Combatting FOMO

remember how in 2009 or 2010 I was attempting to almost phase out E-mail usage (unless or wherever it was absolutely necessary, e.g. account creation/verification). It didn’t exactly work, but I did reduce my usage of E-mail.

Some years ago I made a habit of checking my E-mail only about once a day (unless I was expecting some very important and/or time-sensitive message from somebody).

This year I sometimes don’t check E-mail for a couple of days straight. I then realise I didn’t even miss anything critical. Put another way, there would be no benefit associated with checking E-mail more frequently, except maybe FOMO.

“Today I catch up with email,” I told someone yesterday, “and I think the above is outdated?”

I saw a message from 3 days prior. “Sorry, I don’t check email every day (anymore),” I said.

No harm done, and had I checked messages all day long I’d basically spend a lot of time triaging/gardening SPAM. About 90% of the E-mail I receive is SPAM.

Even if there was no SPAM at all, I’d probably still choose not to check E-mail every day.

Society, in my experience, compels people to be “wired” all the time and do everything “in real time”. That prohibits focus and obstructs concentration.

If you’re not a “999″ operator, then you probably need not see or respond to everything urgency.

We’re drowning in seas of words

‘ve been typing and keeping personal stories since around 2002. It started when I sat at my office in Manchester Computing with plenty of time to pass, not much to do. Some of those stories predate that habit by a year or two. I thought to myself, one day I can turn those notes into publications, even though books were still more common at the time.

The world has changed somewhat since then. Quantity of text does not matter because of serial sloppers who do not value quality and who conflate plagiarism with “intelligence”.

People’s stories that are authentic still have real value; a high quantity of computer-generated garbage ‘stories’ will be culled and put in the digital ashtray sooner or later.

A passing fad of mass plagiarism, not “intelligence” by any stretch of imagination

t was summarised neatly by Ruben Schade this week. Slop is uneconomic, we’ve seen scams like these before, and it is moreover a legal minefield, as recent court disclosures show.

The companies that do this know they’ll never earn any money, just lose a lot, and since it’s copyright infringement there are also major legal bills (or settlements) to consider.

The old pool

think today’s weather qualifies as summer. Maybe it’s one last chance to sunbathe. I took advantage.

We got some good news this afternoon. GNU/Linux replaces Windows and Microsoft is in general perishing while lying to shareholders about the potential of slop.

At this point in time it seems like Microsoft’s decline is truly irreversible.

Simple is funner

think there is a common perception or this widespread belief that when people are young they want to collect, to publicly boast about it, to keep accumulating “stuff”, then flaunt to peers and strangers. They seek affirmation. It’s not so gender-dependent a phenomenon and it has not much to do with “nesting” or “hunting”. It’s about insecurities and compensating for them.

So they hoard, they want big and complicated (extensive) things “in volume”. That is particularly applicable to habitats (homes). When people get older and more mature they may wish to give things away, want to move to smaller places for a simpler life with less maintenance to be done, less to worry about (less inside one’s mind).

The age factor is less to do with having to give things away at death; it’s not much to do with the physical difficulties of keeping intact large places or many rooms/units (sometimes with garden).

In practice it seems to boil down to mindset or mentality. The consumerism brainwash has less sway on older people, who learned from experience they can no longer conflate ownership with happiness and that having more than the minimal (bare minimum) required, e.g. life-sustaining medication, can become a burden.

What’s the point hoarding 100 pairs of shoes when you have only 2 feet for instance?

In geeks’ spheres it is the same. Young people install a lot of things (I was guilty of this too) and as they grow older they consolidate and try to simplify or cement workflows.

The human mind does not work well in parallel. It is an inherently serial machine, with ’round-robin’-type thinking relying on paper notes or memorisation.

Less is more (productivity).

think it was in May of this year (early or mid May) that we ‘branched out’ the fish tank to another one, a shells-dedicated tank. It has since then expanded to a much bigger tank, which I found discounted by about 96% (lower than RRP), it just needed a lot of cleaning and sanitising. Today, two weeks after we added some danios and testas, we can easily see they have grown and have become accustomed to their new environment. We initially had a couple of cardinals, but they could not survive the conditions, I’m not sure why (maybe pH level, but probably something else; size could be a factor, they are very fine). Unlike last year, no fish just mysteriously ‘vanished’.

At the moment I am chasing a heater, as noted some months ago, and look for something that costs a pound or a couple of pounds. I saw about 4 in-water heater this past Sunday (a vendor I know and knows me too), but those were too powerful and way too expensive. We still have some time to go before it gets too cold for tropical fish.

Maybe we can crowdfund this.

Looks like something big and important

t is very nice and sunny today (clear blue skies, unlike what the foolish forecasters said) and it seems like the official opening of the coffee shop at Mayfield is happening, so we went to feed the birds there and enjoyed the sun after a hazy start.

The work on the gardens seems finished now, so after the official openings (and subsequently removal of fences) we will sit there to relax.

There were large cameras and giant microphones there, along with large speakers, pavilion, and what seems like press people. Maybe the opening is broader than just the coffee shop’s. There was recently a Banksy exhibition there.

Photos from an hour ago in that area.