Weekly Thing #231 / UNIX Pipe, Slow Roads, Personal Brand
I’m Jamie Thingelstad. You’re getting this email because you signed up for the Weekly Thing. I appreciate you being here, but if you don’t want these emails any longer, simply unsubscribe.
Hey there! 👋
I’m writing this from my isolation room.
I started getting sick when we were at Disney World and I figured I had caught a cold from my nephew. No big deal… in fact, I’m pretty sure I did catch a cold and a pretty rough one at that. Tyler also got that one. But it seems I also picked up COVID too. On Tuesday morning I was intently focused on getting ready for the day, back at the office, with some really important meetings and presentations I was giving.
Two positive COVID tests later and that plan was completely changed.
It turns out I’m not a fan of isolating. I miss being around the family and moving from place to place. But the good news is nobody else in the family has tested positive, so it is worth it to limit this 2nd ride on the COVID train to just me.
It’s funny that I got sick at Disney World, again. The last time we were there I got Strep Throat. Tyler got an infection. I took him to the urgent care and they helped him out, but that infection jumped to me and gave me a 2nd trip to urgent care.
I’m 2 for 3 on getting sick on trips to Disney World, but I still love our trips there. It sounds like we’ll be heading back again next year. I think I’ll bring extra vitamins and hand sanitizer. 🧼
As you are reading this, I will be able to move around the house and not isolate. I still have to wear a mask, but I’m A-OK with that… 😷
Have a great weekend!
“I know it is wet
And the sun is not sunny
But we can have
Lots of good fun that is funny”
— Winnie the Pooh
This is one of the scenes you enter on Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and it completely feels like you are there. What an incredible experience!
Oct 20, 2022 at 8:25 AM
Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Florida
Notable
Why sprint estimation has broken Agile | VirtusLab
This post gets story points all wrong. The author suggests that story points are the same as time, and that is a broken approach. Spring points should be an estimate of complexity. The value of story points comes in making sure that the stories are actually able to be completed, not to estimate the duration of clock time it will take to do them.
The UNIX Pipe Card Game
Oh. My. Wow! This is the most delightful, geekiest thing I think I have ever seen. Sadly it is sold out or I might have to order a dozen of these to give to friends!
Unix nerds take delight in what you can do with piping commands together. I might have some examples myself. 🤓
Using cards to visually connect commands together seems just brilliant.
He also has a set of cards to learn Go!
Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours – copyrighteous
I use Fastmail to host my mail, and I wouldn’t use Google because like the author here I don’t want them to see my email. Obviously if you email people that use Google, they then have the email. The author here actually did the work to figure out how much that was for his email usage.
The answer is surprisingly large. Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I’ve replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010.
Ugh. Now, even though Google saw that, since I’m not a Gmail user they cannot use it for ads. They would have to somehow match my Google account to my own domain, which may not be that hard. But then the blockers I run protect me from being monitored and augmenting that email data.
But keeping data out of big services like Google is really hard.
Plastic recycling remains a ‘myth’: Greenpeace study
Ugh… recycling isn’t gonna be the answer for dealing with plastic.
Titled “Circular Claims Fall Flat Again,” the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by US households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent.
Neat. Plastic may be mankind’s most lasting mark on the Universe.
What “Work” Looks Like - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
One of my own challenges is finding enough time alone, contemplating the big topics, to direct things going forward.
The funny thing is, sitting alone thinking doesn’t “look” like work.
This made me think of Warren Buffet or even Bill Gates and their work habits around focus time, reading, and a lot of thinking time.
Slow Roads
This thing is mesmerizing! Load it into your browser and press “F” to activate auto drive. Almost like having an aquarium to stare at. The author wrote a great writeup on the project, it was his own attempt to see if he could created a “procedurally generating infinite, scenic landscapes”. Looks great to me. 👏
POAP x ENS x IYK swag at Devcon 6 by the numbers — ENS
This “swag” event that ENS did at Devcon 6 is so incredible, and the recap of the results here is super impressive. I want one of these IYK PAOP Cards so bad now! Check out the connection graph of the POAPs distributed.
the participants started swapping each other’s cards and a total of 18,743 POAPs were collected by 2,197 people
This should just be standard at any crypto events, or any events at all, going forward.
Love it all so much.
Raoul Pal CEO of RealVision, GMI, etc. | web3 talks
Good talk with Raoul Pal on macro economics and crypto. His description of the macro cycle is the most easily to digest I’ve ever heard. Pal also talks about what he sees in crypto. He actually answers something I’ve wondered about for a while. Specifically, if crypto can be used to create new communities, why would companies like Disney ever allow that. Pal suggests that by doing that, they may be able to show these currently unvalued assets on their balance sheet. That is a very interesting thought.
Michael Tsai - Stage Manager in macOS 13.0
I tried Stage Manager on iPadOS for about 5 minutes and turned it off. It doesn’t make sense to me unless you regularly connect an iPad to an external display and use it like a laptop. However, on macOS I’ve been playing with Stage Manager and sort of like it. I’m still getting used to it, but it is a novel way to collect windows and applications together. I wish that the collections you created were persistent, but maybe that will come.
macOS Ventura: The MacStories Review
Incredible detail about every new thing in macOS Ventura. These are long reads but it is a good way to make sure you discover all the new stuff. The Ars Technics writeup is also a really good read.
Burned Out on Your Personal Brand - Tom Peters
Not terribly surprising that many influencers and social media personalities find it exhausting over time. Many turn their entire life into a performance. Performative living! That isn’t going to be fulfilling even for a little while.
Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas - Commoncog
Great article and stories around focus and choosing what is going to get attention.
Ultimately, “focus is saying no to good ideas” takes aim at the lies we tell ourselves as business operators: that we fear missing out on everything that is good, that we think much of what is good is worth doing, and that we think that somehow chasing multiple good things at the same time is doable.
In reality, everything has some cost, and the number of things you can execute concurrently is extremely limited. Hiring that SEO expert is going to cost you time and energy; focusing on F&B is going to introduce a huge source of constant distraction into your company.
Focus is saying no to good ideas.
I prefer to say this as “What makes you successful is what you don’t do, as much as what you do.”
Russell Napier: The world will experience a capex boom
There are a lot of financial people continuing to highlight various situations in “never before seen” spots. This interview frames a view that wea re shifting to a very different economic environment, and explains the reasons why and how.
Back in 2008, the world economy came to the brink of a deflationary debt liquidation, where the entire system was at risk crashing down. We’ve known that for years. We can’t stand normal, necessary recessions anymore without fearing a collapse of the system. So the level of debt – private and public – to GDP has to come down, and the easiest way to do that is by increasing the growth rate of nominal GDP. That was the way it was done in the decades after World War II.
Interesting read, and the timeline is long.
Absolutely. I think we’ll need at least 15 years of government-directed investment and financial repression. Average total debt to GDP is at 300% today. You’ll want to see it down to 200% or less.
There is some potential to avoid he states, if we can figure out a way to drive real productivity up faster. Who knows where that could come from though.
How to Build Software like an SRE — willett dot io
Good list of practices to focus on resiliency of solutions. Some of these are challenging, like strict RPC settings. It is easy for teams to to just add retries and extend timeouts to work through issues, but it creates unpredictability during execution.
Federation ⌐◨-◨
This is a super interesting piece of DAO capability coming out of the Nouns ecosystem, which I have a lot of fun playing with.
For example, Lil Nouns DAO purchased Nouns NFTs with their treasury, giving them voting power in NounsDAO. With Federation, members of Lil Nouns DAO can collectively decide how to vote on NounsDAO proposals directly without any human intermediaries.
I’ve seen this directly and the DAO-to-DAO connection here has some interesting use cases.
Portfolio Allocations — Endaoment
Endaoment is one of the cooler crypto applications, allowing you to set up a Donor Advised Fund completely on your own using Ethereum. They’ve been adding additional features and they just now launched the ability to invest your fund assets into portfolios so you can grow the DAF after it is funded.
Journal
I first got COVID 664 days into the pandemic, and 294 days later I tested positive today, twice. This time feels very different than last time. I’m hoping it passes quick. I’m also isolating from the family since everyone else is negative so far. 🤞😷
Disney World Log Day 9
Weather: Warm and sunny.
Steps: 29,580 Most steps on any day!
- Check out of Sapphire Falls
- Drive to Polynesian
- Leave luggage at Polynesian
- Take monorail to Epcot
- Breakfast at Patisserie
- Kids ride Guardians of the Galaxy (3rd for Mazie, 2nd for Tyler)
- Ride Test Track
- Experience Figment
- Disney Pixar shorts
- Explore Canada, UK, Morocco, Japan
- Lunch at Via Napoli
- Monorail to Magic Kingdom
- Ride Peter Pan
- Ride Splash Mountain
- Ride Seven Dwarves Mine Train
- Ride Haunted Mansion
- Ride Space Mountain
- Monorail back to Epcot
- Amazing dinner at Tappen Edo in Epcot
- Monorail back to Polynesian
- Watch the fireworks over castle from the Polynesian
We got a family picture with Optimus Prime at Universal Studios today.
The Thingelstad’s sporting our Dr. Seuss Things shirts at Universal Studios today!
The Butterbeer Ice Cream is incredible at Florean Fortescue’s in Diagon Alley.
We found the Mystery Machine! Scoooooby Doo!
Lard Lad Donuts. 🍩
Having a Frozen Butterbeer at the foot of Hogwarts Castle. 🪄
Briefly
I love that Matt Mullenweg continues to push forward on the same core principles of software and the web. It blows me away that he is still only 38 years old. 🤯 → Open Source Podcasting Client – Matt Mullenweg
Simple and clean icons for whatever uses you may need. → Lucide
Allows people that hold the same NFT to create private chat rooms. Best used with POAPs to create a messaging interface between people that have the same POAPs. → WalletChat - Wallet to Wallet messaging for web3
Is Ether a security? A commodity? I think the answer is that digital assets are a new thing and should be addressed in their own regulatory framework. → The Block: CFTC and SEC chairs may disagree over whether ether is a security
Aside from these examples being in Typescript, this is a really powerful capability in Cloudflare pages. → Trying Cloudflare Pages: Best Server Tech Since cgi-bin - Perf and other stuff
Interviewing is always hard, and this is a good list of questions to use to get deeper insights into the candidate. → 33 Behavioral Interview Questions to Ask Candidates
Scouts can now get an NFT badge. Brilliant. → World Scouting launches first green NFT badge at JOTA-JOTI | WOSM
There are a number of apps working on creating communities around POAPs, this one looks interesting but is still very much in beta. → Pearl: POAP Inbox
I like it. → The Best Leaders Know 3 Things Average Leaders Don’t - Leadership Freak
Astronomy fascinates me and makes my head hurt at the same time. “18 teraelectronvolts of energy” sounds like a lot! 🤓 → Astronomers are captivated by brightest flash ever seen
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
Your object is to save the world, while still leading a pleasant life.
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About
I’m a fan of the lawn game Kubb and play on the Kubbchucks. Together with a friend of mine, we created the very first scoring & notation system for Kubb so that games can be recorded like a baseball box score. Here is an example of a game-winning turn 3ir 2f f - b b K!
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