The Imperfectionist: It’s worse than you think:

In a piercing recent essay that’s well worth your time, Simon Evans writes about watching his daughter become an adult, and also about the death of a close friend, and how painful it is to experience the speed at which something as seemingly substantial as a childhood or a friendship is over and gone for good. Toward the end, he offers a few thoughts on how to make sure you’re truly present for life – ways to “drive a stake into the shining moment.” But I love what Evans doesn’t do in the piece, too. He doesn’t turn it into a lecture about seizing the day. Nor does he dwell on what he wished he’d done differently, thereby implying that there might be some cunning way to avoid the experience of loss. No, his essay suggests, it’s worse than that: a life fully lived just is painfully bittersweet, the joy inextricably intertwined with loss. The major chapters of life, such as your children’s childhoods, just will feel like they’re over too fast, pretty much whatever you do.

You should definitely click through and read the Simon Evans essay as well.

If you are looking for a way to make buying a car even more stressful and annoying, I recommend doing it over the phone with a dealer in a different state.

Whenever I have to be on hold for an extended period of time, I am amazed by how similar static-filled, fading-in-and-out hold music is to a William Basinski album.

My blog prior to his one was built on Pelican. I had it set up so that all I had to do was a drop a Markdown file in a Dropbox folder which was shared to the ec2 instance I used for hosting. An incron job on the server kept an eye on the folder and would regenerate the website whenever there was a change to any of the files in the folder.

I really liked it because there was almost no overhead to writing a post, and the whole thing was super efficient.

What I didn’t like was having to deal with updating Pelican and Python on the server, and I was perpetually worried about Pelican being abandoned. When Micro.blog started up, I got interested in that, and started doing most of my online writing here, eventually firing up yet another WordPress instance for hosting.

I miss using a static site generator, though. I wish there were a way to do that which did not involve running a server somewhere.

Our household has graduated from constantly picking tape and stickers off every flat surface to constantly picking up Nerf bullets. I guess that’s an improvement?