Work is not supposed to be fun. By work, I mean the kind where you are getting paid to provide a service to a company or employer or client. By that definition, it is almost guaranteed that sooner or later you will be asked to do something that is not fun.
I believe it is rare for someone to have a job that is also fun 100% of the time. An example are professional athletes. I'm sure they enjoy the sport they participate in, but even they have to put in the work to improve their game and their physical conditioning. That is just part of the job.
I'll use myself as another example. I love programming and I love solving problems by writing code to solve them. To me that's fun. However, working as a software developer is not “solving problems by writing code” 100% of the time. I still have to drive through traffic to get to and from the office. I still need to write documentation. I still need to work through ugly legacy code. I still need to do code reviews. I still need to train new developers. I still need to do compliance training. I still need to attend meetings. The list goes on and on and on. All of that comes as part of being employed as a software developer. None of those are necessarily fun, but they are to be expected of me, because that is part of the job. That is the work that needs to be done.
But I’ll always be a writer even if this is the last paragraph I ever write, because when I see “a writer writes, always,” I also see a writer thinks, always. That’s all a writer is — a thinker. When you can’t write, you think about the stuff you want to write about. And as long as you’re hunting for hidden truths in the world, you’ll always be a writer.
I'm not a writer by profession and that's fine, but what was said here tells me that I might be a thinker? You know what, I like the sound of that. I can live with that. This was a great read by the way.
It's Friday and also the first day of November, wow how time flies! Let's do another music log. This one's going to be a punk rock covers edition.
Let's start off with a cover of Oasis' “Wonderwall” by Cartel. This is a really good clean cover. They didn't try to do anything too fancy. They just touched up an older song and gave it the Cartel sound. I find that I actually like this cover more than the original, and I used to be a pretty big Oasis fan back then.
After my digital declutter, I thought I'd change the focus of my online journal. Less personal posts, more post of “value”. What I didn't realize then, but do now, is that almost every post on a personal blog, journal or website is personal commentary. You just cannot get away from it because you are the author. Unless you are copying someone else's work and writing it down, the thoughts that you transform into words are all personal. Your environment, your knowledge, your culture, your experiences, they are all personal aspects that determine the words that you write down.
When I look back at my posts on the loaner car that I got, I see that everything I wrote, my observations, my notes, they were all personal commentary. When I look back at the book reviews I've written, they're all personal commentary. Even my posts on digital minimalism, which are the posts that I think are of “value”, they are all still personal commentary.
I think I was looking at it the wrong way. It might be the case that personal commentary on a subject, is what gives a post value.
It is actually kind of embarrassing to look back on it, thinking I could have avoided personal commentary on my posts. I was naive then, but as is the case with life, you live and you learn. If I cannot avoid personal commentary, I might as well embrace it.
We all have our own values, likes, wants and preferences. No ones lives the same exact life as someone else. Everyone's circumstance is different and that shapes the decisions they make in their lives.
You will never make the same decisions as other people, because you are not living, nor have lived the same life that they've had. As such, we cannot expect other people to do or act the same way as we would, because we all live different lives.
Stepping on other people's life choices to make ourselves feel better, is not cool.
We are all different and that is okay. The important thing is that we all respect each other's differences, whether that be online or offline.
I struggle with this everyday. Whenever I do, I try to remember what my wife always likes to say, “Stay in your lane, bro.”
It's a rainy Friday, but a perfect day for another music log. Let's start off with the classic “Too Much Love Will Kill You” by Queen. Such a beautiful, beautiful song. Love the instrumental with the guitars on this track. Too bad that is a rare thing in new songs nowadays.
Speedhunters has a great post featuring the iconic Ferrari F40. If you're a fan of the F40, you'll love the numerous great looking photos in that post. If you're a fan of cars in general, you'll find plenty to like on their website.
I used Waze for several years before switching to Apple Maps this year. My main reason for switching to Apple Maps was mostly due to privacy concerns. When the drive notifications on Waze stopped working for me, I took it as a cue to try out another navigation app. Here are the differences that I’ve noticed between these two navigation apps:
Apple Maps
Comes free with an iPhone.
No ads, which means your data is not being sold to advertisers.
Provides navigation overlay on top of other apps. This works when you have another app running, in addition to Apple Maps. When you switch to another app while you have Apple Maps navigating in the background, it will show an overlay on top of the current app informing you of the next turn you need to take.
Has very good lane guidance. Meaning it tells you what lane you should be on. Can be really useful on those confusing highways that split into two or three other roads.
Very good battery consumption.
Can sometimes provide the wrong navigation instructions.
For example, when we tried using it to navigate to the place where my son gets his haircut, it lead us to an apartment's parking lot across from the destination. The problem was that there was a fence in between. So we couldn't just get off the car and walk. We had to drive back out to the road, go around the block before arriving at the destination. To be fair, Waze also did the same thing. Only Google Maps got it right actually.
Lesson learned here, if navigating to a new destination, I should double check the location on Google Maps or Bing Maps with satellite view turned on.
When we tried to navigate to the Dallas zoo, for some reason it could not figure out the correct entrance to the zoo. Waze did figure this out though.
It is less intuitive to use than Waze. For example, asking the app to re-evaluate routes is easier to do with Waze.
Has very basic reporting features which pales in comparison to what you can do/report with Waze.