Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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(CW: mental health, death)

Today I received the news that someone I didn’t know well but have known for a long time passed away by her own hand. Over 20 years ago she was a community steward and editor on a work related platform I spent a lot of time at. She was creative, intelligent, and our conversations were inspiring. Not all our conversations though, because at times we talked about our mental health. Me having resurfaced from a deep long depression shortly before that time.
After that professional community, over the years she would every now and then pop up in my inbox, my feedreader or messages. We chatted about tech, Fablabs, tinkering and 3d printing. Until about 9 years ago, although as E remarked today I kept mentioning her on occasion.

We never met. She lived in New Zealand, right at the center of Middle Earth she used to joke. We only ever connected over the open web, both about the same age, both from a generation privileged to see our world suddenly meaningfully widened by internet, through which we could channel our many interests and find likeminded people. Before the slop and silo’s.

E alerted me to a post from our mutual friend J sharing the news of her death, and J shared the backstory. A change in medications tipped her into the darkness of deep depression.

I’m sad. I cried. Not because we were close, we just shared affinity over a long enough period of time to make it mean something. But because I know how among people I know, their spark of brightness, intelligence and creativity is too often tied to the abyss of depression. Because she is not the first from the inspiring connections we made in the early 00s. Because I know into which place she was thrust. I’ve been in that place, and not once. That raging place of darkness, groping around in the ashes of everything, where nothing else exists or penetrates but that fatal way out. By coincidence and circumstance I found other ways to leave that place. It could have just as easily have been me who didn’t come back out again. Like others didn’t. Like she didn’t. It is so deeply sad.

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Working on a visual representation of the European data strategy landscape, integrated as well as alongside a textual representation this morning. It makes for a pleasant experience. The experience comes from what Zsolt Viczián’s Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian allows me to do, something I mentioned here earlier after the PKM Summit last March where Zsolt showed this.

Excalidraw drawings are basically text files describing the drawing, which are then rendered in the viewer. What the plugin supports is putting other text elements outside the drawing elements, and exclude them from the visual view. This creates two representations of the same file: one the drawing presented visually, one the text content outside the visual. Zsolt calls it the ‘flip side’ of a drawing, being a note accompanying the drawing. I see it more like two different views on the same thing. I have a hotkey (cmd arrow down) enabled to flip a note between both views.

Putting both views next to each other, and working in both at the same time, allows me a seamless mode of working, switching between visual material and text writing. As shown in the screenshot below.

Here you see the same note twice, opened in two tabs. The left side is the textual representation. It also contains an embedded auto-generated image from the visual representation but that is something I choose to do. Underneath that image you see some notes I wrote.
The right hand side shows the visual representation, a drawing of how I perceive the context of the European single market for data (at least, part of it).
I use the visual side as a Systems Convening landscape, to think about barriers, possible interventions, visibility etc. I use the text side to turn those thoughts into notes, potential actions, and links to other relevant material, or to write down things I think might be added to the visual.

Over the years my main problem with working more visually has been the lack of fluidity between the visual and the textual. Basically rendering them into two separate silos. Few tools solve that issue (Tinderbox is one). This means I usually favor the textual side of things. Where I use images, they are ‘frozen’ moments of the ever evolving textual side. The set-up this morning is not silo’d and here the creation of visual elements aids the text creation and vice versa, while I work on both in parallel in a single note. Both text and visual evolve together. Very nice.

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When I was at university and my electronic engineering student association got an internet connection at the very end of the 80s, we named our servers. In the early 90s we had Utelscin (a mix of the (sub)domain names for the uni, faculty and association), and Bettie. Bettie was the mail server, short for Bettie Serveert, ‘Bettie serves’, after a Dutch alternative rock band (the band in turn was named after the title of a book on tennis by Dutch tennis player Betty Stöve).

Just now I was going through some papers on language and thinking by Dr. Evelina Fedorenko at MIT’s EvLab, where I came across a statement they name the lab’s hardware after scientists and engineers in history who did not get sufficient credit for their contributions. I like that.

screenshot of EvLAb website stating they name hardware after scientists, with links to those names

Maybe we should do something like that in our company too, for undercredited people in the fields we are active in.

Bookmarked 23 What was 9/11 by Anil Dash

Anil Dash writes his yearly post remembering the terrorist attacks on NYC in September 2001. This time he looks back at how it was, how it felt to be in the city at that time. There is much in there that I recognise from how it felt when disaster struck my home town a year earlier in 2000, and its echoes when I visited NYC shortly after 9/11.

The solidarity and drawing together of people, in contrast to the military in the streets to prevent an expected escalation that really is not how people respond to these things.

The role of ‘imaginary’ online and remote friends reaching out that over time turn into key members of your social environment, something I very much tie to that early web scene of the 00s.

Feeling compelled to go outside, into the streets. E and I simply had to go out and found ourselves walking towards the towering column of smoke in our town, despite ash and glowing snippets floating down on us in our street, and confused people coming towards us heading the other way.

In our case the shockwave of the blasts that our bodies experienced that forever drew a line between those who felt it, and those who were not in the city that day. That shockwave still lives inside of me, as I wrote 20 years after the fact.

And the smell, that smell. E and I visited NYC 3-4 weeks after the attacks, visiting a friend. Something planned earlier as a mere tourist visit had become checking up on how he was doing. Standing at ground zero, it was the smell that suddenly and overwhelmingly catapulted me back to a year earlier in our hometown, and brought all of it back in tears.

How Anil Dash describes how that was turned into something different, into war. I was at Penn station when the news broke that the bombing of Afghanistan had started. A visible and audible ripple went through the crowds in the main hall, people fell to their knees, people broke out in tears. News camera crews suddenly appeared. Only when we sought out a tv screen, in a sports bar, it became clear what just happened.

The similarities also took the shape of the exact same rumours going around in NYC and in my city the year before to try and make sense of the senseless. It taught me how rumours and conspiracy fantasies are a coping strategy. A way to square the enormous impact of something on oneself with the banality of daily life going on. I wrote a paper about it for my philosophy of technology studies at the time, using Heidegger’s hermeneutics. That was my own coping strategy, I suppose.

Anil Dash ends with “If you’ve ever been told a story about 9/11, ask that person how it smelled. Ask them the greatest kindness that they saw. Ask them how they changed.” They’re good questions, not just about then, but also in general.

I finally got around to, and succeeded in updating my and E’s VPS-hosted Mastodon instances.

For about half a year I wasn’t able to update Mastodon, because the automatically generated back-ups before the update were too big for the allocated disk space on the VPS. My VPS runs Yunohost, but the options in the web interface for admins are somewhat limited. One way to get around the lack of storage was mounting another disk, but that required command line access but I couldn’t ssh into my VPS because of a missing password. Making the back-ups smaller by deleting stuff from the database(s) also required the command line. I didn’t see a route out of that and in my burned out state these past 4 months I left it at that.

Today E mentioned she thought that her Mastodon instance was slow. Logging into my Hetzner account, where the VPS is hosted, I noticed that the type of server I have was being deprecated. I was invited to rescale the server. This was an easy option to add a bit of computing power, and extend the disk space. That done, I could update the Mastodon instances. So my need to find a way to the command line of my VPS no longer existed. That of course was the moment I noticed an option in the Hetzner interface to directly access the console of the VPS.

The Mastodon instances are up to date, I have enough disk space, and now know where to find the command line interface.