Tag: Journal
May 19, 2022 / Journal

Think Again

When students confront complex problems, they often feel confused. A teacher’s natural impulse is to rescue them as quickly as possible so they don’t feel lost or incompetent. Yet psychologists find that one of the hallmarks of an open mind is responding to confusion with curiosity and interest. One student put it eloquently: “I need time for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.

The “I need time for my confusion.” quote is brilliant. How can we make time for our confusion? What are some ways we can process the information and then apply it when it is all sorted?
Journaling or blogging is a good start for me because it assists me in reflection. It is based on experience and driven by knowledge. Writing what I know or have learned about is refreshing. Even the fictitious Sherlock Holmes needed time to sort out confusion:

“It is quite a three pipe problem and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”

Sherlock Holmes, The Red Headed League

That does it for me the next time I have confusion. I’ll grab my tobacco pipe and have a think while I walk for fifty minutes to sort it all out.

May 19, 2022 / Journal

Homework

“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

– Lawrence Kasdan

This quote could also be used for any hobby endeavor we choose such as photography, crochet, micro electronics, Ham radio, etc.

A hobbyist is constantly researching techniques, going over best practices and learning how to apply them. You don’t just sit down at your keyboard and start cranking out paragraphs without research on the topic. You learn to see the world through the lens of your hobby and wonder how your craft fits into it, or what you can glean from the world to use it. A hobbyist is always shooting, writing, sewing, tinkering and noticing. A photographer is constantly tilting their head looking for angles and composition or color coordinating. Then act on it. A writer is frequently attaching verbal descriptions to a situation and then document it.

“To write, I first must world”

– Laurel Schwulst

Any experience that can be seen as possibly mundane suddenly has meaning, such as grocery shopping, sitting in traffic or walking through the streets. This means they are alert, focused, awakened and deliberately taking their findings to be applied later as homework. Though this homework is not graded, it does help advance our self-induced education, and we are all the better for it.

May 18, 2022 / Journal

Off The Grid

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

—Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK
May 18, 2022 / Journal

Media Log

“There is now a little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds, our lives are largely shaped by how we use them.”

Sam Harris

In other words, we are what we consume. I want to create a monthly1 maybe? log of my media consumption that tracks my passivity, and cultivates my creativity. Example: If I go further, I could map how reading a book sparks a desire to see a show based on it for a broader perspective. A podcast could point me towards a book I otherwise would have passed up.

I’ll attempt to track the shows and movies I stream (no cable service for me!), books I’ve read, podcasts/music I’ve listened to and the rare YT video I watch. Don’t judge me. I’ve been in bed for almost three weeks nursing an ankle issue(!) I may even expand this log to web links I’ve enjoyed and favorited for future use 2eventually. To kick off, I’ll just log what I can remember from April and May of this year.

Viewed

  • Suspicion- Apple TV
  • The Machine That Kills Mean People- HBO
  • Severance- Apple TV
  • Outer Ridge- Amazon
  • Devs- Hulu
  • Tehran- Apple TV
  • Frasier- Hulu
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds- Paramount
  • Star Trek: Picard season 2- Paramount
  • Star Trek: Discovery- Paramount
  • Star Trek: Generations- Paramount
  • Reservoir Dogs- HBO
  • The Book of Boba Fett- Disney
  • The King’s Man- HBO
  • The Batman- 1/2 in theater, 100% on HBO
Strange New Worlds

Read

  • Ghost Fleet
  • You Are An Artist
  • The Nowhere Man
  • Orphan X
  • Reliquary
  • Kaiju Preservation Society
  • The Return
Jurassic Park but bigger critters

Listened

  • Not Lost
  • iPhoneography Podcast
  • Dialogues
  • Focused
  • Mac Power Users
  • Music- I borrowed a lot of compact discs from the library to transfer music to my iPod. Remember those?
CDs and LPs

  • 1
    maybe?
  • 2
    eventually
May 18, 2022 / Journal

Notable

Interesting conversation at micro.blog about what people use to take notes. Me? 

  • Handwriting in notebooks (usually Field Notes™)
  • Marginalia in books 
  • Plain text notes on the computer
  • Voice recordings notes in .mp3 format (the plain text of audio) 
  • Begrudgingly- Bear Notes and Apple Notes

I want my notes to be future-proof and platform-agnostic.
May 18, 2022 / Journal

Recess

“Recess” 77mm ƒ2.8 ISO 50
May 18, 2022 / Journal

Domesticated or Wild?

Domesticated animal or wild predator? If you’re a stuck-at-home person, you may be considered as a domesticated herd animal. If you prefer to be out in the real world then you may consider yourself a wild predator, untamed.

This pandemic has me feeling more and more like a domesticated herd animal and less a feral, wild, untamed animal and I don’t like it.

Now I know what a predator in a zoo feels like and one can empathize.

May 18, 2022 / Journal

Technical Issues

If you think technology will solve your problems then you don’t understand technology – and, you don’t understand your problems.

Laurie Anderson

Find the best tool for a specific job and stick with it. This is better said than done for me since I enjoy trying all the new shiny tools to play with out there. I am getting better at this and narrowed them down to a select few for writing, post-process photography, etc.

May 18, 2022 / Journal

Invest Wisely

What is your book budget?

May 18, 2022 / Journal

Take Charge

“Nothing about the Internet is fixed, permanent, or inevitable. It is malleable, shape-shifting, and constantly evolving. And it increasingly comes with more responsibility and risks for guarding our own data and taking charge of distributing our words and images.”

EI Skyers

This sums up nicely what I’ve been referring to when it comes to owning your platform. Build a blog, delete your social media account(s), dump Google mail and get your personalized e-mail address, and distribute your words and images your way.

May 17, 2022 / Journal

Ventilate

Clean air boosts mental power.

May 17, 2022 / Journal

3 Rules

My three rules about existing as a hobbyist artist/photographer:

  • Just keep making pictures.
  • Your work will be seen when it’s ready to be seen.
  • Network gracefully.
May 17, 2022 / Journal

Photographic Form

“…taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you’re really doing is giving form—photographic form—to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you.”

Someone
May 15, 2022 / Journal

Test Post

Did I fix the xml-rpc issues that were locking out read/write access?

SUCCESS
May 15, 2022 / Journal

Peace Of Mind

I have successfully modified the xml-rpm.ini file to accept multiple requests from third-party software. That was bugging me for months!