Say what

I started to read Don Quijote, Blackie Books edition. The book is in Spanish (duh) and this is the description they provide in English:

THE CLASSIC OF CLASSICS IN AN ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR AND VAST DELUXE EDITION: OVER 700 PAGES, 100 NOTES, A PHOTONOVEL, QUOTES, AND COLORFUL GRAPHIC MATERIAL. Accessible at last: free of academicism, but keeping its full literary power, everyone who has ever wanted to read it will find their edition of choice in Quixote Freed. An agile text, version of Gonzalo Pontón, Hispanic scholar. Chapter selection by Agustín Sánchez, Cervantine authority. DON QUIXOTE IS MORE THAN A BOOK. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza do not live in the page alone. In over four hundred years since its publication, both characters have frequented music and painting, cinema and advertising, theater and poetry, and popular culture. Quixote Freed includes numerous audiovisual resources (film clips, music, poetry, etc.) that are activated via QR codes. A MOVIE QUIXOTE. In 1957, Soviet director Grigori Kózintsev, of Ukrainian origin, filmed what is considered the best movie adaptation of Don Quixote, with Nikolai Cherkasov (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) in the leading role. It was the first Soviet film to be released in Spain, in 1967. The full movie is accessible through the QR code in the book. Also, we extracted from the movie the most celebrated episodes of the book and arranged them as a photonovel.

My daughter baked chocolate chip cookies for the first time. She found the recipe online, and apart from a little help from me turning on the oven, she made them all by herself. She was disappointed with the final result and did not like them, she said they’re dull. I did like them. I could eat cookies made out of cardboard.

I took a minute to write down the rage episode I had this week. I’m not proud of it, but I made peace with myself. I took time to write every detail and confront my behavior. I can’t say it won’t happen again, but it is true that it does not happen very often and that, when it happens, it’s a very short burst of anger. I wrote it down on paper and it will stay there.

This looks too much like a journal entry. I don’t like journals. I’m not consistent enough to keep a journal so I don’t like them.

I have given up on my country’s politics. I don’t feel represented by any of the multiple choices that compete in Spain. All political parties, regardless of their apparent ideological differences, have sequestered democracy for their own purposes. They only act for their own benefit and if it serves the purpose of gaining or maintaining power. No political leader talks to or thinks about all the people anymore. When they say “the people”, they are only thinking about “their people”, the ones who voted or could vote for them. Policies are not proposals for the Country’s well-being or progress, they are weapons that are thrown with contempt against the other side of an imaginary political spectrum. There is no checks and balances any more, all State Powers are in the hands of the political parties. Only a few independent judges resist in their every day lives in court. None of them have real power to change anything about how the country is governed.

In the Basque Country, a small region in the bigger State, the two main parties still talk about policy. And I really think they still believe in good policy. The problem here is that of the main political ideology, though, which is nationalism. At the best, it makes me sick how many times a day we repeat ourselves that there’s no better place than this and better people than us. At the worst, although nationalism is cool as long as it looks like a small country looking for its place in the world, we know how much pain and sorrow it has caused in our past, and we certainly know it is a seven headed hydra in the long run.

Looking at my countries (both the small and the big one) and the world around me, my only hope is in the small people. In you and me, in that, the day we meet in the field, because that day will arrive, we will not be willing to kill each other. Instead, that we will believe that we are brothers and sisters that need and want to live together. We will prevail over the leaders that sent us there. That’s my hope.

2024-03-17 UPDATE: I changed my home page to a more conventional one. The one I designed was quite gimmicky. If I ever learn a bit more about web design, I may come back to visually depicting my garden metaphor. For now, the patches in my garden, meaning the different sections of my website, will be featured in the conventional navigation bar.

Following a “digital garden” concept, I built a home page with buttons that in my mind symbolize patches in a garden.

Each patch will have its contents, be it a static page, a blog, a collection or category of posts, whatever this personal site of mine develops into.

For now, there’s four patches ready to be visited and four more are empty, waiting for my future gardening. The ones you can visit gather my Thoughts, my posts about my Geek hobbies, some Art I want to share (mostly music) and the Photos I take.

So if you like my garden, you are more than welcome.

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Eliot, T.S., “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

The source of this quote is Nancy Prager’s research as shown in this 2007 article, so kudos to her.

I found it thanks to this 2011 post by David Barnard that was quoted by John Gruber here. Thanks to all of them.

And as a bonus, I found this source for authoritative quotations, that’s going straight to my bookmarks.

I’m going to try the Cards Theme to see if it’s a good way to implement my idea of a static home page with cards or buttons for different sections. I really like Tiny Theme, but this early days are appropriate for experimentation. The other way is to learn a bit more of HTML and CSS, but there’s plenty of time to stop being lazy. Not today.

I want to find a way to use static pages to build my digital garden. I may use the blog format in some places, but there needs to be different sections, primarily static, and an Index home page that showcases and links to the those sections. First order of business, start thinking about the sections. Designing the site will come later.

Today I woke up at 4am. I have a long commute, so I took my car to work and arrived at my office before 6am. Other days I take the train, which is a longer travel, but it’s cheaper, more ecological and it gives me a place for focused work. It’s 11:30pm and I just finished to review my tasks of the day and prepared them for tomorrow. I have two big deadlines for Friday and today I did not push forward one single inch in any of them. Still, as I was reviewing the day, I saw that I did check off many other tasks that also needed to be done. Some clients were benefited from that work, some others are still waiting for me.

So if I intend to grow my small corner of the world in this blog, I’d better start. I learned from Chris Aldrich that, if I am serious about something, I have to stick to it. He was talking about handwriting and taking notes or journaling with analog tools, but I’m going to take his advice and make it my own. If I want to be serious about my particular digital corner, I’d better stick to it.

So here I am, wrapping up the week and getting ready for Monday. I went through my OmniFocus review and I have a couple of dozen of things I have to do tomorrow, so it was not a pleasant review. I positively know I won’t do them all, so I marked my priorities and blocked a few slots in my calendar to make some sort of a plan. And hope for the best. But this week I moaned enough already, so I’m not going to bitch any more about how miserable my every day routine is 😉.

In micro.blog, I met a very nice guy this weekend [Michael H. Gerloff aka @kulturnation](https://micro.blog/kulturnation). He’s german, he writes in English in micro.blog and he seems a very interesting and nice guy. So that’s a good note for the week.

Oh, one thing I wanted to say a long time ago. I’ve tried mechanic keyboards enough, I’ve given them every chance. I don’t like them. I’m very happy with my Apple Magic Keyboard. It’s already a few years old and it still works like a charm and gives me my best writing experience. I always go back to this keyboard. At work I use a Logitech K380 that I like, too. But my home Magic Keyboard is the best. One thing I learned during the pandemic lockdown was to type properly with all my fingers and, although I still make many typos and my WPM is not championship-worthy, I’m the most fluent with the Magic Keyboard.

There, I’m going to bed. Tomorrow starts early.