You gotta give it to Johnny Walker Red Label. It’s a fine whisky after the third glass.

I finished rewatching Game Of Thrones' first season. I enjoyed it and caught a lot of nuances I wasn’t aware of when I first watched it.

🚀 Growth is a mind cancer – Manu

But it's our fault. Our as a society. We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don't celebrate when someone says "You know what? I think I have enough".

The people I admire the most are the ones that have the courage to say I’ve had enough. #thoughts

Saturday evening with 1984 on the Kindle and Johnny Walker Red Label on the rocks. Cheap yet rewarding versions of things essential to a happy life.

🚀 Spinning your wheels - annie mueller

Sometimes we get overloaded. Too much to process. And we need to, well, not force quit everything but maybe sit back in the chair and stare out the window and let the little circles spin. Maybe we can close down a few windows, lighten the load a bit. But mostly, it’s just being patient. Trusting that something is going on, that some kind of work is going on. It’s under the surface. It’s maybe not work that shows up as a produced item, a tangible result, a measurable change, an output of any kind. It’s more of the maintenance work, the de-gunking, the oil change, a little cleaning up and fine-tuning. And when it’s done, you’ll feel better. Clearer. And you’ll get back to it, whatever it is that’s waiting for you. It will still be there. If it’s not, don’t worry. You’ll find something else.

I am going through Annie’s posts. I like them a lot. This one resonated with me. This is what I need to do every so often: stop. Just stop and let the world spin as much as it wants. Get a hold of my own time and rhythm. Breath, slow down my pulse and own myself. #thoughts

My daughter will probably kill me if she finds out that I posted this photo. But I’m proud of her so I guess she will forgive my good intentions. She is making croquetas, following a recipe she asked from her grandmother, my mother.

She first made a bechamel sauce stuffed with small bits of jamón ibérico, Spanish ham cured in salt. Then she made small balls, coating them in wheat flower, egg and bread crumbs. She made around 80 of these croquetas.

She fried a dozen of them for our dinner and saved the rest in the freezer. Croquetas make a great appetizer for any nice family meal.

I love cooking. My children have always been quite lazy to help me in the kitchen, but it looks like they are finally finding their own way to basic survival skills. So I’m happy.

🚀 Why I don’t write dev posts – Manu

The reason why I don’t write about dev stuff it’s because, like many others, I suffer from impostor syndrome. I’ve been working on the web for more than 12 years. I’m still convinced I don’t know shit. I scroll through minimal.gallery or OPL, see the work of all those great designers and developers, and reinforce this idea that there are, in fact, countless people out there who are better than me.

And that’s pretty much why I only write shitty and infrequent legal posts at umerez.eu.

🚀 Seven Days of New Things Day 2: Linear Algebra, Tulips | James' Coffee Blog

Linear Algebra

I think I am starting to enjoy maths (maybe).

Toward the end of high school, my maths classes were anxiety-inducing. Our teacher liked to ask people at random in the class what they thought was the answer to questions. At this time, I was not comfortable speaking out in front of the whole class. I always worried about whether my answer would be right, knowing there were people around me who would definitely know the answer. I was good at maths in the academic sense, but I, like many, encountered math as a subject strictly to learn rather than to be appreciated.

Yesterday and today, I started the 3Blue1Brown course on linear algebra, a topic in math that is the foundation of modern deep learning. I encounter terms like "matrix multiplication" and "vector" on an almost daily basis, but my understanding is grounded in their application or what they represent, not how they work. I want to change that and learn a bit more about the how behind linear algebra. What are the foundational operations? How do they work? How can I build a mental model to understand them?

James is doing a Seven Days Of New Things challenge and I’m enjoying the series a lot. #thoughts

🚀 Mastodon and the Fediverse is too noisy. Why?:

Micro.blog is the only Fediverse-compatible platform I know of which truly does away with likes, boosts, follower counts, and hashtags. I wish all social networks removed these pointless stats by default. Maybe offer an option to see them privately but I certainly don’t find the stats to be doing any good publicly. Micro.blog has but a single social component, a Mentions feed. It doesn’t care for any popularity contests, even if you go looking for it. This has made the local community warmer, better welcoming, and more human than other digital places I’ve been to.

And that’s exactly why I’m so happy in Micro.blog.

I wishI knew what to write tonight. My day has been terrible and I only want to go to bed.

I know, I know, modern computers don’t need rebooting and yours has been running without a hitch for months on end. But mine just said enough is enough, and started sabotaging my every key press and trackpad drag. So I had to teach it how dumb it actually is. I offered it a reboot, promptly said yes and now it’s serving at my pleasure again. #thoughts

🚀 Simona Halep’s ‘triumph of truth’ after doping ban significantly reduced | Simona Halep | The Guardian

“This ordeal has been a testament to resilience,” Halep wrote on Instagram. “The triumph of truth is a bittersweet vindication that, albeit delayed, is immensely gratifying.”

I’m so happy to know that she is back at last. Go Simona!

Three random thoughts this Monday evening.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my searches for the last couple of weeks. Both on the Mac and on iOS/iPadOS, I set it as my default search engine, and it’s been working really well, giving me very accurate results and helping me find relevant things when I was looking for something specific, and interesting stuff when my searches were more general.

Two weeks ago I also logged off my Google account, so I’d like to think that Google is not harvesting as much data from me as it did before, for years. The thing is that I’m still logged in YouTube, so I guess I’m giving Google more information that I’d what to think.

One of the thing that YouTube fed me today is that, apparently, Walkmans might be back. I’m a sucker for useless and/or sentimental gadgets, so I’ll probably end up buying more than one. I do have a cassette collection stored away somewhere…

Another thing that I corroborated today is that I don’t stand this guy. I mean the African one. Everything he says comes off to me as bullshit. I could not watch more than five minutes, and I made myself stay longer than I wanted because I think that we need to expose ourselves to uncomfortable views. Still, nothing but bullshit. Why on Earth are we so prone to give so much voice to guys that have proven to be liars.

UPDATE: These to comments by @pratik and @clorgie are much more accurate in their depiction of the guy:

I watched the entire Don Lemon’s interview of Elon Musk. Such an inarticulate and incomprehensible, the supposedly smart, man! Is this what we are considering a genius these days? Either he’s afraid to (he claimss he is not) admit or doesn’t understand the basic concept of implications.

@pratik I watched some this morning. Musk is a dull man masquerading as a much smarter one caught in his own web of lies. Sad.

I finally caught myself reaching for my glasses to pluck the small hairs between my eyebrows. Right after trimming the long hairs from the same eyebrows. I’m turning into a visually impaired Ebenezer Scrooge. #thoughts

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’m going to write a blog post using Nebo, handwriting it with an Apple pencil.

I’m actually writing this down manually, and I’m quite astonished at how well Nebo converts it all. I read Annie Mueller’s post “It ’s just a blog” and I wanted to tell her how much I liked it. I don’t know if I will dare to tell her anything, I ’ve seen that a lot of people has already praised her and I' m nothing but a speck of dust . So I will post this in my blog and if she reads it, by chance,that will be enough. I’m sure she does not need more praise from a random guy in Spain.

It’s Friday evening and I’m heading to a dinner with lots of friends. A partner in my firm has been the Dean of our Bar Association and his term finally ended, so tonight we are going to give him an homage dinner and thank him for his service.

I have not gone out for dinner in ages and the week has been tough, so all I ask is for me to behave and do not drink. I’ve been known to get wasted in good company and good booze after a stressful week at work. So this is my plan. Go out with good friends to have a lovely sober dinner. Wish me luck.

🫣🙈

Transcript

Miguel Gila (1991-2001), a Spanish comedian, on patriotism:

Patriotism is an invention of the powerful classes so that the lower classes defend the interests of the powerful.

#thoughts

I called one of the categories in my site Thoughts, which means that, in order to write posts appropriate to the name of the category, I need to think, which means that I need to make time to think, and that’s being a problem lately.

I read great news in my local newspaper:

Foreigners set a new record in Gipuzkoa (the province I live in) and now represent one in every eight inhabitants.

Gipuzkoa has broken a new record of foreign population and reaches, for the first time in its history, 12.1% of foreign people out of its total inhabitants, with Morocco, Nicaragua, and Colombia as the main countries of origin. The number of people born outside of Spain with residence in the territory rises to 88,005. The arrival of 4,994 immigrants in 2023 confirms the recovery of pre-pandemic flows and represents a gain of 4,333 foreigners in Gipuzkoa compared to 2022, when there were 83,672 people of foreign origin, accounting for 11.5% of the total. In fact, in just the last year, more foreigners have arrived than in 2022 (1,582) and 2021 (1,877) combined, although still fewer than in 2020 (5,772).

Yes. We need you. You are most welcome. Ongi etorri Euskal Herrira.