Coming out of my office and into the living room, there were rays of sunlight landing on the floor and plants, and on the beanbag where sometimes the dog likes to rest.

I was suddenly overtaken by a combined sense of beauty and nostalgia. For that moment, unexpected and unanticipated, the world looked inviting. Life suddenly seemed okay.

And then, just like that, the sun moved again and it was just the living room again.

I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I’d felt any of those things; they’d just faded into the past. When’s the last time I thought something was beautiful, or that life was actually sort of nice?

— § —

I need to make a lot of things better.

When I first started blogging, the whole thing was a series of shell scripts running out of ~/bin on my PC.

I’d type “post” at the command line and it would use a quick and dirty heredoc block to enable me to just pound in a post right into the terminal window. I’d end with EOF, the script would use sed and awk and so on to update other links in adjacent files to point to the new file (for top of blog, next/prev stuff, and so on), and then would FTP all the relevant files up into a static folder.

At some point, I adopted Graymatter. I think this was maybe in 2002 or so, though it’s all getting fuzzy a quarter century later. (Graymatter was a CMS written in perl. Yes, really.)

From that point forward, posting was a matter of visiting an admin backend URL on the live site, logging/authing in, and using a web-based interface to create a post.

— § —

All of that is fine in theory, but in practice, at times it has meant less posting. Sometimes having to complete the act of visiting the backend URL, logging in, then navigating a posting UI is just a step or two too far; instead, things don’t get posted.

Like everyone, I’ve adopted Obsidian this year and of course am building out AI agents everywhere. So for the first time in a good long time, I have a workflow again that posts without having to navigate the web UI, effectively syncing an Obsidian folder to the CMS, meaning that theoretically i can just pound stuff out in Obsidian and it will end up online.

Whether or not it works (technically) remains to be seen.

Whether or not it works (for reducing friction and changing habits) remains to be seen.

But it’s worth mentioning because I’ve been meaning to implement this ever since I started using Evernote in like 2006, and through every successive notes and everything-bucket style app.

Now in the age of agents, it can finally happen, because you can just throw an agent on it, rather than having to dedicate an hour to coding and another hour to debugging.

— § —

Meanwhile, I have a CT scan in a few days. I hope things are not actually brewing, but they may be brewing. I am taking stock, I guess.