frozen octopus

I like practicing and studying things daily. I am not so into the guilt of skipping a day. My way around it is to make sure my daily practice tasks have a number like "five minutes". If I need to skip a day then I defer the task until tomorrow or some date in the future I know there is more space.

I don't mind arriving to a day and having three "practice drums five minutes" tasks. I can get those done at random times in the day and catch up. That way I know I did the work of drum practice. It allows me to keep on practicing without the daily calendar guilt of habit trackers.

A good system for rehearsal and study. Not a good system for things like taking medication.

This site uses the Drupal CMS (content management system) which has a vast amount of modules you can use to have your site do so many things. My thing lately is choosing one module and test/ruminate on it while working on other things.

So instead of just testing content migration using CSV files, I am daydreaming about as many ways to integrate that into this site (and others). Having a source of truth csv file is good way to work on content. It has made my band's website less of a nightmare to update and maintain.

The next module I did a little deep dive into was the Rate module. It lets you have things like five stars or a thumbs up feature. The Rate module is going to be fun for the albums i listen to. I want some sort of marker for albums I should revisit in the future.

The thing to ruminate on with the Rate module is when to use each feature. Do you go with stars or thumbs? If I add a star rating system to albums, am I really going to listen to a two star album in the future?

It's fun to ponder but it is also a little easier to ponder and test the modules one by one.

"Well done is better than well said." ~ Benjamin Franklin

I was doing some testing of a module called Feeds yesterday. I am migrating a ton of old blog posts to this blog. It is a perfect test for migrating data via .csv file with the module. The last time I tried it out with a large set of albums, the module choked on importing the tags. This time around, it imported about 90 plus albums I listened to with the tags in one import. That ruled. I tried it out again with a bunch of old blog posts, and it imported them all as well. That ruled even more.

Past is a Slight Pain

Setting up the .csv file to import old data isn't the most fun task. It is a lot better than doing things one by one, though. Since all my old info is in .txt and .md files, I am sure there is a way to get it into a .csv. I am actually having good luck doing that lately with various tools. This is a do this in chunks while listening to a long podcast or audiobook task. Lots of tidying.

Excited For the Future

Getting new information into a .csv file is a breeze. So many apps allow you to append to a .csv file, like Shortcuts, Drafts, etc.

For example, I can Shazam what I am listening to right now and have it append it as text to a .csv file with an Apple Shortcut. Now I can import the list of things I listened to with three clicks in the blog. That is magical.

When you start doing it with a Watch or voice command, then it becomes 2001: Space Odyssey level. You can start doing things like voice dictating ideas into blog posts. Capture all the thoughts from the day into a spreadsheet, edit all the random thoughts together, and set up a blog post. Again...three clicks to post.

Save the .csv file in the right spot, and you can post from a phone. That is wizard level. That is get things done on a train level or while you are killing time at soundcheck level.

Lately, I am all about having a starting point or anchor point. When I am stuck on where to begin tasks, chores, or errands and I can't decide where to begin, there is the starting point. Go there and head out.

In computer mode it is the to-do app where all things flow into. For home mode, I start at the back right corner of the office/living room and work out from there. On drums it is a paradiddle on the snare but lately it is a half-time shuffle.

The goal for me with a fixed starting point is to eliminate the "where to start" and "what to start on" decisions. If I can get moving on things, I'll keep going for hours. Getting going is the slog through the mire for me.