Mitch's Blog

Lindsay Zoladz at The New York Times:

Starr then drifted back to a memory of his early days gigging around Liverpool, before he joined the band that he sometimes refers to as “the Fabs.” “When I first started,” he said, “my mother would come to the gigs. She would always say, ‘You know, son, I always feel you’re at your happiest when you’re playing your drums.’ So she noticed. And I do.” He smiled. “I love to hit those buggers.”

Journalist Jennifer Senior writes at The Atlantic about her own and the nation’s struggles with insomnia: Why Can’t Americans Sleep?.

Like Senior, I have struggled with fierce insomnia, sometimes getting only two hours per night of sleep for several nights a week. It started in 2020 or so. And like Senior, medication has corrected the problem for me. She takes Klonopin; for me, it’s 50 mg of Trazodone, an antidepressant. I take it at bedtime, and I sleep soundly most nights. It hasn’t fixed my insomnia, but it’s reduced to two or three nights a month.

Not only is restored sleep great for my physical and mental health, but I get the added benefit that I can drink as much coffee as I want, whenever I want. It’s coming up on 4 pm right now and I’m thinking of fixing myself a cup now!

I wanted to get out to walk the dog early Friday morning because I had an important 11 am meeting — not a video meeting. Real life. So I got up early enough and shaved. I put in a new blade and noticed how much nicer it was. I go months between changing razor blades, and by the end of that time, it’s like dragging a broken beer bottle across my face.

I thought to myself that I need to change the blade more often. So, after I let the dog in from the backyard to the kitchen, I got out my phone, leaned against the kitchen counter, and I checked on ChatGPT to see how often I should change a Gillette Mach 3 blade, which is the brand I use. ChatGPT said every 5 to 10 shaves. So I set a reminder in Omnifocus, which is the reminders app that I use, to change the blade in two weeks, based on my shaving every other day, which is what I do.

I wanted to set a notification for that reminder because I usually don’t check OmniFocus until midmorning, and a notification would pop up on my phone screen first thing in the morning. That’s how I remind myself of things I need to do first thing in the morning — I set notifications to pop up on my phone home screen, because, like many people, I check my phone as soon as I get up. This may be a bad habit, but I’m not going to worry about that now.

I did not want to set a due date for the OmniFocus task, because you should only set a due date on tasks where there is a real penalty for failure to complete them. I learned that from the GTD productivity system.

I could not figure out how to set a notification for a task in Omnifocus without first setting the due date, and after much tapping around on the Omnifocus iPhone interface, I asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT give me a bullshit answer so I searched the web and that didn’t work so I hunted around on the Omnifocus website for the Omnifocus manual. I was not able to find a way to do what I wanted to do, so I just gave up and used the Due app to set the reminder.

Then I decided to double-check whether ChatGPT had misled me on the number of shaves recommended between blade changes, and sure enough, the Gillette website said that I should change every 15 shaves. It also said that there is a colored strip on that blade itself that fades when it is time to change the blade. I have been using Gillette Mach 3’s for 30+ years and was completely unaware of that. So I stood up from where I was leaning on the kitchen counter tapping my phone, and I went into the bathroom and fished the used razor blade out of the trash, and compared it to the new blade, and confirmed that there was a colored strip on the new blade and that was not present on the old blade. So it turned out I did not need to set a reminder at all.

Then I went out and walked the dog, which is what I had initially set out to do.

A Small Web July — The author of the Small Cypress blog is “spending less time on the corporate web for the month of July,” minimizing Meta products, Reddit, and maybe Bluesky, and spending more time on small websites, RSS and the real world.

I did a social media fast in June 2022, inspired by Cal Newport’s writing on “social media detox” and “digital minimalism.' I would not say it had any effect on my life. I would also say I did not follow Newport’s prescription – he says you should make a point to add healthy activities you love to your life, to fill the social media gap.