Week Forty-six! A little late this week, I had to reinstall my operating system (again) because both my sound and WiFi drivers suddenly and mysteriously vanished last week. The good news is that the problems I had with my NVIDIA card seemed to have been resolved with this updated version of Xubuntu, so minor victories.
I wanted to ask you about this - I’m really curious why you wouldn’t call nonlegit even if you were totally incapacitated! That’s the kind of thing calling nonlegit is for - and it’s support’s job to deal with it, and they are happy to help so it’s not a nightmare to click a few buttons. –@ZedMango
I definitely agree with your mindset, and I think it’s sensible, but only for sensible people–which I am not.
The real definition of “incapacitated” can be a slippery slope for somebody with a weasel-like mindset (me), and so it can be difficult to judge when exactly a non-legit derail occurs. Back in 2018 when I previously tried to commit to Beeminder full-time, I called non-legit a bunch, which you can see in my /french graph.
I didn’t even realize this was a big deal until the No Excuses discussion started, but obviously I should’ve since it’s pretty obvious. I feel pretty bad about it in retrospect. So, I suppose this is just personal preference.
Also in entry #39, I talked about the /derail meta-system, which will derail legit whenever another system derails non-legit, which also helps.
I disagree that edge-skating is bad - I think a more sensible solution is to be able to call non-legit if something happens to incapacitate you! –@ZedMango
My argument against this is primarily logistics-driven. Even if you’re totally okay with non-legit derails, there’s still a dozen e-mails I have to respond to if I miss an entire day, and a dozen graphs that need to be fixed, etc. Which is a pain for both myself and support that can easily be avoided.
Also, the idea to be able to change colours (so that things are red with a couple days buffer, etc.) is in the All Of Our Ideas feature requests, which might help!
I also have to add the disclaimer that I’m still totally edge-skating and this is an ambitious and idealistic idea for myself at this point. In fact, I just derailed an hour ago! My productivity is an empty tank right now. 🤣
Truth be told, I’m still feeling stuck in a rut. I’m still performing all the Beeminders I currently have, but as I’ve said before, that’s the bare minimum. Although I’d much rather be updating with a personal failure than not update at all. It’s honestly shocking how material is scoured across the Internets that has been unceremoniously shelved indefinitely with no updates!
One of the reasons I’ve been “lazy” is because I started playing Dwarf Fortress again, which is an absolute time sink, but luckily you run out of things to do after playing it for a week or two straight.
Now I’m planning to work on a forth Jekyll theme starting tomorrow, to replace the one that I’m currently using that I built from scratch nearly a year ago now. In retrospect, man it is ugly.
Also related, I’m sad to say that my ownership of Journal.kim/ is going to be expiring soon, and even though the purchase cost was only a few dollars, the renewal is $65CAD! That’s how they getcha. I’m not sure what URL to go with next, since it’s not really worth that much to me.
Wait, be sure to read the “EDIT” I added toward the top of “No-Excuses Mode 3”! :heart: –@dreev
Oh, no worries. I totally get that the particular user persona that weasels barfing cats is probably far more weasel-minded than I am. (Though I have to take your word on that, since I’ve yet to meet such a person)
But I do think that “No Excuses” is just a good rule to have for all Beeminder goals in general, and maybe it’d be a more constructive goal to enable that for all my Beeminders instead of trying to prevent non-legit derails.
People who require Beeminder to do work are often the kind of people that would try to avoid doing work altogether, so I’m not really surprised to see this be such an issue.
It’s funny, I think about how people that do their work don’t really need Beeminder, and people who don’t wouldn’t bother trying to use it. And yet there’s a large number of people (myself included) that do use it! I believe this is because humans are contradictory by their inherent nature, thank goodness. 😉