Recently, I’ve been digging into ways to better organize my notes, links, and other digital detritus. There’s a lot of it and it’s all over the place!

I stumbled upon a concept called the “second brain” after reading a discussion on Hacker News. Essentially, it’s a way to better organize your digital life, so that you can easily store (and look up) information.

Essentially, a second brain is a personal knowledge management system that serves as an extension of your mind so you don’t have to think as hard or remember as much. You offload thinking and remembering to your private second brain.

Like Sherlock Holmes’ “mind palace”, it’s a place to store all of your lingering thoughts and curate the information you consume on a daily basis from books, the Internet and other sources so that you don’t get overwhelmed with unnecessary info and take action with the knowledge that matters.

Sign me up!

One of the interesting tools that someone in the Hacker News thread mentioned was an app called Obsidian.

I’ve been playing around with it recently and am cautiously optimistic. It has apps for MacOS, iOS (…and other systems, if you’re of that persuasion).

Plus, no vendor lock in! It’s all Markdown files stored on your local devices (and using your preferred cloud storage service).

December is upon us! That means the latest edition of the Advent of Code is here.

The Advent of Code is essentially a daily programming challenge featuring a new problem each day through Christmas. The problems all relate to a certain theme. This year, it sounds like we’re going on an undersea adventure.

— Day 1: Sonar Sweep —

You’re minding your own business on a ship at sea when the overboard alarm goes off! You rush to see if you can help. Apparently, one of the Elves tripped and accidentally sent the sleigh keys flying into the ocean!

Before you know it, you’re inside a submarine the Elves keep ready for situations like this. It’s covered in Christmas lights (because of course it is), and it even has an experimental antenna that should be able to track the keys if you can boost its signal strength high enough; there’s a little meter that indicates the antenna’s signal strength by displaying 0-50 stars.

Your instincts tell you that in order to save Christmas, you’ll need to get all fifty stars by December 25th.

Collect stars by solving puzzles. Two puzzles will be made available on each day in the Advent calendar; the second puzzle is unlocked when you complete the first. Each puzzle grants one star. Good luck!

I’ll be partaking using my preferred language of choice: x86 assembly.

I kid, I kid. JavaScript.

It’s a pretty special moment when you get up to Indian Rock Park early enough to have the whole thing to yourself. The only problem with it is that I want to sit up here all day.

This is an absolutely beautiful (yet heartbreaking) memoir written in the midst of World War II.

Completed in 1942 (and sent to his publisher just days before he and his wife took their lives), it provides an intimate and fascinating look at life in Europe during the end of the Victorian Era and through two world wars.

I think one of the most striking things about this book (especially in the later pages) is how mournful, almost hopeless, Zweig is about the state of Europe and the world as a whole. And it’s no surprise, right? He was an Austrain Jew who saw the home and the people he loved destroyed.

Take this passage, written about Paris. He lovingly describes his time in Paris after he graduated from university and how it was a city that could always make people happy.

“I had promised myself a present for the first year of my newly gained freedom—I would go to Paris. Two earlier visits had given me only a superficial knowledge of that city of inexhaustible delights, but I could tell that any young man who had spent a year there would be left with incomparably happy memories for the rest of his life. Nowhere but in Paris did you feel so strongly, with all your senses aroused, that your own youth was as one with the atmosphere around you. The city offers itself to everyone, although no one can fathom it entirely.”

And then a paragraph later, we get to the hard truth about the time period this book was written in:

“Of course I know that the wonderfully lively and invigorating Paris of my youth no longer exists; perhaps the city will never entirely recover that wonderful natural ease, now that it has felt the iron brand forcibly imprinted on it by the hardest hand on earth. Just as I began writing these lines, German armies and German tanks were rolling in, like a swarm of grey termites, to destroy utterly the divinely colourful, blessedly light-hearted lustre and unfading flowering of its harmonious structure. ”

Another powerful aspect of this book is that while reading, we know that he would soon take his life and he’d never get to see how this tragic story (World War II) ended and how the cities, art and music he loved would eventually recover.

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

We had a bunch of kiddos over for a birthday party yesterday and Benson is just done.

The Civilization series is easily one of my favorite video games of all time. (See here, here, here, here and here). I have very fond memories of talking to my middle school teacher about various strategies to utilize within Civ I and I still vividly remember the wickedly cool box art.

So, it’s no surprise that I’d dig into the memoir of the man who created the games himself, Sid Meier.

It’s a nerdy trip through early computer gaming history and fostered a bunch of nostalgia for old DOS games that I used to play. It’s also a fantastic romp through the mind of a game designer.

There were a number of fun little quotes and life lessons, as well:

“I think that in life, as in game design, you have to find the fun. There is joy out there waiting to be discovered, but it might not be where you expected. You can’t decide what something’s going to be before you embark on it, and you shouldn’t stick with a bad idea just because you’re fond of it. Take action as quickly and repeatedly as possible, take advantage of what you already know, and take liberties with tradition. But most importantly, take the time to appreciate the possibilities, and make sure all of your decisions are interesting ones.”

The turkeys in this town are relentless.

Yes. That is in fact a turkey on top of a car.