“Why so dreary? It’s not as if the world is ending.”

It was an innocent enough question, but the answer was complicated. Outside, the sky was bright, lined with a few puffy clouds. They looked inviting, as if beckoning one to climb in and relax awhile. If she didn’t know better, Fabina would have thought sure, no way was the world ending. But it was ending, and she was the only person who knew it.

“Seriously, you’re lost in thought and I’m right here, are you okay?” Piper was one of those friends who could read between the lines so well it felt like she was reading your mind. She was the kind of friend you’d want to have along to witness the end of the world.

Fabina let her gaze drop from the clouds and looked at her friend. “The world is ending, Piper. We need to get out of here.”

Piper stared at her. “How long have we got? Oh, and when were planning on telling me?! You’ve been holding out, girl.”

“A week, if we’re lucky.” Fabina took a sip of her coffee and smiled. “I figured I’d tell you, oh, a minute or so ago. When you were ready.”

Piper rolled her eyes. “Some sage you are. Come on, let’s go. Sounds like we’ve got some work to do.”

Fabina laughed and fished for her keys from her bag. “You’d better not spill my coffee on the ride. We’re gonna need it.” The two friends got up from the table and headed out the gate.

“Whoa, this is yours? Never pegged you for a biker. Damn, this is nice.” Piper admired the gleaming blue road bike with purple and red-hued flames curling along the side.

“I figured since we didn’t have much time left around here, I might as well get around in style. You like?” Fabina sat down on the side of the bike, then suddenly kicked her legs up and did a full two-seventy spin before straddling the bike. She wagged her eyebrows at Piper and started the engine. “You got moves like that in you? I’m only friends with people who do, so you’d better. And you’d better not do a stupid cartwheel.”

Piper grinned at her, then turned away. Suddenly, she spun the coffee mug and tossed it into the air, then dove into a back handspring. She effortlessly launched herself into the air and with a slight twist landed cleanly astride the bike. “Your coffee, madame,” she said as she caught Fabina’s mug. “Not one dropped spilled.”

Fabina grinned with a sigh and shook her head, feeling better knowing she didn’t have to go it alone. She revved the engine a few times, and marveled at its power. Piper tapped her shoulder. “Where to?”

“The sunset,” Fabina said. “It’s almost time.”

A Day in the Life in Albuquerque, NM. Taking some time out in the morning to visit the tree downstairs and bask in its splendor.

I finally took the plunge and am trying out LinkedIn to see if it helps make connections for my indie businesses. Step one, outside of setting up a profile, was turning off most email notifications and disabling all ad tracking. Good grief with all the invasive ad tracking.

Rest in Power, RBG. May we all use our powers for good the way you have. You will be missed, and you will never be forgotten.

I started out this post with a sentence I didn’t expect to: I wrote I’ve been a user of Goodreads for many years now. I didn’t say “I’ve been using,” or even “I use”. Goodreads, of course, is a service which ostensibly acts as a social network for people who enjoy reading, and for many years, I think it served that purpose for me. Of course, like so much in the digital age, I started out using a different service, called Shelfari, which was eventually bought by Amazon. Amazon did what monopolies love to do and bought Goodreads later too, eventually merging the older acquisition Shelfari into the newer Goodreads.

I’ve recently learned that there’s unrest in the Goodreads community, largely because the site has been left nearly untouched for years now. It’s not too hard, given what we’ve learned about big tech companies, to see why. For Amazon, the real benefit for owning Goodreads has almost nothing to do with users, and likely everything to do with all the data those users generate. I’ve started to think of it this way: I think I use a service to keep track of something, in this case my reading habits over the years. The company in question uses that services for something else: to turn something I thought was tangible into a data point and turn and directly advertise to me in increasingly specific ways. Here’s some books from your “want to read” list that are suddenly on sale, one email says. People who liked this book also bought this other book, says another.

For Amazon, owning Goodreads mean they can access all that information and tie it directly to your Amazon account, giving them yet another place to directly advertise to you.

For me, my use of Goodreads over the past few years was partly to keep track of what I was reading, and partly to take note of other books I might enjoy. I also liked its annual goals feature, which encourages you to set a goal to read a certain number of books each year, and offers a convenient way to track your progress. Every single Goodreads email I receive gets promptly deleted, since it’s mostly a daily reminder of what friends are reading on the site, and how I have the same two books listed as ‘in progress’. Logging into the site recently, I was promptly met with a note that I was behind on my reading goal, and that I should catch up. I’m not behind, it turns out, I just hadn’t bothered with the chore that updating Goodreads has become.

Ultimately, I use this very digital tool in a very analog way. If I happen to read on my Kindle, I never allow it track my progress there. It takes the enjoyment out of the process of reading, and it makes it yet another thing to track and gamify. Sometimes that’s fun! See my enjoyment of annual book challenges above. But at the end of the day, it’s actual work for me to update, and Amazon gets to reap the rewards.

In learning about the unrest among Goodreads users, I’ve also learned about a new service called The Storygraph. It’s an interesting concept, but ultimately its faith in an algorithm takes away the best part of books to begin with: the human connection. The books I’ve most enjoyed reading have come from either people I know, or references within other books that made me want to explore further.

It’s clearer than ever that nearly everything we use online can be reduced into data. If we let it, that data will be hoovered in an instant to help and used to try to sell us more, or further track us wherever we go. I love the idea of a social place to share books, but now, I hope we collectively push back. Let’s use journals, digital or analog, to track lists privately. Let’s write and make videos about books like my friend Ashley. Let’s connect the dots between books in interesting ways like Austin Kleon, or keep a whole page of our websites dedicated to what we read like Patrick Rhone. Let’s go to local bookstores and get recommendations from people we meet there, or from staff who have all sorts of interests and reading backgrounds. If you want to go social, micro.blog has an interesting way to view books people are talking about within the community.

Personal websites and blogs are the most analog forms of the Internet we have left. They’re the places we can go which we can decide what they look like, what we feature, what we want to give our attention. They’re random and weird and interesting, and they’re the best place we have on the Internet to keep things that way.

For the algorithm, users are the tool to achieve their end. The more you use (input), the “better” it gets at its job. Its job, though, is to keep you there and keep your attention and keep you buying. It doesn’t care what connection you made, philosophy you learned, or new idea you had as a result of what you read. But a human will. Whether that human is someone you know, or someone whose site you read and you send an email, a sense of shared experience and humanity can happen. Let’s stop being users and get back to being human.

About a month ago, I realized that in the face of overwhelm, I was looking for any input I could to shift my thoughts elsewhere. The easiest and most readily available places, of course, are feeds. They do little to help, I realized, in part because they shifted my thoughts to too many other places In some cases, these feeds served to either fill time, amplify my anxiety, or provide new sources of anxiety.

What’s interesting to note is that I took Instagram off my phone months ago, deleted my facebook account at the beginning of 2019, and almost never look at my twitter feed. And yet, feeds were finding me, whether in links from sites to twitter threads (which should be blog posts), or to searching for specific information there (even while signed out), since so many people post there.

To try to address this, I decided about a month ago to spend more time each day reading books, and that if I was to spend time in front of a screen, I would either write or I would use my time to learn something. I opted for the latter, and decided I’d spend some time learning to code. I first tried Codecademy, which is nice but I found it to be laggy on my computer. After searching for alternatives, I decided to give freeCodeCamp a try. I’m very glad I did, since the lessons were short enough to complete in small chunks of time in the evening. I’ve done all the lessons for responsive web design, but haven’t yet completed the projects for it.

While learning, I realized I wanted to make some improvements to my own web presence. And in my zest to do so, I found myself searching out other sites to learn from, then wanting to figure out how that was done and replicate it myself. It’s not a bad goal, but it’s also not a realistic one to accomplishing something. My search ended up being another feed, a new way to look at things, visually think about how they were designed, and then diving into source code to see, only to find myself lost amid thousands of lines of code and realizing how little I know. This was discouraging and, I realized last week, not as helpful a way to learn. I’d made no progress on any of the ideas I’d had that lead me down this path.

Last week, to try to move the needle forward a bit, I decided to take another stab at doing some light customizations to my site here. I thought about simply using the custom CSS I’d slowly added to make those changes, or to try writing my own plug-in to do the same. But ultimately, I decided it might be most interesting to simply clone one of the micro.blog themes directly from Github and then customize it from there. This turned out to be both doable and fun, since it allowed me to start fresh and also not have to worry about any missing code specific to micro.blog. I opted to use the default theme as my starter, since it was the simplest of them all and so made my customizations easier. I did all my custom edits from within the editor on micro.blog, which is a bit slow-going for a novice like me, since I made changes gradually, and saved often in order to make sure those changes worked. In the end, it was time I enjoyed and I’m pleased with the site. For typography, I borrowed code from Brent Simmons for system fonts (his site is a great resource to learn simple, effective coding), and otherwise I simply changed some existing CSS and added a handful more to bring it to life.

In the case of dark mode, I’d previously had that as custom css, and I brought that into my new customized theme and then refined it into something more colorful and fun. I’d eventually like to add a button so anyone reading can select their preference, but for now I’m going to leave it as is and focus on other projects.

It’s a little thing, but it’s something that kept me going. I’m proud of it. And especially proud of the dark mode. Definitely check out the dark mode.

Something I’ve learned over the last few weeks of feeling stuck, in many aspects of life, is that staring at a feed, no matter the source, is the worst place to look to try to get unstuck.

The aim for simplification continues. This evening, I canceled my Adobe Photography plan. I’m very much out of the habit of photography lately, and there’s other tools that I can use when I want to, which don’t require a monthly fee.

It’s a weird feeling to send an email to a former employer’s IT team, from your inexplicably still-functioning employee email, to request that they remove some software from your computer since, you know, you don’t work for them anymore.

I got a Fitbit years ago as part of a workplace “health intitiave” and have used it on and off ever since. Being a bit concerned since Google entered a deal to acquire Fitbit (and thus, of course, all its data), I’ve stopped using it and have considered selling it off. Of course, there’s an online account to go with it, so I logged in and found my way to the settings so I could try exporting all my data. While I’m not so much concerned about keeping my data for myself, I was definitely curious exactly how they log that data.

I more or less assumed that all data would be exported in CSV format, given that’s exactly how it states it will. I thought I’d see a table of each date logged, with the accompanying total steps for each day, similar to how it’s reflected in the app. It turns out, the data has only a handful of CSV files, mostly with any “challenges” between you and friends. Steps themselves are in .json files, and when you open them in a text editor, it turns out that there’s a log of the total number of steps for every single minute of every single day logged.

Keep in mind that my Fitbit is the now-discontinued Fitbit One, so it tracked just steps and stairs automatically, and sleep had to be manually started with the timer, and any exercise also had to be manually added in the app. I can only assume that those which are tracking heart rate and exercises are doing so in similar fashion. This isn’t necessarily to say that that’s a good or a bad thing (there are certainly some health implications and potential benefits there), but it should no doubt be more clearly indicated exactly how that information is going to be collected, storied, and ultimately used.

I used to refer to my Fitbit is a ‘glorified pedometer’, but it’s clear now that it’s much, much more.

Update: See this Fitbit blog post that uses collected (and relatively anonymized, given there’s regional information as well as gender and age information) data to look at how COVID-19 and related lockdowns have affected movement. To their credit, Fitbit’s privacy policy does indicate that it may do so, as noted by the following text (emphasis mine):

We may share non-personal information that is aggregated or de-identified so that it cannot reasonably be used to identify an individual. We may disclose such information publicly and to third parties, for example, in public reports about exercise and activity, to partners under agreement with us, or as part of the community benchmarking information we provide to users of our subscription services.

Still, if you ask the casual Fitbit wearer on the street, I imagine it’s a good bet that they have no idea their personal fitness tracker can be used in this manner. The findings are interesting, to be sure, and especially relevant given the public health needs. Still, we need better and much clearer consent when it comes to use of collection of data, both for how it’s collected (in my case, thinking it was just a daily count and discovering it was counter down to the minute, even in aggregate) and how it’s ultimately used.

Important reading today, which I’ve never read before and which is illumuniting and urgently relevant to today: The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Just as important is to look at the photos, examine the maps, and watch the videos.

I spent some time over the weekend writing up something I never quite expected: a phonetic analysis of beatboxing great Butterscotch. If that’s something that sounds interesting to you, feel free to give it a read. Hopefully it’s as fun to read as it was to write it.

Spending time working from home and otherwise quarantining has me thinking a lot about the things I keep in my life, including the boxes that come with some of those things. More than just the boxes for my computer, I have boxes for my router, modem, some headphones, old cameras, and more, neatly tucked away in other boxes in my closet. “Maybe I’ll need this at some point” seems to be the most common reason that surfaces in my head when I ask myself why I still have said boxes. When logic intervenes and reminds me that hasn’t been the case for many years, the niggling thought “…yet” is quick to reply. While I continue to wrestle with myself over this idea, I did read this thoughtful post where a professional organizer suggests cutting off the portion of the box which might be needed for warranty purposes, and recycling the rest. That’s a step my rather stubborn brain seems willing to consider, so I’ll likely start there.

Sometimes, clearing up the state of my browser tabs help clear up the state of my mind. I don’t need them to be organized so much as I need there to not be so many of them.

A lof of folks are taking up Zoom for virtual meetings right now, but if you care about privacy, I’d look elsewhere. Zoom, in addition to doing egregious things in the past like installing a hidden web server to Macs to avoid requesting a user’s permission every time they wanted to join a conference, is also in the business of selling your data.

Here’s a random list of some things I’ve been reading or listening to that I think are worth sharing:

McSweeney’s: No President Before Trump Ever Responded More Boldly, Swiftly, and Decisively in the Face of Criticism: This really cuts to the heart of this man’s character (or rather, lack thereof). It’s right there, with the frequent “That’s a nasty question” comment in press briefings. There is no empathy, instead just a blatant disregard for the very real consequences for his actions, not to mention his willingness to spread unconfirmed information about treatments for COVID-19.

Rework Podcast: Remote Work Q&A, Part 1: I watched a little bit of the video they did, but found the comments on the sidebar incredibly distracting. This is much better as a podcast, and has the benefit of a transcript plus relevant links. I like that they tackle topics not just about remote work, but about work philosophy in general. One of the more interesting points Jason Fried made was to take this time of self-quarantine as a time to learn how to communicate differently, and spoke to using writing to communicate rather than meetings. He mentioned off-handedly, “What if everyone came through this (COVID-19 pandemic) a better writer?” It’s certainly something worth reflecting on, and worth pursuing.

Planet Money: The CryptoQueen: This was a fascinating story. There’s a certainly a lot to keep up with now, especially with COVID-19, but I think reporting like this is just as crucial, since scams like this can perpetuate in stressful times, especially when the economy is yo-yoing the way it is.

Reply All Two-Fer: #158 The Case of the Missing Hit and #159 The Attic and Closet Show: These two are a bit opposites; The Case of the Missing Hit was a sheer delight to listen to, while The Attic and Closet Show is a lot more sobering. Both are good listens, and it’s fascinating seeing the sheer reach this show has across the world.

Margo Aaron at That Seems Important: Coronovirus is Serious, But Panic is Optional: I found this post via Seth Godin, who pointed to her post after comparing the relative spread of calm versus panic. Both posts are worth a read, and the only quibble I have with Margo Aaron’s piece is that I believe we have both a misinformation problem and a fear problem, when you factor in the sheer ease of spreading both misinformed and fear-based messages across social media.

History is a great place to look to learn about the world, how it works and why it often doesn’t, and how those who came before us sought to make it better. The Rework Podcast dove into the history of the 8-hour work day this week, but it goes much deeper. Bonus: read the show notes, there’s much to learn.

Starting and running a couple of businesses was my first foray into really learning about finance, and personal finance was a natural progression from there. Today, I finished reading the original 1992 edition of Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez’s Your Money or Your Life. I’d seen it referenced on a number of personal finance blogs over the year, and when I found a copy at a local used book store, I finally picked it up and gave it a read.

I won’t comment here on the methodology, other than to note that the concept of trading “life energy” for money is an interesting one, and the philosophy around thinking about how you would live your life if you didn’t have to work for money are questions I’d never asked myself, and now am thinking about often. Others far more savvy have pointed out that the investment strategies from 1992 very much do not translate well to 2020, but that said, the most recent edition of the book may offer something different I’m not sure, as that’s not the edition I read.

What I find most fascinating about this book is just how far ahead of its time it was: issues the author’s were citing at the time are very real today. They emphasize a great deal how much consumerism and its focus on consumption can tax the planet. Certainly we can see the effects our constant use of resources has had in terms of climate change and its resulting swings, but if you look further, we have extensive issues right this very moment resulting from constraints of a supply chain that relies very heavily on China. As it turns out, much of what we rely on for cleaning and sanitation is manufactured in China, and at the moment, much of said manufacturing is currently at a standstill while the COVID-19 virus is trying to be addressed and contained.

There’s a lot of issues at play here, certainly, but it’s all undoubtedly connected. I remember foreign exchange students in college remarking about how cheap things are to buy in the US. And while that’s true to a degree, what’s likely more true is that that cheap price drove up consumption while also driving down working conditions in the locations where said products were manufactured. These are externalities, and they’re becoming more and more expensive over time.

The other striking aspect of YMOYL is its focus on identifying what is enough, and uses an idea called a fulfillment curve (thoughtfully written about by Trent Hamm on the Simple Dollar in 2008) to help you visualize your own sense of enough. It’s 2020, and I know I have more than enough, and I know that many out there do as well. Where do I see this playing out? In social media and its heavy use of advertising, and even today’s concept of being an “influencer”. Through having the newest phone, tablet, computer. The myriad unboxing videos of gadgets and items. Targeted advertising which tracks your interests across the internet and “shows advertisements for things which might be relevant to you” (otherwise knowns as things they know you don’t have, but most likely would want if you’re shown it). The list goes on.

Finally, I loved how YMOYL places emphasis on finding what brings you fulfillment in life, and discourages our very real tendency (and very problematic cultural phenomenon here in the US) to equate our jobs/careers/professions as an inherent part of our identify. In fact, Suze Orman unintentionally spoke to this really well in a recent People article where her point of view was contrasted with that of the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement. Suze Orman mentioned the boredom that might come from retirement and cited an example of a friend who retired and missed working. That isn’t a problem with financial independence, or even retirement; that’s a problem with a culture obsessed with work, career, and growth at all costs. It’s simple: the US has a culture that lives to work, rather than embracing the potentially simpler life that could come from working to live. Her friend likely equated working with having a purpose and finding fulfillment, but as YMOYL points out, you can have a purpose while not needing to work; and what’s more, you can work if said work brings you that sense of purpose and fulfillment; you just don’t have to rely on it as your only source of income or even something necessary to your income, so you can exercise much more control over the work you do.

I know, for me, I realized last year that I’d forgotten what it’s like to have a hobby. Writing on my own website again has rekindled an old hobby that I long enjoyed, before life became graduate school, work, work, work, paying off student loans, and more work. As I think about my own student loan debt, I also think about how much the total US household debt has once again set a record by the end of 2019, totaling more than $14 trillion (if you follow that link, hit the ‘max’ button to see the astonishing visual showing growth of debt over the last 20 years). Given my student loan debt, I’m not currently in a place where I can stop the pace of my work, but it’s something I’m diligently working to improve, and this book has given me new insight and lots to think about. It’s also helped change the way I talk to friends and family, and do whatever small part I can to start changing the culture of this country.

Take some time to expose yourself to something outside of your usual routine. Read or listen to something that makes you uncomfortable. Learn about something you’ve never learned about before. You’ll grow from it and make more connections than you think you will.

I made a request to Intuit to delete all my Mint data on January 21st. I received an email today stating that they are “still working on my request.” Which means they likely aren’t working on it at all.

Gilad Edelman, writing at Wired, makes a compelling case that Intuit’s intention to buy Credit Karma is less about owning a competitor and more about getting access to the significant amount of user data said competitor has collected over the years. Here again, we are seeing very clearly the cost of “free” (emphasis mine):

While those people don’t pay to use Credit Karma, they do turn over their financial information, as well as the kinds of behavioral and location data that other companies, like Facebook and Google, track. The platform’s algorithms then help lenders microtarget users with offers for credit cards, loans, and other financial products. Credit Karma gets a cut when users sign up.

Intuit makes it clear that they want to know users’ “complete financial identity”, and couches it as a way to offer “the best loan and insurance products for them.” It makes me sad to know that my steady use of Quickbooks over the last few years, even as small an amount as it is in the grand scheme, has helped fund this sort of behavior. I’ve noticed a conintued dark pattern in which indivdiauls, and especially small business owners, are scared into thinking that they can’t keep their own books via the tried-and-true spreadsheet. Even when we’re paying for a service so that a company shouldn’t have to sell personal data, the quest for constant growth in this land of extreme capitalism is too much, it seems, to handle.

In January, I was musing about how Quickbooks had largely stagnated, and was citing long-standard features (and I mean years-long standard features) of its own product as a reason to justify a sudden 47% price increase. I wasn’t thinking it then, but I’m definitely thinking it now: this is a monopolist’s move. It doesn’t matter whether your product or service is any good if you’re the biggest, and nearly only, game in town.

I’ve been thinking out loud here about my use of Quickbooks, and feeling like Intuit is becoming more and more of a monopoly, and lo and behold this week they reveal a plan to acquire Credit Karma. Definitely don’t like the direction this is going.

After a string of freezing days a few weeks back, I was pondering why a carport at a prior apartment prevented my windshield from frosting over, despite it not being fully covered like a garage. The answer is fascinating.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been doing our grocery shopping more and more at our local co-op, and today we decided to officially become members (it’s just $15/year). Going local is becoming ever more important to me, glad to have taken this step.

I’ve recently taken to reading Matt Stoller’s BIG newsletter, and given my recent forays into figuring out things for my businesses, I’ve been thinking a lot about how QuickBooks has become less and less effective and more and more confusing. I keep seeing descriptions of it as being the “industry standard”, but despite having used it for about five years now, it’s not gotten any more user friendly for my purposes. If anything, it’s actually gotten worse.

While thinking about how QuickBooks holds something of a monopoly in the accounting space, I also found myself thinking about Intuit, the parent company of QuickBooks and TurboTax. ProPublica has done some extensive reporting on Intuit’s lobbying efforts to prevent the IRS from allowing citizens to file their tax returns for free, with efforts to not only prevent the IRS from developing that software, but also by using deliberate design and search-based tactics to ultimately force users to pay for the service when it should remain free. I first encountered this reporting from an episode of Reply All last summer.

What’s notable from my own experience is that despite using two distinct versions of QuickBooks (the Simple Start Online for one, and the Self-Employed for the other), I’ve found that the supposed integration of the Self-Employed version with the Self-Employed TurboTax to be largely unreliable, meaning that the supposed benefit of simply hitting “send to TurboTax” for a Schedule C has never really worked for me.

What does monopoly positioning have to do with this? I’ve stuck with QuickBooks as long as I have in part because I thought it was the only option for me. I selected it in part because it was supposed to integrate so well with TurboTax. As with so many other giant corporations in today’s landscape, the only way to vote is with my dollars (and perhaps some thoughtful reasoning on the Internet, should others find themselves asking similar questions), and it’s time my dollars found better use in more ethical companies.