The sort of grey, monotone day in Bangalore where the default state of being is to wonder where the year has gone and reflect on a variety of things. I’ve been thinking of the past month or so though. It has a been a time of change, both expected and unexpected.
Personal
A lot of my energies went into personal and family matters. I won’t get into all the details, but as a family, we’ve been dealing with multiple deaths within a short span of time, a major health scare and seeking closure on a number of financial deadlocks. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I was thrust into the middle of many of these — to sort, convince, cajole and comfort others. Normally, I wouldn’t mind, but there was a giant, urgent gorilla occupying space in my head and heart needing equal or more attention at the same time.
Work
That giant gorilla was work. I work in an industry that is closely coupled with how people spend money, and as everyone knows, prices have risen and spending has slowed in the past few months. That meant some teams at work needed to be restructured with a shift in focus on the things we do. The inevitable followed, as we had to ask about a dozen people to leave. Such conversations are never easy, and I have had my fair share of them in the past, but this time it felt different, and personal. Over the past year, the team had built a great product, but more importantly learned to deliver on time consistently, quietly and without any drama. It all felt very much like everyone was giving a shit and the needle was moving.
So it was a shock for everyone to process. I am still somewhat in shock, despite having a couple of weeks go by. Will I get better? In time of course, but I don’t think that feeling of unfairness of it all will ever go away.
Presence
The third thing that’s been on my mind has been my online presence. I haven’t been a heavy Twitter user for a while now, but despite that I am not immune to the all the drama surrounding it. That place occupies a special place in my heart. It bought me friends, jobs, love, and immense learning. I won’t abandon the place, until it does really go away. But these events did force me to think about my online presence.
I have this blog of course. I have had it some form of the other since the mid-2000s, switching platforms and hosts many times. The current incarnation in WordPress was primarily driven by my need to make it easier to share my words and pictures (which I think I have succeeded because I am one of those rare people who likes the new editor.) A second reason was also to slowly attach a store to sell prints of my work. That endeavour has gone nowhere mostly because of laziness and covid disrupting businesses of people I wanted to work with.
I intend to write more here, and keep tinkering with the format because WordPress now makes it really easy and intuitive to do so.
I have a presence on Micro.blog and Mastodon. The later I just setup, mostly to protect my user handle at the primary server. I’ve been on Micro.blog for a few years now and I really like it. It is an ocean of calm whenever I visit, and if the infrastructure that powers it is in the mood! And lately, it has been very moody. I get that the team behind the service is small and they are very deliberate about doing things a certain way, but as a user, it really does put a dampener on things when sharing takes ages, timelines don’t load etc… I don’t intend to quit it either, but perhaps may not visit and share as often.
Tools
The fourth and perhaps the least consequential and most navel gazy of all is use of software tools and services. Like a true nerd, I think about this a lot more than I should. If anything, these past few weeks have been worse!
I thought long and hard about my Setapp subscription and in the end, decided to follow through and not renew. The only app I that I was using regularly was Ulysses and PDF Squeezer. I used Noteplan too for while, which would have justified the subscription, but I switched to taking work and meeting notes on my iPad using Goodnotes because it allowed me to be present a lot more.
I also decided not to upgrade my Capture One 21 licence to the latest. Capture One is my preferred tool for processing photos, but the new features aren’t that useful to me. The existing version still runs fantastically well on my M1 MacBook Air. I did add Darkroom to my toolset because I find it far more useful and much more intuitive to use on the iPad than Capture One.
I still have some more ways to go before I optimise my current toolset and the costs associated with it, but it has been a decent start.