pages tagged writingspwhittonhttps://spwhitton.name//tag/writing/spwhittonikiwiki2024-03-16T00:35:14ZEight years in Tucsonhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/eightyearsintucson/2024-03-16T00:35:14Z2024-03-14T04:05:21Z
<p>I spent eight years doing teaching and research in Philosophy at the
University of Arizona, in Tucson, Arizona, from 2015 to 2023. I now have a
love for America and its people, even though I am not sure I could ever live
there again. Americans would say that Tucson is an outlier, an odd
post-frontier town which is not reflective of the rest of the nation’s cities.
And I only really visited New York, the Bay Area, and two towns in
Mississippi, so I mostly take them at their word. But I could see something
in common between these places that’s distinct from where else I’ve lived. I
will not seek to capture that here, but instead focus on how life in Tucson
was, and some things I learned.</p>
<p>When I first arrived I was very unsure about whether it would be a good idea
to stay. I was ambivalent about reentering academia, and uneasy with the
contractual terms under which I would be able to study there without paying
any money for it. Once I did decide to stay for at least one semester, I
tried to get myself set up with a daily routine that would be suitable for
making progress with my classes, while also allowing me time to pursue my
other interests. So I went to check out the library, that being where I’d
done all my work as an undergraduate. I was appalled to find that there
wasn’t a culture of silence. Supposedly the upper floors were designated as
quiet, but the only way I could feel confident in not being interrupted was to
find one of the small study desks sequestered in far corners, with those
moveable shelves of books they have in university libraries between me and
everyone else.</p>
<p>This initial problem with finding quiet and concentration somewhat epitomises
a lot of my academic experiences in Tucson. I felt that the academic culture
in the US was a noisy one: talking loudly to each other was valued a lot more
highly than it had been in the UK, and real deep reading and thinking was
something that people did on their own, at home, and didn’t talk about much.
You talked about all the writing you had been doing, and indeed about what
people you’d read had said, but with the latter it was as though the actual
reading had happened outside of time, and the things happening within time
were on-campus activities, and the hours of writing. You might say, well, it
was grad school, of course the focus is more on producing one’s own work. But
we did read a lot, in fact, and it’s not as though undergraduate Philosophy at
Oxford didn’t involve regularly spending a lot of time writing, even if tute
essays are something strange and staccato when compared to what we tried to
write in grad school. And this is not to say that I didn’t learn and develop
a great deal from many of those loud conversations, both in and out of
seminar, but I think a productive campus needs more quiet, too.</p>
<p>We had two kinds of classes, lecture-style with both undergrad and graduate
students, though in smaller groups than undergrad, and seminars with almost
exclusively graduate students. Many people would take as many seminars as
they were allowed to, and we all continued to join seminars once we’d
completed coursework. But a few of us, including me, joined as many lectures
as we could, even after completing coursework. I just love listening to
masters of their domains of study. This was distinctly uncool – you’ve got
to practice producing in order to become a philosopher yourself, would go the
thought. But it’s not as if I didn’t produce too. And you can’t be
disdainful of continuing to pump good philosophy into your head. Perhaps my
attraction to the lecture classes was because it was somewhat closer to the
deep reading with which I was familiar, that proved elusive on my American
campus. You have to do the hard work to make philosophical progress, but you
can’t engage with philosophy only by doing what feels like hard graft if you
want to succeed, I think. You have to engage with it in other ways too, like
just by listening.</p>
<p>A quality about the Americans I knew well which struck me early was their
generosity with time, friendliness and just materially. I mean to include here
peers who were my friends, as well as people who were part of my life for
extended periods, but with whom I didn’t have enough in common for friendship.
When I first arrived in Tucson I lived in a house in the Sam Hughes
neighbourhood, owned by the parents of one of my two roommates, Nick. He was
from Phoenix, and was taking a second undergraduate degree after deciding that
he didn’t really want to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor,
but wanted to be a programmer. Nick and I would drive to the supermarket
together every Saturday in his big Ford truck, and we developed a habit of
listening to The Eagle’s <em>Take It Easy</em> on the ride back. I never signed a
lease for living in that place. At one point I was short of American money
after spending a lot on a summer trip, and I asked whether I could pay my rent
erratically for a while, as my stipend came in over the following academic
year, rather than transferring savings from the UK. It was no problem to do
this. One Spring Break and one Thanksgiving, I joined Nick in driving up to
Paradise Valley, Phoenix, to stay with his family. His mother had sat in the
state House of Representatives as a Republican, and had two very yappy
chihuahuas, traumatised as they had been by a previous owner. At one point
they had to stay with us down in Tucson for a few days. One of them refused
to walk on the tile floor, and we had to create a bridge of doormats between
the carpeted room in which it was sleeping and the front door.</p>
<p>Nick introduced me to the American love for pulp cinema, which we don’t really
have in the UK. Once Nick graduated and I developed closer friendships in my
department, I watched a lot more such films with philosophers.</p>
<p>After living with Nick I lived alone, for nine months, in a small terraced
bungalow, for barely any rent. The people around me were mostly economically
deprived retirees, and some young people working jobs like driving some kind
of tractor around on the extended grounds of the airport, on his own, far away
from the planes. At one point a different corporation took over management of
the properties, and they tried to make us pay an additional fee for the
laundry room that had until then been included. They did this by installing a
lock, and telling us we had to come down to the office to pay the new fee and
receive a key. My neighbour Wilma and I took the bus down to the office and
objected, and eventually got keys for free. Now that I think about it, I
don’t know whether other existing tenants ended up paying for it. I improved
my understanding of how the economically deprived, even in the West, can get
casually abused by businesses, from this.</p>
<p>Wilma would sit behind her screen door in the evening, without the lights on,
and a disembodied greeting would float out to me, among the crying cicadas, as
I biked up to my own place. I had a nine month lease and I left that place
right after because I was fed up with the insects infesting the place. But at
the same time, living there was when I figured out how to be happy with my
life in Tucson, and I maintained that happiness from then until the pandemic,
when everything got hard for most everyone. Wilma was generous like Nick.</p>
<p>Before I said goodbye to Nick and moved in next door to Wilma, I tried to live
a life involving the kind of variety that my life in Korea had had, before I
went to Tucson. I was continually frustrated in this, because it was too
distant from the lives that the people around me led for me to be able to
figure out how to do it there, and more mundanely, because of how car-centric
Tucson is. When I moved into my place on my own I somehow decided that I
would try focusing entirely on my university work, and I also expanded that
work a bit by registered for a seminar in Japanese literature up at the East
Asian Studies department. My future PhD thesis supervisor Julia joined me for
that seminar and one more the next semester, and I was able to draw upon some
novels we read for my thesis.</p>
<p>I didn’t have Internet access at my little place, and we had finally got some
designated-silent shared offices for grad students, in addition to the noisy
ones where people held office hours, and talked loudly about philosophy.
Suddenly my life got a lot more focused and quieter. I would get up and
scramble an egg with some cheese and black pepper, and have it in a pitta
bread-like thing which I sliced, froze, and defrosted in the toaster. I’d
head to campus, early, and write. I’d do my classes and reading. Then I’d go
swim in the big outside pool the university had, in the dark. I’d do one or
two lengths at a time and then hold onto the edge and just think hard. I
especially did this after my literature classes. They ran until 6pm, I think,
and then I’d go to the pool, and do my lengths interspersed with thinking hard
about the literature we’d discussed. Then after a long time out I’d go home
late, and listen to pre-downloaded tabletop roleplaying podcasts. I slept the
best I ever have, in the quiet among the noises of insects – it really was
quieter despite all that noise – on this wonderful Japanese floor bed I’d
found on Amazon. What I discovered during that time was the power of a simple
life, I think. Or perhaps it was more about not trying to live a more complex
life than the place you live allows. Or perhaps it wasn’t anything more than
about the benefits of giving up fighting against a prevalent culture of
workaholism – but at least, it was giving in to that situation in a way which
strongly benefitted me. Going with the flow, or something.</p>
<p>I tried to build upon my new focus with the next phase of time in Tucson. I
moved into the university’s grad student dorms, living right next to campus,
in the middle of a commercial district for students that felt like one had
left Tucson and gone somewhere more contemporary. This was a change I
appreciated a lot, having, as I said, grown tired with all the bugs. At this
time I got to know my now-fiancée Ke. I had finished with class credits but
sat in on so many classes and reading groups, while still continuing to write
a lot, that my work life didn’t change too much. While most people would
start teaching their own classes at this point, I asked if I could continue to
be assigned teaching assistant roles instead; I started teaching on my own
only during the pandemic. My social life, aside from time with Ke and her
roommate, mostly involved cycling East for forty minutes or so, to a house in
which three fellow philosophers lived. I loved those evening rides there and
nighttime rides back. Tucson is a dark city for the astronomy, and it’s also
flat and bike-friendly, so for most of that journey I was on a route where
various things had been set up to discourage cars from staying on the same
roads as cyclists. The friends I had who lived in that house, Brandon, Tyler
and Nathan, and later Nathan’s partner Meg and Tyler’s partner Amanda, were
now the humblingly generous Americans in my life. We got two tabletop
roleplaying groups going, with me and Nathan running a game each, and playing
in each other’s. Later we were a pandemic pod, watching through <em>Terrace
House: Opening New Doors</em> together.</p>
<p>I also significantly ramped up my involvement in Debian at around this time.
Each Saturday morning I would visit a local coffee roasters, Caffe Lucè, have
an excellent bagel and a couple of cups of coffee with half-and-half, and work
on my packages.</p>
<p>I’ve described how a built for myself something of a sense of belonging
studying Philosophy in Tucson. But ultimately, it did not compare in this
regard to the place I was most content, which was in Balliol, my Oxford
college. The Arizona grad students would go out for beer at a nice place
called Time Market on some Friday nights, and while it was often a very good
time, I would walk home with this heavy feeling of disappointment. I can now
identify this as the lack of a sense of camraderie and belonging which I
thought was essential to a productive academic environment. I can now also
see that I had an intellectual kinship with Julia, Nathan, Tyler, Ke and
others which was just as valuable, but it was still something had only with
individuals, lacking a sense of being part of something not only bigger but
also concrete, actually in the world. The pressures of professional academia
in the US didn’t seem to leave us enough space to have what I remember us
having had at Balliol. Not that the Balliol I inhabited still exists – it
was dependent as much on the place as the people I was there with.</p>
<p>The advent of the pandemic, and the remainder of my time in Tucson after the
pandemic, eroded this life I’d figured out. Our department eroding too was
part of that – a lot of people moved away to be with their partners or
families when lockdowns began, and faculty retired (and in one case tragically
died), and so we lost a critical mass of intellectually energetic individuals.
This hit me hard, and I did not have the emotional resources remaining,
post-pandemic, to try to kick start things again, as previous versions of
myself might have tried to do. I find, though, that most of my memories of
life and Philosophy in Tucson are of the good times, and I find it easy, now
at least, to write a post like this one.</p>
<p>When I think back to all the classes I took, discussions I had and essays I
wrote and revised, I can see significant intellectual development. At the
same time, it was as though my development in other senses was put on hold for
those eight years, in a way that it had not been at Oxford and in Korea. (I
even find myself wanting to say that my whole life was put on hold, but that
would be hyperbolic even if it felt that way sometimes, for as I have said, I
developed many important friendships.) Postgraduate Philosophy was just too
consuming. I don’t know if it could have been other way, but I knew all along
that it had to stop at some point; I knew that I couldn’t put all the other
respects in which I wanted to grow on hold forever. Somehow, Oxford got this
balance right: it managed to be just as satisfyingly intense and thrilling,
without being quite all-consuming. Of course, I probably have rose-tinted
glasses. It does seem, though, that European hard work manages to be more
balanced, at least for what I seek to achieve, than American hard work.</p>
<p>During my final year, a current postdoc at Oxford happened to visit Tucson to
speak at a political philosophy conference. Our quiet (to her),
old-fashioned, relatively informal academic life out in the desert as grad
students seemed to have a lot of advantages over hers in Oxford, despite how
she had graduated from her doctorate and had obtained an academic job, and we
were students. Until I met her, I had taken for granted, I think, all the
ways that academic life in Tucson <em>was</em> quite like Balliol undergrad had been
– she told me how her colleagues are all on Twitter, but none of us were,
really. When I first arrived in Tucson I found it distressing how much more
of an ivory tower it seemed, with Oxford being such a politically engaged
place. In the end I am very glad I did a humanities PhD where I did, and am
deeply grateful to America.</p>
I went all the way to Montréal for DebConf17, and all I got was a new MUAhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/debconf17/2017-08-18T02:42:57Z2017-08-17T21:50:51Z
<table class="img"><caption>This year’s group photo (by Aigars Mahinovs). I really like the tagline</caption><tr><td><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/img/debconf17.jpg"><img src="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/debconf17/500x183-debconf17.jpg" width="500" height="183" class="img" /></a></td></tr></table>
<p>On Sunday night I got back from Montréal, where I attended both
DebCamp17 and DebConf17. It was a wonderful two weeks. All I really
did was work on Debian for roughly eight hours per day, interspersed
with getting to know both people I’ve been working with since I first
began contributing to Debian in late 2015, and people I didn’t yet
know. But this was all I really needed to be doing. There was no
need to engage in distracting myself.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the first week more. There were sufficiently few people
present that you could know at least all of their faces, and
interesting-sounding talks didn’t interrupt making progress on one’s
own work or unblocking other people’s work. In the second week it was
great to meet people who were only present for the second week, but it
felt more like regular Debian, in that I was often waiting on other
people or they were waiting on me.</p>
<p>While I spent one morning actually writing fresh code, and I did a
fair amount of pure packaging work, the majority of my time was poured
into (i) <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/">Debian Policy</a>;
(ii) discussions within the
<a href="https://pkg-emacsen.alioth.debian.org/">Emacs team</a>; and (iii)
discussions about <a href="https://manpages.debian.org/dgit">dgit</a>. This was
as I expected. During DebConf, it’s not that useful to seclude
oneself and sufficiently reacquaint oneself with a codebase that one
can start producing patches, because that can be done anywhere in the
world, without everyone else around. It’s far more useful to bring
different people together to get projects unblocked. I did some of
that for my own work, and also tried to help other people’s, including
those who weren’t able to attend the conference.</p>
<p>In my ordinary life, taking a step back from the methods by which I
protect my PGP keys and other personal data, I can appear to myself as
a paranoid extremist, or some kind of data hoarder. It was comforting
to find at DebConf plenty of people who go way further than me:
multiple user accounts on their laptop, with separate X servers, for
tasks of different security levels; PGP keys on smartcards; refusal to
sign my PGP key based on government-issued ID alone; use of Qubes OS.
One thing that did surprise me was to find myself in a minority for
using the GNOME desktop; I had previously assumed that most people
deep in Debian development didn’t bother with tiling window managers.
Turns out they are enthusiastic to talk about the trade-offs between
window managers while riding the subway train back to our
accommodation at midnight—who knew such people existed? I was
pleased to find them. One evening, I received a tag-teamed live
tutorial in using i3’s core keybindings, and the next morning GNOME
seemed deeply inelegant. The insinuation began, but I was immediately
embroiled in inner struggle over the fact that i3 is a very popular
tiling window manager, so it wouldn’t be very cool if I were to start
using it. This difficulty was compounded when I learned that the
Haskell team lead still uses xmonad. The struggle continues.</p>
<p>I hope that I’ve been influenced by the highly non-judgemental and
tolerant attitudes of the attendees of the conference. While most
people at the conference were pretty ordinary—aside from wanting to
talk about the details of Debian packaging and processes!—there were
several people who rather visibly rejected social norms about how to
present themselves. Around these people there was nothing of the
usual tension. Further, in contrast with my environment as a graduate
student, everyone was extremely relaxed about how everyone was
spending their time. People drinking beer in the evenings were
sitting at tables where other people were continuing to silently work
on Debian. It is nice to have my experience in Montréal as a
reference to check my own judgemental tendencies.</p>
<p>I came away with a lot more than a new MUA: a certainty that I want to
try to get to next year’s conference; friends; a real life community
behind what was hitherto mostly a hobby; a long list of tasks and the
belief that I can accomplish them; a list of PGP fingerprints to sign;
a new perspective on the arguments that occur on Debian mailing lists;
an awareness of the risk of unconsciously manipulating other community
members into getting work done.</p>
<p>With regard to the MUA, I should say that I did not waste a lot of
DebConf time messing with its configuration. I had actually worked
out a <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">notmuch</a> configuration some months
ago, but couldn’t use it because I couldn’t figure out how to
incorporate my old mail archives into its index. Fortunately
notmuch’s maintainer is also on the Emacs team … he was able to
confirm that the crazy solution I’d come up with was not likely to
break notmuch’s operating assumptions, and so I was able to spend
about half an hour copying and pasting the configuration and scripts
I’d previously developed into my homedir, and then start using notmuch
for the remainder of the conference. The main reason for wanting to
use notmuch was to handle Debian mailing list volume more effectively
than I’m able to with mutt, so I was very happy to have the
opportunity to pester David with newbie questions.</p>
<p>Many, many thanks to all the volunteers whose efforts made DebCamp17
and DebConf17 possible.</p>
'Do you really need to do that?'https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/gnulinux_needtodothat/2016-09-28T15:37:49Z2016-09-28T15:25:09Z
<p>A new postdoc student arrived at our department this semester, and
after learning that he uses GNU/Linux for all his computing, I invited
him along to <a href="http://www.grundrisse.org/tfughh/">TFUG</a>. During some
of our meetings people asked “how could I do X on my GNU/Linux
desktop?” and, jokingly, the postdoc would respond “the answer to your
question is ‘do you really need to do that?’” Sometimes the more
experienced GNU/Linux users at the table would respond to questions by
suggesting that the user should simply give up on doing X, and the
postdoc would slap his thigh and laugh and say “see? I told you
that’s the answer!”</p>
<p>The phenomenon here is that people who have at some point made a
commitment to at least try to use GNU/Linux for all their computing
quickly find that they have come to value using GNU/Linux more than
they value engaging in certain activities that only work well/at all
under a proprietary operating system. I think that this is because
they get used to being treated with respect by their computer. And
indeed, one of the reasons I’ve almost entirely given up on computer
gaming is that computer games are non-free software. “Are you sure
you need to do that?” starts sounding like a genuine question rather
than simply a polite way of saying that what someone wants to do can’t
be achieved.</p>
<p>I suggest that this is a blessing in disguise. The majority of the
things that you can only do under a proprietary operating system are
things that it would be good for you if you were to switch them out
for other activities. I’m not suggesting that switching to a
GNU/Linux is a good way to give up on the entertainment industry.
It’s a good way of <em>moderating</em> your engagement with the entertainment
industry. Rather than logging onto Netflix, you might instead pop in
a DVD of a movie. You can still engage with contemporary popular
culture, but the technical barriers give you an opportunity to
moderate your consumption: once you’ve finished watching the movie,
the software won’t try to get you to watch something else by making a
calculation as to what you’re most likely to assent to watching next
based on what you’ve watched before. For this behaviour of the
Netflix software is just another example of non-free software working
against its user’s interests: watching a movie is good for you, but
binge-watching a TV series probably isn’t. In cases like this, living
in the world of Free Software makes it easier to engage with media
healthily.</p>
Spring Break in San Franciscohttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/sanfrancisco/2016-03-20T19:57:04Z2016-03-20T19:57:04Z
<p>Last night I got back from spending around 5 days in the Bay Area for
Spring Break. I stayed in a hostel in downtown SF for three nights
and then I stayed with a friend who is doing a PhD at Stanford. When
initially planning this trip my aim was just to visit somewhere
interesting on the west coast of the continental United States. I
chose the Bay Area because I wanted to get my PGP key signed by some
Debian Developers and that area has a high concentration of DDs, and
because I wanted to see my friend at Stanford. But in the end I liked
San Francisco a lot more than expected to and am very glad that I had an
opportunity to visit.</p>
<p>The first thing that I liked was how easy it seemed to be to find
people interested in the same kind of tech stuff that I am. I spent
my first afternoon in the city exploring the famous Mission district,
and at one point while sitting in the original Philz Coffee I found
that the person sitting next to me was running Debian on her laptop
and blogs about data privacy. We had an discussion about how viable
OpenPGP is as a component of a technically unsophisticated user’s
attempts to stay safe online. Later that same day while riding the
subway train, someone next to me fired up Emacs on their laptop. And
over the course of my trip I met five Debian Developers doing all
sorts of different kinds of work both in and outside of Debian, and
some Debian users including one of Stanford’s UNIX sysadmins. This is
a far cry from my day-to-day life down in the Sonoran Desert where new
releases of iOS are all anyone seems to be interested in.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should have expected this before my trip, but I think I had
assumed that most of the work being done in San Francisco was writing
web apps, so I was pleased to find people working on the same kind of
things that I am currently putting time into. And in saying the
above, I don’t mean to demean the interests of the people around me in
Arizona for a moment (nor those writing web apps; I’d like to learn
how to write good ones at some point). I’m very grateful to be able
to discuss my philosophical interests with the other graduate
students. It’s just that I miss being able to discuss tech stuff. I
guess you can’t have everything you want!</p>
<p>One particular encouraging meeting I had was with a Debian Developer
employed by Google and working on Git. While my maths background sets
me up with the right thinking skills to write programs, I don’t have
knowledge typically gained from an education in computer science that
enables one to work on the most interesting software. In particular,
low-level programming in C is something that I had thought it wouldn’t
be possible for me to get started with. So it was encouraging to meet
the DD working on Git at Google because his situation was similar: his
undergraduate background is in maths and he was able to learn how to
code in C by himself and is now working on a exciting project at a
company that it is hard to get hired by. I don’t mean that doing
exactly what he’s doing is something that I aiming for, just that it
is very encouraging to know the field is more open to me than I had
thought. I was also reminded of how fortunate I am to have the
Internet to learn from and projects like Debian to get involved with.</p>
<p>Moving on from tech, I enjoyed the streets of San Francisco, and the
Stanford campus. San Francisco is fantastically multicultural though
with clear class and wealth divisions. A very few minutes walk from
the Twitter headquarters with its “tech bros”, as the maths PhD
students I met at Stanford call them, are legions of the un- and
barely-employed passing their time on the concrete. I enjoyed riding
one of the old cable cars through the aesthetically revealing and
stark combination of a west coast grid system on some very steep
hills. I was fortunate to be able to walk across the Golden Gate
Bridge on a perfectly clear and mist-free day.</p>
<p>Meeting people involved with Debian and meeting my old friend at
Stanford had me reflecting on and questioning my life in the desert
even more than usual. I try to remind myself that there is an end
date in sight and I will regret spending my time here just thinking
about leaving. I sometimes worry that I could easily find myself
moving to the big city—London, San Francisco or elsewhere—and
letting myself be carried by the imagined self-importance of that,
sidelining and procrastinating things that I should prize more highly.
I should remember that the world of writing software in big cities
isn’t going away and my time in the desert is an opportunity to
prepare myself better for that, building my resistance to being swept
away by the tides of fashion.</p>
Fifth week blues reduxhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/unchargeable/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-09-24T19:53:00Z
<p>It’s the fifth week of the semester and back in Oxford it would be time
for people to start talking about “fifth week blues” and how we might
deal with them. I’m experiencing some blues this week, although it’s the
fifth of around 14 weeks rather than the fifth of eight. I’m having
difficulties because I’m finding my study skills not to be up to
scratch. I’m not sure that they have ever been up the level that they
now need to be, but they’re definitely down below the level they were at
(parts of) my time as an undergraduate at Oxford.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/unchargeable/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Arrival in Tucson, AZhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/arizonaarrival/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-07-31T17:07:00Z
<p>I arrived in Tucson to start the Philosophy PhD at the University of
Arizona on Monday, and I now find myself in indecision about whether I
should do it or not, and I’m stalling on signing the employment papers
with the university. I’ve never been in a situation like this before:
having travelled all the way here, I would have expected my heart to be
committed to giving it a go. But it isn’t, in fact, I’m afraid and I
want to go home. For my own benefit, in this blog post, I’ll try to give
the best arguments I have for attending and for not attending.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/arizonaarrival/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Emacs and a tiling window managerhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/framesonlymode/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-06-20T00:45:00Z
<p><a href="http://spw.sdf.org/blog/writing/geek/emacsevildone.html">Six months
ago</a> I
activated the Emacs Vim Emulation Layer, EVIL, and tried to go back to
the vim keybindings I used years ago, before <a href="http://mph.puddingbowl.org/2010/02/org-mode-in-your-pocket-is-a-gnu-shaped-devil/">Org-mode dragged me into
Emacs</a>
like it does so many. <a href="http://spw.sdf.org/blog/writing/thoughts/backtoemacs.html">I found
that</a> it
didn’t suit me: the Emacs keybindings turned out to be more deeply wired
into my fingers, and I was no longer convinced by the idea of the Vim
zen cult (no hard feelings guys, you’re cool). One thing that I found
when configuring EVIL was that although my configuration for the Vim
emulation was complicated, I could strip out a lot of other stuff from
my Emacs configuration that I was using to work around Emacs not being
that great at editing text. I learnt something from this despite
deactivating EVIL again, a lesson I’ve applied again this week.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/framesonlymode/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
The working people of Britainhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/workingpeople/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-06-15T10:21:00Z
<p>David Cameron likes to talk a lot about the working people of Britain
and how the Conservatives are behind them in their project of being busy
working people. If we’re careful to avoid the Puritan deification of
work, we can agree that the project of holding down a job and working
one’s way through the ranks has a lot to be said for it. There is a
sense in which holding down any job at all, in the short- to
medium-term, uplifts people and gets them out of depressive
self-centeredness. But in the longer term it’s irresponsible not to look
at one’s work in the context of the national and international
economies. And when we do this we find that Cameron is inviting the
middle classes to vote him and his friends in for selfish reasons and
then assuage the guilt by indulging in a narrative about being a working
person.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/workingpeople/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Worrying about e-mail todayhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/fastmail/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-06-02T13:32:00Z
<p>A buzzword in the popular press is to describe Internet access as
something that’s becoming a utility, that people are coming to need in
the same way they need their water, electricity and gas. I realised
today that a reliable e-mail account also has this status. My primary
e-mail account has been my <a href="http://sdf.org/">SDF</a> account for about
three years, but today I paid for a new <a href="http://fastmail.com/">FastMail</a>
account and started using an e-mail address at a .name domain that I’ve
owned for six months or so but haven’t been using outside of git commit
messages. I’ll talk about the reasons for this and also some
observations about the place of e-mail in my life.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/fastmail/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Just going along as beforehttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/justgoingon/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-05-28T12:10:00Z
<p>During my first year in Korea one thing that I complained about was that
I lacked a sense of purpose. I didn’t have a clear next step to
achieving big, longterm goals in my life. I wasn’t worried that those
goals weren’t neatly circumscribed: it wasn’t my having dropped the goal
of becoming a professional philosopher that was troubling me. Despite
dropping this goal, I still knew that I wanted a life that bore
similarities to the life of a professional philosopher, and that also
bore similarities to a bunch of other archetypes. The issue was not
having a shorter term concrete goal that would push me in the directions
of some medley of the archetypes I look up to.
<a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/justgoingon/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>