Photo: Davide Cantelli

Paradise forgotten, paradise remembered

I ended May with a flurry of writing activity: seven posts in this blog in five days. And several posts in others, too. That’s the way that I want things to be.

Then I became obsessed with making the next round of improvements to my vastly improved writing practice. What could go wrong?

I just said it. I became obsessed. I completely forgot the last significant insight I’d had: the one I wrote about in Jocko Wilnick’s three principles for success.

Discipline.

I forgot about discipline.

Now I remember.

And I remember some of the other things that I had learned and wrote about that week—but only because Past Me wrote about them. Thank you Past Me! If I had to remember them on my own, I don’t believe I could have.

So, Future Me, here’s what I aspire to help you become: disciplined.

I could probably acquire a new habit reasonably quickly if I already had discipline.

But I don’t.

But how do I bootstrap discipline?

I have an idea, and I’ll update this post and link to a new one about it if it works.

No link? No discipline.

Yet.

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Awesome development, Redux

Awesome Development is a blog that I started in 2012, posted to sporadically—a total of 23 posts —and now I’m determined to resurrect.

Why?

Building software tools has been my passion for years. The tools that anyone with an internet connection can get for free are astounding. And they are getting better every year.

I want to document what I learn—as I learn what I need to learn—to build the tools of my dreams.

Because I have learned that writing about a thing forces me to understand it better.

And because leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs may help the next guy—especially if the next guy is Future Me.

If you are interested in such stuff you might want to Subscribe to Awesome Development by Email

You might also want to Subscribe to 70 Years Old. WTF! by Email

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Blogging, the current state of my practice

In this post, I am going to recap the current state of my blogging practice, and some improvements that I hope to make.

This is a long, technical post, mainly for the benefit of Future Me, and the benefit of Present Me as I solved these problems.

What I do now

Here’s the way things work right now.

Open my tabs

I start by opening the tabs that I’m going to use for writing a particular post. I blogged about that in this post.

Go through my checklist

My blog template contains a preflight checklist. It’s all the stuff that I ought to have completed before I start composing the blog’s content. In theory, I can march through the process without going around in circles, as I described in another post, written, but not published.

One pass through, and I am done.

The checklist is in Markdown format so that I can use this convention:

“`markdown

• [ ] this is unchecked
• [x] this is checked

`“

Which will render this way:

• [ ] this is unchecked
• [x] this is checked

Enough intention

The first item on the checklist is to make sure I have enough intention to finish the post. The test at each step is: do I predict that I will finish.

Clear picture

I need to make sure that I have a clear picture of the intended result. If it’s a long post (like this one) that means that I need to outline.

So do I have enough intention to outline?

Do I predict I will complete it?

Research as needed

As I’m writing the outline, I do the research I need and drop links and quotes in the Google Doc.

I’ve got a research inventory stashed in Dynalist, and Onetab, and Pinboard and Evernote.

During the research and composition phases, I can use a Chrome extension called TabCopy. It creates formatted links in the clipboard. I can choose to do it for the current tab, selected tabs, or all the tabs in the current window.

Then I paste them into the Google Doc.

If I want to clip some texts, with a reference back to the original URL, I can use the Dynalist Chrome extension, which will give me a linked quote like this:

Maybe there’s a connection. Perhaps not. But right now I’m going with maybe there is.
From 70 Years Old. WTF!: Search results for predictive processing

There are parts of this process I can automate later.

Compose in Docs

Now it’s time to compose the content in a Google Docs, using voice typing. Like I’m doing right now. Or was then.

As I complete each section, I’d like to review it and make sure I’m on track quickly. I haven’t yet developed the habit of doing that.

The check-in process will come later.

Clean up in StackEdit

Once my draft is complete, I copy/paste the entire Google Docs content into StackEdit.

StackEdit turns links in Google Docs into Markdown, using the format:
`“

text to appear

`“
Now everything is in plain text, and I can edit it in Grammarly.

I had been using the Chrome extension Copy as MarkDown to give me tab links in Markdown format, but StackEdit will convert the content that TabCopy puts on the clipboard.

Clean up YouTube links

YouTube links look like this when captured with TabCopy

“ [An interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNRgaCkiUA&t=756s)“
They won’t render on the page. To do that I need to use the magic number at the v= parameter in an embed embed URL in an iframe, like this:

<figure class="video_container">

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/enMumwvLAug" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"

width=100% height=300 > </iframe>

</figure>

### Check in Grammarly

Once I’ve got a clean post in StackEdit, I copy/paste the source into [Grammarly](https://grammarly.com) for spelling and grammar checking.

### Another check in StackEdit

In case I screw up some of the Markdown while editing in Grammarly, I can copy back into StackEdit for a quick visual check.

### Into blogger

Next, I copy/paste the content into the Blogger new post tab.

Once it’s there I do this:

1.  Set the title (and remove from the document)

2.  Set the tags (and remove from the document)

3.  Render as markdown using [Markdown Here](https://markdown-here.com/)

4.  (Optional) Schedule the post

And finally...

5.  Click Publish


## Some other bits

### Screenshots

To capture part of a screen, I used to have to crank up a Chrome Extension ([Nimbus Screenshot](https://nimbusweb.me/) for example).  After I’ve selected the area that I want, I download it. Then upload it to a shared folder

On my Google Pixel, I can use my Pixel Pen to capture the area that I want. I highlight the area and automatically downloads it to my Downloads folder.

Now I can upload it to my Blog Images Google Photos Album. [A link to it is here](https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOV8cTgthOV571-2hmuRzG74MFX9HJT2-Ad489D).

There’s probably an API for that. Later.

### Blog photos

To get the URL for a Google photo, I go to the Blog Posts folder, and click on the image I want and open it in the browser. The URL in the omnibar is NOT the one to use. Instead, right-click the image and choose “Copy image URL.”

If you put a photo in a Google Doc using Insert -> Image -> By URL and then use that URL. When you copy/paste the Doc contents into StackEdit, StackEdit will convert it to Markdown format:

```markdown

![](image URL)

with the text blank.

You can also paste an image URL into StackEdit using ctrl-shift-g. If you select some text, then that text will be used as the image alt-text:

![text you selected](image URL)

Modified image format

You can do that according to the rules in this postenter link description here.

Copying to blog photos folder in drive

I set up links between the Download folder and Google Drive Blog Post folder:

ln -s /mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/Media/Blog\ Photos/ blogphotos

ln -s /mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads/ downloads

So from the Linux shell, I can copy files. For whatever that’s worth.

Blogus interruptus

If I can’t finish a post in one session, I’d like to preserve the tabs without cluttering up my browser. So I can use the OneTab extension to save all the tabs, and then later restore them all at once.

What happens next

Here are some things I want to add to the project—in no particular order:

• Open windows for transcriptions
• Combined editing tool with
• Voice typing (with correction of words like quote/endquote and so on
• StackEdit (JS library)
• Grammarly
• Programmatic replacement of common spellings
• Timeboxing and time notifications

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Automating AutoBlogger

I started out trying to write a post. Failed.

So I worked on writing a post analyzing my failure.

Failed

Actually, not exactly.

Writing is thinking. I thought a lot about why I had failed. And at last understood why I hadn’t finished the first post, or the second, and many others.

So that was a win.

Why I failed

I had an idea but didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to write. So I kept on writing thing after thing, exploring the space, hoping I would find the answer.

I didn’t check to see if I was on track—which would have been hard since I had no track: only a destination, and no road to get there.

I thought some more and looked for other things that often went wrong. Like starting to write something, but not having enough intention to persevere.

I decided that a checklist would help me. So I designed one.

Then I realized that this was not the first time I’d written a blog post complaining about not writing and analyzing my failure to write.

So I went an found the earlier ones I’d written.

Holy crap!

Failure -> learning; learning -> forgetting

I looked back over the many posts I’ve written about my blogging failures. Each one captured a bit of wisdom.

I’d learned from my mistakes. Yay!

Each post had a bit of wisdom, hard-won. And then forgotten.

Or forgotten by my meat brain. But I’m a cyborg. I’d retained the memory in my cyber brain.

Limitations of meat

My meat brain is limited. And aging is making it worse.

But my cyber-brain is—for all practical purposes—unlimited. And technology is making it better.

I’d improved my writing process by picking suitable new technologies and putting them together into a workflow. So why not make that better?

Why not automate more of my writing process.?

And then, I thought: why just writing? I’ve got lots of things that I’ve learned, practiced, and then forgotten. The tools for automating them are at hand. I can learn them.

And then I thought: why not even further automate waking up?

So I started coding something.

And that put me in discovery mode. I discovered a whole new generation of coding tools and techniques that have emerged since the last time I played programmer—just a few years ago.

Down the technology rabbit hole I went. I disappeared for more than a week.

Now I’m back, with a lot of problems solved, a backlog of posts to write, and burning desire to increase my productivity and to use the available technology to overcome some of my biological deficiencies.

AutoBlogger improved

The last time I dove into my blogging workflow, I wrote Authoring, improved, which was an improvement over High productivity blogging workflow. Right? Sure.

Some things stuck. And some things deteriorated. In particular, I lost my ability to use Google voice typing to write drafts.

So here’s Rev 1 of the better process:

I click a button that will:

• Open a tab with a new document—a copy of my blogging template document—and put it into my Google Docs BlogDraft folder
• Open a tab with StackEdit
• Open a tab with Grammarly
• Open a tab with a new post page in Blogger

That would be a great start.

So I built it.

And here’s a video of how it works.

Transcription workflow

Next: When I’m writing a post, I sometimes want to pull quotes from a YouTube video and put them in the post.

Here is the workflow that I have used and that I’m going to automate next.

I made a video of the procedure.

I start with three tabs open: the YouTube video, one for the conversion program (I’m using one called Online Video Converter and one for the transcription program (I’m using otter.ai).

I start in the YouTube tab and select the URL.

I go to the conversion tab and paste it in the conversion program. Then choose format. I’m using mp3. I click and wait. Then click download and it.

Now I go to the Otter tab and import it. And after a while, I have my transcript.

So I used the same programming technique to open the video converter and the transcription program tabs and carry out the rest of the procedure manually. For now, at least.

I’ll post a video of the improved tool, later.

Programming workflow

That’s going to be my next deep dive.

The plan is:

1. Describe each technology that I am using with plusses and minuses
2. Put together a workflow description
3. Solve each problem that I find

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Mark Manson, a blogger who's helped me

Mark Manson has a site with a bunch of long essays that once have been blog posts. It’s markmanson.net.

He’s also written a book, “The subtle art of not giving a f*ck.”

I’m not sure how I came across him, but, hey, I did. Probably some blogger was writing about how much he liked Manson’s stuff. Kinda like this.

I highly recommend him. I’ll be writing more about him. He’s helped me.

The road to subscribing

After a couple of weeks of reading Manson, I decided to become a subscriber. For $48.00 a year I get full access to his site. Not just the tons of stuff he provides for free to everyone with a browser, but the “premium content” for people who pay $6.00 a month, or $48.00 a year. Well worth it, I say.

He reeled me in by offering to swap me an eBook called “3 ideas that can change your life” for my email address. Then he sent me an email every day with a link to a tasty blog post. I’d read the blog post and follow links to other posts. Eventually, I’d get to a premium content post and be asked subscribe. After a week or two of that, he reeled me in. I’m glad he was so politely persistent and so useful.

The three ideas

I thought swapping my email for an eBook was a pretty good deal. I thought it was an even better deal after I got the eBook.

Here’s my quick summary—more to remind me than to inform you. If you want to be fully informed, do the swap and get the ebook. You can get it by going to this page .

First: the list

1. Two minds.
2. 80/20 your life.
3. Believe not what’s true, but what’s helpful.

Two minds

You have two minds. A thinking mind and an observing mind.

The thinking mind thinks. And thinks. And thinks. And thinks. Most of the time it’s entirely out of control. And it causes dissatisfaction and suffering.

The observing mind can observe the thinking mind. Or it can become “fused” with it. Then there’s only thinking. And thinking and thinking.

Once you get used to “defusing” the thinking and observing minds, the observing mind can observe the thinking mind. Better decisions result.

80/20 your life

Apply the Pareto Principle to your life. Get rid of the shit that provides you with no value. Not as useful to me as the other two.

Believe not what is true, but what is helpful

This one I like a lot.

Enough to write another whole post about it. Later.

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From Spark to Post

7 March 2019, Alameda, California, Starbucks at Safeway.

I woke at 5:57. That’s what the TicWatch on my wrist said. (Thanks Daniel, for more cast off gear!)

In my moment of waking, I realized that all I had was a spark. Or maybe that all I was was a spark. Is there a difference?

A spark is a bit of consciousness. It’s a tiny bit in a vast ocean, or sea, or universe, or giant metaphorical space of unconsciousness.

Something—call it me, call it a spark—was conscious.

Everything else was un.

What the spark could do

Not much. But enough.

The spark could decide.

It had one decision before it, one choice to make. The decision was: to be, or not to be. In the beginning and forever, that’s the one decision.

To be was to remain conscious. Not to be was to fall back into the vast unconscious that was everything else in the universe and from which it had emerged.

The spark decided to be.

Maybe that sounds dramatic. Maybe that sounds trite. But that’s the way it was.

To be, or not to be.

What I wanted

I wanted a different experience.

I’d like to have awakened fully energized, full of purpose.

I’d like to have awakened and leaped out of bed and into my day.

I’d like to have known when I opened my eyes who I was and what I was and why I was there.

I would have liked to have awakened knowing I had the energy that I would need to carry out the plans that I wished that I had, and did not.

But that didn’t happen.

None of that happened.

Just a spark. And a decision in front of it.

Obligations

I’ve lived most of my life with obligations: stuff that I’ve had to do

If I’d had obligations this morning—a business trip to go on, people expecting me to show up at a meeting—it might have been different.

But I had no obligations.

No one was expecting anything of me. If anyone had been expecting something, I was unconscious of who they might have been and what they might have expected.

No one, as far as I knew, was expecting me to get up at the fast approaching 5:00 AM. Except me.

Just a spark.

With one decision.

What would it decide?

To be

This morning that spark decided to be. It chose not to let itself go out. Then it decided to expand consciousness. It decided to become more than just a spark. Maybe a tiny flame of consciousness instead of just a spark.

Those were the first in a chain of decisions: to get up, to jump in a cold shower. To stay there and wake up more. To dress and go to Starbucks to write.

Those decisions led to now: this body sitting in this place (Starbucks at Safeway with no fucking Internet) watching this pen (a Precise V5 rollerball) write these words (or at least the ones in the draft) that will get posted so that some other sparks— including a spark that becomes a future me—might read them.

And to now: editing this prior to posting it.

Mostly unconscious

This spark is unconscious of most of the world around it. And most of the world around it is unconscious—not just of the spark—but of everything.

Here’s a Starbucks coffee container. I’m conscious of you, container. Are you conscious? Of anything? If so, how are you doing?

What is it like to be a coffee container?

What is it like to be another person?Or a bat

I can look at another person, and I can imagine what it’s like to be them. I can watch someone sitting there, raising their hand, scratching their head. I’ve raised my own hand and scratched my own head. I can imagine that I’m them and imagine that what it’s like for them is a lot like what it’s like for me.

But what is it like to be a coffee container? It’s standing there, doing nothing. I’ve done that too. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Maybe I can know what it’s like to be a Starbucks Venti Latte coffee container.

Feels nice.

Whatever.

My job

I take doing my job seriously.

When I was raising my kids, I sometimes loved them because they were cute and loveable. But sometimes they were awful and unloveable. Still, I loved them. Because it was my job.

I do my job.

My job at 5:57 was waking up. I did it.

My job was then to make the decisions that would lead to writing this. I did my job.

My job is creating, and I’m doing it.

I created a writer.

A writer has a job: it’s to write. To write this draft. He did it.

The writer will become an editor and a blogger, and if everyone does their job, the draft will become a blog post.

Ideas are alive

Ideas are alive.

I’ve written about that
before

The ideas that have appeared so far want to be written.

They want to be posted.

They want to be read.

They want to change minds.

They are sparks, too. So they tell me.

Who am I to ignore them?

I ignore them at my peril.

When I don’t write, I think I get sick.

Those ideas are means to my ends: I want to write things, and they are things that I can write. So they serve my purposes.

To them, I am a means to their ends. They want to exist and survive. They need me to do it.

For every idea, death is just around the corner.

Only the best and the strongest survive.

Sometimes worst is best, but let’s ignore that paradox for the moment.

If I don’t post this these ideas will likely die in this notebook. Because who reads my notebook? Nobody. Not even me.

So off we go to the computer. Into the world. Another post written. Another idea lives.

All because of a spark.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Holding hands with the unconscious

I’m close to making a change in my life. Everything’s ready. It’s been ready for a while. But I don’t make the change. This happens a lot.

Why?

Specifically this:

Here’s the change I want to make:

When I discover something interesting, or I have a thought I’d like to preserve, I want to write about it. I want to turn it into a post in this blog or another one. I want to write in multiple blogs—one for each kind of content. I want to be a prolific poster.

That shouldn’t be hard. I know how to write a post for this blog. Why not use the same process for others?

To state the goal more clearly:

When I find a random interesting thing, I want to publish a post it in my blog, “Random S*&# I Learned Today.” When I think of an important life lesson, I want to write it up and post it in my blog “What Passes for Wisdom.” If it’s intended for my grandkids, I want to post it in “For the borglings.” I want discoveries of cool stuff on the Internet to go in Joy of Internet. And so on. I’ve got other blogs for other things.

This should be easy. Just keep doing what I’ve been doing (writing here) and add one or more blogs.

But haven’t been doing it.

Worse, I’ve slowed my posting in this blog.

Why?

I think I understand why.

The conscious and the unconscious

To develop a new habit—whether writing in multiple blogs or writing more regularly in this one—I need two things: first, a conscious decision to do it; second, unconscious compliance with the decision.

Two things: a decision by the conscious mind, compliance, and execution by the unconscious.

Why?

Because most of what I do I do unconsciously. Like writing. I’ve decided to write something along the lines of the paragraph you are reading. Unconscious processes have taken over. The words appear. I consciously review the result. If I decide it’s what I want (and I do), then we’re done. If I decide it’s not what I want, it goes back to the unconscious for revision. Rarely I have to analyze it consciously, and determine what’s wrong, or make a more unambiguous conscious decision about what I want. But the work gets done by the unconscious. That’s how this paragraph came into existence. That’s how everything I do happens.

If I decide to do something that I am already “unconsciously competent” at doing, I have to be careful. My unconscious processes might start, but if they hit a roadblock, they’re likely to veer off and do something else.

If I decide to do something that’s a real change, something else happens.

Resisting change

My unconscious mind resists change. Thanks to Jordan Peterson’s “Maps of Meaning” I think I know why.

Creatures—including human—innately fear the unknown. In the right context, that my unconscious might mix fear with anticipation of a reward, but fear is always there.

Changing from writing one blog to writing many produces fear.

What’s there to fear? What could possibly happen that would worry me?

Nothing. But it’s not “me” that’s worried. It’s my unconscious—the part of me that has to do the work.

What could happen? Anything. Anything at all. Without assurances that constrain the unconscious imagination, anything at all can happen.

A path to success

Realizing this, I see a way to victory.

I need to assure my unconscious that making the change is safe. I need to listen to its concerns and reassure it that everything will be fine. Not only that, but things will go well.

When I write my first post for another blog, I can’t just “decide to write” and expect my unconscious to comply. I need to “hold its hand.”: I need to expect that feelings of discomfort may arise and when they do, I need to hold hands with my fearful unconscious, and help it do its job.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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