Niq touches on a subject I’ve been thinking about over the last few days, online reviews. His focus is on the fake ones that people write in return for a discount, reviews that don’t offer a true reflection of the work/service/product received. Quite rightly, he points out that:

Online ratings are built upon trust. Of course, every person has their own rating system, but still, if anything on the internet has a rating close to 5 stars, you can usually expect it to be a genuinely positive experience.

Fake online ratings, however, destroy this system of trust. Dear people of the internet: Don’t take the bait out of personal greed to get a lousy 10% discount when you have to sell your soul in exchange.

Whilst I agree with this, I am starting to land in a different place. The general population should not be allowed to post reviews. It’s a little extreme perhaps, but bear with me.

I think reviews should be entirely objective and there should be no space for a disgruntled customer to post a quick, one-line, one-star review on Google. It benefits no one other than to placate a temporary feeling by the poster. It is an ineffective byproduct of our society which places strong emphasis on instant gratification before moving on to the next thing. It encourages a world lacking in forgiveness and compassion.

Before the internet, we turned to experts to understand what was good or bad about something we are less informed of. The world of food has the Michelin guide, hotels have AA ratings, businesses relied on good service, but now a Google rating of 4.5 or above is a marketing gimmick.

One of my favourite local cafes consistently serves top-quality coffee from friendly and knowledgeable baristas. Its Google rating just dropped to 4.4 because of one disgruntled customer posting a 2-star review that by all accounts is inaccurate. It certainly does not reflect my experience or the experience of the many regulars I see in there every morning. If it did, they wouldn’t keep coming back.

The question ultimately, is: why do we give people the power to post a negative review (or positive) when they could be having a bad day and one thing out of character happens in a cafe that tips them over the edge?

I would much rather pay attention to an objective review of a place written by someone who knows their stuff and who likely has visited multiple times before forming their opinion.

After finishing work for the day I spent a little time futzing around setting up an MCP server with my Obsidian vault and it seems like a fascinating way to interact with the notes I have in there.

The initial setup wasn’t as smooth sailing as it should’ve been. The MCP server plugin requires installing another plugin which creates a secure Local REST API for your vault, try as I might, I couldn’t get it to enable. Of course this meant I needed to get it working more than ever! Turning off all the community plugins and turning the REST API one on first got things working and when I enabled the rest of the plugins again it continued to work.

As a test I asked Claude if it could see my Obsidian notes and it came back with a summary of my vault. Huzzah!

The next step was to ask it to find a recipe note, take the ingredients from it, and then make a groceries project with the ingredients as tasks in Things. It worked and was a much smoother process than finding the recipe in Mela and adding the ingredients to Reminders.

What I like about this is that it all happens locally and none of the conversations are used to train Claude’s models. This kind of connection between local apps is the first time I’ve felt like these AI tools could become useful for me.

Last week Cheltenham hosted it’s annual literature festival and I was able to make it a long to a couple of events. First up was a discussion on Agatha Christie featuring Poirot himself, David Suchet.

It was a fun evening hearing about the efforts Mr Suchet went to in order to portray Hercule Poirot consistently over a period of 25 years. I would’ve loved to have seen the notes he made after reading all of the Poirot books that culminated in a list of 92 things he would need to bring his character to life. The most famous one for me…

Poirot doesn’t run.

The second event I made it to was to see the wonderful Charlie Mackesy. He has a new book out, but hearing about his creative process was both inspiring and humbling.

I’ve come across many artists and designers in my life. Most have a common trait, they are generally very self effacing, preferring for their work and others to be in the spotlight. Charlie takes this to a whole new level. As far as he is concerned he is just a man who like to draw and made a book.

The fact people enjoy his work so much speaks to it’s quality, but also it’s message. I first came across Charlie just before the pandemic when he released his first book, I had been through a difficult time and his work was comforting and encouraging. It seems I was not alone in finding that.

Blogtober is forcing me to put more thought and effort into posting to my blog each day. I haven’t managed to post as often as I wanted so far — last week I managed two in a row, and then things ran away from me. I posted yesterday, though, so here’s to a new streak.

I’ve noticed a new pattern of behaviour is starting to establish itself. I’m using Obsidian more than I have for a long time and with it the new unique note function. When I realise I haven’t written for the day I hit Cmd-N which triggers a new unique note that sets the title to YYYY-MM-DD HHmm and I start typing. That’s how I ended up posting yesterday’s post They’re home at last.

At the very least, it gets me writing and I keep going until I’ve formed some kind of idea. If I can’t make anything coherent I leave it and come back to it another time. Once I’ve written something I’m ok with I will give it a title and publish it to my blog and then file it into my blog posts folder. If it doesn’t get that far, then I leave it in the root of my vault and I can come back to it when I’m ready.

I’ve always been conscious of not posting for the sake of it and I hope that this pattern of behaviour that I’m developing will help that. It gives me a space for ideas to incubate and I expect that if I can’t formulate a post from today’s writing, I can revisit one from another and see how that evolves.

It takes time to find what you want to say, and allowing the space for that to happen is important. In the past, I’ve not allowed that space and have consequently lost the initial post idea to the black hole of the rubbish bin. Equally, I’ve often rushed something and posted before a thought was fully formed—putting it out into the ether and then failing to return to give it the attention it deserves. I would like to change both of those things which is the aim behind making a belated start to Blogtober. I want my blog to be a place to share thoughts and ideas as well as events and activities. In order to achieve that I need to give myself the space to ruminate on things.

Whilst I worked this morning I had on in the background a live stream of the news. I don’t normally watch the news, I prefer to read it after things have happened but this morning I wanted to know what was happening as things unfolded.

I’m talking about the release of the Israeli hostages who have spent 736 days in captivity. Held by Hamas, in underground tunnels, starved of food, daylight, and many other things we take for granted.

I cannot imagine the relief their families must be feeling.

I cannot imagine the grief the families of the remaining 28 hostages whose remains they are waiting to be returned.

Two years it has taken for all the hostages to be released. A war which could’ve ended at any time in that time by Hamas releasing them. For now a fragile peace is in place. I can only pray that it continues.

Already there are talks on going for the second stage of the ceasefire. The disarmament of Hamas and their stepping down from any form of control in Gaza. This will be the biggest obstacle for those involved to over come.

There are already reports of Hamas attacking rival tribes and executing “collaborators” in Gaza City. It does not look promising. How do you persuade a group whose sole existence is founded on the distraction of a group of people? I can only pray.

There’s nothing quite like it. The click of a lid as it pops off, the scratch of the nib on the page, and the slow progress made through a notebook. Over the summer I’ve turned more and more toward the analogue than I have the digital and I’ve come to the realisation that what they say is true. It really is easier to think on paper than it is on screen.

I’ve always had a notebook with me since my later years at school, back then it was called a sketchbook, but it equated to the same thing. I used it to explore ideas and to work out problems, since then my use of it has evolved and it now includes a journal like element as well. In fact I’m slowly developing my own version of the bullet journal, but that’s for another post.

What I wanted to talk about today is how using my fountain pen and notebook make me feel. There’s a steadiness about it that I find difficult to put in to words. A feeling that I am creating something more lasting, even if most of what goes into my notebooks is fleeting, it feels like a body of work is building. Like I’m part of something bigger.

One of my favourite artists I Leonardo Da Vinci, not for his paintings, but for his notebooks. I first came across them in senior school and I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. How he used them to explore ideas, to think, to draw, to document, to do keep a record of everything he did astounds me. I think in some way that is what draws me to the idea of keeping a notebook. It’s why each day I turn to a fresh page, write the date, and begin using it throughout the day. Almost every day something gets written down, and on the rare days nothing gets written, that’s ok, tomorrow is another day and there will be something to go in it then.

I discovered this morning that there is a thing called Blogtober and it got me thinking, perhaps I should try and take part this year. I might be a week late in finding out about it, but if I can take part for the rest of October then why not?

One of the things I seem to struggle with regularly, is a desire to blog but never actually doing it. Most days pass by with me thinking I should write for my blog today, but then I never do. I don’t know what the block is, whether it’s a feeling of not knowing what to write, thinking that what I have to write is a bit bland and meaningless, or simply hiding from what I want to say. Whichever one it is, I don’t think it’s worth while.

I’ve been blogging in some form or another for roughly 20 years now, in fact I think my very first blog would’ve been setup in the summer of 2005. That means I missed an anniversary this summer. The first post I have a record of is from 2006 I know I was posting long before that, I’m sure somewhere I have a proper archive of those early posts which I should try and dig out. It would be fun to look back on.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I plan to try and post every day for the rest of October in the hope that it will help me build something of a habit again. When I first started blogging I used to post multiple times a day, that tailed off when I left university and social media took over, but now that I’m largely off all the major networks I’m more interested in reviving old habits and seeing where things go.