Wow. Just found a classic example of misusing “proof links”. A writer on Medium making certain statements, and linking to “prove” them, but the pages he links to don’t back it up at all.
Credibility hacking. 🤦🏼♂️
It turns out that our local church uses some rather dated tech…
Hmmm. Does anyone have any idea why my micro.blog site wouldn’t pick up an analytics code put in the Footer section of ->Design? It seems to have stopped working when I installed one of @cdevroe’s themes. 😕
Always worth taking time out to feed our feathered friends.
Bottoming out
On Wednesday morning, I hit a low. My family has been lucky during the pandemic — none of us have caught the virus (as far as we know), and we haven’t lost anyone. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been an impact. For me, the main impact has been on my mental health.
The near-destruction of my business a year ago has shaken me profoundly. It’s eroded my sense of self-confidence more than it should have, and left me prone to bouts of bleakness. I hesitate to call it “depression”, because I don’t have a diagnosis, and I know people have it a lot worse than I do. But it’s there, I need to acknowledge it and learn to live with it, because I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.
Some frustrations that morning — a couple of pieces of work I thought were in the bag turning out to be far less so — sent me spiralling downwards. One situation in particular felt like a very personal rejection, and was probably what triggered my bleak mood. I can still feel it haunting me a couple of days later.
I had to pull away from social media — Twitter especially — for a while, because it’s not good for me at the best of times. I toyed with the idea of starting to look for a job again — something I haven’t done seriously for nearly a decade.
Living self-employment
And then, I remembered that I am self-employed, and that I am so for a reason. I really am my own boss, and I can take time off if I need it. I declared the rest of the day a mental health day for myself, and took myself off to Worthing to do a couple of chores.
Once they were done, I gave myself permission to just wander, explore. To see new places I hadn’t seen before, something I haven’t really done in over a year now. I followed the main street in Worthing far beyond where I’ve every gone before, and after I passed the tertiary retail and the empty units, I started finding some interesting wee shops off the side-streets.
And, my goodness, did I feel better afterwards. I hadn’t realised how much I missed exploring for its own sake, going new places and finding new things.
That made me realise that maybe I need to rebalance my time again. As a natural result of the pandemic-driven downturn in my business and the lockdowns, my world had pretty much shrunk to my work, my family and my neighbourhood. It’s not any slight on those three — all of which I love — to say that I clearly need a little more than that in my life right now.
Perhaps, if I invest a little bit more time in things I enjoy, and in some of my personal projects, I’ll be a lot less vulnerable to bad days in the the day “job”.
It’s certainly worth a try.
Zero for two so far on ATT
The beach is going for drama this afternoon.
I have done a democracy. 🇬🇧
Having one of those days where I wonder why I bother with the stress of being self-employed.
It’s been nearly a decade since I had a full-time job. Maybe it’s time to go back.
It’s lovely to see the vegetation sprouting again on the beach — a sure sign that summer is on its way.
Dear Substack writers,
It is not compulsory to have an opinion on the Basecamp mess.
Yours,
Adam
(Who has just deleted several lukewarm takes on the subject from you all…)
Looks like there are security updates for Apple things out — urgent ones, too.
Looks like I’ll be updating all the family devices while I work this morning.
🎵 You’re driftwood… 🎵
This is an absolute shocker: last night someone cut down an osprey nest at Llyn Brenig in Wales, where a young pair were incubating their first egg.
Ospreys are a schedule 1 species, and any disturbance of them during breeding season is a crime.
Just replaced the Cat 5 on the wired elements of our home network with Cat 7 cables.
Boy, I know how to have fun on a Friday night.
This is genius: Paddington in Film
Why Substack stealing the big name columnists won’t kill newspapers — and why it might actually be a good thing…
The masked FaceID unlock works great on my iPhone running iOS 14.5. A nice little quality-of-life improvements for Apple Watch users.
I know everyone’s talking about the “paid podcasts” bit of yesterday’s Apple Event, but I do wonder if the sheer multimedia creation power of the new iPad Pro is the bigger story for digital journalists…
So, if M1 Macs can run some iOS apps as well as Mac apps, and the iPad Pro now uses an M1 chip…
…WWDC is going to be really interesting this year, isn’t it?
So happy to see Apple go back to colour in the post-Ive era.
From our trip to Wakehurst last week:
So, 100 hours on from my first vaccination jab, the side-effects have been negligible. My arm was very sore until yesterday morning. I had a slight headache on Saturday morning, and I was unusually tired for most of the weekend.
Otherwise, all fine. Roll on 💉 #2
Finally, I’ve had my post-lockdown haircut.
