After Spice Girls, Mel C had a period - like so many of us - of experimenting with the cloud.

When she came out of it, she wrote this song:

When the cloud costs more than I can understand
When uptime is not what I had planned
When AWS goes out and there's no end in sight
When Azure can't keep up all through the night

I turn 2 U
Like the admin reaching for a Sun
I turn 2 U
'Cause it's the better one
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U

When my boxes are racked with redundancy
They have the specs that will quiet me
They lift my uptime, they lower price
When I need web scale, when I need device

I turn 2 U
Like the admin reaching for a Sun
I turn 2 U
And call the server man
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U

What would I pay?
What would I do
If I had never made the move?
I hope some day if you've lost your way
You can curl to me (you can curl to me)
Like I curl to you

I turn 2 U
Like the admin reaching for a Sun
I turn 2 U
'Cause it's the better one
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U

I turn 2 U
When Google tells me to turn around
I turn 2 U
'Cause it's the better one
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U
I turn 2 U
I turn 2 U

(When Romans bought new togas in their favourite gladiator's colors)

Books: still nice.

I am in a bit of a reading period again. Much of the reading is preparing for a podcast episode, which is also a bit of a first as far as I can remember. Some reading, or an episode about a specific book, is nothing uncommon. But this time, I have read two books which add background and depth to the topic, and I have a third one I might be able to fit in too. That is new, and I like this new "deeper preparations for a episode, further in advance" track.

It will probably not become a habit, but I would definitely not mind if it did. Or some spinoff thing did.

Really, the most interesting question is if and how I manage to make use of all that background in the episode. We will find out.

The episode is on a topic in the "AI" radiation field, so in a way I have been preparing actively for more than a year, and passively for what, four? Can this bubble burst already, please?

I thought back to my AI bubble conference talk last year and realized that if anything, I would be more pointed and negative in my criticism now than then. Discovering more deeply educated writing on the topic has only strengthened my feeling that I was on the right track.

Words on screen.

Two thumbs tapping on a Clicks keyboard case.

Bebop for capturing the text, sending it into text files later available in Obsidian and known folders for reference and further thinking.

Because the Clicks is attached, the screen contains no keyboard. There is some minimal interface, but mainly white text on a dark background, from top to bottom.

(If the sun was up, it would be black text on white background.)

Typing like this is not faster than other options, probably not even the Iphone’s ever frustrating on-screen keyboard, but it is a lot more pleasant.

Used like this, the phone feels a lot like a single purpose writing device. Remember how they used to say an advantage of an all-screen phone was that it became a dedicated UI for each app? This is it, only more so since I dedicated hardware to getting appropriate buttons.

How much space is there? I am a bit over halfway down the screen right now, nowhere near needing to scroll to see everything.

Truly its own separate way of writing. Different ways of writing shape thoughts in different ways. This seems to have gone in a very straight line to a blog post.

Also possibly influencing thoughts is a bit of reading I just did in The timeless way of building. Every time I give it even a few minutes, I come away feeling a bit calmer, a bit refreshed, and in a mood for thinking slightly deeper thoughts.

… the polar opposite of stereotypical social media (and much other media for that matter) if you will.

I do not think Alexander would be opposed to that line of thought.

I even got some interesting thoughts in relation to our house and garden.

Ever since I started using Tahoe - the glassy latest version of Macos - on one of my Macs, text syncing has felt less reliable.

The core of my system is Obsidian pointed to a folder in Icloud, and on the phone I most often use Bebop to quickly add text to the current day's text file.

Nice and simple and - most of the time - quite reliable.

But in the past few months, I have started catching mistakes.

Sometimes the most benign version, where a second daily note with a "2" appended to its name appears. I simply cut and paste the things I want to the main file, delete the second one, and move on.

But sometimes, I would open a computer and start typing, then later notice something missing. I was then able to command-z back and rescue text which came in through Icloud. Close call, and quite annoying.

Luckily, there is a good part.

Yesterday, I discovered a whole long section missing from the previous day's file. A section I had put some thought into and not only was quite happy with but also knew I would want to use in the future. No amount of undo/redo or optimistic checking of other devices helped.

Then, I discovered Obsidian's core plugin "File recovery". Enabled by default, it saves the state of your files every five minutes and keeps that history for a whole week! Just go into Settings -> Core plugins -> File recovery and click the "View" button to select a file and see what has been saved.

Sure enough, my text was there, and by skipping through the snapshots I could also see where a note from my phone came bumbling in and over-wrote it.

I am still not sure what I should do about the actual issue. Apart from watching things like a hawk and hope that future updates help resolve it. Perhaps I should start saving Bebop's notes to a separate file name, just to be on the safe side?

In any case: snapshots, what a life saver!

I woke up today to find the world had again taken confident steps along the path clearly labeled "worse".

The last few minutes before I turned off the lights last night were the exact opposite. Small, personal, friendly steps on the bright path stretching out next to the "better" sign.

What I did? Nothing out of the ordinary, I just picked up A pattern language and The timeless way of building from my bedside table and spent a few blissful minutes reading passages in both.

We do not need huge solutions to things.

We just need to practice, gather information, and give a damn.

(That last part often feels particularly lost, but I suspect many of our problems actually are strongly connected with doing way too little of the first.)

It is easy to get swept up into exciting systems thinking reading these books. And so it is always a - yet another - breath of fresh air and ray of sunshine to read the last part of The timeless way of building where it all folds in on itself and disappears because when you have actually internalized things you no longer need the support structures.

Both books are simply the training wheels you need to get to where you actually want to be; where you need none of this to be explicit at all. And most likely not applied exactly as written either.

So many more instructions should end with a chapter like that.