April is Global Poetry Writing month. The theme for the prompts this year is around cultural institutions. As the website says:
This year, our daily resources will take the form of online museum collections and exhibits. Hopefully, you’ll find these to be at least entertaining, and you may even be able to use some of what you see as inspiration for your poems – particularly given that our prompts this year will all be themed around music and art.
I am writing the poems as is on a platform called thinkdeli. Here, I want to provide a little more context.
The prompt for Day 1 is:
As with pretty much any discipline, music and art have their own vocabulary. Today, we challenge you to take inspiration from this glossary of musical terms, or this glossary of art terminology, and write a poem that uses a new-to-you word. For (imaginary) extra credit, work in a phrase from, or a reference to, the Florentine Codex.
I looked up the glossary of Carnatic music terms on Wikipedia. I learnt about something I missed learning in my Carnatic music education – Swarajathis. This became the basis of the poem.
I learnt swarams, geethams, and varnams.
But not swarajathis.
I seemed to have pranced over them,
Unknowingly.
I lived through boyhood, adulthood, and parenthood.
But not youth.
I seemed to have pranced over those years,
Knowingly.
I don’t know why I skipped learning swarajathis between geetham and varnam. After varnam, I went directly to learning keerthanams.
In my mind, I similarly skipped over youth. I was eager to get into adulthood as a child. Once I got there, though, I was eager to do many things I wanted to go back and do things I could have done in my youth. Like solo travelling, hiking, etc.
I love how writing here is spurning me to action. After making no progress on my note making process in the last 3 months, I have already set up parts of the note making system. I think having the system will help implement the workflow.
I had a long weekend here in Pune owing to a holiday on Monday on the occasion of Eid. I spent my Sunday afternoon trying to learn the fundamentals of EMACS. I was trying to see what I would like to use to set up my note making stack. I wanted to learn EMACS to try and set up the EMACS Writing Studio.
I learnt a lot of key bindings. I took the effort to learn about key bindings (or keyboard shortcuts) for the various programmes I used. I learnt that I needed to spend some time to learn programming so that I could better understand what I was doing.
Obsidian has held a strange attraction for me because of its purple coloured logo. I love the colour purple. If you visit my blog’s URL, the purple coloured hyperlinks are a dead giveaway. I decided to give Obsidian another try.
I had tried setting up Obsidian twice before this. The first was Nick Milo’s Linking your Thinking system. I do not know why I abandoned that practice but I moved to Roam Research after trying it.
I added only a few notes in the last one year. I did not seem to have used Odysseas’ system. I continued the practice of adding notes to Roam Research and also set up Readwise to export its highlights to Roam Research in this period. This pushed my use of Roam Research.
My wife asked me what I had got in my life out of consuming social media, videos, books, etc. She said that she saw no return for all the time I had invested. I wanted to start consuming in a way that it showed a return for the time I invest, if not for entertainment. This is the role that I want Obsidian to play.
In the aforementioned consumption binge my wife accused me of, I remembered a channel I came across called Wanderloots. I remembered a sentence he said in one of my videos. It will allow me to measure my productivity in terms of “permanent notes” I wrote and not in terms of the input.
He has a playlist that shows how he sets up his Obsidian with a mixture of mixes Zettelkasten, CODE by Tiago Forte, and Obsidian’s system of tags and topics to set up his digital garden.
I plan to tweak his system further so that I can use Obsidian as a place to read, think, and write. I plan to use discretion in dumping things into Obsidian for now.
If you visit his YouTube channel now, he is talking about setting up an AI locally on your machine to work with your notes. I am presently enjoying consuming his back catalog of content.
I kept following that thread the rest of the week. I started selecting to View Source again. When listening to Craig Mod on The Tim Ferriss Show, I went to his website. I loved some of his in-line comments in the source code.
I guess this is what Code is Poetry meant which used to be written in the top of WordPress admin page.
This was what browsing the web was about, in my opinion. That is how I want to browse the web again.
The World of Wikipedia Userpages
There is also a hidden world of Wikipedia user pages that is not widely known. Other than to Wikipedia editors or contributors. I used to consistently contribute to Wikipedia a decade and a half back and I used to love visiting these user pages.
I used to love reading L Shyamal’s ornithological investigations on his blog, Catching Flies. I have still subscribed to his blog on RSS feeds. When I got some of his recent updates, I visited his Wikipedia userpage. I loved reading this, there, about the reason for his contributions to Wikipedia:
The Western Ghats of Karnataka. Blink and this area may have already been destroyed, with ever-widening roads, street-lighting, power-lines, dams, and habitations following well-established and misguided notions of development that are entrenched in the minds of most people. These are the wild spaces that inspire much of my contribution to Wikipedia, a land that supports life and hosts enough wonders to engage everyone, physically and mentally, now and in the future. Incidentally, within this view live floral and faunal elements that represent more than a million potential Wikipedia entries. Converted (or “developed”) into a boring human settlement, it would not produce a single notable person.
Personal Updates
My post-surgery recovery is coming along well. The guy who dresses my wounds thinks it would take another 2 weeks for the wound to heal completely. That would put it at a date around the Malayalam New Year of Vishu, around 14 April.
Many of my family members’ doctors visits were on hold because of my recovery. Those were covered in the last few days.
How AI has changed the way children do homework. Even ones supported by their parents. It is getting to a place where we first get the answer from AI. There is no effort to search. But, as the blog post says, the reward is for the output and not the effort.
Scale above all else is the philosophy that both buries us in endless genAI slop and locks customers in to enshittified platforms… and taste is in tension with scale.
This is something that Craig Mod talks about in his twin interviews with Tim Ferriss.
It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.
I am trying to write using Emacs over the next month or so. I am not that into programming – that’s the reason I use WordPress and Blot and not hosting it on a static website (like I tried to with Hugo).
I was wondering during lunch about how I can improve my note making workflow. This thought arose because I have also been thinking about improving my task capturing workflow at work.
I was introduced to the difference between note taking and note making in a post by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Note taking is about integrating the knowledge in your matrix and hopefully improving your life.
I have focussed on note taking so far because I had a hard time getting that under control. My approach changed when I read Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. The first principle in Slow Productivity is Do Fewer Things. Accordingly, I reduced the amount of content that I read.
I wrote here earlier about how I wanted to reduce this consumption by considering how I consume social media posts. I wrote here about how I reduced that even further to the blogs that I read. I wanted to slowly repair my damaged attention span that allowed me to take a lot of notes but not make many notes.
Late last year, I purchased the same pocket notebook that Hiran suggests in how he uses a bullet journal and using his idea of numbering the bullet instead of the pages and using an index. I was able to take more notes in the pocket notebook.
But, I also like keeping the A5 sized Bullet Journal since I like to write a lot by hand. I started spending more time copying things over from the pocket notebook to the Bullet Journal.
I did this because my 7 y.o. daughter would raid my empty notebook stack to repurpose it for her own use. The casualty rate of the empty notebooks was quite high.
At the other end my 2 y.o would pick up the pocket notebook I would be using and treat it as he liked. He would tear it, rip it apart, or colour in it, depending on his mood.
I found myself repeating the same things when I looked at my notes. I seem to be going through the same stuff or reading authors who seem to be saying the same thing.
This the process I am now considering as a result of asking the question (refer to the sketchnote at the bottom right for the question), How can I improve workflows for capturing?[An earlier version of this read as, “This is the process I am now considering:”, updated 27 March 2025, 2308 hrs]
Write down the note in the physical A5 Bullet Journal or Pocket Notebook.
This includes some highlights from books, blog posts, or articles that I read on Readwise’s Reader.
This includes some screenshots or notes I take on Google Keep. This is usually when I listen to videos, podcasts or audiobooks.
I am thinking of writing these notes at a certain frequency to Roam Research. The highlights from Readwise’s Reader sync with Roam Research.
I am thinking of then exporting these notes to my laptop where I am considering the option between Emacs or Obsidian.
Since these are text notes, mostly, I hope to back them up to offline storage.
This is not the end of the story. It has already been 3 months. So, the idea behind this post is to help you catch up with what’s happened so far.
The next part will drop when I finish thinking and implement the system outlined here.
Update 1: 31 Mar 2025
Saurabh hopped on a call with me. He suggested using the Eisenhower matrix to determine importance of the notes and then blocking out time on the calendar to grapple with the note.
I spent January 2025 reflecting on what jobs Artificial Intelligence (AI) would eliminate. It was at this time that news was circulating about astrology apps were doing extremely well while the situation elsewhere seemed bleak.
These apps had astrologers chatting or talking to you in exchange of money on a per minute basis. The famous astrologers seem to be charging in the region of more than INR 10,000 for 3 readings. The rate increased as the astrologer gained fame.
I asked ChatGPT to create my Vedic astrology birth chart. It created one that seemed to match the ones created using online birth chart calculators. When I tried it later, it could not generate a chart as a python module that it depended on had failed. It seems to be working again now.
When the birth chart creator failed, I used the online software to get planetary positions at the time of my birth and fed it into ChatGPT. I then went ahead and asked it questions like people usually ask an astrologer (or how I assumed people usually do).
It did read the chart and the text incorrectly sometimes and I had to point out the mistake and asked it to revise. ChatGPT’s predictions seemed reasonable with some to very little overlap with my own experience (as was expected).
After a gap in February owing to my surgery, I tried again this past week while I was recovering. I had two long conversations with ChatGPT based on two prompts I had asked.
I copied the responses into a text file and made two files from the two prompts.
I was hearing many things about Claude and wanted to try that out as well, as a note making tool. So, I fed it the two text files and asked it to compare the two documents and provide me the difference between the two documents.
It guessed correctly that the first document was general in nature and provided large life guidelines. The second document was more specific with timelines and answers to specific situational questions.
I then asked it to summarize and provide the top three highlights and the summary of the predictions and suggestions provided in the documents. It did a reasonable but not a thorough job of it.
These were both done on free versions of these models.
I learnt some interesting things about astrology and its practice during this experiment. North Indians seem to be using astrology to predict career paths, relationship styles, health possibilities etc. South Indians but specifically in Kerala, people seem to be using astrology to solve particular issues in their life as they arise.
Getting back to ChatGPT and Claude, I liked the ChatGPT use case better.
I still want to do what Claude does myself. I think and write together. If Claude makes a note out of a wall of text, it has not really helped me understand the nuances of that text. That is where human effort still needs to be applied.
I have had a lot of time on my hands since I’ve stayed away from social media websites this week. Most of that time has been spent writing for work.
I did not do much other reading or writing. I have nothing more to report for this Weekly Notes.
Take 2: I am writing this at 2240 hrs on 24 March 2025.
I read the post I wrote above and was not very proud of it. It does a poor job of reflecting how my last week was. I only thought it prudent to fix it, for the historical record.
Goals have been demonized. They have been confused with or are replaced by resolutions, systems, processes, intentions etc. I returned to goal setting again this week. I set goals with my wife for this quarter.
Read/Listened/Watched
Some interesting ideas from this video –
India thinks inputs based. China thinks outputs based.
Work life balance happens when you have a sense of control over your time.
Every January, ask yourself, if you were to be laid off this year, what will you do?
Important to channelise your anger in the correct direction when you are laid off.
Burnout happens when you lack control or when you are not aware of what role your contribution plays in the bigger picture.
Some of the lessons learned from this video (these are his final suggestions):
Find a sleep schedule that fits your life. Get enough sleep.
Move your body every week.
Keeps you active.
Increases your heart rate
Find a productivity system that works and actually stick with it.
Practice embracing the flinch.
Delete social media from your phone and laptop for 30 days.
watch closely how your behavior changes
Learn your Baseline caloric intake.
Know your macronutrient breakdown
He suggested using the myfitnesspal app.
Be more intentional with how you spend your time, the things you bring into your life and people you surround yourself with.
Stop choosing the default path. Build a life that is uniquely yours.
Treat life as one big experiment.
Learn about who you are
Learn more about the person you want to become.
Truth be Told has a good post about the two modes of functioning of the brain and the six modes of rest.
Utsav Mamoria has a great long read about how to live an intellectual life. He uses fantasy as a great storytelling tool to illustrate his point.
I realized that I love going and visiting websites in their url. Here are two websites that I enjoyed visiting:
I keep reading Cory Doctrow’s blog post about making technology policy.
The job of government experts isn’t just to research the correct answers. Even more important is experts’ role in evaluating conflicting claims from interested parties. When administrative agencies make new rules, they have to collect public comments and counter-comments. The best agencies also hold hearings, and the very best go on “listening tours” where they invite the broad public to weigh in (the FTC has done an awful lot of these during Lina Khan’s tenure, to its benefit, and it shows).
If you look closely, you'll notice the real ones have smaller circles, louder love, stronger integrity, deeper presence, and greater peace.
Parallel Spirals 