Friday, January 9, 2015
Today I installed an extension for Chrome called Block Site and decided to block any site I encounter that has a news headline that contains hyperbole (e.g., Business Insider: "LG's New Washing Machine Is The Most Exciting Thing To Happen To Laundry In Years"; LAist: "Worst Nightmare: Woman Plunging Office Toilet Discovers A Boa Constrictor"—this is certainly a bad nightmare, but obviously not the worst possible), promises an article that most probably just wastes my time (e.g., Bored Panda: "These 5 Women Are The Last Living People Born In 1800s" and "12+ Awesome Pet Cones That Your Pet Will Hate Even More"), indicates a listicle (e.g., Bored Panda: "These 5 Women Are The Last Living People Born In 1800s" and "12+ Awesome Pet Cones That Your Pet Will Hate Even More"), or is clickbait (e.g., Dangerous Minds: "Just how beautiful was Karen Carpenter's voice? Listen to her isolated vocal tracks and find out"; TED: "What your doctor won't disclose"; Psychology Today: "Myths About Circumcision You Likely Believe"). In addition, I'm unfollowing on Facebook those that make these appear on my wall, which is by me following them and them sharing it directly or by liking it on someone else's wall. I hope that I will end up with only personal news that my friends create themselves, but I expect that by the end of it I will have unfollowed every Facebook friend I have. We'll see how this experiment goes. In examining my own posts, I was very surprised to find that I follow my new rules extremely well. Most of my posts seem to be my own photos. Extreme headlines require extreme corrections. Another scourge the web has birthed is poor editing. I'm not yet ready to block any site that contains grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors, but it's just so sighworthy that attention to the correct use of language has plummeted in the last two decades (coinciding with the birth of the web). Breakfast at home: Patrick prepared for me one egg over easy, one slice of toast with coconut spread, one hash brown with ketchup, and one sausage link. Water to drink. Began reading Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs by Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre, which is probably an appropriate followup to The Circle by Dave Eggers. Rode Muni to West Portal. Walked throughout West Portal and a little bit of St. Francis Wood. Ran an errand at the hardware store. Rode Muni home. Scanned and corrected an old photo from Patrick's childhood. Decided to abandon Evernote for sharing a grocery list with Patrick because it doesn't sync to the cloud immediately like Notational Velocity / Simplenote. I was at the hardware store and didn't have access to the data I entered in Evernote at home. My workflow: open Evernote desktop application, add data, close Evernote. I expected it to sync automatically before closing, but I later found that there's no automatic way of doing this immediately. You either have to manually ask it to sync or you have to wait at least five minutes before closing Evernote. Or, you have to use Evernote via the web, which is a much slower process since their "remember me for one week" feature while logging in did not work for me. All this doesn't work for me, so it's back to Notational Velocity and Simplenote. I stopped reading Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs after flipping through most of it. It just didn't interest me as much as I thought it might. Dinner at home with Patrick. We grew tired of our online ordering options for restaurants, so tonight we ordered by telephone from Roti in West Portal. They promised delivery in 45 to 60 minutes and delivered in a little over an hour. I made some changes to our home network, got everything working the way I wanted.