What I’m doing now

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)

Updated May 20th, 2024, from my home in New Zealand.

Final edits to “Useful Not True”

If you want advance access to my next book, buy “Useful Not True” now at sivers.com

I’ve been working on this almost full-time for two years, and I’m so excited to be almost done. I’m super-happy with it.

surprised at the comfort of Shanghai

Just spent five days in Shanghai, China, and it’s so nice! Especially the French Concession, one of the nicest neighborhoods I’ve ever experienced in any city in the world. Cycling around every day on shared bicycles.

The people are kind. The trains are efficient and not over-crowded. The streets are clean. Trashcans (+ recycling) everywhere. The AliPay and WeChat systems for QR mobile app payments are surprisingly great.

And biggest surprise of all: it’s quiet with relatively clean air thanks to every motorcycle and most cars being 100% electric. The motorbikes especially are absolutely silent. 50 of them will go right by you, completely inaudible. Amazing. Intriguing. Makes me want to learn Chinese and spend more time there, getting to know many of the cities. But especially retuning to that adorable French Concession.

redesign of nownownow.com

I visited all 2300 /now pages to see who’s current, and deleted the ones that are gone. Then I changed the nownownow.com home page to browse by location or search profiles for text.

learning the Go programming language

I’ve used mainly Ruby for 20 years now. But for the next 20+ years I think Go is for me. (Combined with the PostgreSQL database and its built-in PL/pgSQL functions.) I’m learning from the book “Let’s Go” and loving it.

Why? Mostly for a change, since the two languages are quite opposite. But also for the simplicity. Ruby is succinct to type, but a bit too complex (for my tastes) to manage on the server. Go is verbose to type, but much simpler (standard library + single binary) on the server. I like that Go’s built-in stdlib seems to have everything I need.

Reframing death

For the last three years, my boy and I have had a pet mouse. We got her from a pet store, and he’s carried her in his hand through so many adventures in forests, beaches, and playgrounds. She sat on many little handmade boats down the creeks of New Zealand. Sand castles and Lego houses built just for her. Drawings and stories for and about her. You’ve never seen a mouse so loved.

The past six months, she’s been next to me on my desk, twelve hours a day, as I wrote my book. Moving slower and wobbling. This week, she kept falling over when trying to eat. Thirty minutes ago, she died. I’ve been sobbing a lot, and again as I type this.

As soon as she died, she looked at peace for the first time in months. It led to a thought that seems like a nice end to my book, and gives it extra meaning for me. Heaven is such a useful reframing. Maybe it’s the original reframing. Death can be terrifying or devastating, so no wonder every culture found a way to reframe it.

Some people avoid loving pets or even people, because they’re scared of the eventual heartbreak and loss. But avoiding sadness is like listening to music with only major chords. The minor chords are so beautiful. I’m crying so hard, but isn’t that wonderful? It’s a part of a rich life.

And even that is reframing. It’s a useful belief that has helped me love people and pets, again and again.