Ten Minutes of Peace

If you use an iOS device and you’ve upgraded to iOS 12, do yourself a favor and add this Shortcut, “Ten Minutes of Peace”. You’ll need to download Apple’s Shortcuts app if you haven’t already.

All it does is turn on your Do Not Disturb setting for ten minutes and then turn it back off again. But during that time – no buzzing, dinging, vibrating: bliss.

Add it to Siri and get yourself ten minutes of peace just by asking.

One time I listened to so much Wilco I showed up to all my appointments on Central Time.

Mathews County, VA

Jekyll Island, GA

Houston, TX

Pastor: Jesus said ‘I am the Bread of Life.’

Parishioner: ‘Sheesh. Some people just need to be kneaded.’

Winchester, VA

Verizon throttled California fire department during wildfire crisis - The Verge

The Revolution will not be televised due to bandwidth throttling. Please stay on the line for customer support. The current wait time is approximately 37 hours.

Is Facebook evil? Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason — Quartz

Is Facebook evil? Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason — Quartz

Without question, Facebook enables brutal and immoral hatemongers. I can hear Facebook arguing that they cannot possibly take a stand on moral issues without becoming censors and losing objectivity. Facebook cannot make those decisions without messing up a lot of the time. I agree. Its scale is just too massive.

That’s just the thing: Facebook can’t admit it, but it’s possible that the most moral thing is for Facebook not to exist.

In a country that slew indigenous people and was built on slave labor, White Nationalism is always also White Supremacy.

273.16 degrees of Kelvin Bacon is so close to being a good joke.

Seven Books I Have Loved

I can’t say ‘favorite’ because these are basically the earliest books I loved, or the latest books I have loved.

    • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
    • A Field Guide to Ecology of Eastern Forests; North America by John C. Kricher and Gordon Morrison
    • How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving by David Richo
    • Beloved by Toni Morrison
    • Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
    • A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
    • How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

My ego is like a Cable News pundit telling me how to think and feel about everything that happens, and meditation is like turning off the TV and seeing life myself.

How’s it going? - BrettTerpstra.com →

Hey buddy, how you doing? I’m good, thanks for asking. You don’t seem good. What’s going on?
I deeply appreciate when writers share how they’re really doing.

Since the time my firstborn was very little it’s always been clear he’s going to roll his own bowling ball and all I can ever hope to do is put bumpers in the right gutters.

Oscar Romero, May 11, 1973

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know that we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down to proclaim blessed the poor, blessed the thirsting for justice, blessed the suffering.

I’m Not Driving

I love my iPhone’s Do Not Disturb feature which mutes the parade of bells and vibrations that come from it. I use it at night so I’m not woken up to the ding of some robot account which liked one of my Instagram photos from four years ago.

I’ve always wanted to use it for temporary moments throughout my day when I don’t want to be disturbed, but after forgetting to turn it off and missing important messages on several occasions, I stopped trusting it for this purpose. It’s just too easy to miss the little moon icon up there reminding me.

But with iOS 11, Apple introduced a related feature: Do Not Disturb While Driving. It holds back on notifications like its older cousin of a feature, but it also won’t let you interact with the phone while it’s on. You have to press an additional button asserting “I’m Not Driving.” My phone automatically turns this on when I’m in the car, which is annoying in the short term, but better for me overall.

But I’ve actually started to manually turn on the feature – you can put it in Control Center – for those temporary moments of peace. And because of the way the feature is designed, it won’t let me use my phone until I turn it off. This way I can’t forget it’s on so long as I try to use my phone.

Which is too often.