Archives for 2019

Along with writing thoughts in a personal, private, solitary manner, I speak likewise alone (i.e., yes—I talk to myself). I use a voice recorder to capture these sessions of self-conversation as a complementary practice to pen & paper journaling—the convention is not far out of left field. I rarely listen back to the recordings, but knowing that I’m being recorded wrenches higher levels of coherence out of me. I find self-talk helpful for working through whatever I’m stuck on. Most of life is an attempt to not become too fixated on any specific agenda and to place oneself in a continual state of adaptation, moving forward. Ideally we’d all have therapists, or be capable of telling anyone anything at any time without fear of annihilation, but self-guided voice recording is what’s doable for me, and I’m more honest speaking (and writing) alone than in the presence of another person.

I started recording with what I already had available—the Voice Memos app on my iPhone—rather than acquire anything new to begin. Voice Memos is a good app. Start there if you’re interested in voice recorder therapy. It’s free, and you already own it.¹ Initiating a recording with Voice Memos is quick, playback is first-rate, and the sound quality is beyond adequate for this purpose. Plus, talking through a phone is second nature for most people. There’s a sense of intimacy speaking this way, with a familiar voice box to held your head. Which is weird. But it is important to feel comfortable enough to divulge the thoughts you’re otherwise not articulating in regular conversation.

That said, I prefer to not interact with my phone when possible (stage right: goofy quasi-Luddite), so after using Voice Memos for two months and liking it (the app, the functionality it provides) but not liking grasping for my phone even more than usual, I bought a dedicated voice recorder.

It’s okay. It’s tiny (only slightly larger than a small pack of gum), so it’s easy to carry around, which is great. If I’m going for a walk or drive, I’m likely to stick it in my pocket or toss it in my bag. The form factor is significant (because if it’s bulky, it’s staying home, and I won’t use it) and the device’s most redeeming factor. Playback is painful without the touch screen which is afforded to Voice Memos, and the sound quality is weak, too. However, I’m willing to put up with those shortcomings. The big problem with this voice recorder is that it’s slow to power on after it’s been off for a while (an hour or more). It takes ~thirteen seconds to start up cold. That’s an eternity. The delay is enough to make me not want to use it. The irony: I want to want to use this thing. It should be more responsive for how narrow a device it is. It doesn’t do all that much, so what it does, it should do well. Developing positive habits is difficult—I’m trying here!—and the start time is fatally preclusive.

What I’ve done to enhance it: I tweaked the factory settings so that the voice recorder never turns off. This doesn’t mean that it’s always recording; instead, it’s put into a pseudo-standby mode—with screen off, software on—after a short period, rather than shut off entirely. None of these specifics matter much; the takeaway is that it should be fast, nearing on effortless, and automatic (like clockwork) to get yourself doing whatever it is you’d like to establish as habit. The voice recorder could be a pen and paper or library book; it’s all the same.

To make this specific voice recorder (the Sony UX560) useable:

• Settings > Common Settings > Sleep Timer > OFF
• Settings > Common Settings > Auto Power Off > OFF

There are other settings you may want to configure, but those are the critical ones. This config allows you at all times to begin recording in ~three seconds, which is a lot faster than intermittently waiting thirteen. The battery lasts for days, but I recommend habitually charging the recorder when not in use, like overnight. (A long charging cable can help.) I also recommend equipping it with a large memory card (I went for 128GB), so space is seldom an issue.

Professional dictation machines (which are what doctors and lawyers use, and are slightly different than generic voice recorders) are likely more appropriate for what I’m trying to achieve; quickly recording and listening to myself. They are also way more expensive. (I figured a $70 voice recorder was worth an initial trial over a $500+ professional device because I was unsure if this habit would last. I foresee diminishing returns beyond my entry-level recorder, which is objectively worse than Voice Memos in several ways, though I prefer having the dedicated device.)

¹ I’m presuming that all readers have iPhones. Whatever you have, use it.

My grandfather, Anthony J Capriola, Sr., is reverently and mystically referred to as “the Old Man” by those who continue to tell tales of his fiery heyday. He fought in “the War,” was captured the by Germans and held prisoner for a year/eternity, returned to civilian life (mostly but not entirely normal; some screws loose), raised four boys with his wife (my grandmother) Myrtle (who on rare occasion threatened to “stab him with no remorse” [but she never did; she was loath to swat a fly]), yelled only on Sundays (the one day of the week he didn’t work as a stone mason), built his own house (and all of his kids’ houses), was the smartest of eight Capriola/Caprioli/Capriolo/however-you-spell-it children (according to his sister Marie), survived a heart attack + open-heart surgery + 20 years of diabetes + 53 years of second-hand smoke, and defiantly, improbably lived to see six grandchildren (who called him not “the Old Man” reverently but “Pop-Pop” affectionately) before passing away in 2005 from mesothelioma caused by exposure to asbestos while working construction jobs before regulations forbid that kind of peril (and received no cash settlement, though his medical expenses were at least always paid for by the VA). He was a tough SOB. He worked through it all. He couldn’t sit still. He was known to help everybody and anybody and he never really retired, though he did inadvertently fall asleep midday more frequently while sitting on the couch watching afternoon baseball or lazing on the hammock as he got older. He did what he could and he deserves to be remembered. This is a monument for my dear grandfather.

Interview: About World War II

Interview conducted on May 2, 1999 by Adam Capriola (his grandson) for a fifth grade class project.

Video

Transcript

[In Anthony’s living room, Anthony (aka Pop-Pop) is seated to the left in a recliner. Adam (Anthony’s grandson) is seated to the right in a wooden rocking chair. James the Butler stands idly, impassively, stoically in the background.]

Adam: [indecipherable] My name is Adam Capriola, and I will be interviewing my Pop-Pop, Anthony Capriola, who was a veteran of World War II. Thank you Pop-Pop for agreeing to do this interview…
Pop-Pop: You’re welcome.

A: …today on May 2, 1999. Let’s get started by asking: What branch of the military were you in?
P: I enlisted in the Army Air Force, and we were sent to basic training in Florida—St. Petersburg, Florida—and after about six weeks, I guess, of Basic Training, we were sent—put on railroad cars—and sent to Scofield, Illinois where I attended radio school for, I guess, about, oh, I don’t know how many weeks, it was quite a, about three months of schooling where I learned Morse code—dot dash, you know, they don’t use that anymore—and then after that I was assigned to a bomber crew in, up in Oregon. But before we did that, we had to go to gunnery school, to learn to school the .50 calibers. Then we were assigned to a crew, then we flew six hours every day, right around the clock—six off, six on—training, and we went to different gunnery ranges and fired so much ammunition. Then we had high-altitude training, too. And then by that time, I guess it was our turn to go overseas, so I was in B-17s, Flying Fortresses, and we started out to go to England. We flew up to Newfoundland, Iceland, and then finally arrived England, where we were assigned to a crew there. We were assigned to a Group, the 452nd Bomb Group, and I was 731st Squadron, which consisted, the Group consisted of 60 planes, and it has twelve planes in each squadron. We trained for a while up there and got ready. I guess you want to know where I went from there. What was your next question, Adam?

A: Why did you decide to join?
P: I decided to join because the country was at war and I guess I figured it was my duty to serve the country and protect our families at home because of Hitler and [indiscernible] taking all these countries in Europe, and Japan and all that started war too, so that’s the main reason we went to fight, to make sure they didn’t come over here.

A: How old were you?
P: I was nineteen when I joined up.

A: What year was it?
P: That was in 1942.

A: How did you feel about going to war?
P: I don’t think anybody feels too good about it, but it was something that we had to do, and I guess we figured we had to go to get it over with, and we had no idea how long it would last or what, we had no idea. We had no way of knowing how long it would take.

A: What squadron were you a member of and how many men were in it?
P: The 452nd…731st Squadron, 452nd Bomb Group. And we had 10 men were on each plane. We had a bombardier, navigator, pilot, co-pilot, engineer, I was the radio operator and gunner, and then we had waist gunner, two waist gunners, tail gunner, and one that flew in the ball turret was a gunner.

A: What type of plane did you fly?
P: That was the B-17, Flying Fortress.

A: Do you remember your first mission and how did you feel?
P: The first mission was, I didn’t think it would be that bad, because we seen the guys going out and a lot of them coming back. We figured, you know, it wouldn’t be too much. But then when we saw what happened, the fighter planes, you were attacked by fighter planes on every mission. And then you were also attacked with the flack, that’s the artillery that’s shot up and explodes in the air, and you would just go right through it. You wouldn’t change your direction, you just kept going straight through it because you couldn’t afford a full round. You only had so much gas to get there and get back.

A: How many missions did you fly?
P: I flew eleven missions.

A: What were they for?
P: They were bombing missions, mostly bombing on the cities, like we bombed Frankfurt, Germany, Augsburg. I was on the first mission to Berlin, which was really a bad time of it. And I flew to Poland, and that mission took eleven hours in the air, so quite a while.

A: Can you tell me about the last mission you were shot down?
P: We had bombed Augsburg, Germany, and we were on our way back—we got through everything good, dropped the bombs, turn around to come back—and we were about maybe, oh I guess about five, maybe ten miles from the Channel, we were going back to England to our base, and we thought we saw—the sun was shining up above—and we thought we were supposed to meet a P-51 escort, American escort. But there wasn’t; there was the German fighters. 109s swooped down on us and hit us right before we knew what happened. We had to drop out of formation, engine caught fire, and we had to bail out.

A: Did all your crew survive?
P: No, one of the waist gunners was shot and killed. He must have been killed before we knew he was. We bailed out; we didn’t know until afterward.

A: Where were you captured and where were you taken?
P: I was captured in, right near DF France—it was on the coast. France then, at that time, was still in Germany’s hands—this was before the invasion took place—and we were captured there, and we were sent to Frankfurt that night to get interrogated. And that night, the English come over, the first night we were there, and bombed the camp—blew it right off the map—but we were lucky, we got in the shelters—the air raid centers—and they destroyed the interrogation center there.

A: How were you treated?
P: Well, you know, they didn’t treat you like a relation you know. We were bombing their cities, you know, setting fires. The main problem, I guess, maybe, was we didn’t get much food. The food was very scarce. Then the first camp I went to we were sent to East Prussia, and we were on boxcars for, oh, I guess, two or three weeks, getting there because their transportation was slow. Most of their transportation was for the military, and we were in boxcars.

A: Can you describe the condition of the POW camp?
P: I was in four or five different camps, and every one was different. Some had tents, some had wooden barracks, and the last camp I went in had a big tent that held 500 people, the camp I was liberated in, at the end of the war.

A: What did you do there?
P: Well, there is not much you can do but wait, just sit and wait until the war got over. And we were liberated there by General Patton coming in. I saw General Patton coming in the main gate, he was on the tank, he had all his pistols around him. Boy, what a sight it was. It was something.

A: What did you eat there?
P: What did we eat? Not too much, Adam. It was just water, potato peels, and once in a while they sent us in some bread they used in the African camp band, and they brought it in but it had all kinds of mold on it, and we couldn’t eat it because it was bad. Once in a while the Red Cross parcels come in, but by the time they divided it up, you didn’t get very much. All hard stuff to eat. Nothing too fresh.

A: Where did you sleep?
P: We slept in the different camps. We slept in beds, bunks, top and lower bunks, crowded barracks. And then when we were on the march, the forced march, and the Russians starting to come in and Americans from the other end, they made us march. We marched through the snow. And, oh, it was cold, and no food. Only what we could find in the fields, like beets, sugar beets, and things like that. And we kept marching around in circles. I guess we marched maybe 150 miles. With no food—that was the hard part—because they didn’t have any.

A: Did you or anyone try to escape?
P: There’s guys that tried to escape, but they were shot, going over the wall or going past the warning wire. They were shot, so they kind of discouraged that. Well, they were all digging tunnels all over trying to, you know, it was something to do. Not very many escaped.

A: How long were you a prisoner?
P: Eleven months or twelve. It might have been twelve. I think twelve months, yeah, a year.

A: Were you able to communicate with your family?
P: The only communication we had after we got up to our camps, we got letters once in a while from home. But our messages, they didn’t get through too often. It took a long time because they were busy with the war; it didn’t seem like they had too much time for that sort of thing.

A: Tell me about the day you were freed from prison.
P: That was in, what the heck was it, I can’t think of the name of the town. But that was the day that Patton come in and freed us. The Germans took off. The guards, they all took off and ran across the field and Americans were firing at them and chasing them. So we stayed right there until they got out of the way. They built a bridge to come in, they built a pontoon bridge over this river, and then we started to hear shots being fired, it was American troops coming in then, we were very happy then that we were going to get out.

A: How did you get back home?
P: I guess probably by the time we got organized and we went to France, a camp in France, and then I saw Eisenhower there, walked right past him, it was a good feeling too to see somebody with a lot of authority, a real important man. He said he’d get us home quick, and he did. I guess in maybe about a couple of weeks we were home.

A: Did you get a medal?
P: I got some; I got the Air Medal and [oak] leaf cluster—things like that—but I don’t particularly worry about the medals too much. I just wanted to get back to civilian life. [It was] pretty tough going. It’s not easy [fighting in a war].

A: Do you have any favorite memories?
P: I might have told you before, the day that we got liberated—when we were free, when we got out of the camps. And also when I got home. They were my two, the best things that could happen to you. You miss your home a lot.

A: Thank you for your interview.
P: Okay, Adam. Thank you.

[Interview ends. Adam is now alone, outdoors. Birds chirp.]

A: This is my Pop-Pop’s license plate. It says that he was a prisoner of war.

[Camera zooms in on Pennsylvania license plate, POW-P45, on brown Jeep pickup.]

Artwork

Again, picking up in the vicinity of where I left off: I own a GoRuck GR1 (21L, black). I bought it in 2014, just as it was beginning to garner the internet’s ubiquitous cult of approval as Greatest Backpack of All Time (GBOAT). I can’t tell you if it’s the best backpack ever. It’s the only notable backpack I’ve owned aside from an L.L.Bean monogrammed Deluxe Book Pack which lasted me from middle school through college. I haven’t touched a TOM BIHN or any others in the $200+ price range. I bought the GR1 and moved on from the domain. But, I will say: The GR1 seems fine to me. It doesn’t get in my way; it holds what I want, the pockets are convenient, the zippers are smooth, and it’s comfortable to wear. (I should note that I removed the supportive plastic frame sheet; I prefer it without, though I tend to carry rather little around.)

I use the bag mostly for transporting my laptop and whatever else (notepads, a water bottle, candy, snacks) when I walk a half mile to and from my local library. To get there, I must venture on roads without crosswalks or sidewalks. Which is perilous, because I am certain I will be run over one day. (I had a very near miss in 2014 when cycling down a hill [Google Street View if you want to recreate the scene, head north] and a driver rolled through at a stop sign to make a left turn at an upcoming T-junction [I was on the major roadway; I had no stop and absolute right of way]. I’m having a slo-mo PTSD-type moment thinking about it. The car was a dark silver slash gunmetal Land Rover, and the driver was a well-to-do, immaculately-coiffed professional on his cell phone wearing mirrored sunglasses. It may as well have been Death himself. I yelled a yell for the ages¹ while clamping my caliper brakes with bone-white knuckles. My back wheel began to fishtail in variable road gravel. I was within feet of colliding head-on with Death, who nonchalantly puttered off, oblivious of one incoming cyclist, (business as usual),² and also within inches of skidding out into an indeterminable trail of biomatter. I steadied the rear wheel, but it—was—close. Ever since then, I’ve been understandably OCD about making sure I’m obnoxiously visible when I’m on the road, by foot or by bike.)

Because I often carry my bag on the library walk, I figured the most sensible approach to improving my visibility in this situation would be to affix a beacon semi-permanently onto my bag. Idea #1 was to attach a strobe to the outer webbing, because I already had a bike taillight that was compatible, but a light requires charging, and turning on, and turning off, etc. It would be fussy. I need a passive system. I want to be visible without thinking about it. Then (Idea #2) I learned that GoRuck sells reflective velcro bands (which, ProTip:, can be bought elsewhere for less). These bands are probably adequate for most people, but they only provide so-so visibility. Multiple pairs might do better; I only bought a single pair and wasn’t impressed. Remember: I’m neurotic about this, being seen; I believe the road will be my end. Idea #3 was to tie neon, reflective paracord to the webbing, since this in theory should be similar to but allow for more flexibility and better coverage than the bands. I could apply as much as I’d want, where I’d want. In practice, the cord was bulky, only mildly reflective, and couldn’t be secured firmly onto the webbing.

Finally, I discovered two glorious materials:

1. Pro-Gaff tape, which is great for daytime visibility, and
2. SOLAS tape, which is great for nighttime visibility.

Both tapes are thin, durable, lightweight, and flexible, and can be cut to shape. They’re (near) perfect for this application.

Anyway, as alluded to, sorry to bore you, (drumroll, please), this is my hi-vis GR1:

The SOLAS tape is applied directly onto the webbing. It is incredibly sticky. You could attach the SOLAS to the fabric instead of the webbing, in a different pattern, if you wanted. The Pro-Gaff tape is wrapped around the webbing. It doesn’t stick directly to the webbing or fabric, but it does stick tightly to its own adhesive.

I think the bag looks hideous, but I have received compliments from middle-aged women about it and I haven’t been run over yet.

¹“FUCKKKKKK”
²To be fair, I did not use a headlight then, which may have been able to catch this driver’s eye. (I only used a taillight.) I bought a headlight immediately afterward.

I left off touching on digital bookmarks. I read books. Actual, physical books. Not the digital ones—the old technology. I am tempted by e-readers, though, starry-eyed with notion that they’ll get me reading more—because they are novel, and somehow, someway. This is misguided bunkum, I’m aware, so I’m reluctant to adopt, but: Book-reading is a habit I’m still trying to further ingrain. (Aren’t we all?) And I do need strategies for this century. I would so rather grab my phone, for example, given the vacuumed choice, than a book¹. It’s an unfair contest. This proclivity results partially because I can use my phone with one hand, whereas a book necessitates two.² I’m all-in reading a book. Phones, because of their form factor (small!), feign as if they lend to the art of multitasking, though I don’t manage to do anything besides be completely absorbed by my phone, while I’m on my phone, all that well. I also tend to think, in terms of commitment, of books as being fussy about time and focus, like I can’t casually flip open a book for two minutes and get anything out of it. The obverse of this is that phones are immediately gratifying, and they take no effort to operate. I can glance at my phone and feel strong emotion.

Anyway: Consequently, I have to skew the odds to get myself to read. The phone is one distraction. There are others, and there’s not all that much I’ve found can be done to sway the situation besides impose temporal and spatial constraints. My strats:

1. Borrow from a library (rather than own books). Due dates are strong motivators. (N.B., This is a temporal constraint.) (Also note my deliberate use “a book” and “my phone”—possessive indicators—above.)
2. Place books in sight, in the way, within reach. (N.B., This is a spatial [and visual] constraint.)

That’s basically it.³ And it’s chiefly the due date that gets me reading when I slack. However, when I do open a book, what took me a couple of years to realize is: I often forget where I left off, especially if it was in the middle of a chapter, and this causes your writer momentary panic and Extreme Visceral Consternation to have to regain his bearings. Shortness of breath, heart palpitations, sweaty palms—the works.⁴ The thought of rereading passages—and conjuring déjà vu—is enough to dissuade me (subconsciously) from opening a book and, less obviously, from reading short of a chapter at once (i.e., casually reading in spurts). So, this had (past tense now) been a constant obstacle that precluded me from reading: fear of losing my place. And this phenomenon occurred despite using a bookmark to denote where I’d left off.

I suppose now is the time to divulge my bookmarking history and habits:

My bookmarks are scraps of paper. I enjoyed doing origami as a kid, and a relic of that is that I still find myself folding bits of paper, more often than the average person, probably, so anyway: I was wont to fold paper into rectangles, which I stuck out from the tops of books. All store-bought and school-provided bookmarks I had when I was younger functioned this way—they jutted out and sometimes had a ribbon or tassel on the end. The reason for the bookmark protruding is so that the reader can readily gauge (or flaunt) their progress, I guess. I don’t know—I never thought about why I placed my bookmarks that way (I only mimicked what I saw others doing), and after giving it a moment’s thought, I realized this mannerism is rather nonsensical. So I reassessed the notion of bookmarking, and came up with a more precise, protrusionless method of doing it.

I want to tell, immediately, by looking at the position of my bookmark

1. which page (left or right), and
2. which line

I left off on. This is able to relay that:

Placing the tape in a corner affords four horizontal orientations for the bookmark. This is my key for the tape’s positioning, in relationship to the spine:

1. Inside: right page
2. Outside: left page
3. Facing up: above line
4. Facing down: below line

I now open books knowing exactly where I left off, and I am more apt to read for a minute or two (in short sessions, in spurts).

Make Your Own

Step 1: Fold and Tear/Cut Paper to Size

ProTip: I use a Teflon paper folder to get crisp creases.

Step 2: Tape

I like Pro-Gaff tape. It’s durable, and the neon orange is grossly lurid, which makes the bookmark’s orientation easy to distinguish (plus the bookmark itself difficult to misplace).

¹Or engage in anything else remotely productive, for that matter. The phone trumps all in a bubble.
²I will concede that it’s sometimes possible to hold a book with one hand, but often I need two. Page turns always require a second hand.
³Good lightning, a comfortable chair, and quiet help, of course, but none of those drive causality. I am as likely to sit in a cozy position and doze off.
⁴EVC is a verified medical condition. Look it up.

I want to forget—selectively. That’s why I stick with Google Chrome, even though Safari outclasses it in almost every way. Safari is zippy and mindful of system resources; it doesn’t slurp battery, or ever kick on a laptop’s fan. It’s prompt and polite. I think I’d call it courteous. Even Safari’s dev tools are probably objectively better than Chrome’s at this point.

However, I prefer to surf the web like an amnesiac—like someone who continually forgets, stumbling out of cyberspace, crumpled cig still lightly smoldering, figure mussed, and past erased. And for this reason, my go-to is Chrome. (It can be customized more in this regard than Safari.)

I’m terrified of tracking and predictive services. They ingrain what should be arbitrary, evanescent behaviors. A spontaneous search shouldn’t become an online identity, but, in a self-fulfilling way, it can. To combat this, I only want my web browser to know so much about me at once. When it’s able to build a profile—really, a magnified Polaroid—and it knows where to navigate before I do, I’m done. Volition is shot. I develop browsing patterns that become impossible to break. This was me after predictive features became commonplace in the late 00s. I almost never cleared my history (does anybody?), thus every letter I typed in my location bar corresponded with a website I visited too often. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t change. Web browsing like this is a Groundhog Day-like ad nauseam repeat experience, except nobody ever figures out that they’re a disgruntled news reporter, they don’t fall in love or even bonk a former classmate, and they become generally worse human beings the longer they’ve trod around.

So: I now start each session with a clean slate: No history. No bookmarks. No hocus-pocus predictive services. Drop me into faraway white-sanded Sahara, queue up my magic carpet, and allow me to fly.

Browser Config #1: Cryogenic Chrome

What This Does

This setup preserves your identity, but wipes your history after each browsing session. The author’s most common use case: I’ve visited a bunch of webpages I regret having visited, and these pages recur as suggestions whenever I type in the location bar; Command-Q Chrome and—zap—I start over.

To Enable

1. Install, Configure: Auto History Wipe

Install from the Chrome Web Store then configure options to taste. My configuration:

• Each time Chrome starts:
  • Check: Clear Browsing History
  • Check: Clear Download History
  • Uncheck: Clear Cookies
  • Check: Clear Website Data
  • Check: Clear Cache
  • Uncheck: Clear Saved Passwords
  • Check: Clear Form Autofill Data
• When you exit Chrome:
  • Uncheck: Clear Local Data

Again, I’m trying to keep myself recognized across websites, so that when I choose to navigate anywhere, I’m able to access whatever it is I want with minimal friction. (N.B., cookies are what preserve logins.)

2. Install: Empty New Tab Page

Install from the Chrome Web Store (no configuring necessary).

Without this add-on, the New Tab page will display Google services and your most visited websites (and thus ingrain tendencies). I prefer a blank screen.

3. Configure: Chrome Settings

Open Chrome’s preferences (from the menu bar or Command-,) and configure the following:

• On startup
  • Select: Open the New Tab page
• Advanced: Privacy and security
  • Deactivate: Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar

“Open the New Tab page” is selected by default; you may not need to change this setting. Prediction services will be activated by default. Deactivate this setting.

4. Delete: Bookmarks

Open Chrome’s bookmarks manager (from the menu bar or Option-Command-B), export (if you’d like), and delete everything.

If you keep bookmarks, Chrome will populate them in the location bar (Command-L) as you type (despite decerebrating prediction services). I instead throw URLs I may later reference into text files; Simplenote, nvALT, and Notes.app are all adequate proxies for managing bookmarks.

Browser Config #2: Always Private Safari

What This Does

This setup turns Safari into a burner browser. It saves almost nothing; back and forward navigation work, but no accessible history is maintained, and cookies don’t even persist from tab to tab, let alone from session to session. This configuration is conducive for not lingering online too long.

To Enable

1. Configure: Safari Settings

Open Safari’s preferences (from the menu bar or Command-,) and configure the following tabs/settings:

• General
  • Safari opens with: A new private window
  • New windows open with: Empty Page
  • New tabs open with: Empty Page
• Search
  • Uncheck: Include search engine suggestions

2. Delete: Bookmarks

And, again, keep no bookmarks, otherwise they’ll appear as suggestions in the location bar too. (Access Safari’s bookmark manager from the menu bar or by Option-Command-B.)

I should note: Safari does have an analog to Chrome’s Auto History Wipe—Safari Cleaner—but it hasn’t been updated in years. Steer clear.

If, after a week, I’m already over my latest AdamCap.com redesign, does that count as progress? (Too soon? Not soon enough?)

I’ve launched redesigns in the past (to be enumerated below), and for each I’ve been privately optimistic that the “new wheels” would spurn creativity and drive and that I’d finally start consistently blogging for once, which I never have in the past, starting then, there, on launch. …Now. Any time. Soon. —I always feel the same deep-down-I-know-it-is-hollow optimism—the progression which follows is similar to that which ensues when you splurge on a product or service, thinking it will help engrain some positive habit or end, because with X in hand or at your disposal, “What you want will be so much easier to attain,” and for exactly one week or month, you are motivated, and it is easier to get yourself doing it, whatever it is—reading, losing weight, drinking water, writing—then the shiny new toy loses novelty, you forget about it, or get busy, and all that momentum abruptly decrescendos into a junk drawer and is eventually regifted to your indifferent (but courteous) “Yeah-OK-I’ll-Take-It” sibling or mom or the trash can.

In the case of my web redesigns, what I splurge is time. I put over a month of full-time work into this recent redesign. That is about how long it takes to make a good website. I did not make money during this time (working rate: $0/hour for approx. 197.5 hours from Dec–Jan), and not making money for that long may as well count as splurging money. I justify this cost because I figure during the process I will improve at web development, kick-start a business (or some kind of financial opportunity for myself), and make the money back later. But that is no shot fish in a barrel. And the real reason I ever redesign my blog is because I think if I have it configured “right,” that I’ll start writing more.

I’ve yet to reach “right.” It doesn’t exist. Writing is the hard part of this endeavor for me. I can code and manage a web property with some celerity. But producing content has always been slow, and tweaking stylesheets doesn’t make words flow any faster or more consistently. I’ve needed to write first, design later. The logical progression would be to make do until the habit is firmly established, then clear hindrances by obtaining resources. I’m acting backwards, again, because I am stubborn, but I did plan this redesign more thoughtfully than past ones (truly! [I swear! (really!)] ) which were inspired with mostly aesthetic (and not so many practical) ends in mind.

I’m going to describe a few of the atypical design elements in play for AC2019. (Which, really, I should not need to do, if the design is actually intuitive and good, but this process will (1) help me, at least, better understand what I was going for and (2) make blatant issues blatant, allowing me to address them.)

Design Elements

Three-Column Home Header

This is a convoluted, experimental, I-won’t-blame-you-if-you-call-it-dubious approach to a header that’s turned out to be…okay? (What?) To elucidate, column by column:

• Column 1: Navigation makes residence in C1, which, really, is an impractical position for navigation, because this situates it on the left side of the viewport, which may as well be mile away from the habitual cursor turf of a right-handed user. (Meaning: It’s a hassle to drag your mouse over there and give the menu use.) But I wanted to employ the underlined ADAM CAP “logo” (I use this term loosely) in the same position throughout the redesign (this is just the home header, remember; all other pages look different), and vertical nav makes efficient use the horizontal space afforded here. I get to include my beloved pixelated A icon in C1, too.
• Column 2: I desperately want to apprise users of new content, without making them scroll far (or at all), while providing them the ability to reference past content almost as effortlessly, and this is my solution. These three widgets show at-a-glance what’s new and allow old stuff to be seen/accessed by scrolling—no clicks necessary to become informed. This is one of the less intuitive aspects of the design. It’s rare to see overflow-y: scroll; elements (though overflow-x: scroll; is becoming commonplace with mobile devices having narrow screens). Even if the average user never discovers the scrollbars, the elements still serve their most crucial purpose (“Here lies activity!”).
• Column 3: I am not at the point yet where I have steady traffic, so it seems critical inform my few passersby whose lawn they’ve tromped on. My face has to be seen (blogs without a face are instantly forgettable [no sideways stares either; “Eye contact!”]) and I feel it’s wise to further cement myself with a goofy, succinct tagline. I’d prefer to include my newsletter signup than the current flat, insipid “hire me” pitch here (but I don’t have the newsletter’s raison d’être even remotely defined yet, and I do need $). This is the designated “call to action” spot, essentially. I’ll figure it out eventually.

This header functions better than anticipated, though it lacks focus. I was worried, in particular, that the C2 overflow-y elements be unusable on mobile, but they’re okay. (If something doesn’t work on mobile, then it doesn’t work at all; mobile users comprise an increasing percentage of the internet’s horde each month, and it’s imprudent not to tailor the web surfing experience to them.) Parts of the home header will inevitably be tweaked, but I’m at least not neurotically stressing out about needing to do so yet. (*grits his fucking teeth*)

Slanted, Canted, Offset, and Askew

This was a theme I incorporated sparingly (once) but prominently (in the header) in my last iteration of AdamCap.com. I brought transform: rotate(); over to SixPrizes for its 2017 redesign, and rotation pervades even more now. I considered myself brilliant and archetypal for incorporating canted elements then, but this appears to be a common design trend in 2019. I keep seeing it everywhere. Maybe it’s always been a trend and I’m just now realizing it. Regardless: Everyone else who’s canting their divs: Please stop. Give me this one opportunity to stick out and appear different and innovative for once. I mean it. (Thanks!)

I’ve not offset the positions of elements much in the past, but I made a deliberate effort to do so this time around. This technique helps add contrast, which makes individual elements more distinguishable and thus the site more navigable.

Anchors, Matey

I struggle with the decision to show (A) excerpts or (B) full content on archive pages. I prefer—usually—to see a full post if I hit the home page of a blog so that I don’t have to click (and then wait, again, for a page to load) to continue reading. Clicking is a decision, and work, and I don’t want to make decisions or do work. Please, take the wheel. Write well, and draw me in. Decide my fate for me. The less it takes to immerse a reader, the better.

However, when dealing with long-form content, which is what I tend to write, it’s a problem if the user encounters a topic they have zero interest in, and the entry is longer than a single viewport height. Scrolling past can feel like being stuck on a cyber treadmill, and the user will jump ship (leave my site) if they become overly disoriented or entangled. (Mayday! Mayday! Man overboard!) I lose my compass scrolling through the new AdamCap.com home page at times, and I am the sole author here. If anyone should be able to keep their bearings, it’s me. (An inauspicious sign this is, surely.)

My solution to this predicament was to add anchor links (these: ⇠ / ⇢) below post titles so that it’s possible to skip around, post by post, with infinitely higher velocity and precision. This is another unintuitive feature (even more so than the occult overflow-y above; I don’t know how anyone’s going to discover it), but the concept intrigues me and perhaps I’ll come up with a more effective implementation of it later.

Anchor links mesh cooly with my new M.O. because they (anchor links) provide instantaneous feedback. They’re fast. I really like the idea of loading a bunch of content (with a single page load) and letting a user zip through it all, in a deliberate way, and anchor links make that kind of interaction possible.

Sidebar Favs

What I am going for in the sidebar (to the right of posts) is to randomly display items from a curated list of my favorite things (you can buy on Amazon [to support me with scant affiliate commissions…]). What I’ve realized while typing this is that this idea (“favs!”) is boneheaded and unquestionably dubious because, even if I do see success with Amazon’s affiliate program, it places me at the mercy of Amazon. The big AZ. And that relationship has gone sour before. Amazon lowered their payout rates two years ago (in Mar 2017; my earnings dropped by over half the following month), and my Associates account was almost auto-terminated from the program the following year, out of the blue, erroneously. (Customer service resolved the glitch, but the incident certainly perturbed me.) It’s delusional to think I could come anywhere close to earning a stable, living income this way, and that has been my pie-in-the-sky hope here.

Instead, I should be promoting myself. I’m the commodity. And, from looking through past iterations of this website, it seems I’ve gotten away from doing that.

Past Designs

Nov ’09–Jan ’11

AdamCapriola.com (source)

This is the earliest capture of any of my web entities from the Wayback Machine. AdamCapriola.com served to share me (my personality and personal interests), essentially. I had started SixPrizes.com a few months earlier and thought it was important to have an outlet (to come across as a relatable, real person) if I was to make it online. The images are broken, but I was evidently into relaying what I was wearing each day. I evidently had a “Fan Page” as well. Who knew.

There’s not much to say about the design. I used a theme called Atahualpa because it was easy to customize, and I read somewhere that red is attention grabbing, so I made the titles red.

AdamCap.com (source)

AdamCap.com existed alongside AdamCapriola.com and contained content more rhetorical in nature. I think. (I am writing this ten years removed from the endeavor, and almost the entirety of it evades my memory.) The tagline reads “Thoughts on life, success, and human nature.” (Turns pale. [Dies.]) (Please ask Siri to dial 911 or shout for help if your eyes also roll clear into the back of your head and remain lodged there for 10+ seconds.)

Notably, I had a newsletter (no recall of what I spouted about—those archives were lost, tragically) and active comments sections, so I did some things right. But I should emphasize: the internet was different back then; this was a time of possibility for the little guy. The web had not become so big and centralized (and wearied and jaded) yet, and a small website like mine, with almost no substance but gumption, could attract a responsive audience.

Re: the design: The capture’s stylesheet is broken, but AdamCap.com was likely identical to AdamCapriola.com.

Jan ’11–Aug ’11

AdamCapriola.com (source)

I added a third column and switched to excerpts. This looks okay to me; the design is clean, if nothing else. Logo font: Helsinki.

Aug ’11–May ’13

AdamCap.com (AdamCapriola.com Absorbed) (source)

Above is what I have screen-captured in My Documents. Which looks great! It’s distinctive, at least, and exudes character. Opaque box-shadows still see use every now and then, most typically in retro-style designs. The red-bordered post titles are emphatic and I think serve well to draw the eye where it should be.

However, seen here is only a partial header. With the complete header, this design doesn’t look so hot:

The red–white–teal color scheme is a shade away from matching Aquafresh. That’s all I can think of when I look at this. ProTip: Toothpaste should not be evoked through web design. I was going for color contrast, but just no.

I could have done without the first row of the header; my name (Adam Capriola) was already above the fold (in the sidebar), and the recent tweet display (“GETTING GNAR OFF OVERLY-RIPE BANANAS #WASTEDDDDDDDDDDD – 3 DAYS AGO”), which feigned liveliness, was a cop-out for going long stretches without posting new content. (I should have been writing stuff for the blog instead of wasting breath [and brain cells] on social media.)

May ’13–Dec ’13

AdamCap.com (source)

This was a short-lived design that I never completed for unremembered reasons. I launched it half-finished and it stayed that way. (Meow.)

Dec ’13–Feb ’16

AdamCap.com (source)

I’m aghast that I let this design persist so long. It’s minimal to fault. It evinces none of my personality and is completely forgettable. Perhaps it speaks of my mental state through these years. The big feature here was the ability to sort by popular posts, which I doubt anyone did, except for me now and then to tug my own willy about how many views those popular posts had. Moving on…

Feb ’16–Jan ’19

AdamCap.com (source)

AC2016 was designed for 1024px-wide viewports and none others. This screenshots shows the design at native size. With a viewport any wider or narrower, you’d have to zoom to read properly, so most initial impressions of my site were probably poor. It was a total mistake to not address this. (By 2016, even I, the wannabe Luddite who held onto his flip phone forever, owned a mobile device and could appreciate mobile-friendly design.) What happened is that I put 100% of my focus into the desktop design and I was too drained by the end of this process to even take a crack at mobile, so I put it off. And I never got to it. (Truth be told, I was lazy and addicted to video games at the time. Call me feeble.)

However, the combination of Abril Display (for H1), Freight Sans Pro (for H2–H6), and Freight Text Pro (for body) does look sharp. My face and name are unavoidable. And a handful of visitors were so captivated to email me. So there were elements that fell into place effectively.

2019–?

AdamCap.com

I’ve delved into the unique aspects of this design already, but one more thought: Perhaps the biggest fault with the current design is the lack of “me” above the fold on mobile and outside the home page—my physiognomy should pervade. (Remember me!) I’ve tried to remedy this by inserting my headshot into the header, but including it anywhere up there throws balance off. (I’m fixed on maintaining the conspicuity of the ADAM CAP logo / post title area which leads downward into the content.) So I’m leaving my mug out until better inspiration strikes. Otherwise, the 2019 design is responsive and generally more engaging than previous iterations.

Takeaways / Future Plans

Publishing (for me) and reading (for you) have to be easy. That’s the overarching impetus behind AC2019. I’m attempting to construct a platform that tips me over and has me spilling my brains out into shark-infested waters.

However, I am a slow writer. It feels like I’m rollerblading up a steep hill naked every time I try to share anything on here. The sun is in my eyes, and people are watching. It is difficult for me to spill. Which means: The platform I step onto doesn’t matter at this point. Any of the above designs would suffice now. I need to write—wherever, however, to whomever, in whatever. It’s consistency that needs to be built up. I’m hoping that with repetition the writing process will become easier.

I’d envisioned having delineated sections within this redesign for specific content types, some of whose content I’d enter database-style, with optional commentary (i.e., writing), so that it would be simple for me to keep the site active. Fill in a few fields, and bango: new post! Ta-da! Read all about it! In practice, it’s too much, in the obverse sense of my publishing woes. I’ve coded cruft. I generate noise. The result is mechanical and flat. “Cut the chaff,” as my grandmother Myrtle used to say while indexing a Newport. All anyone is trying to do is communicate, and this is a conversation.

I jot notes, physically, on paper, by hand, often, though I produce work predominantly through the abstraction of a computer screen. I’m notably less productive when I don’t scribble—even just a few words or fragmented incoherencies—over the course of a day. I tend to make sense of whatever faster when I scratch into matter, which isn’t quite replicated by way of the ephemeral processes of electronic journaling or noting. The act is akin to catapulting globs of stagnant, fetid goo out of the skull and onto stiff bedrock. “Here we are, thoughts: face to face. I see you, now, and you are demonstrably mine.”

We are cavemen at heart, after all, and it’s impertinent to constrain a spatial being. The keyboard is a straitjacket of sorts; it limits movement. Try to dismount. Try pirouetting away. It’s not easy. The right brain yearns to express at least slightly more than which it can computationally. (Kersplat!) So jot!

Tools of Trade

I choose to jot with pens, gel- and click-style, in particular, because they are effective and low maintenance. But there are many pens one could choose from. Too many, in fact: It’s perilously easy to lose oneself in the multitudinous aisles of online pen retailers (see: “timesuck”). I demoed about twenty pens the past couple of years because firsthand was the only way I could translate the practical scope of these objects in working contexts—and I advise readers to do the same. JetPens’ popular section (under $10) is a logical place to start. (ProTip: Use their filters.)

My formerly gross collection has been pared down to two pedestrian pens, in two categories, selected scrupulously for specific ends:

For Writing Quickly

The Pilot G2 (0.7mm) is my go-to in most circumstances. I write fastest legibly with this pen. Rapidity is mainly all I care about—fast, fast, fast; go and a minute ago. The pen doesn’t yield the most consistent lines, but I find the ink clear to read and the point satisfying to push/pull/yank across a page.

I write quickly with this pen because of how it’s balanced. I’m able to hold the pen in a way, with fulcrum (i.e., grip) distanced from the gel point, that allows minimal effort to write legible characters. The technique is similar to that of “choking down” on a baseball bat to swing with more force but less control. In this case, the ballpoint moves further with each gesture of the hand at the expense of precision.

I also use the 0.5mm G2, but in less instances, like when I’m scribbling notes while reading. Results from this pen tend to be sloppy; thinner points expose deficiencies in handwriting. I don’t particularly enjoy using the 0.5, but it’s the appropriate pen at times.

For Writing Neatly, in Small Spaces

I use a goofy, hybrid setup in these scenarios: I’m partial to the ink from the Uni-ball Signo 307 (Micro Point)—it’s grand!—but I abhor the Signo body. It’s thick and unwieldy, not unlike the jumbo crayons I scrawled with as a kid. And the clicker is a bore, no fun. But the ink!—it makes me want to attempt art. It flows smoothly and is consistently neat. I’m sure I could reproduce The Sleep of Reason… if I tried.

So: I attempted to transplant the Signo ink refill (while donning a surgical mask and scrubs) (“SCALPEL!”) into other pen bodies that I prefer, and found it’s compatible with the Zebra Sarasa Push Clip (any size). I really like the Zebra Clip. Its clip mechanism is novel and I think flat-out better than that of the average pen, whose mechanism is more susceptible to breaking and doesn’t engage with a pocket nearly as well. (I confess: I delight in clipping the Clip; I swoon when a marginally fussy, unthought task suddenly becomes a conscious cinch.)

Furthermore, the Clip is conducive to neat handwriting because there is little distance between the gel tip and where the pen is comfortable to grip in hand. It encourages the user to “choke up.” This gives way to higher precision than the G2, at the expense of speed. (Which makes sense: The faster one writes, the sloppier the handwriting. The Clip, by way of form, slows the hand down.)

Clip ink is okay—0.5mm I find to be best—but Signo ink is more reliable.

The most common use-case for me, for this Franken-pen, is addressing envelopes, which I don’t do all that often, truthfully. It sees sporadic use, now, though I wrote with it more in the past.

Uni-ball Signo 307 (Medium Point) ink is also compatible with the Clip body, but I almost always prefer to write quickly than neatly at 0.7mm size, so I seldom operate this combo.

Hastily, On Paper

When structure seems apposite, I write on cheap, yellow legal pads. Otherwise, I jot on plain, unlined computer paper (lightweight stock, high brightness, e.g., 20lb / 96 bright) to allow my thoughts abandon.

And Where to Buy

I’ve included product links above that point to Amazon. I get a small kickback if you purchase from them, which allows me to continue producing this type of content. But: The Pilot and Uni-ball can be found for the lowest price at Walmart. That’s where I buy them. The Zebra Clip is only available online (and at specialty stores, I assume); JetPens had the best price on the Clip, last I checked.