I found Kai’s intro to this week’s Dense Discovery absolutely wonderful, a concise articulation I think of what we talk about when we think about integrity and excellence. https://www.densediscovery.com/issues/354
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- tired
- cranky 6yo
- hadn’t had a parenting break for a while
- took on a new grab-bag project
- new schedule
- feeling a lack of artistry
- caught up on sleep
- a positive few days of the 6yo
- had a parenting break at the weekend
- the end of the project is in sight
- schedule no longer new
- played some ukulele every day
- Replies (so that I can update posts and add to them)
- Image support (for posting images that I don't want to put on third-party sites)
- Maybe ActivityPub / BlueSky
- Maybe the ability to mention folks and follow folks on other instances of this
Bought some Chacos sandals. I am now a 40-something who owns sandals. It's happening.
Never leave myself time to write, because I'm just parenting or coding. It's annoying, because I want to. Keep on keeping on I suppose.
The more I learn about Mandy Patinkin, the more I like him. Here he is on Letterman singing “Somewhere over the rainbow”.
Not sure what platform to scream silently into, so doing it here. Fuuuuuuuuuuuujuuuuujjjjjjhhhuiuuuuuuu.
I had the most delightful "sales call" today with a chap, almost 10 years older than I am, who has used Tito for the last 10 years because he had just this sense that we were values-driven and he liked the feel of the business.
It was really cool to answer his question "what is your philosophy?" and for it to neatly map to his impression. We discussed how traditional measures of success can be insufficient, and how we don't talk to our neighbours enough (a nice segue from my last post).
I feel like I'm busy busy busy for the next few months, but I really want to make sense for having conversations with people about how the world really doesn't seem optimised for joy and delight, but more and more designed in the pursuit of profit.
I had a small chat with a neighbour today. It wasn't ground-breaking, but saying hello and having a little chat with neighbours is one of the small pleasures in life that seems to have eroded. I introduced myself, and she introduced herself and now I know her name and might say hello in the future. That shouldn't be ground-breaking, but it was.
Day 5 of the Quick Haul Long.
Today’s journey was one I biked last summer, but struggled with the kid on the hills, so we took the car at the beginning of this summer.
About half the ride is along Dublin’s Royal Canal. The path sweeps under Croke Park
By bike it’s about the same time as driving, but it feels like half the time. It’s exhilarating and relaxing all at once. I wish, wish, wish this was the default way to get around Dublin.
I read stuff like this on a tech blog, and I wonder the things I’m not reading. Where does hate like this come from? Where does the humanity of the guards go? Who sanctions it. I’m so faraway from it, yet it feels so close. It’s so obscene, and I’m angry at everyone I know that enabled a person, a set of people, a cabal of hate to take over the USA.
The bike is glorious. I’ve already taken several trips with one or two boys on the back. It’s fun, it’s zippy, it’s ever so slightly nerve-wracking. But just the sheer joy of being part of the world rather that observing it is unbounded. I feel like a tether has been cut.
I have 4 consecutive weeks now of ferrying one boy or other to various summer camps, which would be 20 days with 2 car journeys each, and then driving to and from the office on one of the weeks. That’s 50 car journeys I won’t be taking in the next month alone. I just wish Dublin was further along in its bike infrastructure and that I wasn’t joining the minority of folks who want to live this way.
Getting a new long-tail e-bike tomorrow. I'm hoping that it will transform how I approach moving my kids around. I think it will. They used to love going on the crossbar of my single-speed, and I could take them all over the Dublin environs. This bike will take them both. Really looking forward to it.
This page is my little protest against this.
Something I've been pondering lately, particularly with world news, is the way that oppressive regimes seem so intent in removing rights from people who I associate with being full of joy.
I think to experience joy to its fullest, you need to be vulnerable, and so I guess it makes sense that "powerful" people would want to stamp out joy fully because they can't properly experience it, but it makes for real-world tragedy.
And then for my part, it's hard to experience joy to its fullest in the knowledge that there’s so much basic injustice happening within reach.
So much of what I read (online) I end up thinking: “What’s the point of this?” Or “Why is this a thing?”
Learning to ignore most of that and just move on inch by inch is the way.
Last week, my mood was low, and I listed the reasons:
This week, my mood was up, and I listed the reasons:
Go figure! Sometimes we’re very predictable creatures, but it’s hard to recognise it in the moment.
Pro-tip for guitar: if you want to learn to play and sing a song: learn the words first. With the prevalence of chords where you can see the lyrics and chords on the same sheet, it’s so easy to just play those and nothing goes in.
Once you’ve learned the words, it’s much easier to try to play the song without the chords after a few goes with them. If you don’t know the words, it’s just too much to learn at once.
Learn the words first.
I had a spitball as I picked up a rental car just now: what if electric cargo bike rental was the norm at airports. The problem is that the one hour drive I have would be six hours on a bike, and even with assist that wouldn’t cut it.
But then that leads to the further thought: what if the bike took me to a station and I could roll on to a bus or a train that had proper bike storage.
We should have awards and whenever someone achieves $100 million, which is already obscene, we give them a bronze statue of a dick, and when you get $1 billion, we could give them an even bigger dick.
I'm working from WeWork in Dublin today. It's amazing how much hype folks can create around what is essentially some desks and some convenient utilities.
That said, it's great to have it right here in Dublin. Since I signed up to Revolut Ultra I get three free days per month (I'm still on the fence about whether it's worth it). Today I came in because it was about 2 minutes from the coffee shop I was in, and as it turned out, I could have just come here and had coffee here. Go figure!
Ending the week tomorrow I think with a positive chunk of work on https://io.rsvp, by essentially re-implementing the Tito checkout, but attempting to simplify the code and logic significantly so that we can iterate on it more confidently. Looking forward to seeing the first customers using this new flow.
It's weird to read on the one hand local Irish news report on the new US bill as just a list of "things" and then on the other hand on the Kottke blog "There's No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy. It's hard not to feel bitterly disappointed, even from over here.
Things I want to add to this little personal blogging server:
But so far as just somewhere to post that's easy to do, I can do it from my desktop or mobile easily, and with handy Markdown support, I am very, very happy. Should have done something like this years ago 😁.
David Lynch considered AI “a pencil”. I would add that it’s a very sharp pencil that should come with a disclaimer, although that’s literally what Anthropic say on an article linked from their homepage.
Nothing quite beats home internet for reliability and speed. I guess I over-engineered our setup, but it's just been so reliable for the past 7 years. Particularly through the Covid years.
My setup is pretty simple: a Dream Machine Pro with 2x Unifi access points. It just works.
After playing with Figma Make, the idea of "AI" as an assistive tool has further made my head spin with the ethical grey area it represents. I've struggled for so long with translating what I think I see in my head with what I actually mean. I've found it very difficult to describe this to humans, but when I describe it to Figma Make, I get something visual and interactive to continue the discussion around. That is incredibly enabling for me.
Parliament Street going car free. How delightful. So many early Tito (and before) conversations were had in the Larder cafe, since closed. Looking forward to walking along it in a zig zag to celebrate 🥳
Update 1st July: I drove up Parliament street today, so that I could say I was one of the last ever to do so. Still hope to be one of the first to walk on it!
Still very happy to be posting to something that I have some control over. Psychologically, it’s so much more appealing. I feel free to just post.
Update: I realised I could edit this several days later. “No editing” is hard-coded Twitter muscle memory!
I really have to take a deep breath before reading the news these days. It adds so much to my stress, which has a very real impact on me at home. I want to feel like I’m aware of what’s going on, but the levels of injustice can cause me to shut down.
I've been listening to Pet Sounds a lot recently in the wake of Brian Wilson's passing. Nothing else the Beach Boys did (save for Good Vibrations) reached the heights of Pet Sounds, but my word, what a masterpiece. It's so perfectly crafted. Every note serves a reason, every beat is considered. It’s easy to see how it put such high expectations on him for a follow-up. What a tragic story.
Optimism is a privilege, but it’s also a bit of a drug. Tricking myself into optimism is like a missing dopamine boost.
The level of sicko here is high. I can’t imagine the levels of depravity required to conjure such a scheme let alone the sinister shamelessness to deploy it.
And how if I want to fix something, I can just… fix it!
What I love most about posting here is the quietness. There's no noise. Just me, this post box, and the electric feeling that someone could be reading it, but that they're probably not!
(Although I do need to fix some buggy posting behaviour. Should be handy enough!)
Trying to resist the urge not to write and to just put thoughts down. Right now, literally nobody is watching!
Common People at Glasto. Fuck yeah.
Sometimes I feel like there’s not enough musical artists out there and then something like Glastonbury reminds me that there are too many to count.
When the kids are older, I’d love to do a summer of festivals again. (Could maybe chance it with the older one, but not the younger!)
Never heard of “Raye” before. Sounds like a really cool story, breaking free from the constraints of narrow-minded industry execs https://youtu.be/woUVreVQcwY?si=Tg7pERNDPRKNIoVN
I still prefer writing on here. It seems so much more sensible to not gift my thoughts to a platform of any kind.
I don’t normally hear my own accent as Irish, but sometimes it just comes out, for example: just now I said “calenthar” with a soft d and it happened completely subconsciously!
WebScript. I love it. https://mastodon.social/@tolmasky/114766505534616818
Did a little bit of tidying on this microblog app that I made for myself. I haven't known where to post: whether it be on Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever, and I've also known that I would be most comfortable posting to a server that I had control over.
And so here I am: posting to my own app on my own server. I'll post to nobody for the time being and see how it goes.
The Kneecap stuff continues to amaze me at how politicians choose injustice by default.
It's weird being Irish for all of this too, when you have the Irish Taoseach up and saying that the EU response to Gaza is a stain on the bloc: https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0625/1520337-taoiseach-israel-gaza/
It's like in Ireland the status-quo is entirely logical, and everywhere else, folks are tying themselves up in knots to justify the worst things.
The level of nobbishness in this article is high. The contempt that rich people in NYC have for fairness and equity in society is reprehensible. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/hot-commie-summer-zohran-mamdani
Hello!
Hi Till!
Talking to Tony!
Alright. It's nice to post on here now and again. I've run out of time to get tweets in though, but that's ok.
Next steps: getting all my tweets in here.
Ideally I would just write everything here and people would be able to see it there. That remains the goal!
Hi Manton!
I can write!
Is Markham looking?
Showing Bill my project.
Showing Kim my project.
Writing something here because it's my damn server and I think this is cool and it only took me like 2 hours to make!
Is this working now?
First post!