“His observations struck some critics as the smugness of a man who escaped a shipwreck and now has some thoughts about the swimming techniques of the people behind him who drowned.” - Tom Nichols for The Atlantic

How might we let users seamlessly manage calendars from multiple providers in one cross-device app that doesn’t feel heavy, slow, and unreliable?

So ready for day 2 of UX Healthcare Amsterdam

Marveling at the poor interface design of a pill box

As a design mentor, one of the things I encounter constantly is the stark difference between how some men and women speak of their own competencies. “May you be granted the confidence of a mediocre white man” is a phrase I utter at least twice a week. This morning, waiting for my local coffee spot to open, I saw a common occurrence of that level of confidence: somebody walked in before it opened, saying that, if undesired, the baristas would kick him out anyway. He returned three seconds later. I mused out loud, in front of him and two other friendly regulars who are themselves mediocre white men, that I was thinking about the thing I say to all my female and non-binary design mentees. I feel that my ability to do so in this social context proves that I, too, finally have the confidence of a mediocre white man. All this being said, though, I’m beginning to develop an appreciation for this alternative: “May you be granted the confidence of a disabled queer Muslim woman who, despite everything, dances in the rain.”

Nice idea! I like this one, which is often wrongly attributed to Francis of Assisi:

Proclaim the good news at all times. Use words if you must.

“Because every time I go on Facebook, and I don’t do that often…” I overhear a man say to his coworker while they’re out on their lunch break. I love the complexities that arise when self-reporting is a method of data collection.

Watching the documentary “Spijtmoeders” (“Regret Mothers”) and wondering how many queer people regret parenthood.

Spent the morning at Coffee Company, where a neighborhood acquaintance and I talked about Israel, the war, the protests, the police violence. This afternoon, YouTube gave me an ad of the Israeli contestant of the Eurovision Song Contest saying, in Dutch, that I should vote for her.

Sometimes I think about that art criticism professor who told a full lecture hall repeatedly that Asian people would never be able to play Mozart like white people can.

Ever the snob I am, I made it one verse into Taylor Swift’s freshly-dropped “THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT” for saying out loud on the tram “no, I can’t do this” before deserting my goal of listening to it in its entirety.

Today was the first time in my life when someone asked me if I was experiencing menopause. “It’s the only explanation I can give for why you might be tired.”

Black person today: “Doesn’t your name mean ‘lion’ in Zimbabwe? Tarah, what’s that Disney movie about the Lion called again?!”

I like when products become so popular they can actually say something about society, even if what they say is something horrible.

Me: “Good morning love, how did you sleep?” Her: “Still happening.”

Okay wow they filled half the cup with chocolate syrup. The only proper way to convey what the experience of a single sip was like, was to say it felt like being fucked in the mouth by a chocolate Easter egg.

The baristas at Starbucks are jokingly delegating my order to one another, puzzled by what it means to pour a cappuccino that’s half cow’s milk, half chocolate milk.

As always, spending time with Annelie Wambeek is effortless. She taught Anja and I how to cook a few Sri Lankan dishes. I love it when non-spicy spices come together to give me a zinger.

Hate that I’m the type of person who stands in a monitored line on the streets of Amsterdam to get lunch.

I’m intrigued by what’s happening here. When I saw Sydney’s red carpet look I thought of Billie Eilish’s “coming out” as a bombshell. I wonder if a part of me is offended. I don’t think so. I don’t, by the way, think it’s crazy that those far right articles celebrating Sydney’s outfit as the end of woke were written by women.

There’s something undyingly hip about the baristas at Coffee Company Oosterdok.

I’m attending my very first Saturday Writers' Cafe at Omek. Couldn’t be disappointed if they tried.

After having set up my content management system around an Obsidian vault through which I publish content at a fixed daily time, I’m reverting back to iOS shortcuts. It’s more fun to publish immediately; it helps me capture the small things more easily.

After adding myself to App Defaults I took the liberty of importing the available list of RSS feeds into my reader. It was a mistake. I spent the weekend pruning my subscriptions, hoping I won’t be presented with 200+ updates a day in the form of micro blog content. A few of the new feeds immediately struck my fancy, though, among which was Mandaris Moore, one of the few Black people I’ve come across on the IndieWeb. It’s always good to see the African diaspora represented somewhere.

Just about any app can read it, a year and a decade from now, I’m sure, and then some. That’s more than you can say about diary apps and services, they could suddenly disappear, like the Ello social network did.

Look at that, I had completely forgotten about Ello, but I felt its obscure echo when I read about Daft Social last week.

Enjoying a cozy Sunday indoors with Lemonade. We took a long walk in the park, where we met Sammie, Maat, and Hovis and Norman. I can tell she’s becoming a little less responsive to my cues, which tells me she’ll be going into heat soon. I’m meeting Erin before Church. I gave myself a nice two-strand twist for the first time. Life is good.

• Structured menu as a grid with space-x between
• Added active links to the menu (using Harry’s solution)
• Added Updates section, with pagination (using StaticMania’s solution) and an RSS feed, using timestamp with slugorfilename notation for the permalink
• Updated Start page
• Added a bookmarks page, which should probably become a bit sexier at some point

We started watching the fourth season of True Detective (2014-), which seems, so far, like an enticing storyline, great acting, and the firm reminder that Jodie Foster’s ultimate role is as a homicide detective.

Thanks for providing a quick summary of Cal’s video. Saved me a watch. At first glance, his idea resonates immediately, particularly the concept of the infinite buffer. I suppose it’s not difficult to get lost trying to distinguish this buffer from the cybernetic tools we use to populate it.

Lemonade and I have reached the stage of dog-human relationship where we trust each other, and I confidently let her off leash at the park. I can’t think of a better way to start the year.

Me in 2019: “If Anja ever wants to get a dog I will reevaluate our relationship.”

Me in 2024: “Do dogs understand movies especially those featuring dogs?”

The Omnifocus 4 branding feels like it was created for a demisexual trans non-binary space wolf otherkin named Delivery.

I edit my biography in a community app for Black professionals. Other people use the flags of their heritage, and I decide to do the same. Which one goes first, 🇳🇱 or 🇸🇹? I was born in the Netherlands, and consider myself not Dutch per se but definitely an Amsterdammer. Truth be told, I’ve never been to São Tomé and Principe, and the parent who hails from there left when he was ten. I wonder, brushing my teeth before bedtime, whether it’s appropriation for me to use the flag. And then I think of all the brown and Black faces I know, doing just the same, and entirely dignified and correct in doing what they do. It’s one of the prices of growing up Black in a white environment: I wonder when I’ll stop feeling like I’m the racist.

Hey dear Desi, a bit late, but as promised, here are some resources that may be helpful when diving deeper into UX:

• Don’t Make Me Think, The Design of Everyday Things, and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People are books most UXers would recommend. In addition, Interaction Design Foundation has a great overview of books.
• The Guide to Design by uxdesign.cc is a great starting point
• Career Foundry has a nice overview of How to become a UX designer
• UX Matters is perhaps my favorite resource on UX topics
• UX Research Field Guide by UserInterviews.com. It focuses purely on research practice, but it’s a comprehensive overview of all things involved in focusing on the U in UX.

I’m surprised by the amount of tourists who came to celebrate New Year’s in Amsterdam, as well as by their shared urge to leave the country on January 1.

I can’t be the first one to see Jonathan Banks' character Mike in the Breaking Bad universe is strongly reminiscent of Kevin Spacey’s Lester in American Beauty.

New Year’s Eve is sweet. I spent the morning at Coffee Company Oosterdok working on my website. The girl barista and the guy who came to take over her shift are apparently dating. He’s got a full mullet and a geeky mustache. It’s that season of fashion again. He was the type of soft masculine only Gen Z-ers can be. At 36, I seem to be developing a habit of noticing how much I’m no longer an 18-year-old. Everyone who seems my age addresses me with the formal “u”. I also saw S in the street. It’s the first anniversary of her father’s passing and she was wondering out loud what could properly trigger an ugly cry. She offered me a red velvet “oliebol”, which looked like a fried dog treat. No thank you, ma’am. A friendly face in the neighborhood knocks on our window and tells me she has enjoyed getting to know us a little more, and that she hopes to be in touch more in 2024. 6pm and pizzas enter the oven. It took only 15 minutes for us to finally get into Better Call Saul. I expect I won’t even make it until midnight. Happy New Year!

• Updated the general UI of this website by adding a softer background color
• Added a splice method I used earlier to photo posts, which allows me to alter the size of the images served through Cloudinary
• Merged _notes contents into my _posts folder so that my dated content is organized in a single place (this is convenient for pagination purposes)
• Styled the tags page
• Updated layout of an individual tag page so that short notes and posts are grouped accordingly

Knowing I’m at home in Amsterdam is getting on the tram, seeing the same conductor as a few hours ago, spotting various people whose faces I know. A city as a village, but in a non-insular way.

The split personality trend was… a moment!

On my way to my first climate justice march, and wondering, with embarrassment: are religious and financial reasons why I’m walking today? 🤔😂

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the fact that, while humans aren’t supposed to be able to smell a dog being in heat, I am, very clearly…

Here is a person, watch her work, watch her nae nae: Kawaii-ifying my iPad, learning Korean, in deep work mode listening to the lofi Pokémon playlist on Spotify. Slap me.

Does anybody else recognize the habit of suddenly listening to Mitski’s “Francis Forever” on single repeat for three hours straight?

Lemonade got a free treat from the pet store: a nylon bite ring with edible bits. She’s so obsessed with it that she keeps walking around with it while whining, hiding it behind curtains and doors whenever she gets the chance.

I’m slowly sinking into a YouTube rabbit hole about one of the participants in the television series “Love after Lockup” and I don’t know what’s happening.

I was today years old when I learned it’s “long covid”, not “lung covid”.

Short older women with short gray hair give me childhood anxiety.

Just came home from the first edition of a new, invite-only film club, FC de Filmfanaten. I had suggested the film, “Talk To Me”, and I loved getting fresh perspectives and tidbits on it.

What a thoughtful way of writing about racism in the open, Adrianna. You inspire me to be more honest and concrete on the subject on my own website.

As a designer, incorporating AI into my research practice has been a joy. I’m curious to see what it has in store for design matters.

Good Sunday morning! What are you up to? Me? Oh, I’m on Web Archive browsing the blogs I loved in the early 00s.

I love it when I’m in the store and a kid is trying to sell their parent on the idea of buying them some tchotchke. “Ah, wow, it’s moisturizing! Interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

If the world really were my oyster, coffee would be all foam. Thick, fluffy, not-too-dry foam.

The way inmates smile in pictures taken for the purpose of finding a penpal always makes me sad.

I usually take a while to overcome the cringe I feel about my past selves, but why wait when I can laugh joyfully right now at Anja and myself less than a month ago, passing the Swedish city of Göteborg and thinking the printing press was invented there?

I’ve updated some things around here over the weekend that I think are worth documenting. There are three major changes:

• Status update at the top of the page
• Content is now served through a submodule
• Blogroll

I love Mu-An’s status update so much I had to have it for myself. I like the idea of fleeting messages, blurbs shouted into space, with no proper archive. I almost fool myself into thinking nobody will be able to hold me accountable for what I publish there, but we all know that’s not true.

I enjoy writing Densely-linked content, and for this reason it’s better for me to have all of my writing in a single space. My space of choice at the moment is Obsidian, and thanks to Github Publisher, an Obsidian plugin, and Tania Rascia’s sweet writeup on submodules, I now technically don’t have to be in my code base to publish content anymore.

I’ve taking the liberty of hacking together the most obscene of deployment strategies: every time I update my status, Netlify builds my site and checks the latest updates of the submodule, publishing any new notes, posts, or pages in the process. I am not ashamed.

“She got there at 10 a.m. but already the lights and the music conjured a perpetual afternoon.” From Emma Cline’s story “Los Angeles”.

It’s interesting how “Barbie” is ages nine and older the way I used to watch “South Park” as a 11-year-old.

I had been enjoying both iOS apps Dwell and Abide for the way they integrated with my spiritual practice, but it’s disheartening to find out they both skipped the trial and billed me €40+.

All the teachers around me are slowly getting nervous anticipating the start of the new school year. Anja’s taking her anger out on the pottery wheel. I can smell the freshly-sharpened pencils from here. Or perhaps it’s just the August rain, wrinkling the foreheads of sun lovers, creating warm puddles on the pavement, telling us it went by in a blink.

Whenever I listen to PJ Harvey, I get the sense her songs best reflect the personal life of Juliette Lewis.

Not entirely too long ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wrote a talk on his phone, and I’m struck by how mind-blowing that seemed at the time.

Someone once told me “it’s ‘dessert’ with double s because you always want more of it”, and I think about that person often.

Nobody: Me: “Sir, may I give you the weirdest compliment of your life? If Tom Cruise played Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs’ scene where he waltzes into Africa, he would’ve looked like you.”

Trying to put together a road trip playlist, but getting sufficiently distracted by the fact that The Smith were active for no longer than a mid-decade.

For posterity, I’m archiving here that the non-player character streaming trend on TikTok is an example of why I love the weird-but-it’s-ours Internet.

On the playground, a dad rocks back and forth in a swing just slightly and stares into the distance while his child sits in the stroller. The parental leave coffee break.

In some life-imitating-art kind of way, England’s Prince George looks like Olivia Colman to me.

Just spotted a family of tourists, the dad one of those Pabst Blue Ribbon hipsters who’s now adulting. He wore a shirt that read “THE SMITHS”, accompanied by a black-and-white group photo of Will Smith with his wife and kids. Thought it was deeply hilarious.

Hey Desi love, hope you’re well! As promised, here’s that overview of handy UX things:

• You should sign up for ADPList, a platform that offers free one-on-one mentoring with all kinds of folks. They have handy filters in place to help you identify the questions you have, and how you can best answer them with a mentor.
• Some thought leaders that I love: NN Group, UX Matters, Stéphanie Walter (specialized in enterprise products like me), UX Collective, and UX Planet. Career Foundry and Interaction Design Foundation have great blog articles as well.
• An example of a designer who knows how to create a good case study is Buzz Usborne

Let’s use tomorrow to go into some more detail about how to put together a portfolio!

I’m envious of teenagers who get to record their singing voices every day if they wanted to. I have a suspicion that I’m a better singer now than I was at 15, but I have no way of confirming it.

Finally we have them over to the house again, for the first time in what feels like a human life. One walks in smiling, the other bursts out in tears. “She’s pregnant” I think to myself. I’m right. For whatever godforsaken reason I see her as a submarine now. We talk without pausing, picking up from what could have been yesterday.

Looking at a picture of Elon Musk on The Guardian, and I need to do a triple take to see the caption does not, in fact, read “Elton John”. Sometimes, I feel like I’m in a live action dyslexia test.

Thanks for the inspiration, Barry! I had a separate page for snapshots, but why not move them under Notes with the other IndieWeb post types?

Oops, used u-like-of instead of in-reply-to. Hopefully got it right this time.

Using proper in-reply-to mark-up this time around. Note for Elliott and myself: I think I was mistaken about the Netlify build plugin not working.

Testing a simple webmention by talking to webmention.rocks' Discovery Test #1.

Y’all remember MTV Unplugged?

I am humbled to the fullest extent of the word by Bar Bario, where A. took me in a sheer stroke of luck, and where I felt Black in so the right way and where I made friends, and where I saw myself in everyone.

Hey Ornella, as promised a small introduction into the world of personal knowledge management (PKM):

• PKM helps us collect, classify, save, search, find, and share information
• By taking atomic notes and densely linking them we can come to new ideas
• There are many PKM tools available, each very advanced and functionality-rich in their own way
• The easiest, and cheapest, way to get started with PKM is by downloading Obsidian
• You may want to download their Windows app
• If you use a cloud service like Dropbox, you can easily back up your notes
• I think you may enjoy this article on PKM for researchers

I’m humbled by learning that my words are the introduction of someone else’s biography.

It feels cliché to phrase it like this, but I feel I witnessed a historic Keti Koti ceremony today, with a surprisingly genuine request for forgiveness by our king. It was a good year for me to finally understand my place in a holiday that’s part mine and part not. The ceremony made up for the hour-long wait in the half rain to get a sandwich for someone who had already gone home. Wan swit’ manspasi!

How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can’t hold the content it is living?

And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?”

“We have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.”

Yesterday, someone asked if I’m Jewish, and I said “my partner’s Jewish, and because Judaism sometimes explains much better where I am theologically, I’m Jew-ish” and he said I sounded like most natural, well-rehearsed thing he has heard me say.

Hey Elliott, so lovely to have you over for coworking this afternoon! I love the way you think about UX; your artistic perspective is so valuable for the Internet and for web design, and you always make me see things from a new angle. Aside from the links I already shared with John and Maarten on June 23rd, here’s some stuff I love:

• Jason Cosper inspired me to get rid of my About page.
• Agile and Scrum are quite complex, and multi-interpretable, but Nielsen Norman Group has a few nice resources.
• When it comes to extraversion and “people-person”-ness, I think the UX industry is quite a good fit for those who aren’t those things. Like I said, your ability to create an icebreaker on the fly isn’t half as interesting as your ability to figure out what UX method can answer a specific question. This reminds me of a talk I attended at UXInsights Festival 2022, which wasn’t about this topic per se, but about making UX research accessible for neurodivergent UX professionals. You might like it!

Hey John and Maarten, thanks for meeting me for coffee! I loved nerding out with you two about IndieWeb stuff, personal sites, the red ThinkPad belly button, and what personal web projects we’re working on. As promised, here’s a list of things I wanted to share with you:

• A few IndieWeb people I like (who are involved in the community in various degrees) are Simone Silverstroni, Manuel Moreale, Mu-An Chiou, Derek Kedziora, and Elliott Cost, the latter two of whom live in Amsterdam as well.
• The friendly PhD candidate we met is Ornella Porcu.

I’ll spend some time in the next few weeks cleaning up my site. I’ll probably also try to establish some form of digital garden again.

While walking to grab coffee, my colleague tells me about the peculiarities of his seventeenth-century hat making ancestors, proud of the genealogical research his dad has done. After work, I google “Trans-Atlantic slave trade”, looking to see if I can spot my father’s generic colonist surname among those who made it back to his island. I can’t, of course.

I wonder how much of a boomer it makes me that I use red hearts regardless of the social context in which I use them.

It’s a cruel God who would end Succession and Ted Lasso in the same calendar year.

Racism is the relief I feel when I’m woken up at 5 by a drunken fight because I see I won’t have to hear any racial slurs from the participants, who are Black.

“Before and after historical calamities are human beings creating themselves and contributing to the larger follow of civilizations.” Enjoying Michael W. Twitty’s Koshersoul.

If you use FigJam extensively enough, eventually you’ll find yourself presenting a board that contains an accidental swastika.

As I grow older, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the various conflicting regimens I have in place to take care of my skin, scalp, hair, et cetera. Will it only get worse from here?

Reading a book on Bijlmer Bajes (a famous Amsterdam prison), and I’m chuckling at the architect’s decision not to add bars to the windows, but instead rely on “wire alarm” in the glass. Obviously it resulted in a lot of prison breaks, but what fascinates me is that the user story changed completely from a prison guard aiming to keep a prisoner from breaking out to them aiming to be alerted to a breakout attempt.

Just noticed this UI change, Barry, I like it!

Earlier this week I found myself in line at a coffee place giving my friend a very passionate speech in response to her question “why would anyone have a website?”. I always marvel at people who don’t share this sentiment with us, James. Nice to meet you!

Apparently I have a thing for non-Dutch podcasts about the Netherlands.

Enjoying Sunday night dinner with Anja and my father-in-law. As of recent, we’ve been experimenting with taking it down a notch, food-wise. Rather than wowing guests with eight hours of cooking time, we now feel much more comfortable cooking a few dishing and ordering stuff we love. Today, our Middle Eastern menu was complemented by dishes from D&A.

One skill I’m pleased to have been cultivating these past few years is giving myself a permission slip to rest. I just woke up from a two-hour nap and boy, the world is a new place. Anja clearly remembers the dragon I would turn into whenever I was in need of a nap or just waking up from one. As though I would need to punish myself for having taking a break. Now, it’s a mere drop in an ocean of post-nap ecstasy for me.

I’m now writing these notes using an Apple Shortcut (as inspired by Mu-An. It’s a great way to publish IndieWeb content without having to do any special magic. Setting up this posting strategy has helped me evaluate how I handle notes on this website. My writing often contains short, daily reflections, but it may be worthwhile to move that to this section. Then I can reserve the writing area for longer-form content. Derek Kedziora is great at that, maybe I’ll see if I can be, too.

Archiving my previous Now entry from December 13, 2022.

• In Amsterdam simultaneously enjoying and dreading the cold
• At Leeruniek thoroughly enjoying solving design and mentoring challenges
• Preparing for our corgi puppy
• Invested in my yoga and meditation practice
• Teaching myself, once and for all, to play the piano

Isn’t it so that, if a cog in the wheel doesn’t work, the entire thing falls apart? What a beautiful reflection, Adrianna. I’m glad I read it today.

This is precisely what I love about webmentions, the return to the cozy web!

We’ve begun rewatching Succession again to prepare for its fourth and final season. If you haven’t watched it yet, it is a pure Shakespearean spectacle worth every second. Never before had I seen a work of fiction in which every single character is an antagonist.

1. Continue a seemingly unending cycle of laundry
2. Write in my diary
3. Bake challah

I’m not sure what it says about me that I find it annoying when people don’t recognize that my puppy is a corgi.

Today might be the day I finally bake a challah for shabbos again.

Playing the piano is helping me put some puzzle pieces in the right place. I’ve always had the ability to reproduce the pitch of a song, but it wasn’t until I began playing the piano that I now seem able to identify the key by name. It may seem silly or small, but that’s a game-changer for me. It makes me feel that I can put everything together now; as though I’ve come full circle.

I was pleased to find out just now that the longest distance between two things on Earth ever photographed is a whopping 443 km. Photographer Mark Bret was in the Pyrenees when he was able to photograph the Alps. (Via Marnanel)

I love this essay, Simone. Fully embracing the very IndieWeb concept of a personal website has helped me shake this feeling of FOMO, I imagine the same way it did for you. Don’t be hard on yourself, though, we all fell for this concept, and many of us still do. If society presents something as a way to solve a problem, most people will eventually try it. And while it does solve some problems, it also creates others. I have a few Gen Z friends who never fail to make me feel old whenever they talk about “their personal brand” in an unironic way. Gives me the shivers.

Hey

Darn Barry, I feel like 2023 is throwing you for quite a loop. Ever since you wrote about you getting laid off I think about you every now and then. I’m sorry this happened last week, although I must say I suppose it’s a lucky thing those divvies wanted to get a break-in early bird special.

I was today years old when I learned that American Express and AMEX are the same thing.

If you still needed convincing that I’m Grandma Tech at home, struggling to use even the most straightforward of functionalities, please be aware that I was today years old when I learned that, five years ago, TextExpander released a custom iOS keyboard that would’ve solved so many of my mundane problems, and all I was doing was asking myself “why am I even paying for that app anymore?”

I’m quite excited at the prospect of an impromptu, Kimberly Hirsch-is-in-the-Netherlands-inspired IndieWeb meet-up.

Listening to act two of This American Life’s episode The Runaround, in which we meet a boy who can only really calm his mind by running loops around the block, I can’t help but wonder: it’s beautiful to see a young problem-solver with ADHD make life easier for himself, but were there other people who thought of the compensatory behaviors often displayed by people with an eating disorder?