Locking In The Move
I haven’t moved in 8 years, but I’d like to think I remember one or two things about the process. The one thing I’m sure I recall is how much fun it is to place all of the things that are presently in familiar locations into boxes or other receptacles and stacked up for transport to some place else. That was sarcasm.
I have settled on a moving vehicle and a place to store things between the big move-out and the big move-in (a few weeks later), so that’s almost like being done with it! Not really, but certainly dialing in the third parties early makes the individual work of purging and packing a bit easier to do. A month from today I will be moved out and on to the next things…
Projects and Collaboration
I’ve been attempting to execute weekly sprints as a way of advancing some project progress and passing the time (something we’ve all become expert at by now), and while I have made progress, it isn’t as much as I’d like. Why? Sprinting is best done in a nice chunk of contiguous time, perhaps with collaborators, and it turns out that a sudden injection of new, time-sensitive tasks like finding a new place to live, purging and packing, and all of the other stuff involved with a move are just one example of where this breaks down.
While I was working at Intel, I found living in Las Vegas to be interesting mostly because I was the lone Intel employee here, which meant zero chance running in to colleagues out and about (quite the opposite in Hillsboro, Oregon, for example). Despite the fact that the Downtown Project was in full swing around the same time, I found it difficult to cross paths with collaborators (this is a topic to explore more in my FFS Talk podcast… I’ve touched on a few aspects of the DTP there, though irony is making it difficult to find a guest or two to bounce some discussion off of in that regard). A lot of the interaction I was able to take part in during the weeks (I tended to be away at hackathons on weekends, or on extended trips to Intel sites for project development in labs) tended to be more social, which is absolutely essential, but not sufficient. More hackathons in Las Vegas maybe (there were some, and I’m not discounting the actual technical development efforts that were going on…
For the time being, I’ve turned my attention to virtual collaboration where it enters the picture, but mostly solo development. This really slows down all aspects from ideation to implementation, but something tells me we all need to get more used to virtual collaboration in a variety of areas, not only software development. Like internet access in the US, though, asymmetric interaction is the norm, which I think might be a bad thing getting worse. Prove me wrong.
Newsletters and Social Media
I used to write more for my own blog-like efforts, I still maintain my Medium presence (I really need to write more there, I’ve been slacking big time), and lately I’ve been using this newsletter (and the Thursday edition, via Revue) to test out the newsletter idea and these two platforms. So far, I don’t really love either and since my following hasn’t really exploded, moving toward a self-publishing model shouldn’t be too difficult (that is, eventually moving all newsletter mailing lists inside, so to speak).
On top of this, I’ve been seriously reducing my social media interactions, partially because of the misinformation and complaining that have taken over (I’m slightly guilty there, as most of my Twitter posts at this point are to my Vegas Covid thread, since 17 May). While I have not deleted my Facebook accounts, I don’t log in to Facebook more than once a month, and it has been less than that… Instagram really needs to move to the back seat and I’ve found myself looking at posts rather than making my own there, and I’ve already mentioned Twitter.
Having removed the associated applications from my mobile devices, I can say I do not miss the noise, and every time I hear about CENSORSHIP I wonder why so much of our persona is handed over with abandon to social media platforms (or whatever we call them now)… while I do consume a lot of YouTube content, I have to think competition is a matter of resources, not of want and need.
This is where a collaborator or three would come in handy…
How Funny
Let’s keep it simple this week, the one and only, riffing for a few hours over a decade ago, but funny and insightful nonetheless. No introduction needed:
Buy Dan a Coffee…
That is my subliminal monetization scheme, what do you think? Seriously, though, I’ve been experimenting with BuyMeACoffee.com as what I call an out-of-band link blog of sorts, and a minor monetization pathway for those who might otherwise do as the name of the site suggests (this used to be a thing, certainly when I was inclined to visit a coffee shop in the Arts District here in Vegas, for example). I also signed up for Ko-Fi to give that one a try.
There is no obligation to actually spend any money there, but I do have a profile page with links to current and upcoming projects, podcasts, and newsletters (and other stuff?), not to mention some actual coffee-related items as posts there. Experimentation is a good thing, to find out what works and what does not, and this applies to the platform as well as the user (me, in this case). I’ve noticed lately that the BMaC twitter account has been extra active, especially now that they launched their companion site, bio.link, which I have also tried:
There is absolutely nothing magical about that new thing they’ve made, other than the fact that they made it and launched it and they’re using their existing user base from BMaC (of which I’m one, as I’ve described) to engage as first users. There are links to not only my BMaC profile, but also podcasts and newsletters and whatnot, but traffic to that bio.link profile is nearly zero so clearly it works great…
On that optimistic note I will end this Monday Newsletter and wish you a happy week, safe from infection and disease. Cheers!
Artwork Attribution
Photo by Frans Van Heerden from Pexels