frozen octopus

I use an application I love called Hazel on my Mac. It watches files and folders for almost anything you want and then applies rules to them that you set up.

One thing I use the most is rules that react to tags. When I tag files in Downloads, they magically move themselves where they need to be. You can burn through a long list of files, tag them up, and then move on while they sort themselves.

This rules except suddenly the keyboard shortcut I had set up for tagging files and folders stopped working. I seriously couldn't figure out why it wasn't working for a couple of weeks. I switched to right-clicking on files and tagging that way.

This morning I did a little more digging and finally figured out what was wrong with the shortcut. It is kind of maddening.

For my shortcut's menu title, I had "Tags...". I was using three periods. This is incorrect. It needs to be an actual ellipsis, which is made by pressing Option-semicolon.

After that, you might need to relaunch Finder, then tagging with a keyboard shortcut should be back.

Sometimes you just need to put headphones in and drum along with music you like. I did it for two hours yesterday. It is very rare for me to do. Usually I do things like repeat something forever to see where it evolves to or use some sort of randomness generator to make patterns.

Out of the blue yesterday I decided to just play along with stuff. I wasn't trying to play all the things perfectly. I wasn't trying to learn someone's style. It was more like punk music loving me before I knew how to play drums checking to see what level I am at now. Out of all the stuff yesterday, I really enjoyed playing Buzzcocks.

I am not anti playing along to other people's music for fun, by the way. If I do learn someone else's drumming, it is usually a measure or two I find interesting.

My current obsession is learning the drum beat at the beginning of Dave Brubeck Take Five. It is fascinating to me that a song in 5/4 was a hit. I am guessing but 99.9% of all hits are in 4/4. So I am trying to get my head around why this beat is pleasing to people's even loving ears yet it is an odd number.

My colors for this blog are white, black, grey, and light blue. For quite a while I’ve been trying to find a couple shades of blue for the link colors and things like vignettes. Sitting at a desk trying to conjure colors was a bust.

On our trip to the mountains last weekend, I decided to add “find a couple shades of blue” to the stuff to do list.

We were up on a mountain right above the cloud line and the sky was so blue. I sampled the color with an app. It got a little darker a couple hours later and I sampled that sky as well.

Added the two blues to the CSS and crossed my fingers. They look so good. Very stoked about them.

We are going to Nagano and Hokkaido this month. There is chances of snow for both places. If there is, I am going to sample white and black.

We went to the mountains this weekend in Nagano to visit a friend's French restaurant/bar, soak in some hot springs, and go to the top of a mountain to do a cloud ocean watch. On the trip home, we had time to kill before our last train back to Tokyo. We decided to go check out Zenkoji Temple even though it was pouring rain. It is where the first image of the Buddha to arrive in Japan is stored back in 642 AD. It got me thinking that I am surrounded by Buddhist temples here all the time. There is one next to our apartment called Takezuka-jinja from 983 AD.

It made me think that I should really listen to an audiobook about Japanese Buddhism while I work this week. I like podcasts and music, of course, but my book listening is a little sparse. I did a quick search and found that *Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind* by Shunryu Suzuki seems to be recommended. I started in on it yesterday but I am only halfway through it.

At first listen, there is a lot of talk about the importance of practicing and how there is no finish line with practicing. That resonates with me because I like practicing a simple pattern over and over. I take for granted that playing a beat slightly harder than my ability slowly over and over makes it hard for other random thoughts to pop in my brain.

I also liked the parts about striving to remain a beginner. It reminded me that I need to start thinking of the next drum thing to learn in 2026. Past things I studied were linear drumming, swing drumming, brushes, etc. The top candidate right now is drum beats from the Benin/Togo region of Africa. It could change though so don't hold me to it.

The other random thing that popped out was this quote from Shunryu Suzuki...

When my teacher was seventy, he said, 'When I was young, I was like a tiger, but now I am like a cat!' He was very pleased to be like a cat.

I did a little bow to that one. m( ^ _ − )m

Did a three day 1000s of Cats tour of Kyushu last weekend. I had two ways to get a blog post up and four ways to get thoughts out of my mind. I didn't use any of them barely at all. I was so in the moment doing the shows and looking around that documenting didn't cross my mind. Besides the work tasks I had to do, I didn't do most of my daily routine things. Stuff like morning writing and the like.

I got back at it once I got home but kind of interesting everything went out the window for a couple days. I thought I would get a lot of writing done on the Shinkansen but I was traveling with someone. Too much looking out the window and talking about the upcoming adventures.

We have another tour like this one coming up in November so I am trying to come up with a strategy. My mind keeps arriving at dictating micro thoughts with the watch and then combining them at the end of the day if I don't have morning writing time. At least it is something rather than a three day streak gap.

It also makes me curious if I should make the medium I use for morning writing randomized. The choices would be paper (then scanned), watch (voice dictation), phone (typing on small keyboard), iPad (writing with apple pencil), and laptop (typical keyboard). Probably a good idea to keep my skills up with all of them at a steady pace.

Gonna go set that up and see how it goes.