The blog home of Jeff Putz

Long time readers know that I only write reviews for things that are either really bad or really great. While I've enjoyed a lot of games this year, the recently released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a huge standout. It is stylistically inspired by the original trilogy, very story driven and mostly fun to play. The ending is epic and satisfying, and exactly what you expect out of an Indy movie.

First off, despite being published by Bethesda, it is not like the RPG's that they're known for. I'm not sure how much they influenced the studio, Machine Games (which appears to be Sweedish). It does lean on some of the conventions you'd find in Fallout or Starfield, like unlocking level-ups, and having a ton of side quests available, but it is not an RPG. It doesn't have any of the shooter components either, because you can't shoot your way out of things. In the few combat situations required, there are patterns you have to find so you can beat the bad guy with punches and whip cracks. There's a lot of sneaking around, and when you've reached a specific point, you encounter one of the many puzzles in the game. One similarity is that the producer is also the guy who did Fallout and Starfield.

Puzzle solving is a huge part of the game. Most of the puzzles are not super hard, but they are satisfying to solve. Some of it is the usual, take object, put object here, pull this lever, while other parts are just trying to figure out how to cross a chasm. All of these are set up in beautiful environments that are either real places or heavily inspired by real places. For example, Vatican City is actually a couple of parts of the real thing joined together, but you can absolutely spot the real-life buildings on a map. They also go to the Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq, which is real (but does not likely contain what's in the game!). Nothing is half-assed, and while there are duplicate objects to an extent, there are no repeat rooms. Did ancient civilizations really build all kinds of puzzles to hide things, with traps? No, but that's kinda the basis of the Indy universe.

Humans are starting to get very real in games. Teeth and eyes are still a little weird, but not to the point of being freakish like they were even a few years ago. Interestingly, the principles are all modeled after the actual voice actors. My first clue was recognizing Tony Todd, who is a very large man you've seen in a million things and likely heard in other games. (He unfortunately died just last month, and was only 69.) But then I wondered in a close up of the female lead, how does the designer decide where to put a mole on the neck of a character? Turns out, the actress has one, so that's how they decide. They even got Harrison Ford's scar right, though I imagine they had to figure that out from reference footage since he's at least 40 years older now.

The other striking thing to me was that there is very deliberate cinemaphotography going on in the cut scenes, and even in smaller transitions as you do stuff. The virtual camera work and lighting is not random or by accident. I seem to recall at least one rack focus, and a particularly great scene where Indy is talking to a bad guy through a partition, and as the guy walks away, they switch to an overhead shot that just looks great.

The controls and game play are mostly straight forward. There aren't many infuriating "OMG what do I do?" moments. When you're unsure about where to go, there are probably visual cues, like flowers or a streak of paint across a surface. There was one spot where I had to look up a solution, because I kept dying over and over inside of 20 seconds, and that was annoying. That also might be me, because coming out of a cut scene, I just want to keep moving the story forward, not look for some pattern that will keep me alive. There were a few points where I was walking around in disguise and some rando figures out who I am, with a dozen fascists or Nazis shooting me. Again, you're not going to spend a lot of time shooting or fighting, but once you understand how to block and read characters as they attempt to throw a punch, you'll figure it out.

My favorite action is the boat scene in Thailand (well, Siam at the time). You're fleeing fascists and Nazis again, and you've got a stack of ammo to shoot them. Things get nuts, and at one point the boat gets airborne and catches a guy on the front of the boat. In the video below, the player shoots him too quickly, but when I played, he made the most hilarious face before falling off. And yes, there is a Wilhelm Scream in the game.

I finished the main story, and now I'm going back to do the side quests. As it turns out, there are a ton of places that seemed curious to me earlier, but I didn't have the right things to even enter these places. I've found that there are in-game guides that you can buy with experience, to find all of the quests and items, but that seems like a thing of last resort. The quests are better than I expected, because even the characters in those are pretty well drawn.

My favorite thing though is that the game is filled with Indy-isms and conventions from the movie, right down to the last fedora gag. The dialog feels like the movies. The humor feels like the movies. Troy Baker sounds like he could be Harrison Ford. Nothing is phoned-in. It's a rare game where it feels like a movie but is still uniquely a game. The closest I can compare to is The Last of Us, which was actually a series based on the game, and pretty faithfully. This feels like a feature that could have been released between Raiders and Temple of Doom. I loved it.

Also, kudos to Microsoft for making this a day-one game on Game Pass. Best money you can spend on video games.

The whole replacement HVAC thing happened pretty fast, with it dying again Tuesday night and replaced by late Friday afternoon. Fortunately, I had litigated the pros and cons of various options when it died last year, so I kinda knew what to look for and what I was likely to want.

I knew we probably wanted to go up a half-ton in capacity, and our vendor confirmed that was the right thing given our square footage. Neighbors who have upgraded concurred, so we went from 3 to 3.5 tons. You don't want to go too big, because if it's running in short bursts, it's not good for the equipment, and does a poorer job at reducing humidity. The other option was to consider single or two stage, or variable speed. These operate how the names imply. Single stage works at one speed, two works at two speeds, and variable everywhere in between. Each is more expensive than the previous. Sort of. If we're only gonna be in this house another five to eight years, there's no universe where we ever make up the cost in energy savings. So despite my hippy energy efficiency fetish, variable speed was not gonna happen. Two was a little more expensive, but because it qualifies for a $2,000 tax credit, it was actually the least expensive option. Basically, when it only needs to cool or heat a degree or two, it runs at about 60% normal speed, which is more efficient. It's a lot quieter, too. So that's where we landed.

The physical differences in the equipment are interesting. The heat pump is taller and wider, with way more coil surface area than the old one. The air handler coil has three faces instead of two, and is taller. All of that makes sense given the difference in capacity, but I expected the size difference to be more subtle. The installer did a great job routing the pipes, in a cleaner way compared to what was there.

The one bummer was that my now very old Nest thermostat couldn't control two-stage heat and AC, you had to choose one or the other. Meh, whatever, I just bought the newer one. After being in for this much ($8,600), it is what it is. I wanted to stick with Nest so I could still control both from the same place, and their ability to use a remote sensor is necessary. Our upstairs thermostat is in the hallway near the two-story open area around our living room, so all of the downstairs heat lands there, and so it's not the same temperature as the bedrooms. I don't know why they didn't put the thermostat in the primary bedroom. We use the remote sensor in our room, which is as much as two or three degrees cooler in summer. The same phenomenon happens downstairs in my office, but I only use the sensor when I'm working, other wise the rest of the downstairs is too cold.

I saw a recent interview with Billie Eilish that covered a wide range of topics. As I watched, I kept thinking about how right out of the gate she scored Grammys and Oscars and a lot of attention as a teenager. Now turning 23, she has three albums, and each one has been better than the last. She's taking singing lessons. She's playing arenas without her brother or parents on tour. And mercifully, she seems to remain grounded, which seems to be tough for talented young people who get famous fast. The exciting thing is that, at the moment, it seems like her best days are ahead of her.

Yeah, it's another midlife topic.

When we think about our lives to date, and what may lie in the future, I know that a lot of people get nostalgic. Regardless of the quality of the days and years behind you, can you really imagine a time when your best isn't ahead of you? I suspect that a lot of people are miserable because they don't believe that to be true. If you can't believe it, the feelings in that hole are likely those of resentment, disappointment and anger. You know how people go to high school reunions and say things like, "They really peaked in high school?" It would suck to be that person. (I don't know what people say at reunions... I've not been to one, and don't really care to.)

I am firmly in the camp of believing that my best days are ahead of me. This isn't evidence-based, but it is based on intent. It's hard to define what constitutes a "good" life, and it certainly changes as we go, but by default I can't see how I would not see continuous improvement. We're always taking in new information, doing different things, and hopefully, retain a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. How could the best days not be ahead?

This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the whole "make America great again" slogan is total nonsense. If we're not our greatest now, when were we? When we had slavery? When woman couldn't vote? People had less freedoms? (Apparently that last one is a "yes" for a lot of people.) If you're pining for a time when any of that was real, cool, but don't force your sad nostalgia on the rest of us.

Billie is gonna have even better days. Be like Billie.

If you're a Pitch Perfect fan like me, then you know the definition of good comfort food movies and you know this scene. In the second movie, the brilliant Keegan-Michael Key, as Becca's Boss, delivers the following in a staff meeting at his music studio when a video screen doesn't work:

Dax... did you call the tech guy? Do you understand that everything else in my life just works? So, I just need everything else here to work too, OK?

I'm not sure why, probably his delivery, but it cracks my shit up every single time. The exhaustion in his voice is relatable no matter what you do in life. And I've been feeling that sentiment a lot lately.

I don't think that anyone is wholly bad at anything. We all have wins and losses in life, parenting, work, etc. But there are times where it feels like the losses are emphasized while the wins are trivialized or disregarded. That's where I am right now, and it's exhausting.

Unlike Becca's Boss, my need isn't so much that everyone around me keep the ship running tip-top. What I need is for others to recognize my value and accomplishments. I need advocates (as I've written recently). I'm not perfect, but I get some great things done. It'd be nice to hear that once in awhile. Maybe not everything, but most things in my life that I'm responsible for are working. I just need to hear it.

One of my heroes once said in an interview that people want to be respected, valued and appreciated. That's not a revolutionary declaration, and it shouldn't be controversial. But how many people do it? I don't care if it's with people you interact with in retail or people you manage or coach. This has to be part of your social DNA. It's not that hard. If I can practice it, despite sometimes lacking the ability to read the room (#ASD), everyone can. This is 100x true for people who purport to be leaders.

When things are working, recognize.

We made the decision today to replace the upstairs HVAC system (there is one for each floor, because one for the whole house would be inefficient, especially in Central Florida). Last night, we turned the AC back on, and the outside unit did not work. It was last used for heat two days ago. This time, as was the case last year, the controller board failed. Over the years, we've sunk a few grand into fixing this thing, and that's not counting the warranty work performed in the first few years. Pulte installed the cheapest Lennox crap they could find, and there was even a class action over the quality of the coils.

The replacement is gonna be $8,600, an expense we were not planning for, but there is a $2,000 energy efficiency tax credit. We just got tired of putting money into something that breaks literally annually. We happen to be in a time of year where demand is much lower (good luck getting a service tech same-day in July), and we'll be just inside the window to not require a different refrigerant, as Congress has put an end to CFC use in these. The newer systems use something just slightly flammable, which requires more safety and makes everything a little more expensive starting in 2025. I know, you'd think I'd wait for the greener thing, but I already hate putting money into something like this.

The bummer is that we had that money earmarked to replace our carpet, another cheap-ass thing that Pulte installed. It has virtually no pad, is bunching up everywhere, and looks like a dozen people have lived here for decades, instead of three people over seven years. I was gonna say that we almost got through the year without a major unplanned expense, but I forgot about The Great Disney Car Crash. Still bitter about that one, and it's not actually resolved. We'd have one less car payment if that hadn't happened.

It's not lost on me that I'm fortunate that the birth lottery put me in a spot where this is not a life altering event. But it definitely messes with my mental health as yet another thing to create cognitive load. I'm so looking forward to the opportunity to turn my brain off in another week or so.

It's hard to believe, but Diana just reached her 10-year anniversary working at Dr. Phillips Center For The Performing Arts. She wasn't full-time until recently, but she has been a house manager for more time than she wasn't. Combined with years of being Broadway subscribers, and then founding donors in 2021, it's crazy how connected we are to that place. While it's certainly not puppies and rainbows every day at work for her, what a privilege to work in a place that so many people have an emotional attachment to, and have emotional experiences in.

Meanwhile, I'm just a few weeks away from hitting my third anniversary at my job, which will be a new record for me. As I'm sure people who are close to me know, working in technology can involve a strangely ephemeral job cycle. Part of that is because of contract work, which I think I've done for about four years out of my career. You know those gigs are finite in length. But I've also worked for countless smaller companies that are financial question marks, owned by private equity or otherwise fickle about retention. The other thing is that it's often difficult to advance in terms of career growth or salary in this line of work by staying put. At smaller companies, it's because there's nowhere to go, and at larger companies, well, they're just corporate machines that get rigid in structure.

While three years will be a new record for me, I'm not anxious to go elsewhere. Work is definitely challenging at times, and sometimes it's not. That's where I am in terms of career. I have ideas about what the "ideal" role for me might be, but they're positions that don't really exist in most places. I do know that I don't think I want to go up to a director level in a company this size, because it's too far from the technology. In a smaller company, I could be a "VP" but still involved in tech decisions, but that becomes less and less so as companies get bigger. For the size I'm at, I've got a solid balance of technology, leadership, mentorship and, sometimes, influence. It's satisfying. Some companies don't even use technical people in management positions (like Disney).

I can't predict how long it will last, but I hope the answer is "years." That's the other thing about technology, is that when things change, they tend to change quickly. A bad quarter, changes in investors, economic shifts, restructuring, etc., can happen at any time. But my former boss was with the company for a decade, through various mergers and changes, so you never know. I've been fortunate even to have most of the same team, and even more fortunate to enjoy working with them because they were not my hires. Here's hoping for more anniversaries.

"But isn't that what you do in your day job?" one may ask. Well, yes, I work in software engineering, but as a manager of people. Mind you, it's a technical management position, unlike what a lot of companies do when they hire people to "supervise" almost entirely in an HR capacity. So yes, my team ships stuff all of the time, but I'm not writing the code. When I ship, it's my open source stuff.

I've said before that I try to ship POP Forums at least once a year, typically at or around the latest release of .Net, which is Microsoft's open source platform/tools later in the year. This is another year where what I'm shipping is not big on user-facing stuff, but v21 is not without bug fixes and a lot of refactoring in the background. It also updates to all of the latest libraries that it depends on, in order to prevent the "rot" that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, I added "dark mode" to my personal music cloud service, which is the thing where if you have your phone or computer set to render stuff with black backgrounds instead of white. This sounds trivial, probably, but I use it every single day, typically when sitting in bed at the end of the day. I don't need to light up the room and waking up Diana when choosing tunes. How important is this app to me? Well, since I wrote it in late 2020, with my family, we've listened to 70,000 tracks. That's no joke. I've never done a formal release with that app, because there are some little things that are wonky here and there. Maybe eventually.

Shipping stuff is satisfying.

I'm often surprised by the way I can draw parallels between Simon and I, as far as tendencies related to autism and ADHD. My observations on motivation yesterday are an example of that. The bits about being overwhelmed land very squarely on me right now, because life is going to be like that for the next two weeks, until the semester is over and I have 13 straight days of non-work.

The parallels come with a lot of empathy, but also acknowledgment that we are different in many ways. I think the big themes of the way he interacts and interprets the world are similar, though the intensity differs. He's always been far more sound sensitive than I was, but we both had issues walking in sand when we were very little. We definitely have a lot of common experience already socially, and that's heartbreaking. We find it easy to retreat in electronic bliss, though our game preferences are different. We both find comfort in the foods that we like, though he actually will eat more than I would at his age, though it's still limited. (And sidebar... we won't force him to eat things... I think that fucked up my relationship with food permanently.) And of course, we both struggle with scenarios that simply can't be logically reconciled.

So the good news is that I generally feel his pain and his joy as if it were my own. The bad news is that this only goes so far toward making me parent "good." While the empathy runs deep, and I often know exactly where he is emotionally, I don't always react well. And sure, I have my own shit, but sometimes his actions trigger a lot of anger. Some of it is just fear based, because when he says that he can't do something, I rage a bit. I want him to problem solve and self-advocate. Technically I suppose my fear induced rage is a twisted kind of love, but it's not good for either of us. My other big trigger is when he seems oblivious to the impact he's having on our time, even though I know that the amphetamines have long since worn off and a hundred things are competing for his attention.

I have so much anxiety about how he'll do as an adult, and I have to remind myself that a lot of the things that seem like deficiencies have come around, just a little later than what is typical. And I know that his written composition ability can improve, but he needs specific, targeted instruction for that, and I don't think that he's getting it, and I don't even know how to ask for it. I can't even hire experts because there are so few people trained in this area. I'm biased because I'm a writer, and I view the world's opportunity through that lens.

To my credit, I'm getting better about how I interact with him, because it wears on me to do it poorly. A lot of it isn't even about him, it's about my frustration over not knowing how to help him, even though I can empathize. The one thing that I can be confident of though, is that I am at least present. I guess some of my damage is useful.

I hate how much power Google has, and I'm thrilled that they were found to be a monopoly in the ad and search market. I'm skeptical that any resolution will help me as an independent publisher, but dare to dream, I guess.

That said, I have to admit that I'm actually insanely satisfied with their hardware support. When we got hit with lightning (the second time), I inquired on the Twitter to Google directly if you could buy replacement bases for our Nest thermostats, because they got fried. Google thought this was interesting, and replaced them for free, despite being more than four years old. When I had my original A-Series Pixel Buds, and one stopped holding a charge, they replaced them under warranty (unfortunately one broke more than a year after that). Now one of Simon's buds stopped putting out most of the sound (as if it has a woofer and tweeter, and the woofer died), and again they offered a prompt replacement under warranty. After a Nexus phone and four iterations of Pixel phones, plus a Nexus and three phones for Diana, and one for Simon, we've not had any issues with any of those. We have a bunch of smart speakers that were all free or won, and don't use most of them, but they're solid. Last year we added a Pixel Tablet, with the cool speaker stand/charger, to our living room to drive audio via Bluetooth to the receiver, and it's fantastic. Diana got a Pixel Watch free with my phone, and she loves it.

They seem to be totally hosing the Fitbit line, which is unfortunate, but I haven't needed one of those in awhile. For everything that we've purchased, or scored free, we've been totally satisfied. We even use their phone service, Google Fi (referral link for $20 off), which gives us a $25 credit per line every time there's a hurricane.

Google is a lot of things, some of them evil, some of them not. I think their hardware is top notch.

I was having a conversation about Simon and school work, and the other person suggested that he wasn't motivated to do it. For a few years, I also thought that this was the problem, until it was explained that ADHD has a nasty habit of causing the brain to constantly try and decide what to pay attention to. Motivation isn't the problem, it's locking down on the thing that you have to do.

And of course, I know exactly how that works. Acknowledging my "thought spirals" is a fairly recent development, but I deeply understand it from experience. I remember my senior year of college in particular how difficult it was. I remember having to read in American Literature, and write about it, and I can tell you that I was motivated because without it I'd be one credit short to graduate (and also not establish the double major). But I was constantly bogged down in things large and small, whether it be gaming out my next career moves after graduation, or figuring out what the hell I was gonna eat because I was so poor and living off-campus. That book couldn't compete.

This seems abstract and foreign to people who don't experience it. Some people even claim to have no internal dialog, which seems impossible. I can only imagine how well I would sleep if I didn't have that. But it's real, and it affects everything that I do.

Where Simon and I differ is that I've had decades to develop coping strategies, and he has not. These are not deliberate plans, mind you, but rather behavioral action that largely comes out of necessity. High school and college, it was bad. Work requires you to, uh, work, so you can keep your job and get paid. The stakes are different, so you internally find ways to focus on the things. When I was actively writing code, I was not turning out work as fast as my peers, and it was partly because the work happens on a computer connected to the Internet, and also because my skill level made it harder to get to the desired outcomes. Motivation had nothing to do with it. I had an iPhone back then when it first came out, but fortunately you couldn't really do anything with it. I didn't really develop coping mechanisms until I managed more people.

I have two things fueling some degree of focus, my coping strategies, though it's certainly not the hyperfocus I enjoy on certain things. The first thing is that my general empathy for others means I feel a responsibility to them. At work, this means that filling out some simple form for some administrative purpose could be slow going, but a task that benefits a colleague I try to get done as quickly as possible. The second thing is that my anxiety doesn't like me to be overwhelmed, because then I just stop doing everything. The key to combat that is get it done as quickly as possible. That's why I'm inbox-zero most of the time. This translates to home life sometimes, too. When I cook, I wash dishes as I go because I can't deal with the pile. Conversely, I haven't cut my documentary because I don't owe it to anyone, and frankly I'm already overwhelmed by the volume of footage. Motivation isn't the issue.

The point is that you can't assume that someone with ADHD isn't motivated, because there's more going on than you can obviously see. Unfortunately, people still don't like to acknowledge it or get tested as an adult, so you may default to thinking a person is unmotivated. We've gotta change that.

As has been the case since I landed my console in April, I've had a lot of start-stop action in learning all the things. I have my half-dozen physical lights on a truss in my office (because who doesn't do that?), and I can put everything away pretty quickly so I'm not crowded in. It's not as clean as having the non-PC version, but I didn't have to mortgage the house to buy it. I'm fairly comfortable now with basic programming. Theatrical style, cue-based stuff I could do in my sleep. Broader effects I'm OK doing, and the thing that I really love is the use of recipes. Basically you can create components of looks (positions, colors, etc.) and save those to presets, then use a recipe to make up cue or effect. That's great because, if you were on a tour for example, and the singer's position was for some reason not where it should be, you could just correct that position preset, and not have to mess with an overall effect.

But programming stuff isn't the same as designing it, and I want to be good at both. After looking at some of the design tools, it appears that the vast majority of pros are using either Vectorworks or Capture. The latter is made specifically for lighting design, and can do basic scenic stuff as well. Vectorworks is CAD software that has a number of specialty variations, including straight up architecture, but also landscape design and entertainment stuff that includes lighting and scene design. While both can output MVR files ("my virtual rig") for use in consoles, and both can visualize output from consoles, Vectorworks is far more capable. It's also more complicated, but their education stuff is pretty extensive. The pricing models vary, where Capture costs more up front with cheap annual upgrades, while Vectorworks is an annual subscription, and is 50% off right now. Neither is cheap, but good tools rarely are.

So I've started to work through the intro classes online. My hope is that I can absorb enough quickly and quite literally model my office and the six lights on a truss. Making real things is the way that I learn best. I figure once I've got that, I'll create some kind of basic stage and rig. That's kind of fun, because I can use the most expensive fixtures possible since they're not real. I'm kind of obsessed with the MagicBlade FX from Ayrton. They're $3,800 each, so I won't be getting any of those for home use.

I still can't say where this will lead in the long run, but it brings me joy. I can't tell you how badly teenage me wanted to be able to do this sort of thing, and back then, I suspect the people who did were in the dozens at most. Things sure have changed!

I was going to write about feeling burnout as we enter the holiday season, but it looks like I already did this fall, and do most years.

Not sure why I can't prevent it.

I think I realized at some point this year that I'm more of a bartending enthusiast than I am cocktail enthusiast. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy drinking a good drink, but I think I like the making of beverages more. This is especially true as I find myself moderating compared to, say, the pandemic days. We hosted a baby shower for a friend in February, and then had a Big Summer Blowout, and in both cases I really enjoyed making drinks for people. I even made a little progress as far as garnishes go.

Renovating the home bar last year I think was a turning point. Prior to that, we had a few bottles of things to make our favorites that we learned on cruise ships, but as I developed a drink menu, I wanted to have more room and make it genuinely functional. With all of those mixology classes on cruises, the spectrum of things that were interesting to me kept getting bigger. The base spirits, mostly rum, vodka, tequila, gin and some kind of whisky, are easy enough, but there are so many liqueurs that make drinks cocktails. I remember one bartender pointing out that you can make almost anything better with St. Germaine, an elderflower infused liqueur, or Chambord, which has a black raspberry flavor. But you also probably need some kind of orange stuff, I use Solerno instead of Cointreau, certain schnapps, Midori, Licor 43, Frangelico, Disaronno, coffee rum, an Irish creme, and of course, we use a lot of flavored rums from Wicked Dolphin. Oh, other add-ons like vermouth, passion fruit stuff, and don't forget Filthy Cherries.

The hard part is that if you want to be able to make all of this stuff when someone randomly visits, you need to stock a lot of backups. Basically everything starts at $25 for a 750ml bottle (rum and schnapps usually less). It gets kind of expensive, and when I look at what we've spent this year, admittedly a lot of it going toward those two big parties, ouch. It's an expensive hobby.

But it's so satisfying to hear people say that they enjoy something you made. It's simpler than cooking or baking, sure, but there really is a sweet spot in how you mix stuff. Too often what you get it too sweet or too boozy. In good bars, it's fine, they want your feedback and they'll remake something if you don't like it. They want that feedback. But most restaurants and lessor places, not so much. It's why I don't get a lot of drinks outside of my home or on cruises. Making drinks for people is more intimate than cooking in a commercial setting, because the person doing the thing is right in front of you.

My next opportunity to serve will be when my Seattle family is in town, and I look forward to that. And to my local friends, the bar is open for you!

For the past year or so, I've noticed myself using my phone less and less. Sure, I still use it for texting, and all of the NYT games, but I find myself going to it less and less. I can't say that this was intentional, but in the last few months in particular, my usage has sunk.

Keep in mind that I also haven't used notifications for anything other than text, my personal email, and up until recently, news headlines. I've actually never enabled notifications for social media, I don't have work email on my phone, and Slack is restricted to business hours. When the phone is sitting on my desk, it's not asking me to look at it. That obviously goes a long way toward reducing the time wasting.

I've talked about this before, that one of the core issues is that social media stopped being social a long time ago. The algorithm just feeds you a steady stream of pointless shit from advertisers, celebrities and randos that it thinks you will care about. The number of friends posting meaningful things makes for a very terrible signal to noise ratio. If that weren't enough, Facebook can't even get in-app notifications right, so when I post something or respond to them, I never know about it. That also means no dopamine stream from likes. I am using the socials more as a diary. I post photos to Instagram, which forwards to Facebook, and I'll share links of interesting to me things. I'm a writer, not much of a reader.

So when you take out the antisocial media, there isn't a lot left, other than the aforementioned games. I do Wordle, Strands, Connections and the crosswords every day. I use my web-based music app nightly. I read tech news at lunch, aggregated by Feedly. I do utilitarian things like adjust the temperature in the house or turn on lights. It's not that I don't find the device useful, it's that I just don't spend time doomscrolling anymore. It's boring.

I still find myself pulling out my phone in a moment of boredom, but what happens is that I open the 'Gram and scroll a little, see some cats or friend posts, algorithm willing, and a few minutes later I realize how little this is doing for me. I'm starting to realize how much cognitive overhead there is in doing it, and now I choose not to engage too much in it. I think watching others doomscroll, whether it be bored parents at Walt Disney World, or certain older adults in my life, and I think, shit, I don't want that. There are too many thing to be present for, and I say that as a work-from-home person with a fairly small real life social circle.

What I'm starting to see now is that I'm getting a lot of time back, and it moves slower. In some ways it also forces me to think about stuff that is uncomfortable, but that mental bandwidth used to be spent on mindless scrolling. I'll be honest, that's probably not great for my anxiety, but looking at the shit show dumpster fire of online culture was hardly helping my anxiety. There are other things I spend that time on now, including more writing (much of which I never post), reading, mostly technology and science stuff, lots of video games, and all of my usual hobby stuff.

I think I can genuinely say that I feel better, even though the net feels are likely on edge because I have a hard time letting go of injustices and slights that frankly are not easy to change. I spend a lot of time working on that with my therapist. But I'm surprised at how often I get the urge to pull out my phone, and I don't. The other night I was in line to get food at WDW, and it was busy, and I left it in my pocket (missing Diana's text in a different line, oops). It's funny what you observe, if drunken tourists are funny. But even little things like the tile work inside of the Morocco pavilion, or the chefs preparing food, or an overheard conversation about the cider flight at a different stand. There's so much life happening around you, and I promise it's more interesting than anything on a 6-inch screen. Also, WTF if you're at Disney. You can doomscroll at home, where it's cheaper.

If you think I have a judgmental tone about this, you are correct. I owe much of my success to the Internet and the devices that work on it. They're tools that enable a great many valuable things, and I don't want to discount that. But recent research shows that people are spending close to five hours per day looking at their phones, almost a third of their waking time, and of that time, more than a third is on social apps. That ratio is even higher for younger people and active older people. I just can't believe that all of that time spent isn't missing out on something else. The thing that makes it worse is that so many people don't apply critical thinking to what they see online, and I fear that our society is getting dumber, by choice.

So what are my stats? It's hard to get a read on notification counts, because I do have reminders for my work calendar (they're not reliable on the desktop), and I do allow Slack notifications during business hours (they can reach over a hundred some days). My daily unlocks appear to be in the high 30's most days, which is less than expected. Total screen time per day looks to average three hours, and the "winner" most days is NYT Games, accounting for an hour to 90 minutes most days. Feedly is a close second, as my gateway to tech news like ArsTechnica and The Verge, mostly, clocking in at an hour. My Facebook usage varies, and it looks like it counts time reading articles spawned from it, but today it was 12 minutes, and the most I can find is 50. Instagram appears similar, but without the spikes because I'm not reading news from it. Chrome is the next big one, and the sites I spend the most time on are my own.

I feel better using my phone less. Your mileage may vary, but give it a whirl.

I was texting to a former coworker, a guy that reported to me, but not long enough frankly to really get to know him before I, uh, "departed" the company. He asked me if I was still using my home grown music service, MLocker. I told him that, yes, at this point, it has streamed tens of thousands of songs and is used by my entire family. In fact, it's been four years now. As he put it... "The world needs more software like that. Purpose-driven, scratch-your-own-itch type of stuff." I wonder if it could have any potential as a profitable app.

This exchange was extremely flattering, even though he specifically hasn't really taken advantage of my curiosity project. I'm literally listening to music being served by this service right now. While I'm still proud of the longevity of CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz/Guide To The Point, the fact that I use this music app that I built literally every day is uniquely gratifying. I can't think of anything else that I've ever built that is so regularly used by me and my family. Putting aside my preference to own music instead of subscribe to it for a moment, what I made is the functional equivalent of those huge subscription services. And it lands in a profound way because, as I'm sure many can agree, music is an integral and important part of my life.

I've had a great many ideas over the years around "good" ideas for software, and made many of them real. It's a little frustrating though how none of them were likely to become a business. There are two ideas that I've prototyped that theoretically could be this. One is a social media clone that has no algorithm, no ads, just friends posting stuff, but I've mostly left it. People tell me they're interested, but would they give me money for it? I also have a theme park idea that wouldn't net a ton of money, but it's a fun idea. I should flesh that out, even if it's just for the fun of it. Friends know what that is.

I had another blood draw yesterday for lipids, and my triglycerides are down 25% from two months ago. The only real change has been more movement (walking), though not yet as regular as it likely should be. They're still high, 276 mg/dL (150 is normal, up to 200 is "borderline"), but trending in the right direction.

This has been weird because it appears that most people who respond well to a statin, and my LDL "bad" cholesterol is "optimal" and below normal according to the lab, also see their TG's go down. Mine, stubbornly, have not, over the last three years, when I started taking rosuvastatin. Even when I was actively exercising, back in 2005, I registered a high 300's once. Admittedly, my diet was not good then. I had just cut beef from my diet, too. But it does seem like my normal has always been stubbornly high. I don't respond well to other drugs meant to treat the high TG's, so exercise is probably all I've got.

I've read a lot of medical journal papers on this subject, and it's interesting stuff. The 150 designation as normal is essentially the mean value across the majority of people, which feels kind of arbitrary. The problem is that LDL and triglycerides, typically, are high together, and LDL is known to be a risk factor for cardiac events. It's not clear that high TG's do the same. One study, a few years old, concluded that high TG risk for cardiac events levels off at 150. They are known to cause some hardening of arteries, and extremely high can cause pancreatitis (my related labs for that are all good). So it's not that I don't take it seriously, I'm just not convinced that science can show conclusively that the high-ish levels I tend to have are any worse than being at 150.

Anyway, the point is I need to get off my ass more. That problem is entirely psychological, and I talk to my therapist about that one.

Growing up in the inner-city Cleveland school district, in the midst of desegregation (or "bussing," as white adults liked to call it), I vividly remember lessons about the importance of math and science. It was a point of patriotism that we, Americans, had been on the forefront of technology, even in the 70's as many industries began to change. We'd go to our local NASA museum, see the moon rock, or the health museum to see how medicine was allowing us to live longer. (I also remember a computer that estimated your longevity, my first real chance to contemplate death, at age 8.) I found it to be inspiring and exciting. And while I didn't understand geopolitical and economic issues at the time, it seemed like a good thing that we were "better" at this stuff than the Soviets. For those who don't remember, the Soviet Union was the communist government that included Russia and surrounding countries. Ugh, that I feel like I need to qualify that plays into my eventual point.

These days, the US is not leading so much. According to a list of PISA/OECD rankings on Wikipedia, from 2022, we rank 34th in math, 16th in science and 9th in reading education. There are only 193 countries in the world. Yikes. Because of COVID, they don't have China listed, but they were 6th in math an 10th in science in 2015. Most of Asia and Europe outrank us, and Singapore is #1 in all three categories. Why does this matter? Because much of American economic identity is rooted in being first at things, most at things, inventing things. We have to educate leaders and the general population to have those achievements. I don't think economic nationalism makes sense, because you can't reverse globalism, but to be "winning," you can't be behind your next biggest economies like China.

This isn't a problem with teachers, I don't think. They're overworked, underpaid, and most of those that I get to know are aspirationally trying to level us all up. But college is often too expensive, many districts are underfunded and outcomes are tied largely to the socioeconomic status of the people near schools. I think those are solvable problems, but there's a bigger issue at the moment.

At some point, and definitely during the pandemic, a loud portion of the population started to question the very science that was going to pull us out of the pandemic. The experts got some things wrong early on, reasonably so given the speed at which it all happened, but applied the scientific method and critical thinking to course correct. Then it got political. Republicans died more from COVID than Democrats by 15%. Since then, some areas are seeing a resurgence in disease because of vaccine skepticism. Conventional, non-fad dietary advice is being tossed out the window in favor of incorrect things people on the Internet say. People insist that they can "do their own research," but they don't understand that research isn't parroting things they find online. Worse yet, and I think this is the thing to fight, is that knowing things and being educated is somehow a sort of elitism. The people we championed in those museums I went to as a kid are, inexplicably, now the bad guys.

We have to reverse this. Being educated and engaging in critical thinking has to be made cool again. There is this swelling sense that we must be the best "again," but I can say with certainty that we can't be the best if we're not willing to do the work. The work is turning out scholars, researchers, doctors, engineers, and yes, even lawyers. Expertise is not a phantom quality produced by conspiracy theories, it's made real by education and commitment to critical thinking. Is that really something that should be controversial?

I saw Bill Nye a few years ago, and he leaned hard into the need for critical thinking. He explained what it is and how to practice it. He has a Masterclass about it. When presented with evidence, we need to potentially modify our world view, even if it is uncomfortable. And that's the weirdest part of it... Science should not be uncomfortable. We do have a shared reality, and feelings will not make reality less real. If the evidence of something comes from a person who has spent their entire life studying, trust their research, because your Google search does not best their decades of experience and knowledge. If they present evidence, it likely can be independently verified.

Education and expertise is important. If we don't embrace that, we will be left behind by the rest of the world. We're already slipping.

I'm not sure if it's a particularly remarkable milestone, but I made my 1,400th commit to POP Forums since I switched to using Git over Mercurial or Subversion or whatever it was that I was using back then. That was on March 10, 2013, but my first line of code in the post-Active Server Pages days would have been in 2001. I'm not sure when exactly I moved from CodePlex to Github, but probably in 2014. This commit today was to refactor a bunch of poorly named things, and was preceded by a bug that was performing authentication on things it didn't have to. I found it totally by accident, when I noticed that photo grids on CoasterBuzz were slow to load, followed by a ton of Redis cache errors asking for the same data, about the same user. It shouldn't have been looking for those for photos. I'm still curious about why it couldn't accommodate 20 simultaneous calls for the same data, but if I understand that library right, it may make sense. I dunno, the problem is solved, so maybe I don't care about the cache thing.

This serves as a good example of how software is never really "done." At the very least, you have to update the platforms, frameworks and libraries that your stuff runs on. Some of them go away entirely, and the forums have been on three different platforms (technically runtimes, I guess). Heck, it used to be that it could only run on a Windows server, and now it runs in containers on Linux cloud resources. You have to do that updating because eventually whatever it's running on won't be supported, or even available. The frameworks tend to change, sometimes in big ways, which is why that authentication bug crept into the code base.

If you've made it this far, you probably nerd hard, but on the off chance that you're more of a business person who doesn't work in my biz, I hope this makes sense and you take it to heart. You can't just build something once and use it for the rest of time. The longer you wait to update or replace it, the harder it will be. Everyone became acutely aware of this for Y2K, but I think it's time to remind people.

My other motivations include being a performance junkie (pages rendering now in under 30ms), and trying to keep some kind of street cred among coworkers (manager credibility). It also allows me to better understand how hyperfocus works, though unfortunately it seems like it still only switches on if I really, really care about it. It's not that I didn't care about writing code at work back in the day, but the motivation and reason for engagement was different. As a manager I'm context switching constantly, which plays to ADHD strength, I think, but every once in awhile I get in front of something where my architectural advice has been requested, and that switches on the hyperfocus.

I'm gonna try and get v21 out by the end of the year, which is a little later than usual. It won't be a feature-rich release, but there's quite a bit of tuning and organization under the hood that's deeply satisfying.

There are a lot of times in life where we encounter extreme disappointment in people. Like, sometimes I wonder where the heroes are. There are so few people in the world that I look up to, and that's a drag. Those are the folks the I find inspiring. I'm not talking necessarily about famous people, but also folks in your community and profession. I've recently had an overwhelming bout of that disappointment, and that's not even getting into the election where we elected a racist.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that I'm a hero to anyone, or that I haven't disappointed others. I'm sure that I have. Mind you, I don't want to. I want to enrich the lives of others, not disappoint them. There are a few people who have been very kind in telling me that I have been the opposite of disappointment to them, and for that I'm grateful. It's what makes me want to be good for the world and good for others.

Disappointment comes as a result of missed expectations. Who is setting the expectations is, I suppose, tricky, but many are typical parts of our social fabric. You expect teachers to be kind to children, you expect parents to be interested, doctors to care, bosses to be fair. Sometimes you're just enamored with how well a person does something, only to find in the long run that they're not what you expected.

I've encountered a lot of disappointment lately. It's not a good feeling. But it has also caused me to see others who are more exceptional than perhaps I realized. Obviously the spectrum of non-disappointment is huge, and it relates back to my suggestion that what gives you meaning and purpose doesn't necessarily have to be grand. A lot of small things add up. For that, I find optimism.

I think it's a reasonable generalization that people spend a lot of time trying to figure out their identity and purpose. Identity can come from a great many things, including your race, gender or ethnicity, work, relationships, hobbies, art... it's probably a long list. Intertwined with identity is purpose, and that's something that can vary in scope from remarkable to everyday typical. Together these may offer a reason to get up in the morning.

Identity can have a lot to do with pride, which is one of trickier human emotions. There are often a lot of reasons that we should be proud of who we are, but it's usually an accepted social contract that one's pride should not come at the expense of others, or be used to make others feel like they're less valuable. Perhaps an unintentional side effect of pride is that others who do not share in your pride may feel excluded. I'm not a psychologist, but my assumption is that not being comfortable in your own identity may contribute to the feeling of exclusion. Not being a part of things doesn't feel good.

On the topic of feeling excluded, I feel like I have more expertise than I'd like. I genuinely feel like I've been a fish out of water most of my life. It's not that I haven't felt safe or secure in any specific place, I just don't feel like I've been a part of any real community. My social circles have always been small, I think maybe four years of my professional career total had me feeling like a part of something, and I'm not really a part of any group. I'd be lying if I said that this never made me sad, but for the most part I understand better than ever what my capacity is for inclusion in any particular group, and I'm good with it. No one is really intentionally excluding me these days.

Being a white, heterosexual male raised Christian in a mostly middle-class family does not really put me in any deep identity category. Sometimes I envy the communities of some of my friends, though some of those communities are necessary because they're marginalized by, well, people like me. Certainly I don't seek to marginalize anyone. My coach and cheerleader tendencies are an important part of my identity, especially in a professional sense. I'm an ally to marginalized groups not because I want to be some kind of white savior, it's just morally the right thing to do. I remember reading in grade school a passage from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," and it has had a lasting impression on me.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

On the surface, it may seem like he's naming scapegoats here, but when you are part of a marginalized group, it's not by accident, someone is doing it. King's assertion is that the folks on the fence are the ones who can really make change possible. Their apathy only preserves the status quo, or worse, allows us to slip backward.

I don't know if people self-identify as "white moderates" these days. But there are an increasing number of Americans who appears to believe that their identity is at risk of being marginalized. Some portion of white folks are in that pool, and often it includes men of varying races. I think there are several things fueling this. The first is that we seemed to be having a reckoning of civil rights in 2020 during the pandemic. Racially motivated violence, some of it perpetrated by law enforcement, on the heels of the #metoo movement, made it loud and clear that we could not continue to allow inequality to reign. Art forms, especially Hollywood, started to recognize the value of representation in front of and behind the camera. (Mind you, this inclusion just makes more business sense.) Algorithms started to reinforce the idea that all of this desire for equality and representation would come at the expense of white people and men. Whatever identity is carried in being white and/or male was said to be threatened.

Now, it's reasonable to observe that backing anyone into a corner will activate a defensive response. And if there are people who keep telling you that you're being backed into a corner, eventually you start to believe it. It's probably obvious where I'm going with this. The election made it pretty clear that a lot of people felt backed into a corner.

The problem is that it just ain't true, but how do you convince them of that? I'm demographically part of that group, and I can assure you, whatever identity I may have rooted in being a white hetero dude is not at risk. I still have all of the advantages. But being equal with women and people of color does not reduce my standing in the world. The great irony is that there's a backlash against equity and inclusion efforts, because of this belief in a meritocracy. But those equity and inclusion efforts are specifically intended to get us to a meritocracy and ensure that it's real, not reverse the inequity.

I don't know how you fix it. So much of it is rooted in fear and mistrust of people who are different, and when you try to label it for what it is, racism, misogyny, etc., people understandably get defensive. They're backed in a corner. But this is still hate, and it only serves to further marginalize people. People are actually hurt by this. I believe that the morally correct thing to do is to put my own identity aside, understand that it is not at risk, and strive to make others my equal. If you think you're backed into a corner, I invite you to talk to people who are worried about not surviving a traffic stop, or harassed at work for being a woman, or viewed with disgust for who they love. I can empathize with anyone for feeling marginalized, but only if they can engage in the critical thinking to understand whether or not their identity and wellbeing is actually at risk. Unfortunately, that critical thinking has largely given way to beliefs that are not rooted in a shared reality.