2023-02-23 - Reply - Christina - February 2023 Five Questions (5Q)

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Christina, looks like the questions as posted on your gemcap have been truncated a bit by Nano or Emacs &c. FYI. I still cleave to Nano as my default $EDITOR, but have aliased it to always run with flags for line numbers and line wrap for this reason. Highly recommended. Not to mention setting the config for endearing ansi colours! Anyway, no worries, I shall make do with inference. If clarification is needful and interesting, please ping me by XMPP.

1. Do you offer advice to close friends who seem to struggle (e.g. obsession w>

I do, though try to remember not to so much. Listening should always come first, at the same pride of place as caring presence. 🫱🏼

2. What is the best view where you live?

Right by my Baba Yaga cabin, at the “Pawpaw Patch”, if I walk a few dozen yards down the old rough drive there is a place where the trail rises above the tree line a jot. A divot for occasional rains crosses the trail. Suddenly the view to the mountains across the valley opens up for 180°. It’s not really a grand shewing, per se, but it bears a comforting depth. The space is not merely seen, but palpable, felt. And a village in the distance is just on the thither side of annoying. The hamlet seems smol, decently modest on the land. It speaks to me of human possibility towards sanity. But really it is the fact of the mountains, the valley, the space. The space above, too, as stars come on at dusk. I think it bears mention here, though it begs for intimacy beyond the tawdry insufficiency of prose. I’m thankful for eyes here.

3. What useful skill would you want a nontech-inclined friend to learn? Could b>

Like basics? I’m hardly a real techie, so that is about my level of assistance. Command line fun. Getting dirty with diy instead of just buying black box corpo gear. The obscurity of infotech in the general populace is an oppression.

Part of infotech diy learning is the agency that comes of cleaving to what makes plum sense as a trailhead. The divide between techie and muggle I wager is mostly about what happens when we are overwhelmed by complexity. If we rest in our peculiar dispositions to learning, and are lucky enough to find tutors who grok these, anyone can make infotech what they please, to some extent. That is, it is best to start with what revs the engine and makes organic sense.

I’m visually oriented and have found this proven to mine own betterment. I bash (pun, haha) my head against programming when it solely speaks to “coders”, a cognitively very medium-selected population. If I have concrete embodiments and exemplars for code, it makes more sense to me. It’s something I find comforting about Lisp: the parenthesis and cons-cell tree logic are much more lucid to me than the open tabbed syntactic muddle of more mainstream programming languages. “YMMV”, of course, which is the point which needs much more addressing in infotech.

Work with what you are. If you prefer GUI, use it. If you grok CLI, leverage it. If you like hands-on bits and bobs, grab a soldering iron and build boards. If you like to tap, use a tablet. If you like to click, use a mouse. If you prefer to speak, use voice recognition. Start where you are. Many non-techie people truly don’t know this, that one’s innate disposition is the firmest ground to build learning on. Then one can stretch out thence as best one likes and can. Instead they (we) get overwhelmed and thus give up. But the truth is the tech stuff itself is forgiving! It’s the social context of tech which is rigid and preferatory.

4. Is there a habit, initiative, or project you'd undertake if you had a suppo>

…supportive friend? Someone to coach? Oh, so many. I rot at discipline and so do miss having a partner with whom I can build routines for learning. Lately I have the itch to try to programme again. My music studies go moribund every few years. Languages! I miss a dear passed-on penpal with whom I spoke a minority indigenous language. I do exercise as daily chores, but it’s not enough, so could use rigor there too.

5. What is your favourite slow cooker recipe, or slow cooker recipe repository?>

Sadly I no longer have a slow cooker, and haven’t eaten much meat in 2 decades. But hands down, I must say a slow cooked beef and bean stew is a nonpareil delight. It is just beef bones and beans in a deliciously salty broth. Best served in a trencher of home cooked multigrain bread. I salivate to think of it.

TEMP - Asking for recipe, will post here later.

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