As ridiculous as it may sound to some, if I don't schedule time for rest, it doesn't happen. Otherwise there's a demand on my time and resources during every waking hour.
The first and last time I was fortunate enough to see him live was The Glass Spider Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Spider_Tour which was performance art like I'd never experienced.
Very glad managed to see Blackstar released, it's a fascinating, eerie album. The eponymous track was playing when I read the announcement he had passed.
There's a strange note of entitlement that seems to pop up whenever discussions about ad blocking arise.
It smacks of the piracy argument, "if producers didn't make it so difficult to consume the content, I wouldn't pirate it." The argument isn't about whether or not it's theft, so much as whether or not consumers agree with the method and constraints on the intersection between distribution and consumption.
In the case of 'free' content on the web: site 'owners' create and serve content, often via paid servers with labor overhead in the form of creation, curation, programming infrastructure/support, sysadmins, and so forth. The server sits in one or more datacenters, waiting for requests.
Let's use the house metaphor: say I create a website, www.thisismyhouse.com and you like the content, so you visit my (open) house. My house has certain conventions, social compacts, if you will. You don't enter without some sense that there are obligations on both sides: if I am an irritating host, you don't stay and eat my food, you leave. If you are an irritating guest, you are escorted out. At no time in the physical world is there a situation where you can use technology to mute the host while still eating the food (aside from <insert dated in-laws joke here> ).
"Oho!" someone exclaims, "I spent fuel and time" (internet bandwidth) "to visit your house! This cost me (unit of value) too!" So we agree that both sides have a monetary/value stake in this transaction.
But there are rules, folks. The content isn't free and never was. Just because you can line up at the buffet and filter out the environment until it meets your requirements through technology doesn't mean that you have an ongoing right to keep visiting (consuming).
Free content sites are like trialware: you visit, decide if you like it, then pay if you keep using it, and the price is set by the author (ads, subscriptions, you name it). If you don't like the price, you don't get to keep eating your fill.
I'm not a fan of ads, but I accept them as by and large the price of admission to the content I like. There are plenty of ways to get around tracking without fully blocking ads, so that doesn't really concern me).
If the ads are just too much, I go elsewhere. How complicated is that?
Understanding the context of art is frequently as important as direct experience. Jackson Pollack has been decried as an alcoholic fraud by some, but like Da Vinci, it is the techniques he pioneered as much as his works that are fascinating. There was a study that claimed he (Pollock) represented fractals, even Chaos theory in some of this work. http://phys.unsw.edu.au/phys_about/PHYSICS!/FRACTAL_EXPRESSI...
At the end of the day, a lot of the details end up on the mental cutting room floor, there's no getting out of it. If you can't specialize, get used to a bit of Swiss cheese brain, but hopefully retaining the 10000 foot overview so you pick the technology back up reasonably fast next time.
The only things that have really helped:
Key takeaways go into a Deck in Anki (spaced repetition).
Lots of notes and/or screenshots in Google Docs for easy searches. (still haven't embraced Evernote)
Bookmarks in Firefox with tags.
Teach someone what you just learned.
One frustration in particular is the time spent wading through minutiae instead of creating something with impact. But sometimes that's part of what we get paid for, navigating / remedying the pain points. Anyone can (eventually) slog through most development technologies, but adding understanding and context and utility to it, that's where the challenge lies.
Heinlein said something to the effect of "specialization is for insects," but increasingly the bulk of world seems to be leaning that way. There's nothing wrong with specialization, but choose wisely. Check out Google Trends on a few technologies over the past 10 years and see their rise and fall.
Lost my mom to a series of complications, including cancer a couple years ago. A donation to help with Richard's quality of life and his family is a truly kind thing. I'm in.
Upvote for unplugging a bit each day, too.