Writing

“Before you play two notes,” he once said, “learn how to play one note, and don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.”

This quote from Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis, who died in February 2019, is taken from John Harris’s excellent Guardian article about slowing down and reflecting. There is much there that chimes with me, particularly the need to pause the social media onslaught.

I’ve been using the Craft Design Technology Energel Tradio Pen as my main writing implement for a while. It’s got a very smooth action, and (when I’m concentrating) it helps me actually make legible notes. I’m blogging about it cause I’m likely to need to order it again, and I’d forgotten where I got it.

Purged from my phone for the Christmas period: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. They have become too much of a drain on my mental well-being. I’m planning to read a lot over the next couple of weeks, starting with Digital Minimalism.

I’m finding jq to be a really useful tool for dealing with JSON formatted data.

Over the years I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on seemingly useless activity. This has, more often than not, been ultimately useful. Sometimes I beat myself up about this tinkering: it can feel like I’m falling down a hole. That said, recast as continuing professional development (which it definitely could be in many cases), it doesn’t look so bad, somehow.