Words That Stay

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I've been keeping a journal of my medications. It started with keeping track of when I was taking Ibuprofen to help with some shoulder pain I was having. Later on, it extended to me tracking my symptoms while on my new medications. I went from Zoloft to Prozac and a mood stabilizer called Olanzapine instead of an anxiety medication whose name I don't remember because I rarely took it (it was designated "as needed"). We tried some other medications before settling on the Olanzapine, and the journal was used to track my symptoms and potential side effects. 

Originally, I used Evernote to create and update the journal. After some time, I became frustrated with how Evernote was performing. Frankly, there is no excuse in 2025 for updating a text file to have input lag. The file size wasn't even especially large by Evernote standards, yet updating it was a test of my patience. I could finish a sentence before the first word finished appearing. I wrote to Evernote about this and got absolutely no response. Between that and their price hike, I decided not to renew my subscription, only keeping it around as an archive. I moved the journal to Apple Notes on 01 SEP 24 SUN. I had some reservations about it because it didn't seem to have many of the same features as Evernote. 

When it comes to Apple software, a phrase you may hear time and again is how something will be simple and easy, but rarely if ever obvious or discoverable. For example, in my journal, each entry is headed by the date, and the rest of it is a series of bullet points, each followed by a timestamp. With Evernote, making bullet points is fairly straightforward; the icon for it is right there in plain sight. With Notes, the option to format your text that way is not exactly obvious. I felt silly having to look up how to make them. At this point, it's second nature, and one could argue growing pains come with the territory for any piece of software, even a note taking app. 

Note taking apps kind of baffle me the more I think about it. You'll find no shortage of debates online about what differentiates a note taking app like Evernote or Notion from a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The closest thing there really is to a consensus is that a word processor is interested in what your text will look like when printed out, be it on physical paper or something more convenient like a PDF or an ePub file. Note taking apps, by contrast, are designed to help you get your thoughts down as quickly and painlessly as possible, making itself as malleable as possible to your stream of consciousness. On top of this, note taking apps add a number of quality of life features to help you organize those thoughts once you've committed them to text. 

This led me to something of a dilemma. There's an old saying that goes, "Never write down what you don't want spoken aloud in public." At the same time, a journal, by its very nature, is a record of your private thoughts, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it that way. Somewhere between these perspectives rests another quality of journals that nobody really likes to talk about, the fact that they have the capacity to survive you. 

Barring chucking it in the fire before you snuff it as the late Virgil requested (and was ultimately ignored), your journal is the very definition of an open book once your time has passed. It's like any other book on a shelf, able to be opened and read at another person's leisure, no real permission required. At worst (maybe best?), you were the sort of meticulous person who encrypted their journals by writing in some indecipherable shorthand or even a simple substitution cipher. Maybe you were one of those legends who developed a full language and your book can join the likes of the Voynich Manuscript. 

Of course, that's all assuming your journal is a physical book. 

Basically, with a physical book, the part about it surviving you is baked in to the medium. A digital file, by contrast, is somewhat more obscure, especially in this era of increased concerns over privacy in the face of large scale data leaks. 

One of the reasons I keep this journal, most entries of which are simply timestamps for when I took my Prozac and mood stabilizer, is for the sake of my doctors and counselor, so I could refer back to any date and time to aid recalling symptoms or changes in my behavior or whatever else may be relevant. In this regard, it's very helpful since I'm right there to scroll through it. However, what happens when I die? I don't expect anyone other than have the foresight to use my face or fingerprint to open the iPhone or iPad (respectively), much less know the PIN for when those means of entry fail. My Mac mini is old school, using a simple password for entry, and nobody knows that. These are all good things for security purposes, but leave much to be desired on the sharing front. The best I can hope for is to have enough time to blurt out a password or text a link to someone before my eyes close for the final time. 

Maybe I could leave some kind of puzzle-like paper trail for someone to figure out if they felt like going on an adventure, an adventure to discover when and why I stopped drinking coffee. Spoiler alert, it didn't play nice with my medications. 

Quoth the Elephant, Nevernote

Someone on Threads asked whatever happened to blogging. I thought about it and remembered how after Richard Wright wrote Black Boy and Native Son (among many other works) he learned about haiku and wrote several thousand of his own. That’s kind of what I feel like has happened with blogging in light of social media. You’re able to more or less do the same thing as a place like Blogger or WordPress, but it’s more concise and direct. There’s engagement and dialogue (for better or for worse) With blogging, that still exists, but it’s somehow on a different scale. Some will write comments, while others will write blog entries of their own responding to that original post.

I’ve had a few ideas for longer form entries like I used to, but I simply haven’t had the energy to do any deep dives of late. So, I’m writing this instead.

I’ve decided to part ways with Evernote. I’ve been using them since 2009 back when I had a Windows phone. Back when I had multiple devices from different companies, it was great. A note started on one could be finished on another and they’d all sync up and talk to each other.

Since 11 SEP 22 SUN, I’ve been using Evernote as a journal. I was having some shoulder pain that was severely limiting my normal range of motion, so I used it to keep track of my pain as well as note when I took any Ibuprofen. As time went on, I used it to document when I took my medications, namely my antidepressants and mood stabilizer. The latter makes me a little drowzy, so I have to be careful when I take it. If it’s too early, I fall asleep on the couch and disrupt my normal sleep schedule. If it’s too late, it’s harder to get up in the morning.

In addition to keeping tabs on my medication, it was also a general sort of journal, sporadically documenting the various goings-on in my life, sometimes acting as an aid for me to track my depressive cycles and try to rationalize what I was feeling at the time. It’s easily the longest journal I’ve ever kept (not counting Blogger, which has no real regularity to it) and Evernote was great for updating it. Then, it stopped being great.

Despite only being text, updating it became extremely tedious and slow, especially using the mobile app. The desktop app wasn’t much better. According to Evernote, the file is only a few hundred kilobytes, a far cry from the 200MB max size they say a note can be on a subscription plan. I wrote in to their customer support, but received no reply. Couple this with their price hike (70 to 130USD) at the start of the year for me, and it’s a lot of goodwill down the drain. As for what I was paying for, their scratchpad was finicky to use, not always syncing between devices, and other times when it would sync, it would double-paste whatever was written from one device to another. This eventually got fixed, but sometimes it would still slip. Their worst offense in all this, really, was their pushing of AI features. You bump up the price, struggle to handle a 200kb text file, barely handle syncing on the scratchpad, and now you’re telling me to use the AI features? Finish this candy bar before you go unwrapping another. It’s just poor management, chasing trends rather than focusing on and leaning into your strengths.

Meanwhile, Apple Notes seems to have gotten better, if only by comparison. Before, I always felt like it was fighting me. I’d use it on occasion, but I simply didn’t like using it. Now, though, it seems so much more polished, keeping in line with the Apple fan adage, “It just works.” Besides, now that all of my devices are Apple, I don’t need Evernote’s best feature, which was being a middleman among the devices. In fact, I wrote the draft for this entry in Apple Notes rather than Evernote. I don't plan on migrating my stuff from Evernote on any grand scale, only as needed. As an experiment, I started my meds journal as a new document, then copied and pasted the old one into the new space. No lag on the desktop, but we'll see how it holds up in morning with the mobile app. If Notes has similar issues with large text files, at least I'm not paying an annual subscription to have it not work. 

The Death of Drafts

Something I need to get in the habit of is using Evernote to write my rough drafts before bringing them into Blogger, rather than my usual method of writing into Blogger directly. The interface is fine when I need to insert things like links or videos, but as far as the core activity of writing the entry, it's not always as smooth and pleasant a user experience as it should be. I feel the same way about WordPress, though to a lesser degree because the block system it uses is relatively intuitive. Blogger is too much like a word processor; it's very much about the WYSIWYG philosophy.

To better illustrate what I mean, we have to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. A lot of people don't understand the relationship between the movie and the book, specifically which came first. Technically, the book was written first, but it was meant to serve as something of a wiki for the screenplay. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Before you can make a movie, you need a script. Before you write a script, you need a story." Screenplays, by their very nature, aren't really meant for embellishing details or offering backstory to a spotlighted item. There's an unwritten rule in screenwriting of no paragraph of more than 3 lines. They're designed to be concise and quick to read, each page amounting to roughly one minute of screen time. Novels can play with time and structure in ways screenplays can't, hence why some novels are deemed "unfilmable."

There's another rule about screenplays, that the first version of your screenplay submitted is always your first draft, no matter how many rewrites it went through up until that point. When I was in school, we made these things called rough drafts. They were handwritten on paper, and your teacher would eventually hand it back to you with red marks all over it, pointing out every little mistake you made (sometimes with helpful suggestions on what to do next). You would then completely start over and write out another paper taking the edits to heart. I'm sure this is still technically done, only with digital files instead of sheets of notebook paper. My point is that word processing created a convenience in terms of editing your written work. Some writers forgo "drafts" altogether and edit as they go along, never even bothering with the "version history" feature some word processors and notetaking applications provide. There's no more starting over, barring any serious fundamental hiccup like finding out a source is inaccurate or an entire premise is off the mark. It's overall a more nebulous process. You can still number your drafts, but those can be reserved for page one rewrites rather than little typos or moving a sentence from the end of a paragraph to the start of one. 

This concludes the experiment. Draft was successfully transferred from Evernote to Blogger. 

Quoth the Elephant, Evernote

Something I forgot to bring up in my last entry about Amazon Prime was a little addendum about how Evernote is increasing its price by nearly twofold. It's gone from around 70 per year to 130. I was a little stunned by this. It's one thing for Amazon to want 3 extra dollars to take away ads on their streaming service, but this is a pretty big fundamental shift in the business model. I don't pretend to know all the goings-on at Evernote, but they do promise some major upgrades to the newer versions of their application. Most of these had to do with AI, which made me roll my eyes a bit. To be fair to them, they also offered better synchronization among devices, which is definitely something I've felt has been lacking. There was a glitch for some time with the scratch pad where it would "double" itself when I went from typing it out on the desktop to checking it on my phone. Rather than simply double post whatever I'd written, it would insert the copy in the middle of the text, which made copy and paste rather tedious. 

So, I'd write out what I wanted to say in the scratch pad on the desktop versi So, I'd write out what I wanted to say in the scratch pad on the desktop version, and then when I'd check it on my iPhone to copy and paste into something like Threads... on, and then when I'd check it on my iPhone to copy and paste into something like Threads... 

Irksome, isn't it? In any case, despite the sticker shock, keeping Evernote running is kind of a no-brainer. I've been using the application for years, though most of that time was in using the free version, and I still use it virtually everyday. It's where I keep track of my medications, probably the longest journal I've ever kept outside of Blogger. It's also my address book for when I send out my holiday cards. The point is I don't mind this increase. I just hope the synchronization is all it's cracked up to be. 

Unlockable Gateway

I've been a proud Linux user for several years. I started with Ubuntu, but never quite liked how it worked, dabbled in a few others I can't recall names to, and then finally settled on Linux Mint as my favorite, namely for their Long Term Support versions. At the time of this writing, I've yet to try Peppermint, a fork of Mint, though it looks very promising. My second favorite is Jolicloud (or JoliOS, or Jolidrive... they've got a bit of an identity issue they need to work out once and for all). I'd written a review of an early version of their OS, and while I didn't exactly have the nicest things to say, they've gotten much better, and the staff I spoke to while writing my little expose were surprisingly good sports about what I said about their early efforts. Despite that bit of drama, it is actually the flavor of Linux I will always recommend to anyone curious about using Linux that's not quite ready to commit to a full install (or even a partition) of something more robust. 
The Jolicrew is a strange lot with a downright baffling mission statement. Their OS is meant to mimic a tablet's interface, specifically iOS, but is not actually meant to be run on a tablet. Instead, one of their biggest selling points was "breathing life into an old desktop" which sounds a bit silly, but when you consider the elderly or even very young children, the idea of doing away with that tired old desktop interface in favor of app tiles does sound very appealing. In addition to these fairly low system requirements, the system has, hands down, the most painless trial and/or installation process I've ever seen. I wish more Linux flavors took after these methods to make their systems more accessible to weary consumers. Normally, if you want to try out a Linux OS, you've got to go into the boot menu of your startup screen... and it's possible I've lost at least half of you already. I'm not saying you're stupid or anything like that, but you'd never have to do anything like this for a game or a browser, so why should the OS be any different. JoliOS not only can be run effectively as an application (no different than a word processor or a game) that can be un/installed with the greatest of ease, but it can even be run in a browser. 
While I've gone back to using Windows (7, in case you're wondering), and my old desktop running Mint is gathering dust, Jolicloud never left my side, so to speak. It's a kind of OS backup. Even if I'm using someone else's computer, I can log in to Jolicloud and access most of my services through there. I still check in on it every once in a while so I don't get surprised by any major changes or upheavals to the interface or the service connections. 
Today was when I checked in on it and was surprised, then baffled, by a change to the service connections, specifically Evernote. There was a "new" flag over the "add new services" bar at the side, which I clicked on. Most of the apps were ones I'd never heard of, the rest I had no real use for, and then I saw Evernote was there with a padlock icon over it. I clicked on it and got the above screenshot. In order to use the app and have it work with my Jolidrive page, I essentially had to pimp Jolicloud on one of my social networks. 

I'm really not sure what to think about this, and not simply because I already have Evernote on my JoliOS dashboard. 

QuikTek

I mentioned Twitter last time, and writing about how I appreciated its versatility made me remember something. The first weblog I ever had was on Yahoo!360. I knew well of (and hated) MySpace, but hadn't heard of Facebook. I always preferred 360 to MySpace because it seemed that 360, by virtue of being a Yahoo! service, attracted a wider and more eclectic audience, whereas MySpace was almost exclusively a teen phenomenon. Call it ageism or technophobia, but it's probably safe to assume that more people have an e-mail address than a MySpace account, therefore that older and/or less tech-savvy generation still "ooh"-ing and "ah"-ing over Electronic Mail will be more likely to start up a weblog if that service is offered as part of the "packaged deal" that came with their e-mail account as opposed to seeking out an external, self-contained site that requires separate registration. In other words, on Y!360, you got more people who would probably not have otherwise started a weblog because they wouldn't want to leave their comfort zone.

Yahoo!360 is gone now, crushed underfoot by practically every other social networking site in existence, the key problem being a few unresolved technical issues (which led to my friend Vanessa tragically losing her entire account), the others being a deliberate dismantling by Yahoo! in light of a proposed buy-out of Facebook and an attempt by Yahoo! to make the networking tools of 360 a more integrated part of one's Yahoo! profile. I've archived those entries to a site called Multiply, a rather shameless MySpace knock-off. I won't link them here; they're not much to look at. Most of them recount my obsessions over my own personal pet peeve about 360 in light of other weblog sites like Multiply or Blogger, which was mobile-friendliness. I prided myself on "breaking the system" by using my PSP's built-in web-browser and wi-fi to write entries in clear defiance of desktops. It probably went a little too far; every time I got a new device, my readers would know it, evidenced by my "Hey, guess what I'm writing this on!" style of entry.

There was something I don't think I ever said on 360 and I think I never said it because I wasn't actually sure how well it would translate to text, so here goes:

The very best thing about 360 is that WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT, COMING FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, ALL OVER THE WORLD, and yet, at the end of the day, we're all just sitting at home in front of our computers, talking to one another.

the very worst thing about 360 is that we're all different, coming from all walks of life, all over the world, and yet, at the end of the day, WE'RE ALL JUST SITTING AT HOME IN FRONT OF OUR COMPUTERS TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER.

The point is, while I may have been seemingly singing the praises of Twitter last entry, my adoration is almost entirely conceptual; the first social networking site made with mobile networks distinctly in mind. By its very nature, it encourages people to go out into the world and not feel tethered to their undoubtedly uncomfortable desk chairs in front of their undoubtedly cluttered and cumbersome desks upon which rest their undoubtedly ghastly laptops and monolithic desktops.

To crib a saying by filmmaker Jean Cocteau: Weblogs will never truly achieve anything until they can be taken to all the same places ordinary notebooks and pens can go.

Twitter was a good start.

Tumblr appears to be the next step.

Evernote is the long stride between them.