, developer of Tinderbox, Michael Becker, Jack Baty and I got together to discuss the session.

One of the bits of friction was creating a web link in a post. Well, Mark took that to heart and now I'm happy to report that that rough patch has been sanded down quite a bit.

If you're an adventurous sort, or like to witness the development of an app and the discussions and thoughts that go into it, you can buy a "backstage pass," and participate in another Discourse forum as new features are added, existing ones refined and beta releases offered to pass holders. That's how I know that this feature has been refined, I'm running a beta.

It's a double-edged sword, in many ways, for Mark to be such a responsive developer. Sometimes, in the fog of electronic communication and the confusion of misunderstanding, he can be subjected to some unreasonable demands. But he's a model of forbearance, and a surprising amount of the time he will add features to Tinderbox, or modify existing features, to meet the reasonable needs of users.

His accessibility in the forums and in the meetups is unique, in my experience, in the developer community. Perhaps I'm wrong. I don't get out much. But it adds a dimension to using Tinderbox that is absent, not to say "missing," from other apps, and one of the reasons I enjoy using Tinderbox.

Immanuel Velikovsky would have been pleased.

(When I read this, I was pleasantly surprised that I could recall Velikovsky's name. Not due to any particular admiration of Velikovsky. More my growing lack of faith in my memory.)

I got up this morning and this was the first thing I read in my RSS feed. Kevin Kelly is a "futurist," a "techno-optimist." I don't know much about him other than that. I like the "cool tools" blog thing, though that often stimulates my "I don't need this but I want it" response.

Anyway, I laughed and then I got a little mad about the post I linked to. Duty? To the system?

Bullshit.

How about a "right" not to be born into a system that imposes "duties" to an unsustainable "system" that threatens more than serves humanity?

People have a duty to help one another, to be kind. They have a responsibility to do their best, as best they can see it.

Our "techno-optimist" masters are constructing a "reality" that is little more than a hall of mirrors.

It cannot last. KK's little missive about one's "duties" in this new "reality" is a telling indicator of its fragility and ultimate failure.

"Buckle up, Dorothy. Reality is about to go bye-bye."

We're all Alice now.

Setting up a new MacBook Pro with a 2TB internal drive has made me think again about iCloud drive. My 13" M1 MBP only had a 256GB internal SSD, so I used "Optimize storage," which was acceptable given internet access and adequate bandwidth. That doesn't sound like it should be a problem today, but a couple of vacation houses in the Finger Lakes proved to me that indeed, broadband access isn't everywhere.

On the 14" M3 MBP, I'm not using "Optimize storage," except for Photos. I haven't solved my excessive image problem and it seems the best I can do is to keep it from burgeoning ever faster. (High speed electronic shutters have proven a boon for the SSD industry, as has 4K video, I'm sure.) But I can keep all the files in my Documents folder stored locally and in iCloud Drive.

But working with the same document on two different computers can become problematic, at least in my experience.

Because I've been burned by this more than once, I've become very careful about how I work on the marmot between the iMac and the MBP (either one).

In Settings, there's a setting near the bottom in the Windows pane (heh). It says, "Close windows when quitting an application (the little toggle) When enabled, open documents and windows will not be restored when you re-open an application."

It seems to me that this is a very important switch. While it's really convenient to have the files you were working on re-open when you launch the app, I think this is where it gets tricky.

I'd work on the marmot on the iMac, then go somewhere and try and do some blogging from the MBP. Now, typically, Tinderbox is open when I close the MBP. The MBP just goes to sleep. If the battery dies because I haven't used it for a looong time, the state at time of sleep is stored in a snapshot and restored.

But now, that marmot file is out of date with the one in iCloud. I haven't done this in a while, and I'm disinclined to experiment with it again, though I could use some kind of test file, so my memory may be faulty. I think I'd be presented with some kind of alert that the files were out of sync, and I'd try to get the latest one from iCloud. I'd get that, but it'd be missing a post or two. It didn't have the most recent version, perhaps because that file was still open on the iMac, sleeping away at my desk.

I seldom "save" the marmot. In fact, these days, I have no idea how often you should use the "Save" command, since most files are saved automagically anyway. I don't know when iCloud gets the currently open file. I'm pretty confident that the MBP never complained that the file was open on another computer and therefore couldn't be opened locally.

Anyway, in fumbling around with a marmot minus a couple of posts, it would ultimately become the marmot in iCloud, "and hilarity ensues." (Some number of posts would have to be recreated from the exported html files.)

I'm sure this is all very murky. Suffice to say, I no longer rely on the marmot in iCloud. The file is still stored there, but I duplicate it on a 64GB thumb drive. When I'm going to take the marmot on the road, I "Quit" Tinderbox, which presumably automagically saves the latest version and uploads it to iCloud.

I've turned on that switch to "Close windows when quitting an application," so it won't restore the marmot from a locally saved "version" or "snapshot" on launch. I'll have to either double-click the marmot in Finder, or select "Open.." from the file menu, and get the most recent or current version from Documents in iCloud.

If I get a wonky version from iCloud, I'll have the current version on the thumb drive.

It's possible that I'm just becoming cognitively impaired in my incipient dotage, but I don't recall ever reading a clear and straightforward explanation about how all this stuff is supposed to work. If such an explanation doesn't exist, perhaps it's because it's not a "clear and straightforward" process.

It almost makes one pine for the days of floppy disks.

I've been getting the 14" M3 MBP set up, which has taken a bit longer than I expected. Another project today is to collect all the license and registration codes into one repository. Seems like a good job for Tinderbox.

I've been walking 3.25 miles each morning, and adding another walk in the evening. The nice thing about the evening walk is that the sun is on the opposite side. Birds are active in the early morning and early evening. In the morning, they often backlit; not so in the evening. They were relatively scarce yesterday, but I liked how this bluebird turned out.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:57 Thursday, 15 February 2024

I was sitting in the office, going over Medicare and Tricare EOBs, as one does, when I noticed my glass was empty. I went back to the kitchen for a refill and saw a red sky through the trees.

I skipped the beverage and threw a battery and memory card in the DJI mini 2. These things only last minutes. Got GPS lock pretty quick and managed to get aloft while the show was still underway.

It was pretty damn red.

"Sailor take warning," and all that.

Was anyone else troubled by the little infomercial about the NFL camp in Ghana, Africa? I kind of get that the brand wants to expand its global audience, but I have to wonder if it's looking for players?

From time to time I hear that moms are keeping their kids out of Pop Warner and middle and high school football programs. As problematic as the dream of professional sports is as a pathway for upward mobility and financial success is, awareness of the health risks has only grown. Transferring that "dream" of a career in professional sports to a part of the world where it may appear even more attractive, and where awareness of the health risks may not be the same, seems cynical and greedy to me. But maybe I'm not looking at it the right way?

The movie ended just in time for the half-time show, which we watched. I was pleased to see SF leading at halftime, but I knew it was the Chiefs so that didn't mean a lot. I watched the first few possessions of the second half and then switched to episode 2 of Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Prime. (Can't say I'm thrilled with the show, and I have to believe the premiere episode telegraphed the end of the series.) I didn't particularly care for episode 2, so I didn't move on to 3, and decided to check in on the game. Watched until the end of regulation play and went to bed. Figured Mahomes would pull it out again. I was hoping for the 'Niners to humble the Chiefs, but c'est la vie. I'm not a fan of KC.