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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.

I feel like I’m in front of a raw piece of wood, a big one, my task is to carve a sculpture out of that wood, and I’m just too tired to start the process. My mind tells me it will be worth it and the result will satisfy me and my client. But there’s a lot of work to do to start peeling off and shaping the wood before the figure starts to show. And I’m tired.

Bullshit, says another voice in my head. You’re just lazy.

The lighthouse and a few details I saw in the corner of Inpernupe today.

Difficult day at work, difficult week over all. But today I overcame my laziness and did go for a walk and shot some pictures. I’ll post them later. I got to feel like a hacker, too. And I made a potato omelette using a bag of chips, so I’ll never quit my main addiction, food. The day is ending with a smile, and that’s good.

I still don’t write for myself, I still do it for someone else, with the feedback of the crowd in my mind. I’m constantly thinking about how will my commentary be read by other people. Now I’m writing this only for me, to tell me that there’s nobody reading and that this is a journey of self-improvement that I’m choosing to walk alone.

I posted a couple of silly things and run to my Mastodon accounts to see if they had any feedback. The posts did not show up and it took me a minute to remember that I turned off cross-posting in both my blogs, precisely to prevent me from seeking the noise of social media. Old habits die hard, that’s for sure. My withdrawal syndrome is not that bad though and it still lets me make fun of myself.

Today has not been a good day regarding work. I stayed at home so it was supposed to be a productive day, yet it wasn’t. I have a big deadline tomorrow, and I behaved as I often do in this situations: I get blocked and procrastinate. I procrastinated the heck out of my email, so at least that’s quite clean, Inbox Zero goal achieved. But tomorrow it’s going to be a very early start if I want to meet my deadline and craft a report worth its name.

On the positive side, I discovered Jatan Mehta’s journal blog. This particular post on Embracing a simple but effective digital life or Digital detoxing is very thorough and interesting and it is in the line of Manuel Moreale’s post On POSSE, which I briefly commented here.

My RSS feeds in NetNewsWire are starting to look very good.

What I’m thinking now is that I might quit social media altogether and embrace just blogging to express myself, RSS to read nice people’s blog and email to communicate with them. I’ll see.

Oh, and I also recovered my DSLR camera. I need to move my fat ass and taking walks with the excuse of taking pictures might be the way.

The day started quite productively, meeting a deadline one day ahead. Then, around 10am, everything went to hell. I’ve been attending unscheduled phone and zoom calls for the rest of the day. So my Friday deadline is in panic mode. At least I could take a moment to write to Manuel Moreale, because this post On POSSE resonated with me and I wanted to tell him I liked it. In my Twitter time, even in the more recent Mastodon world, my response would have been a star or a like o a thumbs up, maybe a short emphatical shout-out. Mostly empty and ephemeral. I’m liking this new slow approach to my digital life. I think it can make way to more meaningful connections. For starters, it felt good to write a longer and warmer email to a blogger whose example inspires me every day. Not that Manu has any obligation to respond. It did feel good and that’s enough. Time will tell.

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.