Naas Energy

2024-05-04 I'm still alive! Not to worry. I'm employed again and the Sabbatical was a huge success. Details to come... later. Eventually.

2023-10-10 Not already. Also. Someone on the internet has also had the idea you just had and looked up; they didn't "already" have it, as if once something becomes "Google"-able you're too late. Keep thinkin' what you're thinkin', and see where it leads.

2023-10-10 "To overcome one's idleness and take pleasure in necessary exertion has always lent wings to the intuition of the spirit." - Herber Von Karajan, on the value of rehearsing.

2023-10-07 Been listening to a ton of classical music lately, according to Last.fm. I think my favourite piece so far as been falsche Plastikbäume in D Major, Op. 16: I. Andante moderato by Radio Van Head.

2023-10-03 From dust born, as man become, to dust return.

2023-09-28 Added a surprise book to my reading list for October: Disability Visibility, a collection of first-person stories about the disabled experience. My city, Tempe, is hosting One Tempe One Book, a community read in October for this book, with various discussions and events surrounding disability awareness also happening thoughout the month. ¶ I'm excited to expand my worldview and discuss it with my local community, comparing our expierences. I've been fortunate to live a life where I can move how I want, love who I want, and in general be treated well and fair. There's blinders on my eyes that I didn't put there, but they are there regardless, and thus my responsibility to remove. Fortunately, learning awareness in anything new is always easy, because it's always the same: just listen.

2023-09-20 Reading On Satoshi - nutcroft, published in 2018, and this line stuck out to me: ¶ "Regardless, according to that birthdate, Satoshi would be 34 years old in 2009. His masterful knowledge of C++, cryptography and distributed concepts reveal only part of his genius. What he managed via Bitcoin is the use of existing technologies in such a way that he created something so radical that changed the journey of current technology. Everybody in tech now talks about blockchain. The reason is the work of one person. He devoted only 2 years of his life for this." ¶ Literally all of capital-C Crypto nowadays started with Bitcoin in 2008. I first learned about it in early 2013, a mere five years after it was developed. that was 10 years ago. Time flies.

2023-09-19 I'm basically "Matrixifying" (pronounced "Mah-trix-ifying") myself as I get deep into "plain text" this, and "plain text" that. I'm training myself to see the everything in terms of data structures and operations on that data. First my notes, then my tasks, then my schedule, and now my finances. all my finances. All in two days. I didn't have to figure it out myself, try and make sure I get all the edge cases; Someone else already did. I just have to follow the templates. In Obsidian!

2023-09-19 Corey a few days ago: "I should set up a budget again". Corey now: "Whelp I'm fully converted over to a plain-text double-entry accounting system that I can open and edit in Obsidian." I almost forgot the budget part!

2023-09-14 Forgiveness reverses the entropy that evil and harm cause.

2023-09-14 What I am doing in the next three months is going out into the world and accepting that I am ignorant about a lot of it, and letting myself be exposed to it in order to learn from the source, rather than from the safety and comfort zones of my home, my office, or the internet.

2023-09-12 Aim to be memorable, not unique. Unique is an objective term that has no meaning to our daily lives. Memorable is a subjective experience by those around us. People don't always remember unique. But they'll remember memorable.

2023-09-12 I've found myself filling my ears with classical music for the third day in a row. I listened to the same 12-hour Spotify playlist twice, and now switched to another one. It's nice to come in and out of focusing on something without thinking "Oh I should pause this so I can enjoy the song in a minute" and then stop listening for the next four hours because I forgot to play the music again. It's non-invasive. My favourite right now is Shostakovich's Jazz Suite Number Two, Movement Six, Waltz Two. At least, I think that's the name? Ahh, symphonic music, never change. I'll figure you out eventually.

2023-09-12 Tried the Blood Orange Charged Lemonade at Panera, and I did not like it. I'm going to stick to the Strawberry Mint Lemonade. Not to advertise, but Panera's Unlimited Sips trial has been great for switching me off my expensive Monster habit. Their charged lemonades are caffeinated, and I can get another one every two hours!

2023-09-11 I have to resist the urge to grab my highlighter and use it in books I'm reading at Barnes and Noble. after three months of replacing my news-reading with book-reading and note-taking, my critical thinking, interacting, and engaging circuits are almost base instinctual now! I guess I need to focus on "mental highlighting" and taking notes from my phone.

2023-09-11 When I told people I was started to think of myself as 60, I was completely serious. I start my mornings at Panera now! Sabbatical 2023 has begun, not with a whimper but with a bagel.

2023-09-10 Moved my watch charger to the bathroom because I realized it made more sense than my nightstand with my phone. I wear my watch while sleeping, so really the best time to charge my watch is while I'm showering, and the best way to remind me to charge my watch is by having the charger right there when I take my watch off in the morning.

2023-09-04 The first step in making your own path is to remove all influences and other people's definition for where your own path should lead. Remove distractions. Wait for the mind to clear old distractions out. Decide what your path is then come back into the world with perfect clarity and confidence about who you are and where you are going.

2023-08-22 "Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?' 'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him." - A Game of Thrones.

2023-08-21 Getting older is the process of having been around long enough to start seeing the patterns in life. When you're young, everything is a new experience. As you get older, you notice that the "new" things that happen, or the "new" things you do in life, are actually pretty similar to something you've already done and gone through. The trick to getting good at getting older is to start noticing the patterns as young as possible.

2023-08-20 "I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying." - The Shawshank Redemption

2023-08-09 Discovered this idea of having a "now" page on one's website that explains what one is focused on right now in their life. A page dedicated to the question "What are you up to nowadays?" So I set one up for myself!

2023-07-20 [3/3] "Perspective without a Person is dead." However, an explicitly-stated Perspective isn't enough to verify the humanness of content. AI can be used to create reasonable-sounding arguments and narratives out of thin air, in perfect grammatical English that makes it difficult to notice statements that don't make sense, especially in highly-complex or niche fields. Before reading an article, blog post, or even recipe (don't let an AI-made-up recipe ruin the Sunday roast!), check for a name and and dedicate thirty seconds to investigating the likelyhood they're a real Person. Once you read something it's hard to "unread" it, so the intent is to read as little non-human content as possible when I'm looking for genuine human Perspective and Information.

2023-07-20 [2/3] "Information without Perspective is dead." The opening-of-access of AI now makes it exponential easier for anyone, as quickly as 100 anyones, to write entirely unique copy or prose, in any level of English, and subtly slant it politically this way or that and into perfect college-level English. Only trust Information that is vocal about its position, where its Perspective intends to inform you from. This applies to blog posts, Facebook comments, TikTok videos, and anywhere someone is expressing a call to action or arguing a position.

2023-07-20 [1/3] Information without Perspective is dead. Perspective without a Person is dead.

2023-06-08 "Dear fellas, I can't believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they're everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry." - The Shawshank Redemption.

2023-05-12 Every group of three friends has a Hamlet, a Rosencrantz, and a Guildenstern. Have fun figuring out which one you are!

2023-05-05 (as I was falling asleep) a choose-your-own-adventure game but it's text files and folder shortcuts as commands

2023-05-05 Microsoft's Windows 11 audio team saw how the graphics team were rounding out all the corners and asked "how can we round out the system sounds?" My computer sounds like it's made of bubbles!

2023-05-04 Saw an ad in my Outlook.com inbox today. Not an adtertising email: An ad, by Microsoft, for Microsoft, in my inbox. Decided to install Thunderbird and move away from the Outlook web client, and I feel so retro setting up my electronic mailbox (and by setting up I mean logging into Outlook, I'm not self hosting my email yet) and backing up all 10 years of emails to my NAS.

2023-05-04 Updated Spotify on my laptop and once again they've mashed their mobile UI onto the computers. I'm just frustrated the default library is the same algorithm-powered listing as the mobile app. I just want something not to be touched by algorithms!

2023-04-28 When you close a YouTube tab of a video you didn't get around to watching, don't think of it at saying goodbye to learning something now. Think of it as saying hello to learning that new thing later.

2023-04-28 I really should have been a lawyer. "Naas" is too good of an ending partner name to go to waste! Imagine it: WilsonWatsonNaas. Or MasonAdamsNaas. PricewaterhouseNaas...

2023-04-26 "Oh how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world." - Hamlet, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

2023-04-23 Our lives are recorded and divided into what we do between logging into something and logging out of it, and what we do between logging out of something and logging into it.

2023-04-20 If you really think about it, the only thing that connects us to digital information is ASCII. It's the stirrup of technological history. The rawest, most base connection between our human Latin 26-letter alphabet and the binary universe-al one. ASCII-formatted text will be the longest surviving data in our society for the next 1,000 years.

2023-04-20 I've cleaned and organized my home so well that I've organized and cleaned myself out of knowing where anything is!

2023-04-18 A recommendation is an invitation into one's own experience, a "this lit up my brain like none other, I hope it light's up yours too!"

2023-04-12 It sure is a Lovecraftian, Randian, Victorian, Keynesian, Marxian, Johnsonian, Jeffersonian, Smithsonian, Chesterton, Kafka-esque world out there

2023-04-08 Heard this song in a SmarterEveryDay video I watched last night and felt in my bones that it was the most beautiful tune. It sounds like reassurance feels. I hope you do too :) Song is "The Dog" - A Shell in the Pit

2023-04-07 Meditation feels like going from being dragged on the mental highway behind a single thought, waiting for the rope to break to then be caught by the next though to be dragged by, to levitating above the highway observing each thought as it comes but ultimately not being caught by any in particular and letting them each pass as they will.

2023-04-04 Had a good day on the jobsite today. I didn't do too much, which was good because that means there weren't too any problems! Might even get out of here earlier than planned. My youngest brother is flying out to Phoenix this weekend to hang out for two weeks. Not sure what we'll do yet but I'm sure we'll find something fun!

2023-04-03 Just stumbled onto a little site/idea called Zonelets while reading about Neocities (the current host of this site) that better describes my thinking on social media and how this little blog differs from that. Might try to implement their site here, or at least recreate parts of it. Check it out!

2023-04-02 Whelp, after leveling up with all my flights for work back and forth to Nassau, The Bahamas in 2021, I've finally lost my Gold status with American. I don't want to say that "Hopefully I'll get it back this year" since that would require a ton of flying again, but... I hope I get it back! I already miss boarding with Group 4.

2023-04-02 On my way back to my jobsite in Pennsylvania after spending the weekend in Indianpolis for a family wedding. Had a great time seeing my family, aunts and uncles, and almost all my cousins, including one I haven't seen in... I literally cannot remember how long ago! Welcome to my extended family, L.M.!

2023-04-01 This is my very first Micropost! It's like a Tweet(tm) but 100% Elon-free, no character limit and no inane arguments. Allons-y!