Digging for Fire

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with.

This is part two. Part one is here.

On the 22nd of September, 1949, Ronaldo Fabri got on a boat, leaving behind a country on the brink of revolution.

Egypt in 1949 was a country with a long history and fresh wounds.

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with.

This is part one.

In 2009, Talia and I went on a Contiki tour of Europe. Despite being the only married couple (we were only 22!) on a Contiki tour, we managed to have a great time touring Europe without getting too sloshed along the way.

We're spending the last days of pesach in Mullumbimby. There's an amazing Jewish community here, full of young families and friendly faces. The Rabbi was kind enough to let us park our caravan in the yard of the shul, so we'll be very close to services over the next two days.

This morning I was up early with Zohar and we went for a 6am walk down Burringbar Street, which is the main street of the town.

When was the last time you were offline?

Like, really offline. Not just signed out of Slack. Not Do Not Disturb. Not even airplane mode. I'm talking phone entirely off for a good 24 hours. Stay at home, with no internet, and no screens.

It's a forcing function for your mental health.

I challenge you to try it. Once a week, or once a month, or once a year. Some sort of schedule helps set the right expectations with friends and family.

Out of sheer curiosity, I applied for a job that had a really interesting cross-over between Education and AI. I flubbed the interview. I felt very out of practice, but also, the CEO had very silicon valley vibes. She was operating at a way faster speed to me.

Come to think of it, people often say that I'm calm or relaxed. Do they mean it as a compliment? It only happens when I'm on work trips.

I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work.

But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1

Of course, it was AI generated.

I spent 30 minutes going over it with a colleague, call it an hour between us. The damn proposal probably only took 5 minutes to generate.

Normally I start with a blog post that I then convert that into a podcast. But this is a podcast first, and I'm going to turn it into a blog post later. I don't have a script that I'm reading from. This is all sort of off the cuff. There's something that I've been meaning to talk about. To speak out loud. And I hope you find it interesting.

I've been thinking a lot about academic integrity lately.

Welcome to Pirate School! A new podcast hosted by me and Talia Carbis, about the chaotic, messy, wild world of home education.

This podcast is basically just a chat about how we homeschool. We're both trained as teachers, so we do know a lot of those foundational education principles. And, of course, we have opinions.

We just released episode 9, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Say something profound

Say something profound

Say something profound

Say something profound

Pull it down from the heavens

Pull it up from the ground

Say something,

Say something profound

Say something oblique

Say something oblique

Some obscure reference

Something antique

The less that they get it

The better it sounds

Say something obscure and profound

Say something brand new

Say something unique

An utterance that I’ll decode in a week

Pebble is back!1 I wrote about it, Eric Migicovsky wrote about it, even John Gruber wrote about it, and it's now available for pre-order.

But…

iPhone users like myself have been warned. The experience will be hamstrung, due to Apple's lack of interoperability between iOS and third-party devices.

Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app. This is because the majority of our development team uses Android phones, and generally we’re building things for ourselves, so naturally Android comes first.