Thoughts

Spotify Wrapped popped up today and to my surprise, NIN is my top artist of 2022. Yeah, I love this band.

I have also been listening to Eric Hilton (Thievery Corporation) a lot this year. He’s got wonderful (but short) solo albums. I highly recommend his work if you want a little bit of the evening chill out.

But what shocked me about this summary is the absence of Mac Quayle. He was my No. 1 artist in the past years. I guess Mr. Robot’s vibes faded away… Mhm… until Volume 9, friend!

Today it’s 20th birthday of Last.fm. I’ve been using it daily since 2008, and I’ve already scrobbled 222,142 songs (according to the profile’s stats). Happy birthday!

I’m continuing to learn Go and must say I like it a lot. The language feels just right — very natural and logical. I wish I become more fluent in using it in a few more weeks.

I’m starting to learn Go!

Chronos — Mars (5-Years Anniversary) is an excelent album.

I discovered it weeks ago, but yesterday I re-listened it again… and again… and again.

Back in the day, I was a big fan of Jony Ive. But today I saw an interview with him on WSJ and… felt nothing.

To my surprise, a few years back when I would see something like this, I would go right away and read it from cover to cover, but this time I just took a look at the pictures and that was it.

I don’t care about this stuff anymore — especially when I’ve realized that Ive’s designs are not good in terms of usability or functionality.

They are just fancy, pricey and shiny objects. Nothing less nothing more. It’s funny how things changed for me.

Vim or not to Vim…

A few weeks ago I started to learn Vim, and I loved it. So much. But the problem is that when you want to mirror your old IDE’s setup in Vim environment then… the journey starts… Like choosing Linux over macOS. You are excited — a lot — but you know it will be a long road…

With great powers comes great responsibility.
— Someone’s uncle

I was afraid that hjkl would be difficult to master, but… it wasn’t. I got used to it quickly. Especially when I’m using HHKB keyboard. HHKB + Vim is a super-duo.

So all the problems I thought would be hard to deal with, were not that bad. Basic movement, motions, macros, commands… Easy peasy.

Re-configuring Vim to get most of the features I have in VSCode is the most time-consuming part. Things like: IntelliSense, plugins for git, syntax highlighters and so on. And that is the part I’ve postponed indefinitely… But I cut corners here by installing Neovim with NvChad which gives me an extended version of barebone Vim with file explorer as a sidebar buffer, tabs and fuzzy search.

I’m still divided between VSCode and Vim and the gap is getting smaller and smaller each day.

But… I’ve got this thought in the back of my head that keeps saying: keep it simple. And I can do that by using just VSCode.

Slowly moving on from Twitter and other attention-heavy platforms and switching to old school things like… forums and newsletters. I don’t know if it’s still possible in these days but we’ll see. Finding good sources is the hardest part right now…

This is always my favorite part of designing a t-shirt for myself.

Boy, I really love Unix command line. The whole concept of it is so powerful yet so simple. Each time I need to do something I choose shell to make it work. EVERY TIME.

I really miss Monkey Radio (https://web.archive.org/web/20080222143759/http://www.monkeyradio.org/).

Is there anything like this anymore?

It was somewhere around 2005 when I listened to it for the first time. I was using beloved Real Player to stream it.

I’ve learned about so many great artists over that time. I still listen to them almost every day. I guess this radio has shaped my music taste. I’m very gratful for that.

I wish someday someone would bring it back to life in one form or another.

Just finished “The Making of Prince of Persia” and unfortunately must say that the book/journal is unnecessarily too long. The first part (about Prince 1) was cool and insightful, but the rest was pretty much about nothing really interesting…

Found a very interesting album yesterday:

LUM — Homo Infinitus

I feel inspired reading books about “old times” in the programming world. It’s so refreshing to have a chance to take a look behind the scenes of such legendary creations as UNIX, Doom, Quake or Prince of Persia.

Here are the books I’m talking about:

• “UNIX: A History and a Memoir” by Brian W. Kernighan
• “The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993” by Jordan Mechner
• “Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture” by David Kushner