Reflections

I'm not an oracle, and it's usually easier to solve other people's problems than my own… or at least seem to. Even still, when others ask me for advice, I try to help them consider what they could do to improve the situation. I take this approach even when the advisee is the recipient of someone else's bad behavior. If someone is being mistreated by their boss, for example, I might suggest that they quit, talk to HR, or ask for an internal transfer.

Sometimes, the pushback doesn't take very long. “They're the jerk. Why don't you tell them to be different!?”

Of course, the other person often is the jerk, and I will try to tell that person to be better, if I can. At the same time, bad people—the truly awful, cruel, uncaring people of the world, the people others complain about—they usually don't take advice. They don't care what I have to say. If they were so reasonable, they probably wouldn't be causing this problem in the first place.

To that point, I try to remind the listener, “you're the only person you can control.”

It's not fair, but remembering that may be the only strategy that has any chance of succeeding. Jerks are everywhere, and if our happiness depends on them being better, we're probably not going to be very happy.

None of this is to excuse the importance of listening to others and trying to understand their pain without trying to fix anything. I could always do a better job of that.

If you do want something to change, though, focus on what you can do differently. It's not fair, but it may be the only solution worth attempting, because you're the only person you can control.

#Life #Favorites #Maxims

Limelight by Rush sure has some strange time signatures. I don't think I've ever been good at understanding the bottom number of a time signature, but I can count how many beats seem to be in each measure. Without counting how many measures there are of each time signature, I hear the time signature start at 4, then go to 7, then 6, then 4, then 7, then 6, then 4, then 7, then 3. After that, I can't keep track.

Pretty wacky. I like it!

#Life

Earlier this year, a colleague asked me what “my genre” is. I responded that it must be progressive rock. It's just weird enough to be interesting, just unexpected enough to keep your mind engaged, and just absurd enough to remind you that rules really are sometimes made to be broken.

I've listened to the Pink Floyd catalogue many times over, I've been listening to more King Crimson this year, and I've really been enjoying “Firth of Fifth” recently. I only really listened to Rush a couple of weeks ago, but they tick a lot of my boxes. I love synthesizers!

I have so much more to discover. Something to look forward to!

#Life

WordPress is much more complicated than it was when I last used it. I'm afraid that's not a compliment. There are many, many of preferences, which is a pet peeve of mine, especially when sensible defaults would have sufficed. It really seems like WordPress is trying to be everything for everyone. That's unsurprising given how many people use it as a general-purpose content management system, but I wouldn't recommend using it that way. Drupal is a better CMS, with more power and greater flexibility.

Even still, some features that WordPress provides are nice, like search, the “Related posts” that can appear below blog posts, and the ability to rename tags globally. Search is something I would really like, mainly because it would help me find my own posts. (Using Kagi or Google with my blog's domain as a site: filter also works, but the results aren't as helpful and they lag by a bit.) Related posts and global tag renaming are nice features, but they're not essential. I would probably use them, but their absence is not a deal breaker.

Playing around with WordPress just now has made me even more appreciative of WriteFreely, the platform that powers this blog. WriteFreely is elegant. Yes, it's missing some features I would find useful, like the things mentioned above. It's also true that the internal menu navigation often confuses me, and I wish development were more active. Nevertheless, compared to the behemoth of WordPress, with its endless options, overwhelming editing UI, and slow page loads, WriteFreely is a breath of fresh air. I always admire when a product focuses on the few things that really matter, and WriteFreely does: a simple editing experience, sensible defaults, and a beautiful design, including beautiful typography. I hope WriteFreely continues to be successful.

#Tech

A quick disclaimer: Carl Jung has become popular with some right-wing commentators. Please don't take this blog post as evidence that I have any affinity whatsoever for those commentators. It's sad that so much has become political these days, but I don't believe in guilt by association, and Jung was doing his thing long before anyone had heard of Jordan Peterson.

With that out of the way, I recently stumbled across Jung's five factors of happiness, and I find it to be very interesting. This isn't the first set of guidelines I've come across in my life, the first list of ten rules or eight practices one should follow to find salvation, but I find it to be a bit more modern and understandable than some of those.

His five factors of happiness are:

1. Good physical and mental health
2. Good personal and intimate relationships, such as those of marriage, the family, and friendships
3. The faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature
4. Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work
5. A philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life

I would point out that this list may not be complete. A murderer or spoiled child might check all of these boxes, but would they be happy? I don't think so. Perhaps that's why we need multiple perspectives, after all.

#PersonalDevelopment #Philosophy #Wellbeing

I'm interested in using Debian on my next laptop. The releases are slow, of course, but not much slower than Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) releases. For a few years now, I've been using Ubuntu LTS, anyway. I've found that many non-LTS releases introduce problems on my machine. Besides, these days, it's not hard to install newer desktop applications using Flatpak and newer CLI programs using… I don't know, Homebrew and language-specific package managers?

Debian's commitment to free software would have appealed to me more as a younger person, but these days, I want a laptop that just works, and I do see the value of proprietary software. Apple creates great software, for example, and it very often has higher usability and user experience standards than open-source software does. (Liquid Glass and the iPhone setup process are notable exceptions over at Apple. Signal, WordPress, and GNOME, among others, are notable exceptions in the open-source community. Also, I really hate the way Apple behaves as a company, but I think that's largely a separate issue.) Thankfully, with Debian, it's easy to work around the free software guardrails and install proprietary software. So easy, in fact, that the FSF faults Debian for it.

What's wrong with Ubuntu LTS? Not much. I like it, and my gripes are pretty minor. Ubuntu does have a habit of force-feeding their users unpopular software that was built in-house, however, like Unity, Snap, and lots of other stuff. I would prefer a pure GNOME experience. Plus, I think it would be fun to learn Debian. That's probably the main reason I'm interested in switching.

Maybe some additional thinking will change my mind, but at the moment, I'm interested in giving Debian a shot. I probably don't have enough energy or interest to do it now, though. I'll wait until I buy a new laptop. (I remember installing Arch Linux mid-way through courses at RIT and being unable to use my laptop for one week while I figured out how to properly configure full-disk encryption with LUKS and dm-crypt. Yeah, those days are gone.)

#Technology #Usability #UserExperience

I will make certain my next laptop has an AMD graphics card. NVIDIA graphics cards have caused me so much pain and frustration on Linux. I should have known better than to go with NVIDIA for this laptop, honestly. I don't know what I was thinking. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, had it right years ago.

I've heard that NVIDIA drivers for Linux are improving with the growth of AI, but it's too little too late. Besides, I have no doubt NVIDIA will stop working with the Linux community as soon as the benefits to their company become less obvious.

I want something stable that just works, and that's AMD.

#Tech

Over the last few weeks, I've been migrating my short posts (kind of like Tweets without Twitter) from thoughts to this blog. At the same time, I've been migrating my article-length posts from Medium to this blog. This blog is powered by WriteFreely and hosted by Write.as.

I love thoughts so much, and I’ve praised it constantly. I’m so grateful that it’s gotten me back into writing short little blog posts, something I loved doing as a younger person but somehow lost interest in, maybe because simplicity and fun have taken a back seat in the world of blogging. At the same time, I’m now looking for features that thoughts doesn’t provide, like pagination, dedicated pages for individual posts, email signup, RSS, tags, and more. I still think thoughts is amazing, a beautifully simple blogging platform with an “old internet” feel in the very best way, and for that reason, I still wholeheartedly recommend it. I don’t recommend everyone switch to WriteFreely. It just seems like the better fit for me right now.

Medium, on the other hand, I could do without. They sometimes display giant banners above free blog posts to encourage readers to sign up for Medium, which is really annoying. I'm a paying subscriber to Medium as a reader, actually. I think that should exempt my blog from their advertising, but it doesn't. Also, their recommendation engine is horrific, and it encourages endless clickbait nonsense. I don’t want to support a company that does that, and I don’t want that perverse incentive to change my writing.

WriteFreely isn't perfect. Its Markdown parser can behave strangely, although it's not as unusual as the one used on thoughts. WriteFreely also doesn't provide search functionality, the navigational menus presented to authors are pretty confusing, and development seems very slow at this point, among other things of varying importance. But it's a much better fit for me right now. Even just having a separate page for each post is great. I'm sure that's what readers and search engines expect. By contrast, thoughts shows all posts on one page and uses URL fragments to link to particular posts (e.g., https://thoughts.johnkarahalis.com/#1762540598).

WordPress was another option, of course. I have mixed feelings about it, and part of me thinks it might have been a better choice given the issues mentioned above, most importantly the slow pace of WriteFreely development. WordPress can do everything WriteFreely can do, I think, the usability is a bit better, and it's a very active project. However, it's also big, bulky, and it has a bit of a “serious” feel to it, which I fear would take some of the joy out of writing. For whatever WriteFreely lacks, it's elegant and fun. Perhaps I'll migrate to WordPress some day when the tradeoffs become worthwhile (another migration, hooray!), but for now, I like WriteFreely, and I hope it continues to grow. edit (2025-12-18): Shortly after this blog post was published, I wrote about an experiment with Wordpress and how it made me appreciate WriteFreely even more.

Over the next little while, you'll see posts disappear from those places and re-appear on this blog. I expect I'll be done somewhere around the middle of January, 2026, but time will tell.

#Tech

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

—Unknown

#Quotes

I'm a perfectionist, and not in a good way. It harms me much more than it helps me.

I was trying to come up with a phrase that I might be able to repeat to myself as a reminder that progress beats perfection and that small steps in the right direction really do matter. I came up with this:

Hope for perfect. Aim for great. Celebrate good.

Consider saying this to yourself any time perfectionism gets in the way of your happiness, whether the source of your frustration is your diet or your wedding. Nothing is ever perfect, and I've come to appreciate that any goal taken to the extreme becomes truly neurotic and harmful. Hope for perfect. Aim for great. Celebrate good.

#PersonalDevelopment #Wellbeing