brainwagon

It’s kind of amazing when things that you have been thinking about for a while come together and make you think that the world is trying to tell you something (or perhaps something that you have been trying to tell yourself). A couple of days ago I posted quick link to a short video that I did about a tiny craft project that I did this week: making myself a small notebook. I have long been interested in bookbinding, and the gift of a 1905 copy of a rather crufty copy of The Whitehouse Cookbook seemed like a reason to start down that path in earnest. At some point I’d like to rebind the cover and replace the and repair some torn sheets, and given that it’s not especially valuable, I thought it would be a good first attempt. Cutting and sewing some signatures seemed like a good way to start, but amidst this, I watched this video:

And it got me thinking…

First of all, a good friend of mine has been carrying a small pocket notebook for as long as I’ve known him. Inside he scribbles all sorts of little bits of intellectual flotsam and jetsam, and it is not uncommon for us to be having lunch and for him to pull out his notebook and add some notes.

And I keep thinking that I should be doing the same.

In the modern world, it’s exceptionally easy for your attention to be distracted by your phone or your computer. I spend hours each day in front of one or the other, and while I often start with a particular purposeful goal in mind, it’s dreadfully easy to have your attention pulled away by something these remarkable devices choose to show you, and then you never get back to what you were intending to do.

Consider yesterday as an extended example: I went to my computer to spend a finite amount of time (I scheduled an hour) to learn something more about the very first of understanding the ActivityPub tech that underlies Mastodon. One of the first things that you learn is that the “webfinger” protocol forms a means for someone to discover some basic information about you, which will be needed to create an Actor in the protocol, which is the basis of identity and would allow you to exchange information on the Fediverse. So, I did some simple web searches to find how I could do that/implement that.

You can uncover the basic website that tells you what webfinger is. Basically, it’s the means to have a standard URL that can give people information that you’d like to share. The cool thing is that you can use this identity in a way which provides some independence from any particular social media network gives you as your identity, but you can create aliases which will link to different identities. This is especially powerful when you use it with sites that are powered by ActivityPub. (Or so the idea goes, I’m still learning about this.)

Had I been clever, I would have uncovered this webpage first. Or perhaps I did. I already have a website hosted via Github Pages that would seem like an ideal way to create a presence and experiment. It is, after all, already being served on a domain that I always have, and creating even a static file would be likely adequate, and in any case, I’d learn a lot by doing it.

But instead I started by thinking about possible plugins for WordPress that I could host here, on this blog.

This was a mistake. I ended up searching multiple plugins, and in the course of this, I made a startling discovery: that someone had managed to hack into my WordPress blog and had modified the wp-config.php to serve up links to their cryptocurrency wallet product.

And, well, that was the rest of the afternoon.

I mean it’s good that I noticed it. It’s kind of annoying to think that my blogs dozen or so daily visitors might be co-opted into shilling for a cryptocurrency wallet, but…

You see, this post is already been lead astray again. We were talking about notebooks.

A notebook has certain advantages over sitting at your computer and surfing:

1. It’s intentional. Nothing in your notebook happens by accident. If something is in your notebook, it is because you decided that this is important and I want to revisit this again some time in the future.
2. Nothing is in it that you didn’t mean to put into it. You won’t suddenly get distracted by a political discussion you didn’t want to have, or a new dance craze on Tik Tok, or even the latest Raspberry Pi news when you really want to be thinking about ActivityPub or hugo or bookbinding.
3. It serves as memory. I’m getting older, and I must admit that keeping track of the millions of things that I need to deal with requires that I make lists. Lists of things to do. Lists of things to look up. List of projects that I briefly considered, but couldn’t begin right away. Sometimes these fleeting ideas are gone with the very next disruption in my thoughts, but if they are written down, I can go back and see them again.
4. Nobody else’s messages interrupt me on my notebook. There is no algorithm that substitutes what it thinks I should read for what I think I should read.
5. You don’t have to share your notebook. I probably overshare a bit on social media and even here on my blog, but my notebook is entirely for me. Most of it is probably only meaningful to me. That’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay: it’s desirable.
6. Our attention is valuable, and we give a lot of it away to social media. The attention we spend in our notebooks is for our consumption and benefit. Perhaps some of it will be turned into things of value for others, but we all could benefit from marinating on our own thoughts and ideas a bit before expressing them to the world.

These are not an exhaustive list. If you find keeping a journal or notebook valuable, I’d love to hear about your experience.

My own personally bound 32 page book will be my companion for the foreseeable future.

Oh, just remembered: “check to see whether commenting on brainwagon.org is fixed.” Next on my list.