Reader, I lol’d.

magit-wip-mode

magit WIP modes:

“Git keeps committed changes around long enough for users to recover changes they have accidentally deleted. It does so by not garbage collecting any committed but no longer referenced objects for a certain period of time, by default 30 days.

“But Git does not keep track of uncommitted changes in the working tree and not even the index (the staging area). Because Magit makes it so convenient to modify uncommitted changes, it also makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot in the process.

“For that reason Magit provides a global mode that saves tracked files to work-in-progress references after or before certain actions. (At present untracked files are never saved and for technical reasons nothing is saved before the first commit has been created).”

I wander back and forth machines a lot and this seems like useful insurance, so I turned it on.

accurate but not good

Luke prompted a half-response this morning:

I replied in a spirit appropriate to me, which is to say “disappointed idealist who should learn to either quit being disappointed, or give up on being an idealist, or get a new sense of humor.”

Because that article feels like a bookending, illustrative underscore of this column, which I went into sort of nodding along in a “checks out” sort of way, then sitting up straight when it got to:

“Expect more antiracist action plans, more vaporous decolonization, more mandated training, more huckster consultants, more vacuous reports, more administrators whose jobs no one can explain, more sleazy land acknowledgments (“Sorry I stole your house!”), more performative white self-flagellation, more tokenization of minority faculty members.

“And amid this great tornado of race chatter, if you take a moment to plug your ears and look around, you will probably begin to notice fewer and fewer brown and Black kids reading on the quad and, down the line, fewer and fewer brown and Black doctors in the maternity wards. It will turn out that all those initiatives will have next to nothing to do with actually combating structural racism. We may well find ourselves teaching Toni Morrison to rooms that get whiter and richer by the year.”

The biggest change I noticed at my job from 2019 to 2022 was that HR managed to edge everyone out of anti-racist work, and suddenly anything that seemed like it could be meaningful and engage senior managers was ruled “performative.” Mentorship programs? Performative. Sponsorship programs? Performative. I came to realize that “we don’t want to be performative” was just a thought-terminating cliché meant to shut down the conversation.

What were you supposed to do? Basically, fill low-stakes associate positions, maaaaaybe send a manager out to specific recruiting events, but otherwise just hand the entire hiring process over to recruitment and forget about it. If you looked at any demographic information that suggested perhaps the lenses you were supposed to use — ratios that ignored role or level — were problematic, you were asked how you got the information you were using because they thought they’d locked it all up. And I watched a good leader driven out by someone who weaponized the whole topic.

When I helped interview HR business partners, it suggested to me that what I was seeing wasn’t just local. One of them got uncomfortable when I asked about their experience with ERGs, and preferred to discuss how happy people were with a local soccer team ERG they’d sponsored. I honestly didn’t know what to do with that, but just marked “strong no,” explained why, and was relieved the hiring team went another direction. For all I know they thought that — as an older, white, male interviewer — I wanted to hear about a soccer ERG instead of an identity-based one, but I didn’t feel like playing eight-dimension chess. Including soccer fans seemed like an odd DEI triumph.

So if I’m coming off a little mordant about an NYT piece that manages to both report and perform a certain weird forgetfulness in the summer of 2023, it’s because I’m struggling to understand what we got besides a new consultant class, a new slice of territory for HR departments, and vague commitments to “work on ourselves.” I can’t get mad about the reporting itself, because it seems accurate. It’s where we all are. What do we want to do about that?

New loom on the Himalayan

I stuck the new loom on the RE Himalayan today. It was a 20-minute process, from taking off the side plate to figuring out where everything was, to disconnecting and reconnecting all the connectors.

The net effect is that it puts the gear detector behind the ignition instead of straight to the battery, which I hope will stop the parasitic drain I’ve been dealing with. It’s a weird thing to have to do, but I read a few rumors online that some dealers have been putting them on at sale. It’s just a bad design decision with a $25 fix.

Al and I took a ride for groceries this evening. When we got home I took a reading off the battery then set a reminder to myself to check back in 24 hours to see whether the drain seems reasonable. Since I put an Antigravity battery in there the stakes are a little lower if it drains too much while I observe.

Not related to the loom, the bike is running really well now. It sounds good, feels smooth, and I’ve appreciated how manageable it is. I had it out twice today and just enjoyed driving it through a few curvy parts of southeast Portland in the sun. We’re thinking about taking a camping trip down in Clackamas County and going out separately so we can bring the Himalayan along and enjoy some forest service roads and rides along the river.

Still considering trading it in or selling it, but it’s growing on me again. I just wish RE was just better at QA overall. I’ve got $125 worth of dongles hanging off the thing to get it to just do what it should have done out of the factory, I’ve spent four hours sitting around the dealership while the mechanics grudgingly fixed stuff like pinched vacuum hoses and weirdly tuned electrics, and I spent a bunch of my own time hand-tightening connections and digging overpacked grease out of connectors.

With all that time and effort invested, it’s behaving. I don’t know if I’d recommend these bikes to a newbie. I have some patience and don’t mind having to do a little work — it’s sort of educational and interesting. Someone new to the hobby shouldn’t have to think about that stuff when they’re trying to just learn the basics and wondering if stalls or glitches are their fault.

Looking around for other people who have done CRM/PRM-ish things in plaintext, I found JacobEvelyn/friends. It’s written in Ruby, uses Markdown for its home format, and gives you a command line interface to a record of your friends and activities. I appreciate how thoroughly it thinks about what it is trying to do, and I sense a set of concerns similar to mine about the “keeping up with personal contacts” challenge.

Some things I like about it:

• Simple CLI data entry syntax
• Some “habit tracking” style reporting to help you understand if you’re keeping up your practice.
• Clean reporting with a lot of flexibility that would let you build more reporting.
• Simple use of Markdown, with no elaborate syntactical overlay. If you gave up on friends, your data would be easily readable.

It’s probably good to note that friends isn’t a full contact management system. It’s better to think of it as a sort of journaling and habit tracking tool with a tight focus on keeping up with people, not a way to manage all your contact details. If I could extend one thing about it, it would probably be to be able to store email addresses with contacts: Email addresses aren’t great keys, but also they’re fine keys sometimes, and they’d open friends up to interacting with other tools.

ox-json and the wisdom of Neil McCauley

As I was looking through the docs for friends and waming up to it some I wondered how readily I could migrate my org-contacts information. My home language is Ruby, so I tend to start there when I’m looking for a library. There’s one org-mode gem I’m aware of, but its primary preoccupation is converting org-mode to HTML or Textile for presentation purposes.

Another way to come at the problem is to get the org markup into something more universally parseable, which is where ox-json could help. Does what it says on the tin: Converts an org-mode file into JSON, including, crucially, the data stored in the :PROPERTIES: drawer. Currently it passes by the :LOGBOOK: drawer, so that limits what you can do with it, but it still opens up possibilities.

Why?

ox-hugo update

I started blogging with ox-hugo several weeks ago, going into it a little warily.

Recap:

• You write all your posts in a monolithic org-mode file.
• Each heading is a post.
• Heading tags become post tags.
• Headings in a TODO state are drafts.
• Metadata can be stored in the :PROPERTIES: drawer (tidy, but the templating syntax gets cluttery if you’re not a lisp native) or additional metadata src blocks (more visually cluttered when writing, but easier to read the template if you’re a YAML native)
• You can set it up to automatically export the Markdown version into your Hugo content hierarchy whenever you save the buffer.

Why would you want to do this?

As someone who does a lot of digest posts, I like having my pre-publication notes, links, etc. in the org-mode ecosystem, with all of its text manipulation affordances. If a topic I’m working on isn’t ready when it’s time to publish that day, I just refile the subheading under my * Daily Post Overflow heading and keep going. I also like org-mode’s structure editing features. It’s simple to move headings and their content around within a post.

I thought the “all-in-one-file” thing would annoy me, and there is part of me that still doesn’t like seeing all the surrounding context, but that’s what subtree to indirect buffer is for. I drop into an indirect buffer for the long-haul writing, then pop back out of it if I need to pull things in from the overflow area or check on something from a previous post.

I did stub my toe on one thing, which was that the org-capture template I found to make the post setup simpler was setting :EXPORT-HUGO-DATE:, which updates dynamically when you save a post heading. I went back to make some edits to a post, saved my work, and it altered the date metadata in the Markdown output and jumbled my post order. The answer seemed to be to switch that to :EXPORT_DATE:, and now it behaves.

I also put off cleaning up my capture template so all the metadata could go in the :PROPERTIES: drawer. At first It was easier to just embed some YAML at the top of the post body with #+begin_src yaml :front_matter_extra t rather than working out the Lispier syntax for post image and cover image in the context of writing a capture template. It just took a few minutes to fix once I decided to bother with it, and the template now outputs :PROPERTIES: metadata:

:EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER+: :cover '((image . "" ) (caption . "" ))
:EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER+: :images '(/momo-logo.jpg)
:EXPORT_DESCRIPTION:

I only sometimes use cover images, but I like to include my site logo in social posts, etc. when I don’t have some other image to show, so the template defaults to an empty cover image and image metadata that Hugo’s OpenGraph templating can pull in.

Several weeks in, I like the workflow. One tiny part of my soul is troubled that I have org source and Markdown output, but on the other hand the org source overwrites the Markdown output on edit, so the two don’t drift. Realistically, the Markdown would be the more migratable content were I to shift off of Hugo, and it’s simply better to author in org-mode. So there’s no associated toil and each format gets to be useful in the way it is best suited to be so.

That Royal Enfield Himalayan

I complained a little about my Royal Enfield Himalayan a few days ago: a little big for the power it has, and it had some QA problems that took some time to track down I am pretty sure I am going to sell it to fund something similar. But I did swap in a fresh battery and cleaned it up from winter storage, and rode it up to St. Johns for lunch yesterday, which meant a few dozen miles. It ran pretty well!

Last year, after dealing with rough idling and stalls, I finally broke down and installed a BoosterPlug. Himalayans run too lean out of the factory, and the difference after installing one was pretty amazing. It was about a five-minute operation and it made the difference between a very rough first five minutes and “let it idle for 30 seconds and it’ll be fine.” The machine never stalls now. I do think it still idles a little low, but that’s a fine-tuning thing.

Anyhow, it was nice to ride around. Yeah, it’s a little big, but it’s not a big bike. There’s plenty of pep for the city. Running up HWY 30, it did fine with the lunch crowd and there was plenty of power to overtake or squeeze out of spots at urban parkway speeds. I’d do exit-to-exit on the Portland bypasses with it.

I was also glad to see an RE dealership up in St. John. Wasn’t a fan of the Harley dealership I was getting service at and had to do a lot of research on my own to get help when it was suffering from factory QA problems.

Last year I went on a tear around personal knowledge management (PKM). It started with discovering Obsidian and really appreciating its out-of-the-box capabilities. I do think, if Emacs is just more than you can bear the thought of, that Obsidian is an excellent choice for the sort of text-as-organizing-data approach org-mode is simply best at.

That said, its fatal flaw is basically Markdown, which is not meant to bear the load of text as organizing data. You can use it that way, but after … two decades? … of Markdown, we are not conditioned to think of it that way, and any superset of the core emph/strong/link/image markup comes at the expense of its overall feel. I’m not saying it can’t bear more, I’m saying that the more you add, especially when you start getting into multiple characters to do things like wedge in HTML or what’s essentially XML, the more burdensome it becomes and the more unreadable your source text becomes.

Realistically, org-mode has a similar problem: To get the really good stuff out of it you are adding metadata at at least the heading level. The difference is that for the balance of its lifespan it has been like that, and its development is both enhanced and constrained by the fact that it is a creature of Emacs. There are affordances that can hide the worst of the clutter, and the inline formatting syntax is not much more verbose than Markdown when it is at all. Deciding to use org-mode is not a “buy the ticket, take the ride” proposition. You bought the ticket when you edited your init.el the first time, and org-mode is just part of the ride.

Anyhow, You can’t really get into Obsidian without being exposed to the whole Zettelkasten thing. It led me to Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, a small book about how to build a Zettelkasten system and what to do with it, and I found that book very compelling.

When I contextualize my reaction to it, I’m going to own a few things up front:

• Like a lot of people, I was in the process of climbing out of a few years of lockdown, isolation, and anxiety. I had a certain kind of mental energy that was very inward-focused.
• I had a strong sense that my job was not going to be long for this world, but was just beginning to get some traction on things that mattered to me, so that energy was searching for an outlet.
• I had a few ideas for projects that I’d shelved for a period, but I was beginning to think that I needed to get going on them as part of my preparation for either being displaced or hitting the job market.

So I was primed for the Zettelkasten pitch.

But I’ve also been a sort of tech/nerd-adjacent type for decades, and was around during the heyday of GTD, 43 Folders, “lifehacks” before “lifehack” meant “refrigerate bologna and you won’t get sick eating it!” or “don’t run up the balance on your credit cards!”, and all the other productivity manias that blew through. This is me in 2005:

Sometimes I read a comment from someone who insists that his routine involves some insanely arcane and convoluted use of yarn and a special shell script he whipped up that reads crap down from his Backpack account and then squirts it into his Palm, makes a redundant backup on the server he maintains in Malaysia and produces printed 3x5 copies in triplicate, one of which he pins to his infant son’s sleeve before leaving for the morning (“If I died, I couldn’t live with him thinking his father went out the door without an action list and a plan!”).

… and me again in 2007:

While looking around for some info on “Getting Things Done” so I could share a summary, I came across:

“Allen says his martial arts background helped him appreciate the value of eliminating distractions.

“‘If four people jump out at you in a dark alley, you don’t want to be thinking about two e-mails you haven’t answered,’ he said.

Fending Off Four People - A Plan

@street, by alley

• run down street flapping arms and yelling for help (?) (save breath by not yelling?)
• run into nearby store? (make “nearby store” context?)
• make Bruce Lee noises to see if that works then run? (split into two actions? or is that too much?)
• prioritize possible ambush choices … by absolute order or relative priority? (make note: plan this ahead of time for future – someday)
• make folder and list for “@street” context … hasn’t come up before
• muggers in @mugger agenda list or defer due to one-time nature of encounter?
• followup – could I have run faster or yelled louder?

Basically, I guess, there is a part of me that reads these things as largely aspirational (which is fine), but also very hung up on the idea that we are one special system or weird trick away from realizing our greatness (perhaps naive, but also fine), and that once we’ve mastered it we will finally become productive (which is fine(ish?) to the extent it means “does enough work to keep job” but is terrible when such a mushy word becomes a proxy for human worth).

How to Take Smart Notes hits all those aspirational notes, recounting the remarkable tale of Niklas Luhmann and his astounding lifetime run of 60+ books and hundreds of articles. It’s an inspiring story, and I’m going to grant one point for sure: If one choice is to be inspired by a prolific academic who expanded the sum of human knowledge with his little slipbox, and the other choice is to be inspired by someone whose productivity system is self-evidently great because he has used it to organize a small empire of retail productivity enhancement books and accessories, I’m goin’ with the perfesser over there.

So I tossed myself into Zettelkasten-via-Obsidian. I had a few things I wanted to work on, I had years of material in different formats that needed to be atomized, and I was reading two or three books a week, plus dozens of articles. Like I said, I had a ton of nervous energy to displace because a ten-year run was about to end, and the last time I’d felt thrown out of the nest my comfort zone was “crabby, introverted autodidact.”

In the end, it just wasn’t for me. I tried it, and Obsidian is an excellent tool for organizing your work that way, but I think the problem I had with it was that the ratio of “volume of stuff that’s just there in my head” to “volume of stuff I need to keep in a second brain” didn’t justify the existence of the second brain, or at least not one organized in classic Zettelkasten fashion. That’s not to say I can hold every consideration of a writing project in my head. I benefit greatly, for instance, from the whole project notes thing that integrates magit and Projectile: I have an org-capture template that adds a note to a todo file in the top level of a given project (read: “repo”) linked to the parent heading. If I’m out and about and think about something material to my writing project, I put it in my inbox. It’s a vestige of GTD and the idea of a trusted system. I just don’t think it will help me in a mugging, and the way I write, share experience, and organize my thinking isn’t amenable to the atomicity of Zettelkasten.

Maybe I could have gotten there! I believe other people who say it helps them! I understand the gentle pull of tending a little digital garden! I just don’t think organizing knowledge is my particular life struggle, and I do not think getting better at it will be a huge life enhancer.

So, all that said, I really appreciated this post (somewhat) about org-super-links, which describes how you can get automatic back-linking into your org-mode headings. Even though Zettelkasten isn’t for me, I did come to appreciate automatic back-linking in Obsidian (and my brief excursion into org-roam).

Spring is here, so time to take Lou out

“Lou” is my Yamaha TW200, a little farm bike I bought as a compromise between the tiny and “bounce it between your thighs at stop lights” Honda Grom and the bulkier, vaguely miserable Royal Enfield Himalayan 400. “Vaguely miserable” because mine was a victim of a bunch of factory QA problems that left me feeling like I could never really trust it during break-in.

It is meaningful to me that when the tender cable for my Grom came undone and I didn’t notice it for six months the Grom had so little in the way of parasitic drain that the battery still had life when I got back to it. The Himalayan? It needs to be on a tender 24/7, and never off one and parked for more than maaaaaybe two weeks at a time. It’s just like that, and who knows, and the dealer I bought it from shook the whole issue off with “that’s how this price point is,” which helped me clarify why a Harley dealer was selling Indian-made motorcycles to begin with: You walk in, run over to that Harley, surreptitiously glance at the price tag, realize you’re in over your head but cannot abide the thought of not riding your new bike off the lot on that particular sunny Saturday afternoon, so maybe that Royal Enfield that looks sort of classic will do the trick, for about as much as the down-payment on your Harley was gonna be.

I mean, I went in wanting to buy mine up front. I’d read good reviews, liked the looks, and wanted something of about that displacement and size. The QA stuff, though, is miserable. It took two goes just to figure out that the bleed lines from the fuel tank were tied too tightly to the frame, creating a vacuum that constantly caused stalls. The dealership was plainly sick of my face before I could even get 500 miles on it, and it lives in this weird space where it is too big and not powerful enough. If anyone asked me today, and if they were not interested in the “adventure” pedigree, I’d tell them anything but an RE Himalayan. A Rebel 300 would probably out-perform it, and my TW200, at half the displacement, comes pretty close without having to wrestle the bulk.

Anyhow, Lou is my Yamaha TW200 and I love it. Fat tires, low-slung, pleasant, low rumble. It is simple and sturdy and it is the perfect bike for SE Portland’s pothole alleys and torn-up 82nd Ave. It goes just enough to hold its own for a ride up to Sauvie Island or maybe the back way out to Estacada. It’s a great in-city commuter.

This week it was finally warm enough and dry enough to start Lou up for the first time this spring.

TW200’s (t-dubs) are notoriously cold-blooded, so it didn’t want to go. I dumped some fuel treatment in and shot some starter spray in its intake and it turned over. I let it sit on high choke for a while, then turned it off, rinsed, repeated an hour later and then took it up the side of Mt. Scott. It was still sounding a tiny bit uneven while it ran the old fuel through, but the two runs since it has sounded smooth and healthy, and it turns over right away.

I love it.

Al’s still up in the air about finishing up her motorcycle endorsement, so we have the TW200 and the Grom sitting here. If she decides nothing doing on motorcycling, I’ll find the Grom a home and consider something that can handle two-up a little more gracefully. We enjoy summer date nights on a motorcycle, and the TW200 isn’t quite up to that.