Category Archives: History

The Realms Of A Lightworker

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Many years ago, when I was twenty years old I experienced a massive and radical awakening through what I later discovered was a Kundalini experience. What I never realized was what this single experience did for me, for the rest of my life. In the intervening years, into my mid-forties, I explored everything. I resolved, in a poetic way, that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living, so I explored as much as I could. I intentionally opened myself up to everything that would come to me, and that’s when the synchronicities began.

At first, they were curiosities, coincidences and happy accidents. I was beset by strange memorable dreams, deja vu, and a whole host of little oddities that I could comfortably ignore. My explorations included a bunch of discoveries, and realizations that not everyone starts their life like I did mine. From eight years old, I knew what my life purpose was, I wrote it out, and I never revised it since, and it’s been with me for forty years of living and I have no reason to change it now. At twelve years of age, I lost what little drabs of organized religion were impressed upon me by everyone else, and I lost it in the most amusing of places, the Church Library at the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, New York, which was my maternal grandmothers church, and the one where I was baptized and grew up frequenting on Sundays. Then zoom forward, seventeen years of age, and I encountered a medium / psychic fellow who helped me remember a previous incarnation. I was an Irish Catholic priest, mid 1800’s, and being inducted into that understanding was at the time just another amusement, but turned out to be fundamental for all the things that came afterwards. All of these events, little accidents, little nudges, all to place me on a certain path, and now that I look back in retrospect, it is hilariously obvious that I was always going to end up here.

Then several years ago, I started knowing things. I would be able to guess, with shocking uncanny success, if I was posed with a problem or question, and in the first heartbeat, that answer, which more and more started just happening all by itself would just land in my lap. After a series of self-exams where I would honestly test myself, test this gift, and after I was rocking nearly 100% accuracy I accepted it and let it become a part of who I am. I don’t use it intentionally, instead my instincts guided me to regard it as just another worthwhile input, pouring all of what the world had for me, all my perceptions, the events that happened in my life, all into a central pool and let everything mingle. I later discovered that this gift has a name, it’s called claircognizance. The ability to acquire knowing, gnosis, immediately without having to expend any sort of mental labor to reach the answer. I still had no idea what was happening to me, but I wanted desperately to follow all these breadcrumbs left for me, like a trail of M&M’s.

Over time, I picked up many more skills, through my young adulthood I picked up Tarot, Runes, and Bibliomancy and started to appreciate the more numinous and subtle shadings of existence. I started asking the big questions, the purpose of life, why we exist, and trying to understand this world that I exist in, what it means and my place within it. Then I had three lifelong lessons to cope with co-dependency. The first lesson was co-dependency in my family, then in my love life, and finally in my public life. Each time I thought I was done with the lessons to learn, only to careen into the next lesson. All of this set me up for my development, but also encouraged me to start addressing all the shadows in my life. Early traumas, sadnesses, and hurts that all goaded me into a kind of compartmentalization. Every interaction with others was jarring and painful, unpleasant and upsetting. Turns out, my nascent empathy was traumatized and as such, I created barricades around this, to protect myself. Everyone who wanted to grab a token and hurt me could line up, get their abuse jollies and I would just sit there and take it, stoically. It was just dissociation, which I came to understand much later in life. You can’t reach me if I’m not here, so I would leave. Leave within myself.

Years of this, of being the black sheep of my family, to being isolated and lonely, a permanent outsider, never once fitting in properly anywhere, never a part of anything, always browsing from outside and looking in on a world that seemed to be really quite wonderful, but also not for me. So I decided that I could just do it all alone, I was isolated and lonely anyways, nobody could understand the vast sweeping ideas that I was having, so I just determined to keep it all inside. That I could explore where I wanted to go, how I wanted to evolve in this lifetime and I would do it as a solitary practitioner. It felt right, I had mile-high barricades built around me, I kept my caring parts, my empathy, close to me, protecting it from a rude and nasty world full of rude and nasty human beings, and I resolved that I would live the rest of my days, cut off and happy. Happy in my separate peace.

And then, suddenly and unbidden, I started to channel. I would talk to myself, or more clearly, I would hear my own voice talking to me, and there was both messages and feelings to this exchange. I didn’t think I was losing my faculties, I felt like it was another gift from the Universe, maybe something like a consolation prize for an unhappy childhood, perhaps. And I accepted it, if it was going to be a part of me, then I would welcome it, add it to the chorus that was feeding into the central pool of experience building slowly within my mind. By accepting it, it doesn’t upset me, and some days the channel “pops open” several times a day, and sometimes it doesn’t for weeks at a time, it comes when it comes, it says what it says, and always the messages are advice, suggestions, and above everything else, this pervasive feeling of love and support. I can’t make anyone proud of me out there, but I apparently can for my channel, and whatever is on the other side of the line. For good or ill, I accept it.

Then after a while, with a lifetime of material building up within me, I started feeling this unfocused foreboding sensation. Like I could feel something coming towards us, from the future, something we were all blindly stumbling into, traipsing into. That’s when I tried to reach out, I didn’t know what sort of warning I could give, so I started to try to help people. My gift comes with a curse. The curse of Cassandra is the closest mythological story I can come up with. Gifted with knowledge, the gnosis from the claircognizance, but the curse that I would never be believed. I came to understand that I was still an outsider, but oddly enough, I started to also find people who could actually hear me. I think they would be proud to call themselves neurodivergent, and when I would share with them, they would hear me. It was jarring and shocking. The curse was always with me, making me othered, separated, an outsider with those that surround me, except for the neurodivergent.

Over time, I came to learn that everything that was happening to me was suited to a much greater purpose. Ticking boxes, checking off elements, and slowly evolving my way into becoming a Lightworker. I had this sense of foreboding still, and I carry it to this day, it’s still with me. I then encountered a dear friend who I never considered interested in any of this stuff, but he started helping me by saying the exactly right things, at the right time. The channel kept on telling me that someone would walk into my life, sometime very soon, and that they would help me to grow and open up. So, with my channel telling me it was the best path for me, and nudging me with synchronicities and unexplainable coincidences, I gave up my barricades and let each one of them crumble. This one person, this one very special person, enabled me to share all that I had become, all I had discovered, and everything that I had to say. This person could hear me, they would listen, and they offered kindness and support. I then started to dream again, I wasn’t remembering the dreams like I had, but I felt this irresistible pressure build within me. I wanted desperately to grow, to relax, to unclench. I knew exactly what would be my next step in my personal evolution, and that was that I needed to be Bright. As a Lightworker, I am told that I have a presence and a glow to me, perhaps I do, but I also feel this urge to actually try. Not just to accept what the channel and other sensitives and empaths share with me, but to grab the reins and pursue it. This pursuit has become one of the most exciting and passionate pursuits of my entire lifetime.

I know what I am supposed to do, my role in all of this. As a Lightworker I am supposed to inspire others. I am to follow a path of ever increasing emotional vibratory frequencies. I have to ask at every juncture, what do I prefer? What choice would lead me to where I want to go, this image in my mind of a world that we all want to live in. One built out of kindness, compassion, love, and respect. That’s my path, and as a part of it, I felt this overwhelming revulsion to all my prior low-frequency emotions. Hate, Fear, Anger, Rage. So I actively spurned all of those, at each juncture picking hope, kindness, compassion, and deep feelings of love over all the awful feelings. I was so angry, all the time, and I have come to understand that anger and fear are just messengers from beyond me, helping me to push myself towards the light. More than just abandoning the low frequency feelings, I embraced them, felt them, let them reach expression through me and as I did, they one by one faded out of my life. As it turns out, I was doing shadow-work, without even knowing that it was called that.

For me, in this world, I see the realm we exist in made up of three spheres. The lowest sphere is what my channel has termed “The Tar”, it’s hot, black, sticky, and has a breathtaking undertow that will grab you and pull you under with it. The Tar is a world of hate, fear, risk, suspicion, and scarcity of everything. It’s repugnant to me, and when I feel it, I try to steer away from it if I can. The next sphere is “The Dim”, and that’s our current world. You can see the light, it isn’t bright, but it is visible. You know what you should do, you see the path, you just need courage to walk it. We all live in The Dim, it’s the work-a-day world, the subsistence of living, the endless trudge of Same Shit, Different Day. The last sphere, the sphere I am working to enter, to champion, is “The Bright”. This sphere is one of kindness, compassion, respect, understanding, and is the home of my irrational altruism. That impulse to do something nice, unbidden, without any recompense because to give of myself in this way feels authentically vital.

I figured, as my journey started to take me down many unusual and out-of-the-way avenues, which I term my “woo woo” landscape, that really all of this, how I got here, what it all means, can all be reduced down to me simply wanting to have the Bright feelings, kindness, compassion, love, hope… the things that gain and generate and produce without working for it. A balm to the scarcity of The Tar, I suppose now that I have laid it all out for the first time from thoughts to words. My Lightworker nature just gives me a kind of vector, not only do I want to be more in The Bright, but I want to bring more of The Bright to everyone around me. All the advice that I get from my channel and all the sensitives and empaths that I have gotten to know on a personal level all give me little nudges. At first I wanted to scoop up everyone that I cared for, like a kind of shepherd of my flock as it were, and try to literally drag them into The Bright with me, because I didn’t want to lose any of them to The Tar. I could help them rise above The Dim, if I could just be strong enough, and convincing enough, to try hard enough. Once I had started trying, the channel and my sensitive friends all started to beat the drum to correct my path, another nudge. My place wasn’t to force or cajole or even prompt people, but instead to understand that what really matters in everything isn’t hard power, but soft power. Hard power is slapped down by Karma, where soft power is supported by Karma. So I shifted my approach and now I am concentrating all my energies on picking the right options in each juncture, and flowing from trying to make people hear me, to trying to inspire people. I can’t inspire without actually sharing myself with others, and so, this blog post was born in my mind and I write it out in an effort to be Bright and to shine.

The foreboding of what is coming is still with me. The world has sputtered and coughed in recent years, and there is this sense of something on the horizon that we are witlessly marching into, all of us. I don’t know what it is, nor when it is supposed to be, but I do know that I am right where I need to be. I need to tell people who I am, what I can do, and to simply inspire and shine as best that I can, being as damaged as I have been – and to rise above that trauma, all the reasons deep inside me that are screaming at me to not write any of this, to not share it, to not shine. If I don’t shine, I won’t be noticed, and I’ll be safe. If I ignore all of that, if I chase this Bright down and embody it myself, then I will shine, I will be noticed, and there might be risk. Then I smile and recall that I am to pick whichever choice is brighter at every juncture, and so, it’s brighter for me to share this with you all, knowing that an act of deep disclosure of a personal vulnerability is a monumental act of grace and trust, fills me with such joy and happiness. It’s scary, it’s frightening, and it’s also incredibly liberating! As with many things, when you are up close to a thing, all you can see is that thing, so this feels huge and monumental, but over time, and perspective that develops, this is just a blip, a pebble on the path, not a mountain.

The time for me to inspire, to learn to shine in time to reach my loved ones, if not more people, is running out. I don’t want to convince anyone of anything. I want to only share ideas, not beliefs. Ideas are fluid things, they can be endlessly revised and they don’t pick up the kind of baggage that comes with belief. Soon the foreboding event will happen, and I, and the other sparsely distributed Lightworkers will be standing alone again, but instead of being alone and separate from the rest of everyone, we are supposed to stand and guide. To be independent and strong, and to show the way.

That’s what occupies my time now, all my thoughts, every motive is bent to pursuit of this Brightness, and right now my channel is open, and whatever lies on the other side has this to share here, “The thing that scares you the most is quite often your next step. Be brave. Do your best.”

And that’s what all this comes down to. Do my best. My gift to give is giving itself. I am to give my shine to everyone, in hopes that they understand what it is that I want of the world. To leave the Tar and the Dim behind, to be Bright.

Walk in the Light.

Done with Higher Ed

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I haven’t had a University dream in a long while. We were moved to new offices and I went exploring. Trying to find the vending machines I end up on a service elevator that heads to a basement. I don’t have the oddly shaped key that lets you return so I leave and discover that I’m in the middle of service corridors and I start to try to get outside. I end up in another one way hall in the library with an odd platform that seems to have only one function, to crush people. Like a compactor. I get out of there and end up in a sub-basement and eventually find my way out through a construction area with metal and glass doors allowing only exit, not entry. A student looking terrified actually gains entry and runs the other way. I make my way out to a courtyard and run into a younger student fleeing an older man who is chasing him with a machete. Then I wake up.

I can say that the part of my life where actually being inside University buildings is well and truly over. Here’s a dream exploring that awful place. I woke up and laughed, “Yeah, not going there ever again. You don’t have to wrap it in symbolism.”

Higher Ed, hah. Done with that.

Favorite Things

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As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.

The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.

The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.

The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.

The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.

Dinner Designs

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Tonight we shall have Colcannon for dinner. I can’t believe that it took me this long to discover such a fundamental Irish dish!

This will give me lunches for the entire week. Also used up two gnarly segments of cabbage (with the oxidized parts cut away), and put another dent in the porkbellies that I froze weeks ago.

Enjoying a rather strong Bloody Mary as well.

Strategy to Inbox Zero

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Earlier in the week I had talked to a friend about my unmanageable email pile in my Inbox, about 78 pieces of email just sitting there, dwelling on the edge of my consciousness and weighing on me. Is there something there that I should take care of? Did I miss something important? So I started to chat and to do some research.

There are many strategies out there, and I adapted them for my own use, and so far it has worked out marvelously well. Here’s how I process my email:

  1. Create sorting folders. I created a host of new subfolders in my work email account which runs under a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. Because folders sort alphabetically, I forced the sort using number indexes and dashes.
    1. 1-Email Management
      1. 1-Today
      2. 2-This Week
      3. 3-This Quarter
      4. 4-FYI
      5. 5-Toodledo
      6. 6-Done/Sort
    2. 2-Help Desk
    3. 3-To Evernote
    4. 4-Barracuda
    5. 5-Syslog Alerts
    6. 6-ATP
  2. Then I sort the Inbox into the “Email Management” folder structure. If something has to be done today, it goes to 1-Today, and so on and so forth. My first consideration is the due-date for the item in my Inbox. If the item is purely informational, it goes into the 4-FYI box.
  3. I have rules set up in my email application, which happens to be Apple Mail. If I get email from Toodledo, my favorite To-Do system, they are moved into that folder. Anything from my Spiceworks Ticket sytem ends up in the 2-Help Desk folder. The messages from my Barracuda backup appliance end up in the 4-Barracuda folder, all my incoming Kiwi Syslog alerts end up in 5-Syslog Alerts, and finally the Advanced Threat Protection from Hosted Exchange reports get filed in 6-ATP. Rules are a huge part of keeping your neck above water when it comes to emails. There are a lot of purely informational emails that have zero urgency and very low importance, you want to keep them to go through them, but they don’t need to clog up your Inbox. Rules can help you sweep a lot of these away automatically. Always flag your junk mail, review that occaisonally to drag it for any false-positives.
  4. If an item is a request for help from work, and it didn’t come in as a ticket originally, those need to be pushed into the ticketing system. Thankfully Spiceworks allows you to forward emails into the ticket system by sending forwarded mail to whatever mailbox you’ve configured for the Spiceworks system. There are a litany of hashtag controls you can place in the email body to configure how tickets are arranged. My Cisco CUCM system is configured to also kick voicemails to me as attached MP3 emails, if they are requests for help, they likewise end up being forwarded with some extra flavor text to stomp down on confusion.
  5. If an item isn’t help, is urgent, is rather important, and has a clear date and time I will forward the email to my Toodledo using the configured email address on that system. Toodledo has a flag system that works on the Subject line. My preferred method is to alert people to events, include Toodledo as a BCC addressee, and then add at the end of the Subject line this text fragment: @work :1 day #{duedate} where the field duedate is whatever the date is that is relevant. Send it, forget it, it’s in the Toodledo list.
  6. The next step is to cycle through folders in Email Management, starting with Today and then reviewing all the rest. The Today folder is the action items that can be done today, or are due today. After completion, simple things are thrown away, but anything more elaborate or anything that touches on CYA gets sorted into the 3-To Evernote Folder.
  7. Evernote is a bottomless notekeeping system that I also use, and I leverage Evernote as a destination for all my CYA emails, and each quarter the extracted Sent Items from my Exchange account. I don’t trust Microsoft at all, I’d rather keep things in Evernote. Microsoft has a 50GB quota, Evernote does not have a quota. At the end of each week, I have a “Sharpen The Saw” task in Toodledo that I run, and a part of that is running along the structure in the 3-To Evernote folder, which includes all the emails across the branches of the company I work for, and all the vendors I have relationships with. Every Quarter, I search for all the emails for the previous block of time, soon Q1-2019 will be over so I search for all Q1-2019 emails and also move them into Evernote.
    1. The Evernote move is accomplished in two steps. The first step is to extract all the attachments out of the emails in my Exchange account, I use Mac Automator for that purpose, and here’s how it’s configured:
      1. Get Selected Mail Messages – Get selected messages.
      2. Get Attachments from Mail Messages – Save attachments in: “Attachments”
    2. I then run the Automator workflow, and all the attachments are put in a folder on my Desktop called Attachments. I then bulk rename them with their folder, a date such as 20190301 (YYYYMMDD), and then select them all and drag them into the right notebook in Evernote.
    3. Then I highlight all the relevant emails in my Mail App that I intend to send to Evernote, and I have created a General Service in my Mac called “Send To Evernote” which is actually another Automator Workflow, called “Send To Evernote.workflow”, that has this content:
      1. Run AppleScript: 
        1. on run {input, parameters}
 -- Slightly modified version of Efficient Computing's AppleScript: http://efficientcomputing.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/03/17/copy-email-message-in-mail-app-to-evernote-applescript/
 tell application "Mail"
  --get selected messages
  set theSelection to selection
  --loop through all selected messages
  repeat with theMessage in theSelection
   --get information from message
   set theMessageDate to the date received of theMessage
   set theMessageSender to sender of theMessage
   set theMessageSubject to the subject of the theMessage
   set theMessageContent to the content of theMessage
   set theMessageURL to "message://%3c" & theMessage's message id & "%3e"
   --make a short header
   set theHeader to the all headers of theMessage
   set theShortHeader to (paragraph 1 of theHeader & return & paragraph 2 of theHeader & return & paragraph 3 of theHeader & return & paragraph 4 of theHeader & return & return)
   --import message to Evernote
   tell application "Evernote"
    set theNewNote to (create note with text (theShortHeader & theMessageContent))
    set the title of theNewNote to theMessageSubject
    set the source URL of theNewNote to theMessageURL
    set the creation date of theNewNote to theMessageDate
   end tell
   -- move the email message to archive and make it bloody obvious
   set background color of theMessage to blue
   set acc to account of mailbox of theMessage
   move theMessage to mailbox "Archive" of acc
  end repeat
 end tell
 return input
end run

           

      2. It takes some time, but it efficiently moves the text parts of the emails selected into Evernote, using my default Notebook, called IN BOX.
      3. I select everything in the Evernote notebook IN BOX and move it to where it has to go, the destination notebook within Evernote itself. The messages all end up in the Archive folder, so then after that I hunt them down and delete them out of Exchange. Then empty the trash out of Exchange.
  8. In the end, I have a very slim Exchange account, a well fleshed out Evernote data store where I can search for all my email CYA details that I might need later on, and it also works on the web and over mobile apps as well. It’s very handy.
  9. It only took me a little while, maybe an hour tops to sort my Inbox and get to Inbox Zero. Then the cycling through the subfolders helped give me a handle on both urgency and importance, and I have a far better sense that I am actually on-top of my emails.

 

Amazon and GIGO

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I tried to buy a 1.3oz tin of Reuzel Beard Balm from Amazon. Twice they shipped me Blue Pomade. Why?

Because Amazon has a GIGO problem. Check out this snapshot I just took. The wrong one is on the left, the right one is on the right. Look! At! The! Labels!

Amazon will always error out here because they have totally mislabeled the entire stack supply at distribution! So anyone who orders this will get the wrong thing. Thankfully my barber will trade one for the other, so it’s fine. Honestly I should just buy it from my barber. Lesson learned.

Stupid dullard Amazon. You done fucked up now. Morons.

TWSBI Fountain Pen

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A few months ago while talking with a friend about technology the conversation turned to throwback items that we enjoy using. I brought up my fondness for fountain pens, which always seems to surprise people. The idea of a pen as a writing instrument goes back a really long time. Around the turn of the last century, there was an explosion in patents related to fountain pens and how they hold and dispense ink as you write. After my conversation with my friend, I was inspired to go shopping a little bit. I had some money that I set aside for small little gifts to myself that I had set aside over the past number of years. I never really touch it, so the money sits in my accounts. I came across a company that sells a highly regarded fountain pen, called TWSBI. As I got to browsing the options on Amazon, I looked at my Lamy branded Fountain Pen and realized that it was good as entry level pens go, but I wanted to move up a notch. TWSBI seemed a good option. The pen I selected was the TWSBI Diamond 580AL Silver Fountain Pen with the medium nib. I also got the “Broad Nib” as many reviewers expressed pleasure at writing with both.

580AL_1024x1024.png

TWSBI 580AL Fountain Pen

I have to say that writing with it is quite an experience. I started writing with fountain pens back in college and found that the way the ink flows beat any other sort of pen hands down. Plus the way the nib moves on good paper makes writing longhand a pleasure. It can still work on rough stock, but it struggles with the rough material, and there is more skritch-skritch-skritch while writing on some of the lowest class papers out there.

The Lamy I have uses a piston-convertible insertable tank, while the TWSBI has its piston tank built into the frame of the pen itself. I find that the TWSBI holds more ink, way more ink than my Lamy ever did.

Another little bit to note, fountain pens aren’t meant for left-hand writers as far as I know. The ink doesn’t dry fast enough for the way a lot of left-handed writers have to use a pen. Although I don’t have many folks I know that are left-handed writers, so there is no way to see if they could use it or not without making a mess of their hands with the ink.

If you have a little bit of spending money, this pen can go a long way in both its look and its function to add a little something to your workaday life. It won’t solve problems or anything like that, but it is something nice to have that a lot of people appreciate. I always chuckle to myself when people remark on how I use a fountain pen, and what I do for a living, which makes people think I should be keyboard bound. Sometimes old things peak, and iterations afterward are all downhill from that peak. In a lot of ways, just like Windows 2000. LOL.

Crocodile Apologies

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The media is starting to process the Cambridge Analytica misuse of Facebook data, and the story is only just getting some legs underneath it now. I see this as a reflective surface of the panic that we all felt back in November 2016, digging all that psychic turbulence back up again.

I want to focus more on Facebook itself. There have been several instances where Facebook has declared innocence publicly up until proof found, usually by journalists or investigators, and then when the truth comes out, Facebook stops, pauses, and issues an apology for their transgressions or mistakes. This reactivity is for me what lies at the core of my misgivings about the Facebook platform, and Facebook as a company.

In my opinion, it appears that Facebook is only chastened and contrite when caught red-handed doing something improper. I cannot trust a platform or a company that behaves this way. I honestly admit that I never really expected Facebook even to want to try to be upright and wholesome, I wanted them to, but all of this is similar to the feeling that I had when Google walked away from its mission statement “Do No Evil.” Facebook cannot be trusted.

There is no shock or surprise that Facebook has no tapeworm function available, only two options exist, leave everything alone or blow it all to kingdom come. I know there is a third path, the manual deletion of everything in the Activity Stream, but over ten years and quite a regular amount of use that is utterly impractical. Plus, I expect Facebook to be both capable and invested in retaining my data even if I think I’ve deleted it. Just because it no longer exists on the interface to me doesn’t mean that it is gone. I doubt thoroughly that even deleted accounts get deleted. I would bet money that they get hidden from view. It would not be in Facebook’s self-interest to lose any data they can get their hands on. I would also not put it past Facebook to also log every keystroke that goes into the text boxes on their site, so even if you don’t post anything, I would bet that Facebook has a record of what you did type and that you abandoned it. That they could record and store your unshared thoughts, indexing, and selling them even if you didn’t share. Logging into the Facebook site itself is a personal hazard to privacy. I have no proof of this last part, but I would fully expect a company like Facebook to do this very thing.

There is little that quitting Facebook will accomplish, since human personalities are quite fixed and constant constructs. We maintain that iron grip of control and Facebook has monetized it, and now, since Cambridge Analytica, they have lost it. Pandoras Box is open.

So why stop using Facebook then? Facebook must be caught being evil, which means that the intent is a stain that runs right to the core. I’ve abandoned Facebook itself because continued use is tacit approval of their offensive behavior, and if it makes them money through advertising revenue, and I’m a part of that? That’s personally unacceptable.

Wayback Machine: March 22nd

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On a lark I thought I would go into my www.bear-writer Journal and see what I was up to on previous March 22nds. Here is a little view:

2017 – The Kalamazoo River was quite aromatic. Funny enough, it was aromatic today too, in 2018. There is a paper plant on the river and their effluent supposedly comes out at 150 degrees Fahrenheit. This cooks the vegetation in the river and then that releases various organic chemicals. The practical upshot is, the Kalamazoo River smells farty.

Cisco also released a gaggle of updates related to CVEs linked to a CIA release last year. Ah, cybersecurity.

2014 – An article about Marriage Equality. How quaint. I still maintain that such a thing goes nowhere because rights that people can vote away aren’t rights, they are privileges.

I also wrote about the little shower-thought epiphanies that strike randomly. That you were working on a problem for a long time and you stopped “thinking” about it, but you didn’t really. And then on a day, a fine March day, the solution comes plopping out of your subconscious, with a neat little red bow tied around it, ready to go. I had one for Western right before the end, but I whacked that idea with a shovel and buried it in a shallow grave. I apparently also had a similar idea for Meijers, since I was applying at Meijer corporate in Grand Rapids as well. As the Dalai Lama is famous for saying, “Sometimes you don’t get what you want, and sometimes that’s an incredible stroke of luck!”.

2013 – Returning from vacation, waiting for a flight in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It’s been a rather long while since I did a vertical memory exercise. Another hidden gem when it comes to my journaling.

DayOne 2.0 to Evernote Migration

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Years ago I started to write a personal journal. Mostly the application I used was Microsoft Word, sometimes other text editors, and I’ve always been on the search for a better way to conduct my journaling habit. When I started using Apple’s Mac, I discovered Bloom Built’s DayOne journaling software. DayOne came highly recommended on many pro-Mac websites, so I bought in. Everything was going fine with journaling for a while, and then I noticed that the authors of DayOne were going to release DayOne 2.0. I eagerly jumped onboard with this update and forged ahead. The feature set was welcome, multiple journals, a more refined syncing experience with an online service run by the manufacturer (turned out to be AWS), and I was rather happy. The new syncing system also came with extensions for one of my favorite online time-savers, IFTTT. What more could I ask for?

Then the updates started. I noticed in my Mac App Store application that there was a listed update for DayOne 2.0, and I clicked on it, and the system acted as if there was no update present. A deviation from the expected behavior that I thought was some glitch or bug. So I dived into the problem and searched Google for hints. There were so many options in the Google Index that I figured one of them should solve my problem. In the end, I had completely roto-rootered the entire Mac App Store. I tried one last time, and still, DayOne 2.0 refused to update. I gave up, figuring that was something that maybe a reinstallation of the Operating System would solve because it was a behavior that was unexpected and this sort of thing doesn’t happen with Apple products in my common experience. So then, resistant to being beaten by a bug I forced the issue with the App Store and tried to download the update to DayOne 2.0. I discovered to my chagrin that the update required the next edition of the Mac OS, El Capitan. I have a vested interest in staying with Yosemite; I’m happy with my MacBook using Yosemite, so why should I upgrade the OS to satisfy an application?

The next injury came shortly after that. While using DayOne 2.0, I was rather miserable since the software acted so downright sluggish. I would type, and the application would just pinwheel or pause, and then in a blur, all my words would spill into the display with the same rate at which I type. I wasn’t getting the instant response to keyboard actions that I was expecting. I verified that other applications behaved properly, TextWrangler, for example, behaves perfectly fine to my expectations, so this isn’t a system problem, it’s a DayOne 2.0 problem. Previously to this, I had sprung for a copy of Little Snitch on my Mac to help me better control my network interfaces. Little Snitch had options to block an application from accessing the network. So on a lark, I figured I would test the sluggish application, DayOne 2.0 by blocking its network access with Little Snitch. It was like turning a lightswitch! The sync component was broken, showing a red exclamation mark, but man, text entry was back to normal, and tag entry was super quick as well. I didn’t have to wait for pinwheel after pinwheel to get where I was going. I wanted to journal, to get my text entered into the system for safekeeping and remembering. So for a while, I would use Little Snitch to damage DayOne 2.0 so I could use the application the way I wanted to, the way I expected to. I then wrote to Bloom Built and asked them if they would update the application for the users who didn’t want to march forward with El Capitan or Sierra, and declined. It was a longshot, but I figured it was in their best interest to address their application to the largest group of users, and that would presumably mean even people using Yosemite. It wasn’t to be.

So then after thinking about it for a while, and growing weary of the rather extended procedure to get Little Snitch to help me block DayOne 2.0’s broken sync routines, I made the fateful decision to switch my journaling to Evernote. Why Evernote? Because it was on all my devices, just like DayOne 2.0 (at least Mac devices), and Evernote already had integrations with IFTTT, so that was set. Evernote was something I knew, and the Evernote syncing routines were significantly better than DayOne’s syncing routines. Saying that has to be tempered by the fact that sometimes Evernote’s syncing routines also break, but the one-off hard-to-diagnose sync error is better than a broken sync routine that throws pinwheels when you type text or try to enter tags, as it is with DayOne 2.0. Evernote also has one extra feature, which wasn’t a part of the decision but now that I’ve made the switch, I’m glad for, and that is you can highlight text in Evernote and encrypt it using AES. This is something that DayOne 2.0 had as a promise, but they were by all appearances dragging their heels when it came to journal security.

I then started writing all my new journal entries in Evernote. That was very straightforward. However I left about 11,000 entries behind in DayOne 2.0. I started looking at the ways to get that data out of DayOne 2.0. There are a few options, the creation of text data, PDF data, HTML data, or JSON data. So I started extracting entries out of my DayOne 2.0 journal trying to import them into Evernote. What I wanted was individual entries to move over to Evernote and be individual entries there as well. Everything that comes out of the exporter in DayOne 2.0 comes out as chunks. One big HTML file, one big PDF file, one big JSON file, and one big Text file. There is no easy way to get individual entries out one-at-a-time unless you wanted to manually slog through every single entry. At 11,000 entries, that wasn’t going to happen. I have no patience for that. So then I started to look at ways to hack my DayOne 2.0 exports, since the people that wrote DayOne 2.0 didn’t have anything helpful, and all the other tools I found online were solely written for DayOne 1.0, something I couldn’t use. I didn’t have a Journal.dayone file, I had an AWS hosted JSON chunk. So the hackathon commenced. HTML was a giant headache, since there isn’t any way to easily split HTML up into chunks, syntactically speaking, at least not with the data that DayOne 2.0 exports. The PDF was a mess, one immense PDF and the text was in 8-point, it’d be fine if I was 20 years old, and didn’t mind slogging through a monolithic PDF file for a date. I even tried to hack around JSON in my limited way. I got JSON out to CSV but then realized that my instinct to make the CSV a data source for a mail-merge and mail-merge my journal out to individual entries was going to be a bust. Macs don’t do mail merge at all. I made peace with that a long while ago, not that I ever had any work that needed mail merge. So there was only one format left, the most basic format, text.

DayOne 2.0 spits out a journal into one monolithic text export file. So I have to figure out how to hack this text file up into pieces. I spent a long while with the bash terminal, screwing around with csplit and discovering the subtle differences between Apple’s implementation of csplit and GNU’s implementation of csplit. After a night of blind hacking, I gave up on csplit. Of course, by this time I had also given up on DayOne 2.0, it wasn’t the application I wanted anymore. My feelings had soured against the manufacturer, for only going so far with their export code and leaving the rest for me to hack out on my own. I was irritated and felt gypped that they didn’t just go one step further and include an “export individual entries” checkbox somewhere. But I got over my funk; I burned that bridge there was no reason to keep on complaining about it. I was moving to Evernote and Bloom Built was pretty much post-fire, all sad ashes soaked with water. Nights of searching and hacking on this monolithic text file and I eventually found the solution. The first step comes with Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

undef $/;
$_ = <>;
$n = 0;

for $match (split(/Date:\t/)) {
open(O, ‘>temp’ . ++$n);
print O $match;
close(O);
}

This little script is something I found through Google. I’m far too lazy to hack this out on my own if I’m brutally honest. The keyword in DayOne 2.0 entries in this monolithic text file is “Date:” followed by a tab character. Every entry starts with this key. So, export my DayOne 2.0 journal to Journal.txt, and then run this script against it: ./split.pl Journal.txt. Perl tears the file into perfect chunks ready for action. But the files are temp001, temp002, temp003, so on and so forth. Two lines then add the last crowning bits to each file. The first tacks on a txt extension and the second one grabs the first line of each file and makes that line the new filename. In DayOne 2.0, the first line is the date line. So now my entries have their dates as their filenames. This is just a compromise, I would have much preferred to have the dates preserved in the file metadata, but hey, you get what you get:

for f in temp*; do mv $f $f.txt;done
for f in temp*; do mv $f “$(head -n 1 $f).txt”;done

So for my test journal, I exported from DayOne 2.0 into Text, chopped it all up using Perl, and used the bash shell to hack the names to where I was happy. Then lasso the entire batch of files and drag them into Evernote. Once I had this done for all my journals, I closed DayOne 2.0 and left it alone. There is no point in trashing it, let it dwell on in a ghostly non-life for all I care. Evernote at least has proper behavior when it comes to text entry, tag entry, and the syncing routines are better. Plus Evernote will never abandon me the way Bloom Built did. They’ll never stop updating Evernote for Yosemite, or if they do, it’ll be so far down the pike that I get a new laptop and all of this is just so much foolish wrangling anyways.

In the end, I won. I won against an annoying choice made by a company I used to love; I won against a file format that seems so dumb, and I was able to shoehorn years of journaling without having to abandon my past or make it so annoyingly inaccessible that it would be the same as abandoning it.

If you find an interest in switching from DayOne 2.0 to Evernote, this is one way to do it. There may be better ways, clever ways to convert the JSON to the Evernote import file format, perhaps. But I didn’t care enough to slog through JSON, this is my way, in all its dumb glory. Of course, my tags in DayOne 2.0 are shot, and the tagging in Evernote is a manual affair, so that was another little compromise. Perhaps if I have dull weekends or evenings, I can hack out the tags over time. Having the entries and losing the tags is an acceptable loss. At least I no longer need to force Little Snitch to break DayOne 2.0 so I can use it. Heh, that’s still something that makes me shake my head in disbelief. That you have to do it this way is such a mess.