Shall We Begin? - Self.Newsletter - Issue #28

Stop Short Week Syndrome!

Have you ever noticed that whenever there is a short week (a Monday or Friday holiday of some kind, or Thursday+Friday, etc), the week before and the week after can sometimes fall under the short week excuse scheme, allowing for as much slack as possible in any interactions? You know you have heard at least, “well last week was a short week, so…” and then the inevitable delay.

It is even easier to get away with this after a move (and before), because where a long weekend or a holiday weekend each have some sort of fun or familial distraction (both, sometimes) associated with them, there are zero people who believe that moving (from one residence to another, for example) is a fun distraction that will leave you energized to begin a new week or month. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Now, as I type this on the morning of November 1 (normally I would have started on the weekend or sometimes before, today I begin and will send on this Monday), I am surrounded by boxes and minor chaos, I have a storage unit to move out of this week, and I am trying to determine how much available space I have to work with. I could very easily claim distraction for the rest of the month, and nobody would push too hard on that.

Yipes that would be bad. I am wont to procrastinate already (I will tell you more about that later), and with a legitimate road block to forward progress in most things (I mean for anyone, where a move is a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts) it is not difficult to imagine a December 1 with nothing done.

No thanks.

If you’re new here I will repeat myself for the few current subscribers and regular readers:

I have an out-of-band profile page (and recently, some actual posts) on a website called Buy Me a Coffee, where I post links to projects, newsletters like this one, podcasts, and other such things. I say it is out-of-band because it exists whether there are zero projects, several projects in progress, multiple projects launched, or whatever the case may be. That particular site also enables a show of financial support, if you are so inclined, and any proceeds flowing through there do indeed go toward the project coffee supply. Caffeine makes the world go round, especially in this room full of boxes and ideas.

Not yet on the BMaC profile, though, is a collaboration effort with a former manager and colleague of mine from the mid-90s, wherein we will tackle some interesting software and hardware projects (some I have mentioned, some not yet), which we may be kicking off this week if he makes it in to the Las Vegas area (we have several phone chats behind us at this point, but who does not want to visit Vegas now and then to talk about engineering projects?).

If you do click on that profile link above (without obligation to pay any money, it is still a central repository of project links), you will find some podcasts listed, and now that I am back to Vegas and in my new place (and not procrastinating), they will slowly and surely return to the internets, and I am really, really hoping that some guests will take some time here and there to join in the discussions. We shall see… here is one more link, this time with some imagery:

This week I am calling out Roy Wood Jr. as a truly funny and also insightful comedian, and while I have not yet seen it in its entirety, his most recent special on Comedy Central just popped out on 29 October (see the last video link below for his promo, after the excerpt from the actual show right before). This is not a paid promotion from me, I just appreciate his work and his sense of humor, maybe you will also.

I happened across this one while flipping through a stack of available titles at my local library (audio books to check out, literally, for my exercising and whatnot), and it has turned out to be a nice walk down memory lane. I worked at Netscape, for example, and many of the names are quite familiar from first person interaction.

Surely there will be some story time editions around my time at Netscape in my Quoggling Sand podcast and this has helped to push that along to the top of the list of tales to tell. Really interesting, whether you read about it, or remember it, or both.

Thanks for subscribing or at least reading this newsletter, whether in your inbox or online (did you know you can read them online? Visit this newsletter profile on the Revue website for the back catalog: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/danhugo ). While I often talk to myself, I do sometimes write these things down and mail them out to people, perhaps you are one of those people. Perhaps you will forward or otherwise share this newsletter with others of a similar bent?

One of my post-move adventures will be something I have been talking about and advocating for a while now: Self-Publishing. I have already stopped using Facebook (I still have at least two accounts which are not deactivated, but I do not log in and I do not check up on them frequently so pretend they are gone), I deactivated my Instagram account (maybe not permanently, yet), I deleted my WhatsApp account a long time ago, and I closed or removed a lot of other tools and apps and accounts over the last months, toward this end.

Keep an eye out here and perhaps on Twitter, for the eventual switch to my self-hosted, self-published presence on the internets, in which I hope you will participate in some way.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash