Discipline=Freedom

" Discipline equals freedom" Jocko Willink.

Last year I started a course to learn strategies and tools for coping with ADHD tendencies. The previous Christmases had been very unhappy times, and I wanted to break, which I did. I have no ADHD diagnosis, I just find the tools help me deal with imposter syndrome, and seasonal depression. I mapped my highs and lows in detail for 2 months last year. I uncovered symptoms which are, as far I can work out, caused by anxieties. Like the FOMO (Fear of missing out) from my last post https://zaphodikusrealm.blogspot.com/2025/01/gently-curious.html .

Anyway, one of the typical ADHD'er tendencies is a desire to optimise everything, and free up "CPU cycles" and so when someone says discipline equals freedom , everybody's brain just melts. That just sounds like a juxtaposition, not a truth. But my next two weeks are about routine establishment. By having routines, you can take guesswork out of small tasks that waste the cognitive and risk assessing part of the brain. We execute about 10 mini risk assessments every single day without knowing, what if you could roll just some of those into a practised routine? What if we could batch chores up, and do it in a way that ensures we don't forget any of them, in itself , that's a stress source. As someone with very little routine, because I am constantly guarding against my OCD tendency, I think I'm achieving a goal. Yes there will be a blog post about goals, I'm working through some of the course material backwards, Can you tell I'm a rebel?

Gently Curious

  If you are a bit ADHD, you will find yourself often getting into trouble with people. I say often and I mean often but for differing reasons, one of them is when a thing someone does just grinds you because it's just inefficient to do it that way.

Big triggers of grumpiness (anxiety) like lack of sleep, stress, technology that glitches, over-loading or even a food change are more general ones that we have some amount of control of. But some you have no control over. Like when a friend takes 20 minutes to eat lunch and you know it takes you 10-15 minutes and the train will be arriving exactly then. It grinds you, if the train runs early, you want to be on it early too dammit! I have always had FOMO (fear of missing out) which means I love to arrive early to every meeting. My FOMO however had started to drive my wife mad. I needed to teach myself to be less anxious about time itself. Last week I twice managed to actually run a few minutes late getting somewhere and a miracle happened, I did not end up driving faster. And I missed out on nothing at all.

Gently Curious

What grinds me, is not just people who eat slowly. I had to realise that my FOMO and wanting to get to every single meeting 5 minutes early was also stressing other people. This works two ways a lot, much more than I had realised. And just like my totally irrational desire to never miss things was not understood by my family, I often don't understand their quirks too. I very often fail to accommodate others, I mean why can't they just do things my way, the better way? Well, that's because everyone has different goals and different things they get out of the habits they might have. So how do I satisfy my unhappiness with the choices of others to do things wrong?

I used to just tell any person straight out, that that is not the best way! And when you turn it in it's head, and instead ask, what they are doing first, then ask why they do it that way, but without asking the why question, ask the how does this activity meet a need, for example how often do we all do "X" in a day for example? Almost in a reflective way, as if you are asking yourself, and then even though you will then learn why they do it the wrong way, and you will not be able to change them, you will understand the person better. Ever since I started being more gently, I have been building my own list of annoying things that I do, which I now work on, to minimise. It goes two ways.

2017

Dec 2017 : This year I tried to fix everything. Everything. I bought a house. Found 2 boys. Found a handbag. Lost my job. Prayed. Found a job. Made fire... a lot. Got sick and wobbly just before Xmas. (twitter.com)

Stop reading now if introspections offend you.
Everything?
I probably set out thinking anything can be fixed, the physical or built things that break often that-is. I mean in the old days they made stuff to last. I still recall the old SONY set my mum had, it looked a lot like this one, and lasted for years and years, just like her refrigerator. 

So why does so much break, and what can I do about it? Fix it faster than it breaks? Just get on top of it, it requires loads of tools today, just to be able to work on stuff, but why all the throwaway stuff? Youtube is great for teardowns on almost anything you want fixed, and guides to fix it. So give google a try first. Anyway, my solution is superglue, the good superglue. Get it here http://softcircuitry.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/how-to-repair-stuff.html

Bought a House
This was the painful part.
I at one point started making a mental list of things to fix, while we were in the buying process (which was drawn out and clearly shows also that property law in the UK needs fixing.) Basic things we knew, like the roof neede re-tiling, and the kitchen floor, the kitchen splash-backs, and the bathroom,... anyway the list went ape.  I stopped after hitting about 30. New things kept on coming up. however once we got moved in, I had already learned to put in a floor. Thanks to Peder Peterson (a Belgian who plies me with great imported beers) and his reciprocating saw, I got trained up in chipboard flooring. 3 slow days, one room, many plasters and scrapes.

The house buying was something I prayed about a lot to be sure, it was a long drawn out process, the owners were not divorcing themselves of each other and the house very well. At one point I was about to walk away. In retrospect, I should have put in an offer 5K lower, possibly 10. This is the part about life where I wonder if I have short-changed myself. l always assume that if I am good to someone, that they will return the favor, not this time. I am probably too trusting.

Found 2 boys
It is easier than you think to loose contact with teenagers, they go through a stage where day is no longer cool, and that will hurt, trust me it will happen. 
http://zaphodikusrealm.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/proud-of-my-son.html . More on this, as we go along.

Found a handbag
I found a handbag, belonging to M it turns out, it was really strange, I got home one afternoon, early for some reason, and just a few yards from the front door, on a pretty quiet high street was a holdall. It is on an A road, but that just means that more cars use it than makes sense. I left a message at the post office, and left it at a nearby respite center and at and the next day, we got a thank you note. Samaritans +1

Lost my Job
I'm not allowed to talk about this, but despite the process being painless, it was stressful to me. I got demotivated during the process, despite telling myself over and over, that it's not my fault.

Prayed
Well, not me, I want to send out thank you to Esther and Rosemary. It was always going to be a worry, a worry that nobody wants to hire you, or that you get hired by the wrong crowd for any reason. But having someone on your case with the Big Guy is just a guarantee that it's going to work out if not to my own plan, at least to a better plan.

Found a Job
This required a bit of examtime cramming to start off.

(post updated in Dec '24)

new job started, new bathroom

updated Dec '24

New job started at arm

That's with a small "a", something all the hip tech companies are doing. But that's not all that is new once you start working for one of the most invisible yet totally huge tech companies in the world. Apart from being very cool to work at a place that had almost invisible products everywhere, is the "in" jokes around 3 letters, a r m . I'll not spoil it, you have to work here to hear them all, and even understand them all. It's a very creative and hard working crowd.

New bathroom

Almost done , it looks brilliant, but some small things I did not expect.
- the grout colour gray needed to be a little bit lighter gray
- the towel rail radiator starts quite near the ground, which means it's less of a towel rail, but it should be fine
- the towel rail is bigger than thought, so the basin kinda lines up or does not centre well in the remaining space
The missus is wondering about where to put the toilet roll, so I'll have to sort that out pretty pronto myself. I had fun getting downlighters onto a string of lights this weekend, just hope I can get holes into the ceiling without cutting anything by mistake under the flat roof. Limited space and other cables in there too.

Boiler instruction manuals http://www.greenbrook.co.uk/eshop/files/files/T205-Ins-June-18.pdf

Updated - that job lasted a whole year, I think I struggled a lot with the traveling and being a bit lonely.

Singing rehearsal pieces

Nobody will know:

A note I made back in April of '23, long before I had to start takign singing seriously, but this is jsut a note, so here goes.

A Gaelic Blessing Deep Peace to You - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lF56VahTa0gn2JqLnJcUiK4lU2R-5Z6g/view?usp=sharing

Bridge over Troubled Water - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0D6ul5nZ_wsfvUDGI8D005DxnZcOlGs/view?usp=sharing

BQQ recipe update

A note for future me (I write this in summer of 2023, and it's almost 2025 now)

I have said this before, I hate recipe websites. So I like to write up my version of a recipe and stow it someplace. I suppose that's a bit old fashioned. Almost like a circular technology shift.

Anyway, going to do a repeat of the BBQ with fish soon. I'm going to be adding aubergine and plantain.

A History linkup

(Wrote this during the great shutdown - but never published this at the time, so the date is wrong, but it needs sharing now.)

I'll have to find an old picture or two of us. This is a history lesson, it's not long in terms of years, but it's long in terms of miles. I'm sitting here writing this today, crying. My good friend Marinus has lost his best friend this week.

Marinus van Zyl

Marinus actually has many middle-names, he once recited them for us, there is a family tradition of giving each son and daughter in the family, successive names from the fathers middle names. A way of holding your family names which curiously would mean that sometimes your grandfather would have the same name as you. Marinus son, Manie holds this privilege, I hold the benefit of having met both of them. But let's start at the beginning. A bit of this is my history, just in my writing.

1991

Johannesburg city center. I'm pretty sure it was raining as I queued up to register for a programming course. I was a bit self-taught at programming at that time, but since I'm not university material, a practical course run by a certain company called "Van Zyl and Pritchard" was my way into the industry. It was a Cobol Programming Foundation certificate and going to be my ticket into programming. One of the training company directors was, Marinus father. A short course, co-incidentally also attended by one of his children, Marinus. I made one other friendship in that course in between lectures on a large yet packed second floor room. Craig Austin now lives in London. After lectures we would walk across town, run really most often to catch a train back home, and after that, a bus.

Nobody reads these

It occurred to me, that some people blog as a self-branding or portfolio building activity.

I probably should have started writing more of these personal signposts a bit more regularly, since there are very few landmarks here, marks I'm leaving for future me, almost like a diary, because nobody reads these, but almost like a personal wiki or a self-help guide. I tried making my own wikimedia wiki once to store all the info I had about transistors and odd electronics I collected, it was a lot more work to write up than I originally hoped. But it did teach me to be super comfortable with writing markdown. glad that this blog does not require markdown.

Interestingly the saying goes, that "our future is written in our past". And that's largely true, as knowing what you did before, lets you know more about what you will do next, but. Big but, when truly looking for change, honest change we might too often use the past to beat ourselves into a kind of submission to all of our past wrongs. 2 years ago, as parto f a change I wanted to drive, I started a bit of a writing exercise. Now this blog was always an inspiration outlet, but I was writing about computer games, and the audience and context did not fit, but the goal, was to start writing more clearly and purposefully. So I wrote my creative pieces as game reviews on Steam, and grew to 99 followers over a year, and am now at 150 followers. I wanted to learn to "Write-like-you-are-paid-to-write". And so now I am hoping that my writing style becomes more deliberate, because next up is a bit of blogging with more purpose than usual. So do stay tuned.

Let's see if this becomes another one of those new year resolutions.

Ringing Association web changes

1.  find all dead links
2.  find all and add missing images
3.  update any blurry images
4.  make page headings more consistent (banner redesign)
5.  get people to send updated content in
6.  get events data from someone?
7.  make homepage more inviting and cleaner
8.  catalogue all embedded pdf and google docs (use pdf)
9.  write up some guidance : this document

Guidance

• Spelling is to be English UK, not US.
  Examples: colour, centre
• Note any change when you make it so people can be included and review after.
• Decide on a font style and sizes : TODO
• Decide on consistent image sizes to make things look more pleasing : TODO

(1) Dead Links

The Huntingdon website is moving/moved - find best new page, then fix any links : TODO

The quick links page on EDA page and on the Ely EDA page differ un-necessarily (somehow I cannot find both pages now.)

elyda.org.uk "A" record needs to point to ely.elyda.org.uk someone with the mythicbeasts DNS record hosting needs to do that bit. : TODO

Telegraph lines to our Past

 A few summers ago, I heard a chiming, a ringing, and a connection started to form faintly. Faintly because the great lockdown of 2020 hit us. So it was not until the first lifting occurred and a lot of people connecting and messaging happened that I got started.

Ringing bells that is. And it has taken some time to get schooled in the art. but we are finally guild members the missus and I. My interest has been about history and the old buildings, and as a hobby ringing lets you touch a lot of those bases in a very tactile way.

Anyway. It's Sunday and I have a lot to do, so . Yes loads to do. I'll use this space for notes I think.

StPeters Wilburton : Part of a quarter-peal attempt.

2 minutes

Ringing down at St Peters Wilburton
Ringing Down

Where did you run to in Lockdown

so i quit all my normal clubs

For me, the digital world has often inhabited a subliminal space around the real world. That's because it's a construct of what is essentially our physical world but with vastly different constraints. Constraints that are easy to ignore and are often ignored and grotesquely twisted by users of our digital worlds. So when lockdown pretty much jailed everyone who did not open the door into the digital, I could always see the "construct" of the digital space for what it is, a lie. But everyone was online now, to communicate, to share, and to work and to socialise, you have to open that door into the slightly twisted, but the only world that remains.

It started with the uncanny valley of zoom meetings. People compose books on the shelves behind them on camera and aim the camera just so. People use backgrounds and then the camera portrays the other party up close, really close, just 50 cm away from you. That inside your comfort zone visually, and the mind boggles. So we all try different online meeting solutions and mix up the online meeting screen with backgrounds and so on, to try and make it feel less personal-space invasion-like, less home privacy invasion-like and try get on with it. But apart from the way the camera lens lies and the fact that only 2 people in the meeting can speak at a time, (which is a really dumb problem.) There is the drift into doing everything digitally, which is of course meaningless. You cannot feed someone digitally, or even less check that they really have taken their daily meds. You cannot help them get to the bathroom (there is a famous discussion on how the simple stranger entering a place asking for directions to the bathroom is in fact a bigger introduction to deeper communication, but that's part of the pain.) Yes, lacking physical touch, but for me, digital has always been fake.

Digital will always be fake, it conveys very low trust, and is unable to transport any goods or provide really useful services, and still cannot make tea. And for those who could not work remotely the "imposter" and fake of my cushy life made me trip out on guilt early on. I had a security of my little personal zone, a luxury, which very few had, many were jobless. For someone who abhors luxury, this was very hard to process.

So I ran away.

Why?

Well because it's a complete waste of time and effort. Mental effort which has now been frustrated for some people who don't normally hold it together anyway. There was no point in going to online club meetings; meetings where you cannot give someone a lift back home afterwards; meetings where you cannot have a side conversation and meet for coffee afterwards (some exceptions exist). Meetings devoid of cookies, and meeting with no beer involved. Nobody seemed to care that this was a problem, which for me further eroded trust in the people meeting because everyone else was happy to forego one of the things I really felt was key to me. I have always felt I trusted the smart people I admire who built the communities and ran meetings. Lockdown undermined that trust. All the clever people had no answers. I quit a number of clubs, some clubs I quit frivolously, others more out of general overload. Generally nobody cares about the "person" in a digital club.

Overload

An Olympic athlete pulled out of one of her events this last week, she was not confident she could focus and complete the slightly dangerous techniques. Too much at once, in fact some clubs I abandoned were abandoned just because my bandwidth dried up. Not only do I not pay attention to postal paper mail anymore, I don't pay attention to spammers like YouTube who spam me with totally pointless content, making me feel even more isolated by the "actor" on a soap box with a fake smile that their "algorithm" forces into the foreground. Just let me be quiet, let me go back to basics, and let me do physical things, things that really do matter. This lockdown reset has prompted a lot of us to take up hobbies in cooking, crafting, gardening and more. It has even forced a lot of us to start cycling more, walking more, and make some better life choices. some of these good habits which I hope people decide to keep after this all blows over, and blow over it will. Lockdown has cut down air travel, which might be good for the re-calibration of our waste culture too.

I read this week about a few people recalling vivid dreams they have which are like the Truman Show, being in a fake world where everyone else is really a robot, and you are the only human left alive. A feeling of being continuously observed, but not in a move star kind of way observed. Guinea pig kind of observed. I used to have these thoughts once, and lockdown has triggered them again, but making me feel liked a trapped or jailed mouse. I often wonder if pets feel like they are jailed. I'm a cat lover myself, so sometimes I just wish I was a cat. Okay, forget that cat reincarnation idea, it's not that appealing unless you are a cat in a good home anyway.

Casualty

The casualties are many, and I'm not yet ready to take responsibility for ones I've created, sorry, just, sorry if this is you, find someone who is responsible to blame please.

Blame

As someone who struggles to follow even a basic math formula, I was never going to be the one who solves this blame thing. However my faith in smart people to make good choice dissolved in early 2019. A lack of honesty and even a desire to have prevented this are my foremost reasons for miss-trust of the system and of my betters. I can see how some anti-vaxers use this same line of argument against the establishment of medical professionals. It's however blindingly clear, just how weak willed politicians are, to address the real causes by minimising encroachment on wildlife and minimising climate change which is the leading cause of the encroachment problem. I'm sure that's not the only thing we would do if we could wind back time to November 2019, but now that it seems a lifetime away, it's too late. The fact that clever people give up too easily worries me. That weakness underlies a lot of anti-vax argument, which sadly is illogical.

Return

So, sadly I'll not be coming back soon. I'll come back when I'm allowed to sing and dance indoors without a mask, when I'm allowed to grab cookies from the same jar as everyone else, and without individual wrappers on foods. I'll be back when I can do physical things that make a difference, like buying you a beer, or giving you a lift. I'll be back when the people have dispensed with the bullshit and have stopped playing. Playing is fine, but just not when it's at someone else expense.

I know that nobody will ever read this, but that's fine, it's digital, so it's fake anyway.

Every time I see an advert, a puppy dies

Ads, advert or advertisement? If the contractions introduced over time were not hint enough. Please tell me I'm not the only human who has spent the last 20 years teaching myself to ignore advertisements. It used to be that television adverts were entertaining back in the 80's. Billboards and newspaper advertisements glossy magazines with great artwork were setting the standard gradually higher and higher. Culminating in an entire book worth of advertising of homes, that you can buy every Sunday at the newsagent. Yes, there used to be a time when adverts targeting specific people would actually be all in one specific place.

Mutually Assured Destruction, simply by having a bigger banner Ad.

1. MAD

Digital changed all of that, advertisers can now follow you around and target you. Companies have always had more money that sense when it comes to advertising spend. That's because brand awareness and influencing peoples buying habits, is big big money. Brand loyalty is such big money that companies prostitute themselves to the advert companies, who happily ask for more money in order to promote their client above all the competitors. Creating a MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) cycle which sees ever more bizarre advertisement spending in order to emerge on top. Being seen becomes so important that brand awareness surveys and number of impressions become a metric to chase after, yet another lie to pile onto the ill in that industry. To the consumer, advertisements become a bombardment, which frankly comes across as increasingly desperate, and often insensitive.

The impact of advertisements on customer in many ways however is harder to ignore. An impact that goes beyond a datacenter carbon footprint, a datacenter built just to store gigabytes of data about you to target you. Because targeted adverts are coming under pressure with new privacy controls possibly coming to Apple. Apple are bizarrely not a player in the advertising game, even though their entire raison d'etre is about image, and suddenly Google and their free portable-device OS don't look so stupid anymore. I get that Apple are all about what will make them more money, so pandering to privacy is a song they have sung for a while, and will continue to sing new cover versions of. I can respect that, someone who sticks to their guns and gives me a service, worth the money I fork over to them. If only I did not have other problems with Apple, I would be mucking in down at the Macintosh farm instantly. but I digress, because privacy and the impact AI has on it is key, even if fans of the platforms cannot see that.

2. Privacy

So, lets get back to this anonymous user problem. Apple use a special "advertiser id" generated for each device, that allows you some privacy, because an advertiser gets a unique ID for you, but that ID is not tied to "you"... which is complete bullshit as a concept. But for now I'll let it stand.

The vast majority of us have nothing to loose by being tracked, until... Well let's understand privacy better here. Privacy is about protecting the vulnerable as well as about preventing identity theft. And you will be surprised at how many vulnerable people are online. Activists online who are tracked by state actors are just the very tip of this iceberg. "State level" actors are powerful enough to drop tracker pixels into social networks, and sniff metadata directly off the wire to find and start profiling the contacts of anyone the activist connects with. Apple's clever little "ID" can do nothing to protect these people, because the privacy metadata at risk is your links, to other people. And even if those people are anonymous, someone with enough metadata will quickly map your habits and location using ML. The only defense against being tracked is to change your identity regularly, or to use ML itself to randomly make you appear to behave differently or randomly. Humans are creatures of habit through their timing and their connections (sites they visit). Internet activists are more vulnerable than we think. Advertising has created a huge industry to enable tracking people, often for the wrong reasons. Don't even start me on the very very bad health biases that advertisers willfully create.

I'm not even going to start on how advertising trackers get misused to sell health related items to you, another landfill contributor. If you start visiting baby websites while trying to have a baby, and then your wife has a miscarriage, they keep on bombing you with misery for years without ceasing. I'm not even going to describe the trivial effort to research buying one toilet seat of the correct size, then going to buy a replacement toilet seat in a real store. For the next month I got toilet seat adverts, even though I only have 1 toilet in my house. What a waste. The other day I bought a special kind of bolt online, I never buy any similar finds of things, but just that one experience saw my stream flooded with all manner of metallurgical products. Products I could often not even identify, and less likely even ever buy. The waste is dangerous, but the creepy thing is that this data, me buying a bolt, asking a friend a bolt related question allowed the advertisers to link me with my friends. Soon we all see the same bolt adverts. I kid you not. Imagine if I was researching a sexual health related product, something very private? Suddenly my friends will know.

The thing that pisses me off most about this is that this has a huge impact not, on men.

So you think you are anonymous out there, let me tell you a story about a big games console company. They had a huge problem, their console could not advertise new games to users because not only did the console not really know who the gamers friends really really were. But they had no way of knowing how to push relevant adverts to a gamer and their friends, because the console had no web social network linkup. And we all know that the web and most especially the mobile platform gets the most "conversions", or actual purchases. On our mobiles, a device we carry everywhere and has our attention 24/7, the console game publisher had no way to touch it's users. So the console company went to a cloud company and agreed to combine basic user metadata with whatever data their own website tracking could provide. Suddenly using ML alone, an algorithm if you like, was able to use terabytes of metadata, not about the users, but about their activity alone. And successfully build customer journey patterns that now save the console company millions in advert budget. Watch this landscape. It's about to change.

3. Waste

The ad industry is a huge waster, not just in terms of the MAD stacking and compounding problem, but because a lot of us cannot resist adverts. I've gotten into the habit of hating adverts and on a platform I block advertisers when possible, set preferences and enable trackers as often as I can to prevent adverts that are really more a waste of my time and a waste of money for the person placing them. Advertisers may want to start paying me, there's actually a browser that tries to do that, but that's another topic altogether. Adverts waste my bandwidth, which I pay for, and they just assume is free. Adverts waste my time. By lacking any kind of real targeting adverts force me to wait longer for pages to load and get in the way of me doing the things I love. Basically imagine you are about to kiss a beautiful girl, and a guy wizzes up on a bike and suddenly offers to sell you a condom. You buy one, she runs off anyway at this point, so you toss it into the landfill. 

Image showing the "Golden Girls" Maude not being rude.

Most commonly advertised products are the cheapest products and hence more likely to be impulse purchases, that get binned. Advertisers are often wasting their time because I've not bought a single product off of an advert, ever. I know this because I only buy items off of a researched wishlist which I keep in various ways. It's not hard to prevent landfill.