It’s Friday, November 1 2019.
I've been travelling this week and if there were ever anything that would go into some sort of \"I'm too old for this shit\" list, as if I were on the verge of retirement and had to team up with some young, energy-filled zoomer, it would include \"flying across three time zones to do two days' worth of meetings and then flying back home and going straight back to work.\" And if you were to say OK BOOMER to me in response to this moaning, then I would just sigh.
This travelling week was an experiment: I ditched the thin, keyboard-challenged 15in MacBook Pro with the never-touch-it-apart-from-changing-the-volume bar and instead took on of the new big iPads Pro (SORRY) along with a pencil and a Logitech Slim Folio keyboard. Jeez, even typing this makes me feel like Jerry Pournelle writin a Chaos Manor column at the end of BYTE magazine, which I suppose means I'm simultaneously fulfilling a childhood dream and being insufferable. Because I really want to say: RECOMMENDED, even though the damn thing probably cost over a thousand dollars all in, and that was even after hacking my way through selling the old iPad Pro, finding an Apple Refurbished model of the kind I wanted and so on.
Anyway! It turns out that I could do pretty much everything I needed to do on the trip -- which included put together a whole set of Google Slides... slides, mess around in Google Sheets (to the extent that I even needed to mess around with running some Sheets Queries and getting really annoyed about having to learn SQL syntax All. Over. Again.
I could type on the thing, I could write on the thing, I had the same USB-C hub with me that I'd normally use with the laptop and, like I said, everything worked, just... a bit more slowly.
I think the new iPad OS makes a big difference: I'm finally comfortable with whatever kind of multitasking Slideover is and don't make any frustrating mistakes where my finger glides over the wrong thing and the wrong window appears, or the window or I app I wanted suddenly disappears or takes over half the screen. I managed to write a whole Snow Crash chapter recap episode with the Kindle app open in one third of the screen, which felt like it worked pretty well.
This bit is pretty much turning into a typing bit: I've been out of the co-working space and travellin or whatever for so long that I haven't managed to spend any time on the Old Mac (OH MY GOD THIS IS TOTALLY A JERRY POURNELLE COLUMN), which is what I'm writing this episode on, right now. A weekend or so ago, I spent about 45 minutes mucking about and replacing the original hard drive with a SCSI2SD thing, a piece of homebrew electronics that fakes an OG SCSI interface to an SD card. So this little Macinotsh LC III that used to have a 160GB hard drive now has a 2GB boot partition on on virtual drive, and another virtual drive with another two 2GB partitions. I'm surprised the machine hasn't completely freaked out, to be honest. All of that's to say that this is being aggressively typed on an old Apple keyboard into Microsoft Word 5.1a, which I'm reliably informed is The Best Word Ever, running on System 7.5.5. I'm pretty sure if I look at this machine wrong while it's running more than one application it will fall over, but I don't care, because I finally own a Proper Old Mac.
Writing this on the Proper Old Mac means saving it as a plain text file on the fake hard drive, using Fetch 3.0.3 to FTP it over to the FTP server running on my MacBook Pro and then pasting it into a Safari window over here. Because, you know, I like to make things easy.
A long, long time ago (fine: March 2014) Robin Sloan challenged me to write three episodes that had nothing to do with technology or the culture/economy thereof and although it was frankly terrifying, I managed to take him up on his challenge. Part of the reason for this is because I really respect and admire Robin as a writer (his Annabel Scheme has made it into the very small group of books that just makes me feel warm inside and I'd treat as a comfort book), so if someone like that asks me to do something which implies that I might be a good writer, well, I figured I owed it to myself to give it a shot.
I bring this up because one of the pieces I wrote ended up being something I talked to my therapist about and pretty much directly led to a diagnosis of adult ADHD. \"A story about a brain and its hands\" was a stream of conciousness typing of my interior experience and a little bit of What Is It Like To Be A Dan, and an example of the kind of personal writing I stubbornly hang on to for this newsletter. All the other newsletters, especially all the cool ones, feel sharp in some way to me, they are a certain thing and they are not, for example, a horrendous mish-mash of personal introspection and thought about, well, technology and the culture/economy thereof.
Anyway: I had the chance to talk with someon recently and we got onto the subject of ADHD and I'd sort of started feeling that I didn't really have ADHD lately. There's a thing where the symptoms of ADHD are pretty much exactly the same as what you might have if you have some sort of complex PTSD (itself a difficult to deal with term, because I imagine if you tell someone they have PTSD and they haven't suffered some sort of horrific, obvious physical trauma, then you've got... PTSD imposter syndrom?). This trauma presents itself as extreme avoidance: leaving things to the last minute, being terrified that you're going to get negative feedback or that whatever you do just isn't going to be good enough. So I'd started getting myself comfortable with the idea that hey, maybe I don't have ADHD, maybe I'm just terrified of negative feedback and have a deficient sense of self wherein I'm convinced people are just going to yell at me the whole time.
Turns out I bumped into a Twitter thread that covered some of the symptoms and diagnostic criteria of adult ADHD and I went down the entire goddamn list, photographed from the book Driven to Distraction, by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. This is a list of twenty suggested symptoms that I had not looked at in a good five or so years, I think, and I just about burst into tears after checking off the fifth one.
There is a joke I have with my psychiatrist, whom I see roughly every month or so. Every time I visit them, we do a baseline and check how my symptoms are doing. One of the questions tracking my ADHD symptoms is something like: \"Are you restless? Do you need to be moving around? Is it hard for you to stay sitting down? Do you find yourself leaving a table frequently?\" Presumably this is a problematic symptom: for children who aren't receiving any accommodations, it can be a horrible experience at school where you're forced into regimented learning. I joke with my psychiatrist about this, though, because my answer is always: \"Yes, but.\" The reason why is I've done that thing that people with undiagnosed chronic symptoms might be lucky enough to do: found some sort of successful coping mechanism. For me, it means I've accidentally found myself in a job where getting up in the middle of a meeting and walking around is totally fine, because I try to work places where there are whiteboards everywhere and I get paid to stand up, after listening to people, and draw whatever it is we've just been talking about on the whiteboard.
This isn't always a good thing. Turns out that if you keep getting up and going to the whiteboard, you're interrupting people. You're not letting them solve things for themselves. You are showing signs of symptoms 11 (impatience, low tolerance for frustration), 12 (impulsive behavior), 5 (tendancy to say what comes to mind without consideration of timing or appropriateness). Honestly, it's only been in the last 18 months or so that I've realized I need to do a better job of not jumping up and scrawling on the whiteboard as if we're a room full of consultants playing Pictionary.
(I am terrified, now, of seeing a comedy sketch full of management consultants playing Pictionary).
I've also spoken with my mental health team about that fifth symptom, if only because \"being on Twitter\" is clearly not a great drug for those with ADHD. Oh look, here's a medium that literally rewards me for blurting out whatever comes into my mind without due consideration.
Anyway. It's been about half an hour and I've written about eleven hundred words and it wouldn't be a piece of writing about ADHD if it didn't just sort of trail... off.
This has been an extra bit on Friday, 1 November 2019.
I hope you're all good now that autumn has set in on this side of the planet, I usher all kinds of loving kindness toward you all and hope you have a good weekend.
Best,
Dan
","body_text":"0.0 Sitrep\nIt’s Friday, November 1 2019.\nI've been travelling this week and if there were ever anything that would go into some sort of \"I'm too old for this shit\" list, as if I were on the verge of retirement and had to team up with some young, energy-filled zoomer, it would include \"flying across three time zones to do two days' worth of meetings and then flying back home and going straight back to work.\" And if you were to say OK BOOMER to me in response to this moaning, then I would just sigh.\n1.0 An extra thing\n1.1 The first bit\nThis travelling week was an experiment: I ditched the thin, keyboard-challenged 15in MacBook Pro with the never-touch-it-apart-from-changing-the-volume bar and instead took on of the new big iPads Pro (SORRY) along with a pencil and a Logitech Slim Folio keyboard. Jeez, even typing this makes me feel like Jerry Pournelle writin a Chaos Manor column at the end of BYTE magazine, which I suppose means I'm simultaneously fulfilling a childhood dream and being insufferable. Because I really want to say: RECOMMENDED, even though the damn thing probably cost over a thousand dollars all in, and that was even after hacking my way through selling the old iPad Pro, finding an Apple Refurbished model of the kind I wanted and so on.\nAnyway! It turns out that I could do pretty much everything I needed to do on the trip -- which included put together a whole set of Google Slides... slides, mess around in Google Sheets (to the extent that I even needed to mess around with running some Sheets Queries and getting really annoyed about having to learn SQL syntax All. Over. Again.\nI could type on the thing, I could write on the thing, I had the same USB-C hub with me that I'd normally use with the laptop and, like I said, everything worked, just... a bit more slowly.\nI think the new iPad OS makes a big difference: I'm finally comfortable with whatever kind of multitasking Slideover is and don't make any frustrating mistakes where my finger glides over the wrong thing and the wrong window appears, or the window or I app I wanted suddenly disappears or takes over half the screen. I managed to write a whole Snow Crash chapter recap episode with the Kindle app open in one third of the screen, which felt like it worked pretty well.\nThis bit is pretty much turning into a typing bit: I've been out of the co-working space and travellin or whatever for so long that I haven't managed to spend any time on the Old Mac (OH MY GOD THIS IS TOTALLY A JERRY POURNELLE COLUMN), which is what I'm writing this episode on, right now. A weekend or so ago, I spent about 45 minutes mucking about and replacing the original hard drive with a SCSI2SD thing, a piece of homebrew electronics that fakes an OG SCSI interface to an SD card. So this little Macinotsh LC III that used to have a 160GB hard drive now has a 2GB boot partition on on virtual drive, and another virtual drive with another two 2GB partitions. I'm surprised the machine hasn't completely freaked out, to be honest. All of that's to say that this is being aggressively typed on an old Apple keyboard into Microsoft Word 5.1a, which I'm reliably informed is The Best Word Ever, running on System 7.5.5. I'm pretty sure if I look at this machine wrong while it's running more than one application it will fall over, but I don't care, because I finally own a Proper Old Mac.\nWriting this on the Proper Old Mac means saving it as a plain text file on the fake hard drive, using Fetch 3.0.3 to FTP it over to the FTP server running on my MacBook Pro and then pasting it into a Safari window over here. Because, you know, I like to make things easy.\n1.2 The fast brain and the slow hands\nA long, long time ago (fine: March 2014) Robin Sloan challenged me to write three episodes that had nothing to do with technology or the culture/economy thereof and although it was frankly terrifying, I managed to take him up on his challenge. Part of the reason for this is because I really respect and admire Robin as a writer (his Annabel Scheme has made it into the very small group of books that just makes me feel warm inside and I'd treat as a comfort book), so if someone like that asks me to do something which implies that I might be a good writer, well, I figured I owed it to myself to give it a shot.\nI bring this up because one of the pieces I wrote ended up being something I talked to my therapist about and pretty much directly led to a diagnosis of adult ADHD. \"\nA story about a brain and its hands\n\" was a stream of conciousness typing of my interior experience and a little bit of What Is It Like To Be A Dan, and an example of the kind of personal writing I stubbornly hang on to for this newsletter. All the other newsletters, especially all the cool ones, feel sharp in some way to me, they are a certain thing and they are not, for example, a horrendous mish-mash of personal introspection and thought about, well, technology and the culture/economy thereof.\nAnyway: I had the chance to talk with someon recently and we got onto the subject of ADHD and I'd sort of started feeling that I didn't really have ADHD lately. There's a thing where the symptoms of ADHD are pretty much exactly the same as what you might have if you have some sort of complex PTSD (itself a difficult to deal with term, because I imagine if you tell someone they have PTSD and they haven't suffered some sort of horrific, obvious physical trauma, then you've got... PTSD imposter syndrom?). This trauma presents itself as extreme avoidance: leaving things to the last minute, being terrified that you're going to get negative feedback or that whatever you do just isn't going to be good enough. So I'd started getting myself comfortable with the idea that hey, maybe I don't have ADHD, maybe I'm just terrified of negative feedback and have a deficient sense of self wherein I'm convinced people are just going to yell at me the whole time.\nTurns out I bumped into a Twitter thread that covered some of the symptoms and diagnostic criteria of adult ADHD and I went down the entire goddamn list, photographed from the book Driven to Distraction, by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. This is a list of twenty suggested symptoms that I had not looked at in a good five or so years, I think, and I just about burst into tears after checking off the fifth one.\nThere is a joke I have with my psychiatrist, whom I see roughly every month or so. Every time I visit them, we do a baseline and check how my symptoms are doing. One of the questions tracking my ADHD symptoms is something like: \"Are you restless? Do you need to be moving around? Is it hard for you to stay sitting down? Do you find yourself leaving a table frequently?\" Presumably this is a problematic symptom: for children who aren't receiving any accommodations, it can be a horrible experience at school where you're forced into regimented learning. I joke with my psychiatrist about this, though, because my answer is always: \"Yes, but.\" The reason why is I've done that thing that people with undiagnosed chronic symptoms might be lucky enough to do: found some sort of successful coping mechanism. For me, it means I've accidentally found myself in a job where getting up in the middle of a meeting and walking around is totally fine, because I try to work places where there are whiteboards everywhere and I get paid to stand up, after listening to people, and draw whatever it is we've just been talking about on the whiteboard.\nThis isn't always a good thing. Turns out that if you keep getting up and going to the whiteboard, you're interrupting people. You're not letting them solve things for themselves. You are showing signs of symptoms 11 (impatience, low tolerance for frustration), 12 (impulsive behavior), 5 (tendancy to say what comes to mind without consideration of timing or appropriateness). Honestly, it's only been in the last 18 months or so that I've realized I need to do a better job of not jumping up and scrawling on the whiteboard as if we're a room full of consultants playing Pictionary.\n(I am terrified, now, of seeing a comedy sketch full of management consultants playing Pictionary).\nI've also spoken with my mental health team about that fifth symptom, if only because \"being on Twitter\" is clearly not a great drug for those with ADHD. Oh look, here's a medium that literally rewards me for blurting out whatever comes into my mind without due consideration.\nAnyway. It's been about half an hour and I've written about eleven hundred words and it wouldn't be a piece of writing about ADHD if it didn't just sort of trail... off.\nThis has been an extra bit on Friday, 1 November 2019.\nI hope you're all good now that autumn has set in on this side of the planet, I usher all kinds of loving kindness toward you all and hope you have a good weekend.\nBest,\nDan","raw_format":"html","source":"import","summary":"This issue weaves together reflections on technology, writing, and self-understanding prompted by a grueling work trip. The author experiments with iPad Pro as a laptop replacement and finds it surprisingly capable for complex tasks, while also becoming nostalgic about setting up an old Macintosh LC III with vintage components—these tangents reveal someone perpetually tinkering with tools and drawn to writing about the experience itself. Running through it all is a deeper thread about ADHD and perfectionism, where the author reconsiders whether their lifelong struggles with procrastination and fear of criticism stem from attention deficit or trauma-related avoidance, ultimately using personal essay as a way to work through these questions.","reading_minutes":8,"links":[{"url":"https://danhon.substack.com/p/episode-thirty-seven-challenge-response","normalized_url":"https://danhon.substack.com/p/episode-thirty-seven-challenge-response","domain":"substack.com","anchor_text":"A story about a brain and its hands","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"}],"sections":[{"id":1626,"ord":0,"number":"0.0","heading":"Sitrep","level":1,"word_count":96},{"id":1627,"ord":1,"number":"1.1","heading":"The first bit","level":2,"word_count":566},{"id":1628,"ord":2,"number":"1.2","heading":"The fast brain and the slow hands","level":2,"word_count":937}]}