Notes for December 8th 2023
Song of the week:
- Most delivery companies tend to screw up. It happens when you're moving items globally. Some are dog slow, some are poor at customer service. But UPS have been absolute pure, unadulterated dogshit. A few weeks ago I had a shipment simply get held hostage in their parcel centre (which is 2km from my house) without being released. It wasn't until I noted with an agent that they actually weren't going to help because they were saying the same thing as the previous 5 agents over the course of a week, that they escalated, and 2 days later the package was released.
- But now, a package was delivered to a Drogheda collection point. Which is a good 90 minute round trip from my house. All of that despite me updating the UPS tracker with a more appropriate place to pick it up. Cue 3 calls (so far) and a thread with the actual shipper. But I think going forward, if someone is shipping with UPS I'll just refuse to purchase.
- I'm now furiously researching a new coffee machine. I got myself a half decent espresso machine for my house; a Sage Bambino. I've learned a lot with it. But it's time to step it up a bit. I think I'm landing on the Lelit Mira X, but there are a lot of options in this price range (broadly "prosumer"). Which makes it tough to make a call.
- After many months of neglect, I went back to doing some Lego. I have a number of sets that are sitting idle that need to be done, but with work and kids I've just not had the time to do anything about it. Approaching it from the perspective of meditative, relaxing time for yourself rather than a job-to-be-done has helped a lot. Soon, I'll have a DeLorean to show for my meditation.
- I've been reading through the Musk biography. And while Musk is certainly a character worth documenting, at no point in the approximate 50% worth of pages I've consumed so far does he seem like a good guy. A good leader. Someone you'd follow into battle. Big ideas, sure. But those big ideas seem fuelled by his ability to spend vast reserves of money rather than genuine knowledge of the domain. You can see that now with his bizarre meddling in politics via X, which appears to be a passion project to have influence rather than a product he feels he can develop into something special. Almost all of his successes are down to him being rich, and having partners who are willing to work for him. Imagine if he just took big ideas to a certain point, and then become more of a venture capitalist rather than a C-suite member of the team.
- I also got Rick Rubin's book, 'The Creative Act: A Way of Being'. Which is extremely 'Rick Rubin,' insofar as it's more of a coffee table book to grab a random page and be inspired by, rather than a deep dive into creative thinking, visionary work or even stories of his career.
- I ordered a new keyboard ages ago. Largely because $job's merch designers made a custom keycap which is legitimately gorgeous. And frankly, I'll take any excuse. It's a new one from Monokei, iterating on a previous one they had done. It's super modular, beautiful and should sound amazing. But they've hit some production delays. Which is to be expected as it has a lot of features they've not meddled with before (bluetooth modules, being one). But it's just amping my expectations and excitement up as I have the key caps and switches ready to go here!