Personal on Janusworx

Happy Birthday Abbygail

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530

Abby, at her second favourite place in the world.

Love knows no difference between life and death.
The one who gives you a reason to live is also the one who takes your breath away.

جینے مرنے میں کچھ فرق نہیں فرق نہیں
اُسی کو دیکھ کر جیتے ہیں جس کافر پہ دم نکلے

(jeene marne mein kuchh farq nahi farq nahi
usi ko dekh kar jeete hain jis kafir pe dam nikle)

— Ghalib

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Change!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:28:30 +0530

Distill a whole year down into a day
Act like we all start over with a pristine slate

To get yourself a new life you’ve got to give the other one away

And I’m starting to believe, in the power of a name
Cause it can’t be a mistake,

if I just call it change!

— Sara Bareilles, December

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14 (All is Possible!)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0530

How it started & How it’s going!

Picture credits, Walter Pinto & Priyanka Saggu
Click the pic, to make big!

In love, as in dreams,
all is possible!

I love you for completing me, in every possible way. I cannot imagine life without you! 😘

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13 (Grow Old With Me)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Abby and me, sittin in a tree, c-l-o-w-nin-g!

Picture credit, Priyanka Saggu
Click the pic, to make big!

Grow old with me, the best is yet to be …

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Happy Birthday Abbygail

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0530

You haven’t changed a bit in all the ways that matter!
And so …

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

— The Bard (as rendered by the Dench)

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Bread and Roses

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 13:59:42 +0530

Click the image to see the much larger, original

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers,
for bread is food for the body,
but flowers are food for the mind.

— Galen of Pergamon

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

— James Oppenheim

Reading this beautiful conversation on Tumblr, led to this lovely page on Wikipedia.

Several Corroborative Thoughts on Pacing Yourself

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:28:43 +0530

That is what I should have called, yesterday’s post.

Pace yourself!

Be disciplined.
Show up.
Do the work.
And know when to quit.

And in more serendipitious bathing and reading hijinks I came across several folks who resonated with that thought. Slowly pacing yourself and doing the work, leads to big things.

Here’s Ryan Holiday, in 37 (Or So) Lessons From A 37 Year Old.

I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there—especially when what you’re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that’s outside your control—is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.

And Cory Doctorow in his very, popular Memex Method

These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

And then there’s Cal Newport with his Slow Productivity.
I don’t even need his words to describe what he does. I have followed him and his output long enough to know his modus operandi.
The only thing I don’t know is how he latches on to some topic.
But once that happens, he starts blogging about it. (and now talking about it on the pocdast).
His very popular Deep Work was published around 2016. A cursory search for the word “deep” in his blog archive will show you what I’m talking about. You can see him writing, thinking, refining and coming to the core of what he wants to convey.
Further refinement happens over on his New Yorker column.
And then finally, after all that slow, steady drumbeat of work comes the book.
Small wonder, they then turn out to be evergreen titles.

So there! Like Cal espouses,
1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:43:28 +0530

Rain lilies, from Abby’s tiny window garden.
They bloom only around this time of the year, on the onset of the monsoon.
Click the pic, for a bigger image

I love to write.
Correction, I need to write.
Writing helps me think, to be deliberate about things, to slow down.

At the same time, writing is also a slow, plodding process for me. Every post seems to take forever. So many years of doing it and it does not get any easier.
I agonise over what I want to say, the picture or quotes I want to include, the overall arc of my thoughts, the structure, everything has to be just so.¹
I’ve lowered the bar, to build consistency, with my #100WordHabit and now I have a new problem. First, I could not get started, and now I cannot stop once I get started.
I just have to finish my thoughts, my post, and that sometimes takes hours.
Which brings me back to me not wanting to start, for the fear that nothing else (that are in fact, more important) will get done.

This in turn, brings me to the brainwave I had a couple of days ago, in the bath.²
The pressure comes from wanting to publish what I write, the day I write.
What if, I didn’t?

Nothing has to change. With the exception of a hard stop.
One hour.
One hour to write and publish.
Or one hour to write and then put my pencil down.
And then I can come back to it the next day.
Yesterday’s post was the result of this approach.
I wrote it over two days, in two one hour sessions.
Very like Abby’s rain lillies up up above. They are prepping through the year, to bloom at this time, every time. Just because I cannot see it, does not mean nothing’s happening

One downside, that I potentially see, is that I will use this as an excuse to slack.
I hope I don’t.
But then on the other hand, without a pressure control valve like this, I can very easily see myself burning out again.

So let’s see how this goes.
I’m betting on me being a rain lily.

The end result might not be any good, but my mind needs to be satisfied, that all is to its liking and that I did the best I could ↩︎
Don’t we all? ↩︎

Need Day of Month Reminders in Org Mode? Emacs Sexp Diary Entries to the Rescue

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:08:40 +0530

This is how I imagine diary float entries in Emacs.
Photo courtesy, noah eleazar on Unsplash

I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were.

Going back, a bit.
I make heavy use of Org Mode’s deadline and scheduling features.
I put schedules and deadlines in lots of tasks across my ten or so org files, so that I can look at them every week, to decide what I’ll be doing this week as well as to review at the beginning of every month.
To wit, there are plenty of tasks that repeat on a weekly and monthly cadence, and Org’s repeaters.

But¹, there’s one kind of event I have, that Org doesn’t support quite well.
If I want something on, let’s say the second Friday of every month, there’s no easy way to describe / do that with Org.
Org defers to Emacs’ native Diary Mode to do something like this.. Ok, not defers, but it supports Diary expression entries with a few caveats.
Now those were scary when I first saw them, which is why I kicked the can down the road, and decided to just live with manually making entries for the second Friday of every month.
A year of doing this, and I’ve finally had enough. So I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were.

Click the pic to see a larger version of the chicken scratch

Only to realise, that they were not as scary as I feared, after close to a year of messing around with my Emacs config files. They look² just like Emacs functions with arguments.

I scribbled one out the way, Org needs them written, by referring to the Emacs help.

<%%(diary-float t 5 2)>

I marked the sections out in the scrawly figure above.

diary-float seems to be the function that does all the magic and then I have three arguments
The first one, refers to the month by number. 8 will mean August. t will make things repeat every month.
The second argument is day of week. 0 being Sunday, and 6, Saturday.
The third one refers to which week of the month. 2 in my case, means the second week of the month.

So …

* My super important task
 DEADLINE: <%%(diary-float t 3 2)>

shows up in my agenda as a task for the second Wednesday of every month!

There are a couple of caveats to this approach.

This is not as task, even though I write it as one. It behaves more like a calendar entry. It more or less, just shows up in the agenda and I have to look at it.
I can’t mark it as done and expect it to repeat, like a normal Org repeater. If I do that, the task is, uh done and then that’s that.

Neither of these things bother me, because of the idiosyncratic way I drive my day.
I normally review my daily agenda, and create a day plan for myself.
Which means that I copy the repeater task into my daily agenda as a single task and mark the repeater as done. So with the weird way I work, writing it out as a diary sexp, actually saves me a step ❤️
And my cranky brain can now heave a sigh of relief.³

old folks know by now, there’s always a “but” or “however” coming ↩︎
and probably are ↩︎
until next time ↩︎

Bird on a Wire

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 16:01:45 +0530

Photo courtesy, Abbygail Braganza, at the Seawoods Flamingo Point, part of the Navi Mumbai Mudflat Wetlands
Click the pic to see a larger one

Like a bird on a wire …

Like a fish on a hook …

I have tried in my way to be free

— Aaron Neville, singing Leon Cohen’s, Bird On A Wire

The Rest Is Memory

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 17:01:54 +0530

Priyanka, hoping Hedwig will carry her to Hogwarts.
Click the pic for a bigger image

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück, Nostos. (via @ashstfu on Tumblr)

How to Stop Time

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 17:36:44 +0530

Click the pic to see a larger version

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.

— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive (via, @melodybookshaven on tumblr)

Be Nobody but Yourself

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 20:22:04 +0530

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

— E.E. Cummings, via The Marginalian

I Read Like Grandma Does

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 05:45:00 +0530

1943!

Folks who been reading the blog, for a while know about the reading lists.
I began writing down what I read, just to keep track, ever since I started this incarnation of the blog.

And then just a few days ago, serendipity led me to that pic above, on Twitter.
User, Ben Myers’ grandmother has been doing exactly what I have been doing, for the past eight decades! (rather, I have been doing what she has 😂)

This makes me so giddily happy!

Cursive Is Fun

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 14:42:15 +0530

I love it, meaning, I love writing cursive, not someone’s suffering

Some poor soul on Tumblr, seems to’ve been traumatised by cursive as a kid.

While my chicken scrawl is legible only to me mostly, I love the doing of it. The actual writing. (I do write legibly if someone else has to read it, mostly Abby, Mom or Priyanka¹)

Peter Morwood, in his beautiful post, makes a lovely point as well …

Also, learning to write cursive meant learning to read cursive (it would have been hard to separate one from the other!) which is a useful skill when looking at historical stuff, and which might prove a problem for future Professional Historians who weren’t taught cursive, so will have to learn it from scratch.

The thought that I’ve stumbled into some niche skill by attrition and accident, makes me smile :)

Three presentations together and I still insist on mostly outlining on paper and she’s stuck trying to decipher it 😂 ↩︎

What I’d Do for You

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 17:08:36 +0530

Click for a larger pic

this morning
i told the flowers
what i’d do for you
and they blossomed

— Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

Search for Something! Kill the Line! In Emacs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 25 May 2024 10:19:21 +0530

So I bought myself comics. And I was naively trying to count how many I got.
And I went aha! I’ll paste the lines into Emacs and the lines numbers will tell me :) So I just selected stuff off the web and put it in and …

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
185.4 MB
EPUB
105.4 MB
PDF
439.9 MB
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
17.7 MB
EPUB
16.6 MB
PDF
137.2 MB
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
229.3 MB
EPUB
135.9 MB
PDF
438.6 MB
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
132.9 MB
EPUB
50.2 MB
PDF
376.8 MB
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
106.4 MB
EPUB
118.7 MB
PDF
351.7 MB
… really long list elided

And I go, Ugh! It’s Saturday! I’m too lazy to go selecting and deleting that cruft between my titles. Isn’t there something in Emacs that can help?
Spoiler Alert: Of course there is! Meet flush-lines

M-x flush-lines asks me for a regex pattern.
I gave it \ MB¹ et voilà! Every line that had a space followed by MB disappeared!

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
… long list elided

And so a few, rapid commands to excise lines with Dynamite Entertainment, CBZ, EPUB and PDF later …

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01

… still a long list, but exactly what I wanted :)

I love you, Emacs!

the \ followed by a space is just to demonstrate here that I put in a space. I just naively typed a space followed by MB, actually ↩︎

Why I Write

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 24 May 2024 20:53:48 +0530

Click to see a larger version, just as illegible

As I struggle to write, sometimes I wonder why I even do it.
And when I don’t, I then get this strange uncontrollable urge to write something, anything.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And now in addition to that crazy struggle, I’ve caught myself getting upset of late. All because nobody “shares” the posts I put out.
And I worry if anyone even reads my stuff?
And do they like it?
And if they do, why would they not share it?
Not good enough?
Should I be doing more?
Write better?

All of which came to a head today.
And after a bit of laughing at my silliness, I decided to write down what I tell myself every year.

Because I do write.
Whether anyone reads it. Or not.
Which is why I wonder why I get trapped in this weird neurotic spider web every year.
I’m done comparing, in the words of Lamott, my insides to their outsides.

So a few thoughts to myself on why I do it. A non exhaustive list …

I love to read.
I love to write.
I write primarily for myself. First and foremost.
I write because I cannot help it.
I write because I cannot not write.
I write to document things and thingamajigs and doodads and small things and big things. Because I forget. And writing helps me remember. And then it helps other people learn. And then they teach me new things. And I learn more. And I write more. And the whole virtuous cycle repeats.
I write because everything in me, has got to come out on the page, so that there is space within me, to then function.
I write because then everything slows down to the pace of my fingers rather than the crazy light speed dizziness within my brain.
I write because I can then think.
I write because it sharpens my focus.
I write because it makes it easy to forget.
I write because I read what I write. Even if no one else does. Even if no one else wants to. Even if no one else can. And I love my past selves, who’ve scribbled their thoughts and feelings to protect me, shield me, guide me and give me comfort, solace and love.
I write because then, my heart then aches a little bit less.
I write because it’s brought me back from the edge of the void. Twice.
I write because it helps me be resilient. Persistent. To quote Taleb, Antifragile. And to quote Angelou, “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I rise.”
I write because I have scars. And writing lessens the hurt. To quote Bareilles, it helps me hold on, till there’s something else to hold on to.
I write because …
I write because today I realise, that’s who I am.
I am a writer, because that’s what I do. I write.

First Love

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 May 2024 14:45:37 +0530

Moss Roses, in my window.
Click to enlarge

Petals unfurl
    from a delicate flower,
    closer to picked
    with each
    passing hour,
    losing the I
    and gaining
    an our.

— Michael Faudet, First Love, Dirty Pretty Things

Make Bad Things

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 10:54:10 +0530

Art by Amanda Domagala, on Tumblr

Amanda says,

“Make bad things, instead of making nothing”

Something similar that’s been drummed into my head innumerable times over the years, by many mentors:

“If you cannot do it well, do it badly.” :)

If you love doing something, if you want to do something … do it.
Does not matter how poorly or badly its done.
You’re going to love it nonetheless.

No Love Is Wasted

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 11:51:17 +0530

via Diane Duane

I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far:
every strange thing you’ve ever been into,
every failed hobby or forgotten instrument,
everything you have ever learned will come back to you,
will serve you when you need it.

No love, however brief, is wasted.

(I’d add every act of kindness,random or otherwise, to that list.)

My Reading Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 11:30:48 +0530

from somewhere on Tumblr. I lost the source. Apologies, original poster!

The Art of Losing

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 20:39:16 +0530

A path, somewhere in the palace gardens at Versailles.
Click to enlarge

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

— Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Notes to Self, How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:01:16 +0530

“Liberty & equality forever, or Death!”
Written on the Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France
(Click for a larger image)

I recently read Scott H. Young’s article on How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language and realised it would be a handy guide for me, as I go about increasing my French & Urdu vocabulary.

This is what I took away:

The first 2000 words will cover 80-90% of a language’s vocabulary. 3000 will cover 95%. That should be your goal.
Use a frequency dictionary, then according to frequency do 1000/2000/3000 words
10000 will lead to almost being fluent. Hard to do that quickly with French, sitting in India. But, aspirational goals :)
Do:
- Flash cards, knowing that this will not teach you the nuance and flavour and texture of French
- Graded reading, Like the article states
To successfully guess the meaning of a new word from its context, we need to understand between 95% and 98% of the surrounding words. This is difficult to achieve with native-level materials. Graded readers, which deliberately limit vocabulary, can be beneficial here.
- If you’re doing the slow and steady way, because you lack the time, then growth will be slow. Assume 400 new word families a year
- Use the four pillars of learning. Paraphrasing & Quoting the article:
  1. Meaning-focused input.
    Input provides the raw data for learning new words and enriches the contextual associations of words studied deliberately elsewhere. This includes conversations, books, films, television and other media that you attend to primarily for their meaning.
  2. Meaning-focused output. (Note: I am focussed on reading and writing)
    Speaking and writing are more difficult than simply understanding particular words from input, as using words correctly requires a more precise knowledge of each word and its meaning.
  3. Language-focused learning.
    This is the deliberate act of memorizing words, studying flashcards, or receiving explanations about word meanings. Webb and Nation argue that this should account for ~25% of the time spent learning a language.
  4. Fluency development. (I don’t know how I’ll do this. Re read stuff? Watch TV again.)
    Finally, attention should be paid to activities that speed up the understanding and production of words already known. Familiar materials that enable quick reading or conversations on familiar topics may not be needed to build new vocabulary, but they reinforce what was learned previously.

Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:50:35 +0530

If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.

It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.

Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.

You haven’t failed at a normal human task,
you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task.
Go get takeout.
Or beer, bread, and onions.
Eat cheese and some dates.
Relax.

— Ursula Vernon via, Diane Duane

I stumbled across Ursula from her art.

Art courtesy, Ursula Vernon

And then I realised she is an accomplished children’s author

And she does not stop there, she writes Hugo award winning books for adults across genres; horror, fantasy and romance.¹

And talk about making art from pain, she fucked cancer right in the eye!

Read all about her long journey here!
And if it does not inspire you, and make you shed a tear, I’ll eat my hat.

I’d say she’s a female Neil Gaiman. But let’s face it. She’s far more talented and kicks ass. Gaiman is the male T Kingfisher! ↩︎

Beautiful Arunachal!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 05:45:00 +0530

Memories of a trip, from a few years ago.
This was the second best vacation¹ I’ve had!

When you finally see the Aurora Borealis thiry four years, after you first learned about them, nothing else will ever come close :) ↩︎

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:56 +0530

My old-style slow notetaking process.
Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes.
Click to see bigger

Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life.
Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn.

It matches, what I’ve organically been doing all these years.
And I was really happy to see it structured and rendered so well.
So I wrote and paraphrased and jotted it all down below.
Note: These are my mangling of Cal’s words, not what he actually said. The audio/video above should give you exact specifics.

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

too much friction with other systems
friction in work that matters is ok, is good, is perfect. McPhee & Caro! But for most other things, not needed.
- Cal goes on to verbally list what McPhee does, but my notes are better.
- In a nutshell, friction slows him (McPhee) down in a way that’s beneficial, that lets him do his best work
Notetaking does not need such friction. When information is coming at you, your time to act + energy to think are limited
Friction stops you from taking action. That information could then be lost
- For e.g. a complicated note taking process when reading a book, might stop you from getting into the book or ever keep you from reading the book altogether.
Your system should therefore reduce friction, so that you can capture as much information as possible quickly, efficiently, painlessly

Outsource your brain? No!
#

When it comes to things that matter, stuff should live in your brain. So that stuff percolates into your value systems and mental models and you evolve!
Your brain needs to be part of this curation process. Your brain needs to build hooks. To remember the big things. For accuracy and precision, details can always be looked up.

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

If there’s somethng interesting on the page, mark the corner fo the page (dog ear with pen) and then …
- Mark up the thing that interest you! Simple marks in the margins. Put a box around text. Checkmarks next to a line. Curly braces next to a paragraph to remember
- Occasionally write a short note, to help you remember the context, or to tell yourself what it reminds you of, or is there any other place where you’d find this useful?
Barely slows you down. Does not get in your way. Does not prevent you from reading
Then when you go back to your book, and look at your dog marks and then look at stuff you marked on those pages? You will in a few minutes, reconstitute all the ideas from that book.
Bonus: One “shortcoming”? You need to remember! Oh that book? That was the one that had the interesting ideas about such and such
- That is not a problem. This is the one bit of friction that is useful. It allows you to use the gist of what you learned from the book in the schemas of knowledge that I am constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that’s not really a bug, rather a feature. In English? It helps me build better Mental Models!
- You become a better reader

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Where do notes relevant to a project go?
Store notes relevant to a project in the location where you will one day work the project.
- I do this on a personal level too. Everything is where my mind says, I ought to look for them, not where they “ought to be.” Which is why my keys are next to my Minnie mouse plushie and my flash drives live in an old, soup bowl.
So when it comes time to do the work, everything that you’ve gather is all there for you to use.
Duplication is ok. (If there’s too much duplication, which happens rarely, I organically figure something out)
Bonus: Whenever you add something new to the pile, you always encounter your old stuff and it keeps refreshing a mental picture of the project in your mind and helps create new mental grooves

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Keep a fancy, awesome, cool, aspirational notebook!
A fancy pen you like
Basically whatever you used when you started your journey? You wrote notes, you made headlines, you had marginalia in your pages, you did everything by hand. Just use the classiest things you like and can afford, to give it heft and meaning.
Your life has few ideas, important as they are. Easy to keep track of them in a notebook
You want the form to matter.
Digital notebooks? They’re cool too, if you like them.
All you need is semi regular review and process
- A good lazy way to do it is when the notebook fills up
- Review and copy over the summaries of everything good and lasting and important
- See what sticks

Moving Audio Library to Flac & MP3 Formats

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:47:52 +0530

A piece of metal being converted into something useful.
Image courtesy, Jonny Gios, Unsplash License, on Unsplash

I thought I was set with my audio jukebox when I finally finished collecting and digitising all my tapes, records¹ and cds and then tagging, sorting and organising my files in or around the late noughties.
When I began doing all that in the mid noughties, I was comfortably ensconced in the Apple/iTunes ecosystem, so all my files were in various MPEG-4 formats.²

And the one big thing I missed, was letting a track have multiples genres or multiple artists. I wanted to be able to search for a song in each artist’s name i.e. the song ought to be listed as an entry under each singer’s name (Shibani Dandekar and Zoya Akhtar and Ankur Tewari and SEL) in the jukebox and also have it listed / searchable under multiple genres (remove Bollywood, but be able to add IndiPop and Oldies). I always thought that wasn’t possible. A decade passed since. I’ve moved homes to Mint and the .deb ecosystem in the meanwhile. And it still never occured to me to re-evaluate my choice of audio formats, despite this being a constant thorn in my side. I still thought it wasn’t possible. Look at what happens when I try to add a genre to a song in Quod Libet …

Click to enlarge

Until, when I read that message more closely, recently. It wasn’t telling me that it wasn’t possible, just that I was a dummkopf³ with my choice of audio formats all those years ago. These files did not support multiple values for genre, but was it possible that other formats did? Spoiler, of course, they did!
A quick search revealed both mp3 as well as flac supported this.

I decided to try this with one of my recent songs.
I use ffmpeg to convert Plum Pudding.
ffmpeg -i "05 Plum Pudding.m4a" -c:a flac "05 Plum Pudding.flac"
And tada! A quick metadata edit in Quod Libet and I had multiple artist and genre entries! 🎉🎉🎉

Click to enlarge

Sigh! I’m both happy and a bit chagrined.
I can haz music the way I want it organised and tagged, but I’m looking at weeks/months of work now 😂

Thank you daddy ↩︎
lossless and lossy m4a files. ↩︎
a dummkopf with the benefit of hindsight that is ↩︎

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:27:18 +0530

courtesy, R.F. Kuang & Carlton Gibson

I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel and watching Carlton Gibson’s talk on surviving open source¹ a few days ago.
They both touch upon ingrained privilege in their book/talk.
The popular proverb urges us to engage with the world as it is, not as we would have it be.²
But sometimes, we are so caught up that we need other, wiser eyes to see. That’s what Rebecca & Carlton have done for me :)

Here’s Carlton. I paraphrased the relevant bits from his talk. It begins at around the 10m, 10s mark. (all emphases mine.)

We’re not getting paid. But we don’t always act like we know that.
We give far more than is reasonable given the fact that it’s a volunteer thing that we are doing

It has a consequence.
Open Source skews overwhelmingly white, male and English speaking.
The bottom line is that contributing to open source is a privilege that only a few can afford.
We like to think it’s meritocracy. Well, you do the time, you do the hard yards, you work on your project, you get the rewards, but well Sorry! Meritocracy, my arse!

What’s really going on is that pre-existing economic relations are being reinforced by contributors leveraging the inequality of opportunity that those economic relations provide.
Sorry!
In English.
If you let it, Open Source extracts such a cost; physical, financial, and emotional, that the only folks who can do it are the global rich and of those, only the ones that are either directly supported by, or can make their way around the patriarchy. English speaking, white, men.

And these series of quotes from Babel.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Watch the talk.
Read Babel.
You’ll be better off, having done both.

not at the same time. I know I’m cuckoo, just not that cuckoo. ↩︎
I love this one from Saul Alinsky’s, Rules for Radicals:
“I start from where the world is, as it as, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.” ↩︎

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:56:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Here I was, trying to laze away my day by getting lost in a book, when the book kicks my behind and tells me to go work 😂

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week.
‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”.
Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

— R.F. Kuang, Babel

Publish! Show Your Work! You Don’t Have Leonardo’s Genius or Luck

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:12:18 +0530

Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The only reason we know that both, an emperor as well as a slave, both practiced the same philosophy that inspires people even now in this day and age, is because the former’s personal notes and the latter’s words compiled by a student, have come down to us through the ages.

The only reason that Leonardo Da Vinci has such a legacy, is that the few pieces of his work that were created and displayed, have somehow, miraculously lasted the ravages of the past half century. But so much of his work was unpublished, stowed away in private journals, never to be seen for centuries. How much more would we have known, or learnt if only? If only.

Decades of stunning art, never released. No one knew the genius of Vivian Maier, when she was alive.

From John Maloof’s, Vivian Maier, Maloof Collection

Like David Kadavy writes,¹

Finishing what you start is overrated.
[…]
Contrast this with many other things Leonardo never finished. The observations that lie hidden in his notes would have advanced humanity by centuries in the fields of medicine, flight, geology, and more. These sketches and notes weren’t finished – but, most tragically, they weren’t published.
You don’t have to finish to have an impact. You do have to publish.

Honoré De Balzac had it right,

“For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed”

On which Austin Kleon expounds²

If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do.

Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online. Imagine losing your job but having a social network of people familiar with your work and ready to help you find a new one. Imagine turning a side project or a hobby into your profession because you had a following that could support you.

Or imagine something simpler and just as satisfying: spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might attract a group of people who share your interests.

All you have to do is, Show Your Work.

From Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work

all emphases mine ↩︎
in his book Show Your Work ↩︎

Create New Scars (or Calluses)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:37:55 +0530

I wrote about creating with your experience, your scars, the other day.
And the best way to do that is to develop your calluses, your own scars in the first place.

Herbert Lui writes …

On either fence of, “Write what you know,” I tend to lean towards writing about what I don’t know; “Write What Obsesses You,” as Meg Wolitzer describes it.
[…] Some people say in order to write a book, you need to live it. While I lived aspects of Creative Doing, the more accurate way to say it would be, the writing process changed me, and that I live the book now. I wrote the book I needed to read, not just in the past, but also in the future.

Indeed, you become what you write about, (or what you do)!

This is what I’m trying to do with this slow writing thing.
Which also drives home, what Kushal is still nagging me about and what I am still procrastinating at. That I do the same with my work. With the stuff that I want to learn.
This is my stake in the ground, Kushal. I’ll do this.
I don’t know how good I’ll get. But I will begin the practice.

The best role model, I have, for a craftsman.
He spent a life at his art and had the calluses and the scars to show for it.
I know this, because I felt them everytime he caressed my cheek as child.
Daddy was the best, there ever was.

There’s No Dearth of Things to Write About

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:27:36 +0530

Only a short note today.
I dreaded starting up this challenge, because I thought I’d run out of things to say.
What would I write about? Will I dread coming up with topics?
Turns out I needn’t have worried.

Writing seems to be like a muscle to be worked on and flexed.
The more I do it, the more I want to do it.
It is making me more observant.
Everything seems like cannon fodder for the page now 😂
This makes me very happy!

Use Your Scars

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 07:39:40 +0530

I was catching up with my Cal Newport episodes this morning, when I heard this little clip above, at around the 44m mark It reminded me that the things in life, that you can talk most easily about (with authority), are the things that you have the most experience with; the things that you carry the scars of.

Like Mandy Brown or Taleb do.
Like Cheryl Strayed does.
Like Roosevelt’s, Man in the Area.
Like Rachel.

The best things happen the easiest, when you use your scars.
Write that fucking book, indeed.

Poor Ceres Always Gets the Short End of the Stick

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 08:08:52 +0530

Courtesy, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, Public Domain, via Wikipedia

I just finished Tamsyn Muir’s Nona, last month.
And of course, I’m now stuck along with the rest of the world waiting for Alecto to come along.¹ In the meanwhile I’m having fun with the rest of the world, dissecting the old books to pieces with various pieces of headcanon and wild theories, one of the popular ones being trying to find analogies between the houses of the books and our solar system

And then I ran into this little head exploder² …

Which made me remember this, on the Expanse³ …

And all I could then think of, was Aww, poor Ceres!
No matter what universe, dimension or time period, it’s always oppressed and languishing.
Here’s to me finding some piece of fiction, someday, where Ceres is all powerful!

Tamsyn, please give us the book now! I kid, I kid! If I can patiently wait for the old man across decades as he weaves his saga, I can just as patiently wait for you ↩︎
via sentientcitizen on Tumblr ↩︎
the best scifi I’ve read ↩︎

100 Word Writing Habit

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 18:42:43 +0530

I want to write better.
And the best way to do that, is to write more.
Thinking about which, immediately kills the urge to write, because I take really long to write anything.
And the actual writing, is very arduous to me.

So what to do?

I guess I need to just lower the bar.
Do less.
More consistently.

And then serendipitiously, as they say, when the student is ready, the master appears.
David Kadavy’s conducting a 100 Word Writing Habit Online Course, this month.

He seemed to be in the same rut as I am now.

I’m not a born writer. I hated writing as a kid.

But …

I’ve written three best-selling books, and I write an email newsletter every Monday, a 2,000-word article every other week, and a 5,000-word income report every month.

Well, that sort of consistency is exactly what I need.
David taught me how to setup and use a Zettelkasten. His short book, is the best resource I found on the topic.
And that is something I have been consistently building for a year and a half now.
Here’s hoping he inspires me to become a better writer too!

A few notes from his first lesson, that I am putting down here for me to remember; to not overthink stuff, to … just write!

It doesn’t matter what you write about. Just write 100 words.
It doesn’t matter if they’re any good. Just write 100 words.
It doesn’t matter if you repeat yourself in your writing. Just write 100 words.
If you miss a day, do it the next day. If you miss that day, do it the day after that.
You don’t have to publish the writing. (Feel free to share on Twitter, Instagram, or other social on the hashtag #100wordhabit, so your classmates can see.) What’s more important is you just write 100 words.

Viewing Hugo Server Output Remotely

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 15:18:13 +0530

I’ve been living a little dangerously when posting stuff on the blog.
While it’s true that I compose my posts locally on my desktop, with a locally installed Hugo, I always catch a ton of things that I miss, after I publish a post. Nearly every single time.

So the process then becomes …

Open the post on the server in Emacs (after logging in, via ssh)
Make an edit.
Build and publish.
Reload the page and re-read the post.
Find a typo. Fix it.
Repeat steps 3 & 4.
Keep the Emacs pane to keep editing and open another terminal pane, just to build and deploy.
Twenty three edits later … Be ok with what I have. (with a build and deploy, and reload and reread every couple of edits)
Do a final build and deploy

Having done this, for God knows how long now, I’m used to this workflow and decided to just lean into it.
But while I loved my edit, build, deploy, reload, reread, workflow, I felt like I was tempting the fates, everytime I did it. Besides I did not like messing with the live website like that.

So I wondered, if the way I did it locally, could be kinda sorta done remotely.
When I write posts locally, all I need to do is run hugo server in a terminal and it spins up a local server, with the all the posts, built and rendered in memory for speedy access.
Could I have that? But remote? Could I run hugo server on my server and view the results in my browser from anywhere?
About an hour of exploration later, I did have it up and running!

Here’s what I did, after delving into Hugo’s server command options

Created a subdomain (drpr.janusworx.com) and pointed it to my server. (this is where I’ll see my temporary, work-in-progress, results whenever I run hugo server on my server)
Used Nginx as a proxy to point to it. (Also serves as my SSL termination point, freeing Hugo from the burdens of HTTPS/SSL drama)
Spun up Hugo with hugo serve -D -b https://drpr.janusworx.com --appendPort=false --liveReloadPort=443 where …
a. -D builds posts marked with drafts
b. -b tells Hugo the hostname and path to the root of the blog (in my case, https://drpr.janusworx.com)
c. --appendPort is set to false, which stops appending the port number to the url (happens by default, http://localhost:1313)
d. --liveReloadPort is set to my SSL/TLS port, so that I can watch changes live with every edit.

And everything worked!
Except for the live reloading. That bit just refused to work. I could make changes and then go manually reload the web page and it would update. Grr! So near, yet so far!
Some more exploration led to Pothi Kalimuthu’s extremely helpful comment on Github …

Where I realised that Hugo’s LiveReload script (that reflects changes) needs a location in my Nginx config.
So a bit of copying and pasting and adapting and tada! 🎉

This blog post was written entirely on the server, with me watching the changes live as they happened …

And once this was done, I could just do a single, final, build and deploy to publish.

A Signed Copy of Neil Gaiman’s, “What You Need to Be Warm”

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 10:38:58 +0530

I went and fulfilled an old dream of mine.

A signed copy of Neil Gaiman’s, What You Need to Be Warm.

A New Year’s Gift! From me, to me 😂

I got mine from The Golden Notebook, an indie bookshop in Woodstock New York, who are kind and prompt and ship world wide.¹

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

I got to know of them from Neil’s tumblr. Methinks, this is his local bookstore. And he signs books there often(ish) ↩︎

Read, Read, Read, Everything

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 19:41:04 +0530

With eternal gratitude to Bruinhilda the Librarian, for writing this.
And with lots of apologies for stealing it wholesale and making it my new reading manifesto :)

As a library worker, there’s something I want to say to you.

You do not have to apologize for the books you choose to read.

At all. To anyone. You owe nobody any explanations; you need no excuse or “good reason” to be reading the book.

You do not have to be ashamed for wanting to read “bad” books. You wanna read Twilight? We got Twilight. Need a banal, cookie-cutter-plot mystery or thriller? Those are always fun. Our regulars check them out by the towering stack. Ask Betty for recommendations; she’s read them all. 50 Shades of Oh Fucking No? We’ve got it, we even got it in large print. Have fun. Check out the rest of our porn too. Oh, and the sex manuals are a MUST if you want to “experiment” yourself. Don’t be afraid to ask; they’re here for a reason.

Want to read a book written by a huge asshole everyone hates and agree was a monster? Yeah, we have those. No, we don’t think you’re an asshole for wanting to know what was actually written in there, or judging things for yourself.

You are not too old for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Babysitter’s Club, or Captain Underpants. You are not too young for Sherlock Holmes. There’s nothing wrong with a boy reading The Princess Academy or Sweet Valley High. There’s nothing wrong with a girl being into The Hardy Boys or Artemis Fowl instead.

You do not have to pull the shame face and offer me an excuse when you check out your books. I don’t care if I got so angry at that book I threw it against a wall when I read it: you have the right to read it, and enjoy it if it’s enjoyable for you. THAT’S WHY THE LIBRARY HAS IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. If we only stocked pure, unproblematic literature everyone approved of, by authors of unquestionable virtue, we wouldn’t have any books at all. Or music. Or movies. It would be utterly fucking boring. And it certainly wouldn’t be a library.

My Year in Reading, 2023 Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 18:19:09 +0530

I normally hide Easter eggs or just random comments into my footnotes. And so normally it does not matter if you folk read it or not. But this post was really off the cuff and there are some details that have snuck into the footnotes. So, please do give ’em a peek

courtesy, Tom Gauld

Reading is my one thing.
The thing that most people I know, can say without reservation, that I do.
There’s only been a brief period of time when I did not read¹²
Nevermind that. It’s all water under the bridge now.

Riffing off Tom’s toon
#

The Unread Book Pile: I should keep track of just how much my unread book pile increases or decreases every year. Who am I kidding? This is never going to happen 😂 But just for kicks, my current unread pile is around four and a half thousand books. Most of these have been lying around in one form or another since the late 90s when I discovered Palm ebooks and the Gutenberg project. I have to get around to converting most of them some day. Which leads me to …
Most Considered Authors: The reason I downloaded all of them. Someday, young Jason said, I will read all the classics. Joyce and Proust and Tolstoy and Dickens and JKJ and Keats and Yeats and Donne and Dickinson and Wordsworth and all the Brontës and Newton in Latin and Montaigne along with du Châtelet in French and Epictetus and all the folks who I admired. So I got them all! They were free! And then instead of reading those, I got sucked into sci-fi and fantasy with PKD and Asimov and Moore and Gaiman and GRRM and Peter Watts and Le Guin and Duane and Jemisin. Whither the classics? I’ve barely scratched the surface. Someday! Someday soon! I live in deluded hope :)
Non-Fiction: I learnt to skim modern non fiction quite rapidly. If something appeals to me, I make notes, so that my distracted magpie brain remembers. And if something doesn’t, then non fiction is the one genre where I’ve no qualms about dropping the book like a hot potato. The old stuff, is where it’s at. Despite being a product of their times, Andy Grove and Maya Angelou and Anne Lamott still whoop anything modern.
Audiobooks: This was the year I finally found my groove, with audiobooks. They helped me in the past when I was so busy, I barely had time to read. But then I would miss my notes. So I couldn’t quite do it with most fiction or non-fiction that I liked and wanted to pay close attention to. Listening and taking notes was joyless. But ever since I switched to History as an audiobook niche, I’ve fallen in love again. While I do listen to history books, most of my history listening this year has been long series on various history podcasts. Anand and Dalrymple’s Empire is outstanding. They began with the Raj and then covered other empires. I loved Persia (which I think still isn’t over) and the Ottomans too. Holland and Sandbrook’s, The Rest is History is pretty neat too. Dan Carlin is the one who blazed this path with Hardcore History. I have no words to describe what he does. Suffice to say, that everytime an episode drops³, the whole internet⁴ rejoices. The amount of research and work that goes into these is astounding.⁵ The two series I really enjoyed⁶ and learnt from were Supernova in the East (Japan in WWII) and my favourite series of them all, Wrath of the Khans (six long episodes on the Mongol Empire). And finally I really wanted to know why English is the way it is. John McWhorter’s, Our Magnificient Bastard Tongue taught me a lot, but Kevin Stroud’s, The History of English is something else. A leisurely walk from antiquity to today⁷
Loans: I never loan a book. I either give them away and buy myself new copies if I miss them; or I never give them away, in the first place. I’ve haven’t lost many books, but the few I have I miss dearly. I miss my first edition of Anthony DeMello’s, The Song of the Bird to this day. It was Daddy’s copy. I was very sentimentally attached to that dead tree.

Riffing Some More
#

I reread quite a bit this year. I’ve begun hankering for some feeling I would get when reading certain books, and so now I keep going back to them. The Little Prince and The Count of Monte Cristo. I went and got a lot of old Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews too⁸ and have been making my way through them slowly. I have close to a baker’s dozen of friends, I call Book Santas. And thanks to one of them who shares my love of comics⁹ and so I am now the proud owner of the entire Goscinny/Uderzo Asterix run, as well as the gorgous three volume Sandman omnibus. Reading them was so much fun! I reread all the books of A Song of Ice and Fire, because believe it or not, I haven’t watched the TV series. I have been patiently waiting for that grumpy old fart¹⁰, to finish the series and so I read the books again to remind myself of where I was in that world. I gave talks after quite a bit, so I went back to Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology and Resonate as well as Scott Schwertly’s Deck ’Em. I reread American Gods, this time as a graphic novel. I surprisingly did not read any Poirot this year, but that probably because I watched the Suchet series and the Branagh movies this year and so that cup was full. I did however read all of Holmes, twice! And what else? Oh yes, I read How to Pronounce Knife and The Overstory. Both of them are so evocative, so raw, so real, so … it feels less like reading and more like experiencing them.

Three lines from the Overstory, always haunt me. They keep popping up at random times.

“I ask you. Has there ever been such a little nation of two?”

“places remember what people forget.”

“It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.”

“How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?”

Ok, that’s four. But it is that kind of book. The kind that grabs you and never lets go.

I discovered Erotic-Sci-Fi-Opera, courtesy Sarah Hawke and historical couple everything courtesy Minerva Spencer. They were really good. They were really hot. ’Nuff said.
Being an enthusiastic Sherlockian, I’m always on the lookout for folk who put their own stamps on Holmes and Watson. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar¹¹ writes Mycroft, but they didn’t appeal to me. The TV series led me to the Enola Holmes books, but I haven’t read those yet. Bonnie MacBird is wonderful at it though! I really loved Art in the Blood
This was my year of Sanderson. He reminds me a lot of GRRM. Rough, workman like prose, but lovely worlds and lovely people! Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter were my favourites. I’m only through one third of his books. I still have more to enjoy!
And finally, I had my mind bent¹², by the Locked Tomb. Most folks are really polarised by the books. I’m one who won’t accept a single bad thing about them. They’re really good! I’m really blessed to be living in the age of Muir and Bardugo and Jemisin!
Finally, finally, yes, I did read Taleb

In Parting …
#

I realise that I’m doing a lot of this, because of my battle with the black dog and books help me cope. The sheer quantity will definitely drop off once I get back on the horse, but the reading will continue.

And oh, before I forget, Charlie Munger died this year. And I learnt so much from him. What could a old white billionaire teach a poor, brown kid in his early twenties? Plenty it turned out, over the years.¹³ While I reread a couple of his biographies and listened to a live podcast this year, I did not read his own Poor Charlie’s Almanack this year. So now you know what I’m going to begin next year with :)
But why just me? You can too. Stripe Press has turned the book into a gorgeous website for everyone to enjoy.

I leave you with this wonderful Gaiman wish for the New Year

I hope you will have a wonderful year,
that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously,
that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it,
that you will be loved and that you will be liked,
and that you will have people to love and to like in return.
And, most importantly
(because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now),
that you will,
when you need to be,
be wise,
and that you will always be kind.

— Neil Gaiman, courtesy The Toymaker’s Journal

P.S. I’ve only written about, what still resonates at the end of the year.
To see the complete list, go here.

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

in my twenties when I took someone’s well meant, but ignorant advice and stopped. ↩︎
three years! Oh, the books I could have read 😂 ↩︎
Methinks, this year there were just the two Viking episodes ↩︎
atleast, my corner of it ↩︎
Complement, Empire’s Persian History run, with Carlin’s King of Kings ↩︎
you cannot really “enjoy” them. They are full of all sorts of situations. Lots of them, not good. ↩︎
which I don’t know if he has reached or not. I am still at episode 100, while the podcast is at 178. ↩︎
once again, products of their time. Treat them as such ↩︎
Graphic Novel say you? Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe say I ↩︎
I jest. GRRM is kind and gracious. As a young boy, new to the internet and at a time when authors did reply to their email, it was he, who turned me on to quite a number of other authors. Maurice Druon and Daniel Abraham, to name a couple. Was it him? Or a minion writing on his behalf? It was the 90s and I was 17. I choose to believe it was him :) ↩︎
Yes, that one ↩︎
in a really good way ↩︎
The two best things I learnt? 1. Be a Stoic 2. I can only have an opinion if I can state the opposing arguments better than the people who support it do and 3. Always be learning, so that someday you gain wisdom ↩︎

Bloom

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 19:51:35 +0530

Click to enlarge

To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —
— Emily Dickinson, Bloom

12

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 05:45:00 +0530

Twelve years have passed in a blink of an eye.
It still feels like only yesterday!
Here’s to so many more, together!

Photo courtesy, Priyanka Saggu

To quote Sara Bareilles’, Orpheus …

Don’t stop trying to find me here amidst the chaos
Though I know it’s blinding, there’s a way out
Say out loud
We will not give up on love now,

No fear, don’t you turn like Orpheus, just stay here
Hold me in the dark, and when the day appears
We’ll say
We did not give up on love today

You will always be the better half, of the two of us 🙂

You Can’t Have It All

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:25:59 +0530

Mountains in Ladakh. Click to embiggen

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

— Barbara Ras, via Maria Popova

Wade in the …

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:42:33 +0530

on a canal outside Keukenhof. click to embiggen

If you get there before I do
Wade in the Water
Tell all of my friends I’m coming too
God’s gonna trouble the water

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children … 🎵

45

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 05:45:00 +0530

goofing off near a canal, somewhere outside Keukenhof, in the Netherlands

The last five years have been, to put it mildly, a bit trying.
I lost my father, my brother, my clients¹, and quite a bit of my sanity.
I lost a lot of weight and then gained it all again.
The career pivot is going slower than expected.
I feel pettily jealous of the bright young minds I mentor, when they go on to accomplish great new things, while I am here, clawing the mud.
There are days, I don’t want to get out of bed at all.

And then I have to remind myself, that all of this could change in an instant.
There was no way I could be sure when I slept yesterday, that I would see the dawn today.
While I crib and cry boohoo at my life, there are folks who struggle physically, mentally, and spiritually a lot more than I do.

Even when I thought my world was falling apart, there were so many things that held my body, mind and soul together.
I stood on a mountain, to touch the clouds.
I’ve walked in mossy green forests.
I stood with my beloved under the stars, as it rained light upon us.
I have my health.
I have my friends, young and old, new and old.
I have my mother and the rest of my family.
I have my long suffering, better half. The one who makes life worth living. My rock. My anchor. The one who makes me whole.
I’m surrounded by warmth and love.
I remain blessed.

And so, I remain doggedly, carpe diem-ly, persistent.
I remain grateful.
I will do my best to, as May Swenson² puts it,

Enter each day
as upon a stage
lighted and waiting
for your step

Crave upward as flame
have keenness in the nostril
Give your eyes
to agony or rapture

and to …

Take earth for your own large room
and the floor of the earth
carpeted with sunlight
and hung round with silver wind
for your dancing place

the Pandemic ↩︎
in Earth, Your Dancing Place ↩︎

81

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 05:45:00 +0530

Dad

“He’s dead?” said Princess.
[…] “Who told you that?” said Grandad.

“We keep that name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly […]
His name is in the code, in the wind, in the rigging, and the shutters.
Haven’t you ever heard the saying,

‘Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’?”

Excerpted from Terry Pratchett’s, Going Postal

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:28:03 +0530

This was a thread on my fediverse account, that grew too long.
Posting it here, all together, the way my thoughts spilled out.

All I knew about Mandy Brown when I began following her a year ago is

she has a doggie called Furiosa
she thinks about books the way I do
she reads books and then writes about reading them, the way I always dreamed I could
she’s a prominent member of my circle of the Eminent Dead

Today, as she celebrates the quinceanera of her blog, I realised that she also:

is an awesome people herder
is one of the forces behind A Book Apart
is one of the leading lights of web design world
has put in time as a suit (CEO)

Which leads me to understand how she writes so resonantly.
It’s not just her beautiful mind, but also that she writes with her scars.

From her celebratory post,

And this is a home, in more ways than one. There are books here that have taken up residence in my mind. Or perhaps more accurately, I have lived long residencies within them, have curled up under their eaves and stretched out on the porch, have explored the basements and attics and crawl spaces. I read on paper still, so the evidence of time spent is visible in dog-eared corners and coffee stains, in curling covers and the occasional broken spine. I’m hardest on the books I love the most, so that more than one of them is neighbored by a newer edition: not replaced (because I would never forsake my margin notes) but accompanied by a copy that will decay in its own way, soon enough.

And maybe that’s a good way to think about blogging, too. The new stuff sits next to the old but doesn’t supplant it, doesn’t shove it out of the way. Each new post lays atop the next like sediment, and all the old layers remain exposed for you to meander through, with their mediocre sentences and lapsed claims, all the sloppy thinking ever on display. It’s a great exercise in humility, keeping a blog for this many years. But in exchange for the keen awareness of how far I still have to go as a writer, I have the space to keep going. I have the home to keep coming back to. And I will. I will return, again and again

Thank you, Mandy!
For all you do, for all you’ve taught me, for the worlds you’ve led me to, and the all the dreams you’ve shown me.

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.S. I now have to go catch up with thirteen to fourteen years worth of writing. There goes June!
P.P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

On Things That Last

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 20:33:23 +0530

Just something that kept coming to mind today.

I met an old friend the other day. We’d fallen out of touch and gone our separate ways.
We were both gifted watches by another friend of ours at the time.
And they pointed out to me, I was still wearing the same watch.

I gently pointed out to them, that this watch was a different one, something the better half gifted me just after we got married. This is a white dial, see. The old one was blue. And then we moved on to other things.

What I didn’t tell them, was that I still have the old one.
It’s battered.
It’s scratched.
It works.
It keeps perfect time.
It’s beautiful.¹

I didn’t tell them, because I imagine, they probably wanted me to remember the times we were together, fondly. Because I imagine, they think I’d get all dewey eyed over friendships long lost.

And that’s not why I have it around at all.
It was my companion through the worst years of my life.
When I was lost, at sea and barely keeping my head above water.
When I was nursing my brutally broken heart, which then got broken again. And again.
When I had no money, and no friends.
When I was thinking of the futility of going through one more day.
That’s when I’d strap it on. And go live one more day.
I have it, because it reminds me of my resilience.
I have it, because it reminds, I decided to live.

Strange that a thing has lasted longer than my friendships.
Not so strange, when I realise that it’s no longer a gift.
It’s imbued with the echoes and memories of decades of my life. Those that I chose to live.
It’s not just mine. It’s me.

P.S. If the blue is for resilience, the white is for joy.

in a very wabi-sabi-esque way ↩︎

Learnt the Urdu Alphabet

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:26:42 +0530

Finally done with learning the Urdu alphabet.
Inordinately proud of myself :)

Now to go begin, reading slowly and building up my vocabulary.

What I Learned Today (9th of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:22:28 +0530

Regex
#

Started doing regex exercises, so i don’t get bored doing only python. will alternate them for now
Using Practice Makes Regexp. I have only the book though. It’s now expanded to include video solutions too. Highly recommend any of Reuven’s courses
Set up environment and did one exercise which was to look up the user’s input in a dictionary (a word dictionary. not a programming dictionary)

Linux Mint
#

Yesterday’s work was for naught

Devops
#

Kubernetes, began doing some exercises
Set up the environment today
Spoke with a friend about practicing Ansible / Devops stuff
Learnt about putting in environment variables into a docker compose file and then using them in a Django container

Hugo
#

Diddled with the code element font size on the blog, to make it look a little larger

Urdu
#

Learnt about the “tashdiid” symbol that helps add emphasis to a consonant

Physical Fitness
#

Nearing the end of my month long journey.
Have gotten over the pain hump, but the personal trainer isn’t quite sympatico with my needs. He’s a good egg, but we seem to be talking past each other. Wonder what to do when my time is up mid week next.
Did legs today. Went well. Jogged 10m after. Walked 30m after that.

Personal on Janusworx

Happy Birthday Abbygail

Change!

14 (All is Possible!)

13 (Grow Old With Me)

Happy Birthday Abbygail

Bread and Roses

Several Corroborative Thoughts on Pacing Yourself

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

Need Day of Month Reminders in Org Mode? Emacs Sexp Diary Entries to the Rescue

Bird on a Wire

The Rest Is Memory

How to Stop Time

Be Nobody but Yourself

I Read Like Grandma Does

Cursive Is Fun

What I’d Do for You

Search for Something! Kill the Line! In Emacs

Why I Write

First Love

Make Bad Things

No Love Is Wasted

My Reading Life

The Art of Losing

Notes to Self, How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language

Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

Beautiful Arunachal!

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

Why? #

Minimal Friction #

Outsource your brain? No! #

The System #

For Books (the Corner Marking Method) #

Projects (Professional and Personal) #

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life #

Moving Audio Library to Flac & MP3 Formats

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

Publish! Show Your Work! You Don’t Have Leonardo’s Genius or Luck

Create New Scars (or Calluses)

There’s No Dearth of Things to Write About

Use Your Scars

Poor Ceres Always Gets the Short End of the Stick

100 Word Writing Habit

Viewing Hugo Server Output Remotely

A Signed Copy of Neil Gaiman’s, “What You Need to Be Warm”

Read, Read, Read, Everything

My Year in Reading, 2023 Edition

Riffing off Tom’s toon #

Riffing Some More #

In Parting … #

Bloom

12

You Can’t Have It All

Wade in the …

45

81

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

On Things That Last

Learnt the Urdu Alphabet

What I Learned Today (9th of February, 2023)

Regex #

Linux Mint #

Devops #

Hugo #

Urdu #

Physical Fitness #

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

Outsource your brain? No!
#

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Riffing off Tom’s toon
#

Riffing Some More
#

In Parting …
#

Regex
#

Linux Mint
#

Devops
#

Hugo
#

Urdu
#

Physical Fitness
#