Jim Willis

A friend unexpectedly gifted me this the other night when we were rehearsing for an upcoming gig. I can not believe what a huge difference it makes in the sound/volume of my already very loud Martin D-18.

It’s called a d-gard and is purpose built for the back of a Martin dreadnaught. I put some new felt on it so that it wouldn’t scratch the finish. I’m astounded at how much more volume and sustain I’m getting from this. A good friend of mine who plays mandolin has been telling me to get one of these for years and I’m glad I finally got one. For standing up and playing at live gigs around a single mic, I’m hoping this gives me the volume I need.

When you sit down to learn Norman Blake’s New Chance Blues and just keep clicking though on the jams:

https://youtu.be/x4wIldrOSJE

https://ift.tt/tqbuJ6R

Love the mix of drum machine and live drums on this track:

Man, I have got my music streaming dialed in using Marvis. Combining tracks from a bunch of playlists, applying some filters and sorting. Just saying.

This:

Massive centralized platforms create problems for society. By posting to your own site, you control your content, distributing it more evenly across the web and minimizing the power of big tech companies.

and

Temporary, viral movements like #DeleteFacebook are not enough. We need something sustainable that permanently changes the narrative.

Both from Manton Reece’s excellent Indie Microblogging.

Our high-schools should have a whole class built around this book. It would teach kids how to take action, how to not be powerless. From understanding ownership of content to understanding the way the Internet runs on open standards. It’s all in here.

I’ve never pre-ordered a book so quickly.

This quote from Illich shows up in more than one of L.M. Sacasas’ excellent newsletter, The Convivial Society:

“A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence,
exploitation, and impotence.” 

— Ivan Illich, Tools For Conviviality (1973)

Working in tech, I’m always trying to find balance between autonomy and support. Recently we spent a lot of time thinking through how to best allow staff to use their personal smartphones with our work systems. I am glad we did so and it looks like this was a step in the right direction for autonomy. This WSJ piece is about a recent, small study that shows this kind of empowerment is good for employee morale.

Out for a late afternoon walk in my local woods. The silence in this particular spot was incredible, in part because I’m in NJ and it’s almost never quiet, anywhere here. Took this with my iPhone. I had my Fuji w/ me in my backpack but was too lazy to take it out. Wish I had. That velvia simulation would have looked awesome here:

Several months back I read Tim Egan’s Pilgrimage to Eternity. I am a sucker for books about long walks. Egan’s was really good. He references a great St. Francis of Assisi quote:

Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

I’ve had that quote in my mind so many times over the past few weeks and several times have ignored its sage wisdom to my own detriment.

Every (workday) morning, I follow a checklist called Morning Routine in my Things application that walks me through triaging my inboxes, checking various project status sites (Jira, etc.), responding to open loops in a bunch of different messaging platforms (SMS, Zoom, etc.) I have come to rely on this checklist very heavily over the past few years as working from home has allowed me to refine, add, hone and massage this checklist into a list that sets me up for a good day of work. 

Lately though work has been entirely overwhelming for a variety of reasons (short-staffed, too many projects, interference with home priorities, etc.) and there have been several days over the past few weeks where I’ve sat at my desk in the morning and had a work inbox that was so backlogged with messages that I would just jump into my email. Once I do so, I almost never go back to my Morning Routine checklist. This is a bad thing. Stuff falls through the cracks. By responding to my inbox (the brightest/hotest burning fire) instead of doing what is necessary, I’m shooting myself in the foot.

This is just mostly a public reminder to myself to have faith in my checklists, do what is necessary first or I’ll never get to the possible let alone the impossible! 

Sort of relieved to see that I’m not the only one who had some significant fallout with the latest round of OneDrive and MacOS updates. It looks like it mostly had to do with a new File on Demand issue in MS’s OneDrive client update. 

The problem, for me at least, is that the update inconsistently upgraded/migrated my OneDrive and SharePoint links to the new ~/Library/CloudStorage directory. 

My situation probably isn’t unique, so sharing how I fixed it.

I had OneDrive files that I accessed through Finder on my Mac. I also had SharePoint Libraries that I accessed through the Finder on my Mac. Both of these files were synchronized and represented in the Finder through the OneDrive client. 

When OneDrive updated, it moved, I presume appropriately, my non-SharePoint OneDrive directories to ~/Library/CloudStorage and created a symlink in my Home Directory to that CloudStorage location. Seemed like everything was mostly working (though, I will note that when I renamed a file in Word using “File->Rename” menu option, it did not change the file name in OneDrive. 

Importantly, of the 10 or SharePoint libraries I was accessing via my Finder with the old OneDrive client, only one was moved to ~/Library/CloudStorage. I experienced all sorts of problems trying to save and/or access SharePoint library files on my Mac through the Finder or application File dialog boxes. 

So, I 

• Quit OneDrive client in the menu bar
• Put the OneDrive app from Applications folder in the Trash
• Reboot
• Reinstall OneDrive app

Note, that after the reinstall, I do not have the option to control Files on Demand:

Also, importantly, only one of the many SharePoint libraries to which I was accessing through my Finder were added to the Account tab. Totally bummer. I will have to go back through and resubscribe to all of those Libraries again. 

Hoping that this leads to a more stable OneDrive/Finder integration experience on my Mac.

Also, after this upgrade, I’m going to explore a bit more carefully the collaborative editing settings from Microsoft.