Author: Nick Kempinski

Now with Shit Goggles!

I’m usually a happy-go-lucky look-on-the-bright-side-of-life kinda guy, but seems like not been so much.

My wife had to have a hard talk with me.

And now, boy oh boy do I hear it. The back handed comments, the “sure this is good, but….” amendments to every sentence.

So, what do I do? These things feel a little glued on right now. So I’m going to focus on the small things. The things I can change. I’m going to break a pattern or two, ever so slightly.

Breaking patterns, even the smallest pattern, by the fewest of moments, means you can change the big things.

It’s a twist on the classic making your bed speech.

Hold off on picking up your phone for 20seconds once in the morning, then tomorrow you can wait 22; then 30; then a minute; then 5; then 15; then 30; then an hour; then longer.

Go to bed 1 minute earlier.

Get up 10 minutes earlier

Sit on the opposite side of the couch.

Instead of doing X – try doing Y, just once a day.

And when my patterns can change, hopefully the shit can crack a little, and a little more until it rolls away, and I can get to that happy-go-lucky look-on-the-bright-side-of-life kinda guy.

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Oh ya – and I was inspired by Derek Sivers’s now page so, I have one too now.

Way things are going, it’s been more bi-weekly updates. But the thing with weeknotes, remind myself, that’s ok. Keep Calm and Post on.

Laravel & Statamic

I’ve really been reading more and digging into Laravel, specifically Statamic.

I’ve been looking for a foundation to do my own ActivityPub “thing”. I have my own ideas on what it can do, should do, and with a plugin.. maybe… 🤔

Other ActivityPub thoughts

I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, there’s a lot of really good foundational apps already in the wild. WP’s ActivityPub plugin is fine. I also really like what’s going on with Ghost. But, Statamic and Known have caught my eye from an infrastructure perspective.

• Statamic being having more jazz hands, flare, and a very vocal and fun loving community
• Known having a really portable and rock solid underbelly and foundation.

Reading through the ActivityPub specs, there’s a lot of really interesting possibilities, however right now, it feels like projects are mostly staying in their own lanes. Taking a smaller lane approaches, which makes total sense. However, I really want to “play” with the whole specification; more extreme possibilities, like IntransitiveActivity:

• Replace Last.fm scrobble with something in ActivityPub
• If we’re going old school, Fouresquare check-in’s.
• The Quantified Self all via ActivityPub

But more than that – I’m imagining a more monolithic app rather than micro-service approach to it all. One that doesn’t need fancy cloud hosts or only a hand full of hosts offer support for crazy languages ( not that I can’t set those thing up… ). I just want to sftp it on a classic host and go from there.

But as always no time

Yet as always, I am bound by a 3 years old and 6 year old that rule my world ( btw: I love that they do ). I’m still struggling to find a balance to get some “me” time. And when I do, being at a computer is not always what I want – I’m on it all day after all.

So hey, if you you ever want to chat more with me, ask away on the socials. Want to take it on yourself and beat me to it? Who’s got two thumbs and can beta test. Have at it.

Noticed I missed last week did you?

It’s been that kinda few weeks where one gets sucked into the suck of the web. I’m Canadian, I have a lot of hope, but man… that hope is being tested for sure. I think we need to come up with some other name for doom scrolling… it’s not so much doom as WTF.

I’ve been trying to pick the pieces up from my last weeknotes. I had a nice hiatus celebrating my Wife’s Birth Week ( yup a whole week here, full of zany 3yr & 6yr old ideas for how to celebrate ). Topping off with a great no-kids bday party which opened a window just a little bit in my immune system for me to then be smote down by some good awful bug. One that taunts you be being healthy just enough during the day to try and work or feel really guilty for not, and then when the sun sets, the beast is released in a rage of heat and chills.

So, in the end, those pieces I’ve been trying to pick up off the ground, pieces of my ego, hope, drive… ya, those are mostly still on the ground being gently shuffled over by a dirty slipper to make a path to my bed.

I’ll keep if brief.

How I feel at work

How I feel at home

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Update: Haha! it’s 2025, not 2024. Let’s change that title shall we. I’ve since typed 2024 10,000 more times by accident.

You know, sometimes you start the day tripping over something in the dark trying to get up quietly no to wake anyone up. Then you bang around and the whole house is awake?

That feels like the beginning of my year.

I’m not going to jinx it, because I remember that on those day’s, while it take a bit, I do get some semblance of recovery.

Missions

My weeknotes for work ( I do them on an internal blog ) was about setting missions. I used to do Chris Brogans 3 Words. But right now, that seems much to much. I’m going to focus a but more low key on smaller missions this year. What’s my mission today? this week? Nothing more, nothing longer.

The goal, if I choose to accept, is simply complete the mission.

Is work not that into me?

One mission I have is to get people at work sharing. There’s something about our communication that feels too silent for a relatively small, all remote, growth stage company.

Part of the difficulty of working all remote, is something you feel like “they just aren’t that into me”. Which most of the time that’s not the case. Silence, when you don’t want it, is probably the hardest part of remote working. You go a bit zany. The more asynchronous communication processes you can instill, can help with those moments.

Right now, I’m feeling it.

And I want to fix it.

Designing my life

My outside work mission? To get into the drivers seat to design my life. There’s a few exercises I’m stuck on, but one foot in front of the other. I’ll get there. I’m saying it out loud on a blog on the internet, so it must come true – By the end of the year I’ll be prototyping and experimenting with life idea’s.

Happy 2025!

This week has been health and family first. The rest can wait.

I’ve had several conversations over the course of the week that have me thinking about repackaging a couple idea’s into an upcoming post:

• The Literaty – the idea that there will always be a deep underground group of active readers.
• Proficiently Literate – that as the US drop below 50% proficiently literate, what’s going to happen?
• The rise of government during the rise of literacy = the reduction of oligarchy as literacy rises. What happens in the other direction?
• I want to learn more about serfdom. I have a feeling there’s something in there that has some parallels to what we’re seeing in the world. I just can’t put my finger on it.

Make a mess clean a mess

I tell my kids this all the time. This week I made the mess. Long story short, with Power Pages and Power Platform I was given the choice of “blue door” and “blue door” and I investigated, thought I experimented and when it came to click and squint…. I picked the wrong “blue”. 

When doing so, it brought in a flood of things into the “solution” we didn’t want.

Clean up was just as slow. Do you want to remove the purple thing or the purple thing. Luckily, I was able to find a way ( through a series of 4 clicks… over and over… ) which which was which.

The Team Onion

Read The Team Onion this week in search of more comms ideas for the day job. I bought it right before postal strike, I was the silly one who picked “regular mail”.

I thought I would never read it, but today, I finally got the book!

It’s one of these things that deceptively simple, but breaking down has some very interesting applications.

Time to throw it against the company wall, and see if it sticks.