Category: Miscellaneous

Update: I messaged the author on mastodon and have a link to the post. See below.

There’s a blog post I read around the turn of the century that’s stayed with me over the years. It was written by Andre Torrez, and was about how ideas are worthless in themselves. I’ve tried to find it a couple of times, but the only trace remaining is a section quoted on another blog.

…that’s what’s got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they’d like to do. Stop talking about it and just build it. Don’t make it too complicated. Don’t spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site…

That fragment doesn’t really demonstrate why this post proved so powerful to me. The rest of the post talked about how cheap ideas are. An idea that can be easily replicated has little worth – the value is in the execution. Founding up a start-up based on only an idea is pointless if someone with more money can reproduce and grow it faster than you ever could.

I spent a lot of time at technologies meet-ups, and sometimes you’d meet people who had their one big idea. And they’d refuse to discuss details because they didn’t want you ripping it off. But if their idea’s only strength was that nobody else knew it, then maybe it wasn’t all that valuable.

Update: I realised I’d never messaged Andre Torrez about the post and they found it on the wayback machine. The post is as good as I remember.

tldr; I’ve paid for several years of Jetpack backups, but when I needed them they didn’t work, and it was impossible to contact support for assistance. Jetpack are very efficient about billing the customer, less so about helping them.

Towards the end of July I decided to do some maintenance on my servers, and tried to upgrade Ubuntu. I made a foolish error and up replaced the GRUB bootloader config with the default settings. I tried my best to fix the server, but this was beyond me, so I made some backups of the recent data and reverted it to the last OS image I had (which was four years old).

I often remind people to take regular backups, but I should have paid more attention to my own. I used the ancient image I had to restore the basic set-up, dealing with some ‘interesting’ problems along the way, including debugging wordpress arcana. I figured that, once I had jetpack working with my wordpress install, I could simply restore the most recent backup.

This was not the case. Despite following the instructions on the jetpack site, the backups were failing with an unspecified error. I tried to contact support, given that I had a paid plan, but found no way to raise a ticket.

I’ve cancelled the annual subscription to Jetpack, but I had 10 months remaining on my last annual subscription payment. There’s a lesson here about testing backups rather than assuming they work. But, also, I am frustrated and annoyed that a company can take so much money without giving me any access to their support.

One thing that did work well was ChatGPT, which provides excellent guidance on working through problems. Fixing these issues would have taken even longer without that.

When I was young, I loved the Dennis Pennis interviews. Pennis was a character played by Paul Kaye who attended celebrity events and asked the stars unexpected, often insulting questions. This shattered the illusion of celebrity a little, showing how staged a lot of the other interviews were, and I found it fascinating.

I saw Pennis live once, when he was introducing the Prodigy at Glastonbury. When the band’s equipment failed, plunging the gig into silence, Pennis was sent on stage to entertain the crowd, which he did by singing Hebrew songs.

Notoriously, while Steve Martin was in the midst of a career slump, Pennis asked “How come you’re not funny any more”. Martin was asked about this in a recent Guardian interview:

Before I go, however, I mention that the line has come back to haunt Kaye: he has said it is now the one thing strangers say to him in the street. Hearing this, Martin tips back his head and lets out an almighty laugh, warm and rich, yet curiously lacking in schadenfreude.

I read John Salvatier’s post Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail some years back, and then couldn’t find it afterwards. It’s an amazing piece, which starts out looking at the subtle complexity of a ‘simple’ task, building a set of stairs. I found it again when it turned up on metafilter:

At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences… But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

It’s a thought-provoking piece of writing. Metafilter also linked to a good related post, Why everything might have taken so long

I read John Salvatier’s post Reality has a surprising amount of detail some years back, and then couldn’t find it afterwards. It’s an amazing piece, which starts out looking at the subtle complexity of a ‘simple’ task, building a set of stairs. I found it again when it turned up on metafilter:

At every step and every level there’s an abundance of detail with material consequences… But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

It’s a thought-provoking piece. The metafilter post also linked to another interesting post, Why everything might have taken so long

I’m subscribed to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files, where he answers questions from the public. Cave is frank and honest; many of the responses explore grief, with Cave sharing his experience of tragedy. He can also be playful, sometimes sanctimonious and pompous, but it’s amazing to see an artist being so open with his audience.

One particular quote has stuck in my head, from an April 2022 edition, where Cave from about cynicism:

Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils… Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like…keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

There are so many things in life that are choices that we pretend are not. People are driven into despair, but cynicism is an attitude, an approach to the world. It might not be as easy, but it is better to choose hope.

Metafilter recently linked to Thomas Whitwell’s List of 52 things learned in 2023. At number 8 was the specialness spiral:

A specialness spiral is when you wait for the perfect time to use something, then end up never using it at all. “An item that started out very ordinary, through repeated lack of use eventually becomes … seen more as a treasure”

I heard a story from my sister’s in-laws of a neighbour who kept all their best china on a dresser, rarely used. One day the dresser tipped over, broke everything and it was wasted. Then there’s a quote from Emma Burbeck, who wrote a list of things she wished she’d done differently. Among them, “I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.”

This is something I’ve been prone to, until I read Craig Mod quoting a friend of his about what to eat from your pack when hiking: “Always eat your best thing. That way you’re always eating the best thing you’ve brought.”

Saving the best for last seems a somewhat puritain attitude, and risks never getting to enjoy that thing.