The blog home of Jeff Putz

We're still two weeks off from the shortest day of the year, but it can't start going the other way soon enough. Tonight I hit 6, and was like, I've got six hours before I'm going to go to bed. That's a long-ass time. So much time for activities!

So what am I doing with that time? I am starting to get back into coding, sort of. Getting an AI subscription has made it fun again because I don't have to deal with the drudgery of stuff that's boring. It also means a lot of waiting around for it to do stuff. Obviously I'm playing a lot of pinball, and my scores are starting to average a lot higher. I'm closing in on my thousandth game on Stern Insider, too, most of which are on our machine. I'm writing more, though not publishing everything, necessarily. Oh, I cranked out a basic lighting rig in Vectorworks right before my subscription ran out, with 50-ish instruments. I'll sit down with that again soon I'm sure. I have a song in mind.

I do feel anti-social to an extent, but I'm very much connecting this to the life of a remote worker. To be fair, we recently went to a show with a friend, we're going to a show this week, and Simon is involved in a theater class that by extension gets me out of the house. And we have lots of plans the rest of the month.

I'm so over early darkness though.

Simon is going through a phase where he says he's bored and wants me to do something with him. This makes sense, because I'm pretty sure that he's outgrowing some of the gaming stuff he was into, as that used to be a primary leisure-time activity for him. But I also find myself telling him that he needs to learn to be bored.

When you're bored, I think it makes you more curious. Being curious leads to new adventures, or at the very least, new interests. Curiosity keeps you learning, too. So in that sense, boredom is a very useful thing. It also gives you time to reflect, gain perspective and rest the mind.

Venturing into social commentary (because where else did you think I would go with this?), I really believe that folks are often incapable of boredom. And yes, it's because of those doom-scrolling devices, or more specifically, anti-social apps. You see it everywhere, even at a place as over-stimulating as a theme park. If there's even the slightest moment of boredom, out come the phones. If you don't see it, you're probably doing the same thing.

Try this: Next time you're waiting for something, or queueing, at the airport or the grocery store, keep your phone in your pocket. Look around, watch people. Observe. If you're really ambitious, try talking to people. If my eye contact-avoiding autistic ass can do it, so can you. I think whatever momentary human connection you have will be far more rewarding than pulling out your dumbphone.

The cure to boredom isn't electronic stuff, it's curiosity.

You know how the Internet can make something untrue fester into alleged fact? This is one of those things, and it drives me nuts.

Getting crystal clear ice is a neat bar trick that is typically achieved by freezing it in a directional manner. It's why ice on the surface of a lake is typically a lot clearer than what you'd find deeper. In your freezer, this can be achieved by putting the water in a deep container that's insulated around the sides, but not the top. If the upper half is separated by small holes, the top bits freeze clear, while the lower part is cloudy.

What almost every words-on-the-Internet say is that this is because it forces the "impurities" to the bottom. This is bullshit. If this were actually true, then the purest of distilled and filtered water would freeze clear in conventional ice cube trays. But it doesn't. Distilled water has effectively no mineral content. The reason has nothing to do with minerals or whatever people claim is in the water. It's because of gases. I imagine it's mostly nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 (i.e., air). It's the air that gets forced down in the directional freezing.

Seriously, every "article" or how-to says it's impurities, but unless you consider air an impurity, it just ain't true.

I had an interesting conversation with my therapist, relative to my recent involuntary departure from Facebook. After a week of FOMO, I was pretty over it. (Sidebar: She asked if it bothered me about the non-justice of AI enforcement, and you'd think it would grind on me, but I don't really care.) But I told her that I still had an urge to post and/or share whatever happened to be on my mind.

It was her observation that most of her clients likely do it for the usual reasons, as in the likes or comments, the dopamine, or whatever they think it's doing to move the needle on some issue. But I'm a weird outlier (as usual), in that I never did it for any specific audience. This blog is kind of in that category too, in that I don't know who is reading it or why, but I don't really care either. My reason is that writing something down, and making it public or semi-public, allows me to process it and move on. That makes sense given the noise, thought spirals and constant context switching that goes on in my head. For whatever reason, writing composition is something that I can do quickly and clearly, in a way that the thought soup can't do. Making it non-private also, in my way of thinking, forces me to be authentic and honest.

When I see a cool music performance or funny comedy sketch, my first instinct is to share it, so it's a bummer when I can't do that. Oddly enough, if we're going back 15 years, this is the social behavior that social media was supposed to facilitate. Before the algorithms, ads, brands and ephemeral nonsense that fills the screens now. I still believe in this as a concept, I just don't know if there's a business model for it. I think paying something annually for it is the model, but I don't know if it's something that people would actually buy it.

There is another reason to post, which a friend of mine described as scrapbooking. This is where I wish I could have retrieved the data (their export after the fact appears broken), because especially as a parent, it's fun to see what you and your kid were up to ten years back. Sure, it's also an easy way to share the same with friends and family, but to me it's the analog to photo albums, only better annotated and tagged with locations.

I've been coding around software that covers the former scenario a bit, though I imagine it could to the latter. While I'm very much thinking about this for my own amusement, along with a few close friends, I suppose it could be a wider used thing, if they'd pay for it. It's not a complicated thing to build, and it's kinda fun to build, so even if it's just for me it's worth it. Then I can get the thoughts out.

So here's a fun thing I've come to realize. Whatever gains I've been able to make by using AI to write code, I lose in the time it takes for it to write code. Stay with me...

When I was coding full-time and not managing, my output was not as voluminous as that of my peers. Now I know that it's because I have ADHD, but at the time, I figured that maybe I was lazy. I now better understand that the then-undiagnosed condition made it hard for me to concentrate on the work, especially if I wasn't able to get into the zone, which I also now understand to be what they call hyperfocus. See also: working in a cubicle office with countless distractions. While I like to think that I wrote quality stuff, it was definitely hard to write as much as others.

Fast forward to today, and I'm mostly writing code for fun on my own time. I've been getting a little deeper into it lately because the AI tools are like having a junior to mid-level developer pairing with you. If you give it the right directions and scope, something that definitely takes some time to learn, the outcomes are pretty OK. But there is a dark side to this as well, and it comes with the whirling icons or messages like "noodling." As text scrolls by and Claude does its thing, the desire to go do something else is overwhelming. The return time for usable code (assuming it compiles) can be at least 30 seconds, which is an eternity for someone with ADHD. I've estimated that in the course of five minutes, my inner dialogue may context shift at least a hundred times. Thirty seconds is a very big window.

I've been unknowingly developing coping skills for ADHD my entire life. When I got the diagnosis four years ago (also ASD), I learned about how neurodivergence forces people to find the shortcuts, the hacks, the compensation for having a brain that's wired differently. But this is the first time since then that I've found something totally new that I'm not used to. And it's crazy that I'm trying to compensate for a machine that's supposed to be helping me!

A lot of this is still right-sizing the work for the AI. When you ask it to take a big swing, it often gets stuff very wrong. But when you model entities up front, think about efficient ways to do stuff, and really design a solution, it's like giving the AI well-formed ideas and letting it figure out the glue. That's the boring part anyway, so knock yourself out, Claude. I do wonder how folks stay focused with the start-stop rhythm of using AI.

I know this is obvious, that everyone knows the aesthetic, but why were there no railings on anything in Star Wars? It's already weird that everything was built with cavernous pits that went on forever, but you know, maybe have something there to keep anyone from falling?

Imagine being a building inspector or OSHA person working for the Empire. You can literally phone it in, because it doesn't matter if there's a deck with a giant hole that goes, somewhere. Need a bridge through that shaft where the tractor beam controls are? No problem, I'm sure that narrow walkway will be fine.

Meanwhile, at the rebel base, there are more trip hazards than you can possibly imagine. How do the droids get around? Don't they have a union?

I don't think the average person looking down at their phone could survive in the Star Wars universe.

Sundays, for me, have become a routine where I have a little too much time to think about stuff. I'm not going to write again about the constant noise in my head, but I do know that the best method of getting away from it is to be present in literally anything. Diana typically works, and Simon has become a little obsessed with going to the parks solo (which I suppose is better than sitting in front of the computer all day). I am left to my own devices, as they say.

I imagine that survival instincts, whatever bit humans have left, are the reason that we tend to inventory all of the sucky things. There is a lot of that, and much of it I can't control. Parenting is hard, and I wouldn't say I can control that either. But my caveman brain seems trained on knowing all of the bad stuff, past, present and future, and keeps me on high alert to be ready for the next thing. Of course, there's nothing actionable there, so you just feel defensive and gross.

But there are things that bring me joy that I can do. When I feed that positivity monster, it grows. It's just so hard to divert energy to it. It feels like you're fighting instinct. When I can get there though, it sure feels good. It's something that requires practice.

This is around the time of the year that I have to decide whether or not to re-up my Adobe subscription. It's super shady the way they do it now. If you do nothing, they charge you like $800 and that's that. But if you go on and try to cancel, they offer you a rate of $480 for a year. Like, if that's the way they're going to play it, why not just give me the better rate in the first place? I hate these stupid games. It's the kind of thing that SiriusXM used to do before they gave me a permanent forever rate of $10 or whatever. I don't really use it much anymore. I could probably just drop down to the photo tier, which is Photoshop and Lightroom. That's around $240, which is more reasonable. I don't use Premier at all, since I have a perpetual license (and free updates) for DaVinci Resolve, which is superior in every way. Illustrator and After Effects use are rare. I've probably used Acrobat more.

One bit of perspective: When the Adobe suite was boxed and perpetually licensed, I would typically buy the new version every two years, and spend $1,200 in aughts dollars. So technically, $480 is a deal. I just don't like how they go about it.

Then there's Vectorworks, which I decided to try about a year ago with a Black Friday deal. That's a legit CAD app that also does lighting. So full on rigs that you can export to MA3, plus a very nice visualizer. That was an expensive self-taught "class" so to speak, but for $900, I did actually learn quite a bit. I get the software to an extent, but it's really overkill since I'm not doing actual rigging, including weight and power stuff. But because it's also CAD, I could theoretically build anything in it, and 3D print it. I have a feeling that's yet another expensive hobby I could land in.

By contrast, the Vectorworks folks are actually very cool, and real humans. That makes sense given the cost and niche of their product. When I found a bug early in the subscription, they were very supportive. As I neared the end of my sub, they reached out and asked if there was anything they could do to help, though they weren't going to extend another discount, which I get. At least they're honest about it.

I keep having this experience where I'm like, "Oh, it's only 6:30, I have plenty of time for activities!" You'd think that I've never seen winter.

But despite the slight sense of dread, it's kind of energizing. I know intellectually that there aren't more hours in the evening, but it feels like it. I've found myself getting back into my various hobbies. I'm interested in too many things, and finish few of them. Ah the ADHD brain.

I did ship a new forum version today, though it only has one new feature.

I'm not gonna lie, life without Facebook is definitely better. Since getting bounced off of it by what I assume is AI enforcement, and a false positive to something, I've mostly confirmed what I already knew: The algorithm is for attention, not for tracking friends. There's a great video by the CEO of Patreon, of all people, spelling it out for you, if you don't already get it (embedded below).

It's weird how the doomscrolling can radicalize people, not in the terrorist sense, but in the "I'm a victim and it's 'their' fault" way. My experience has been that being a hetero white male has resulted in little to no systemic discrimination or disadvantage for me. No amount of DEI efforts, anti-racism or other corrective action has changed that. But I suppose if people are telling you anything enough, you might believe it. It's unfortunate that critical thinking hasn't headed this off. But while older generations subscribe to the, "If you see it on TV (or online), you can trust it," and the younger people don't remember three network newsmen whose credibility was everything. In many ways, a lot of people have never had to think critically.

Again, I was using FB less and less. It was basically a scrapbooking mechanism. I saw so little of friends, because Facebook's intent is not to keep you connected with friends. That ended years ago. The only issue, maybe, is that there are a few folks I was hanging on to in terms of contact, but I don't know if that was ever that important. Maybe it was just hanging on to feeling like I know people. I know for sure that not seeing endless things intended to enrage is better for me.

Hard to believe that it has been almost two years since I first tried using an AI agent to help write code. Looking back, I seemed really optimistic, but I recall giving it a ton of context, and the thing I was working on was specifically math. I tried again a few months ago to add a feature to POP Forums, and wasn't that excited about the results. Despite it being a mature code base, if not necessarily the most well-structured or coded, it just got a lot of stuff wrong. Maybe that was just the state of Github's Copilot, but that was not ideal.

A friend of mine kept raving about Claude Code, so I forked over $20 and gave it a shot on a new greenfield project that I started. I took the guidance to have it generate its own readme first, and it seemed to figure out a number of the conventions that wanted, in terms of the project structure. It's a Blazor-based WASM app, meaning it runs in the browser, so I wasn't sure how much it would "get." But it actually did really well, provided I was giving it specific context. So for example, I wanted to create a class that scraped a web page, pulled out the title and any social-protocol for meta tags that would correspond to an image. I did this in two parts, knowing that's how I'd structure it. First I had it code a class to fetch the page, and then I had another class parse out the title and image location. This involves a bunch of regular expressions, the bane of my coding existence, so I was happy to let the machine figure it out. Finally, when the result came back, triggered by typing a URL in a text box, I wanted a link and the image to appear in a box that you could remove, and it did all of that, pretty much first try. There were some tweaks I asked it to do, like un-HTML-encoding the title, and some other minor things, but it worked.

This was a much more positive experience than I had last time, but to be honest, a lot of that has to do with the context. I keep saying that over and over, that AI needs context to get stuff right, so I gave it a lot of context. Having something that is new and not infested with years of bad decisions also helps. I'm also limiting the scope of any given problem. I'm not telling it to do some end-to-end thing that involves many application layers.

And that's why, at this moment, I still see so much value in senior software developers. The analogy that I recently saw was to plumbers and plumbing. Sure, with PVC pipes and twist on couplings, you don't need to solder pipes anymore. It's all much easier. But knowing how the system is supposed to work, and all of the associated nuance, is still something that requires plumber knowledge. Well, code is in many ways like plumbing, so that experience is important. Sure, you can find a bunch of YouTubers who are "vibe coding" until they have something that works, but it doesn't mean that it can scale, that it's secure or robust enough to handle humans breaking it.

"Just you wait," say people selling AI stuff. But many predicted that it could be there by now, and clearly it is not. In fact, I'd say the last year has been kind of stagnant in terms of improvement (specifically in the code generation realm). I'm not saying that it will never get there, it's hard to know, but as I've said before, if AI eventually hits a point of having to train on its own work, it will break.

The funny thing about the "internet of things" and "smart" stuff is that most of it seems like convenience, or marginal quality of life improvements. But as time has rolled on and we sit with this stuff, it's more than that.

For example, my recent issues with HVAC spotted a potentially expensive issue. The short story is that a wiring problem, in combination with a blower motor problem, resulted in the system turning on the stage 2 heating coil. This was happening with the AC running at the same time (since the heat pump and blower communication is pretty crude). It may have taken awhile for me to notice, since it was blowing room temperature air, but I noticed immediately that we were pulling an absurd 14 kW from the grid. Even having caught it when I did, we used something like 120 kWh that day, and it could have gone on for days.

In this case, the thermostats track run time, and the electric plant (solar and batter) measure usage. Ordinarily, this is just something neat to see, predictive of your electric bill and a record of the climate. But in this case, it also identified a serious issue.

Even when you go smaller, there are unexpected benefits of devices. A self-cleaning litter box seems like a luxury for people who tire of dealing with the cat shitters, but it turns out that they also weigh cats. So combined with the usage statistics, this thing is giving you a picture of your cats' health. Without this, you likely have to be reactive about cat health, but with the data, you can be proactive before something becomes serious.

The HVAC guy has something in his electrical panel where he can spontaneously measure everything on a per-circuit basis. That would be cool, if generally unnecessary.

I feel like I've had enough experience with AI this year to conclude that the thing it's not good at is context. I have some very recent examples of this.

First off, my Facebook banishment is a perfect example of what happens when you turn things over to the machines. I don't know what it thinks that I did, but I'm certain that cats and theater selfies are not against the rules. Enforcement is probably the worst application of enforcement of any kind, as false-positives in law enforcement can attest. It kind of reminds me of a variation on Minority Report, where people were convicted for crimes before they happened. This is an example though of the stakes are too high to use tools that get it wrong. Facebook banning doesn't matter in the larger scope of things (other than the continued enshitification of the platform), but civil rights violations are serious. The context of any situation, not simply markers that might relate to an actual problem, has to play a part. But AI doesn't do that.

The coding agent stuff gets a lot of attention lately, because people really believe that it can reduce the number of people that you need for those jobs. So far, that hasn't been true. Putting aside for a moment that software developers probably only spend about 40% of their time writing code, at best (because of meetings and other stuff), the AI tools today only write code if you can tell it exactly what you need. I have first hand experience with that. First I have to correct it over and over to do what I ask, then I end up having to ask it to do it in a way that is more readable, maintainable and scaleable. If that weren't enough, it confidently gives you code that won't compile. I've seen people liken this to plumbing. You don't have to solder pipes together anymore, because of PVC and snap-together bits, but you need a plumber to understand how the system works, and various quirks and concepts. You might be able to DIY stuff, but you aren't an expert.

What I really don't care for is the chat bots in customer service situations. Admittedly, this might be how they're trained and programmed more than what AI is capable of. If you've ever used these, all they're really doing is steering you toward support articles that may sound like they could help you. They generally do not ask contextual questions that get closer to the root of what you're after. So yeah, they're fine for the kind of "level 1" first line that's just following scripts, but when does your issue ever fit a script?

I had my tires replaced at my house today. They only had 28k miles, but two had already been patched and slow-leaked, and a third had a huge hole from something. Totally not fun thing to spend money on. But while they did cost more, it's certainly more convenient to have it done at home. That, and I don't have a spare, and it was very flat.

Beyond the convenience though, having stuff delivered, or services rendered at home, is actually much better for the world. Sure, the ethical and moral situations with Amazon are not great. But it is far more efficient to have drivers bringing stuff to you, and potentially dozens of others, than for you to get in your car and go to places to shop. It's better for the environment, too.

The weird thing is that this was more common back in the day, before cars became such a dominant part of our culture. Ask your grandparents about having milk delivered to their house (mine actually had a little door on the side of their house). I also get my propane delivered, infrequently as that might be. Obviously online commerce is almost entirely delivered. The pandemic seemed to bring us back to this, and then it stuck because it's so convenient. Not sure about where food is going to go, because it's never fresh and the fees are ridiculous.

So yay for new shoes on the car that I didn't have to go anywhere for. Though ironically this enables me to drive places. It's sun-powered, at least.

If there's one thing that you can say about LinkedIn, it's that people are overly confident. Not a lot of, "I don't really know" happening there. And that kind of makes sense, because everyone is selling something, even if it's themselves. I see frequent posts around software development that present "simple" solutions to common problems. "This process makes it easy and obvious!" Sometimes I wonder if that isn't a level of disconnect to some degree, judging by the titles some folks put by their name. The problem is that sometimes you can't just check boxes in a playbook and collect your bonus.

In thinking about how I may approach the talk I'm doing for Orlando Code Camp in the spring, about developers who want to be managers, it occurs to me that there are aspects to leadership work that do not conform to a playbook or system or process. The ability to provide wisdom, enablement and decision making is the process. For example, I saw a guy declare that a particular metric was the only way to achieve a certain outcome for code quality. But the truth is that there are a great many levers that can affect that outcome, most of which require experienced people to call out quality problems. There are no silver bullets, but there are great people who can lean on their skills to guide others toward better outcomes.

If I seem skeptical of frameworks and systems and checklists, that's because they devalue the people who can steer you in the right direction. So much of what we do is contextual. A metric or a standard assumes that a very Type-A defined condition can accommodate a very contextual and nuanced situation, and I find that's rarely the case. Sometimes, when you look at these standards, they're more about control and in-the-weeds stuff, not about the larger outcomes. As the Agile Manifesto says, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." We tend to forget that.

This has been a tough season so far. I always get a little seasonal affective disorder this time of year, and then the time change makes it worse. I'm already on 300mg of bupropion, so I can't have more.

Mind you, there's a confluence of other things in life right now that make everything feel shitty. I am both fascinated and frightened by the way that environment affects your brain at a chemical level. I worry about the ways that age may affect that, too.

Fortunately there are a ton of distractions coming soon, like holidays, shows, comedians, more shows.

While I'm complaining about platforms, Google is on my list as well. Sure, there's the usual ad monopoly nonsense, where we're banking 37 cent CPM's lately, but let me turn my attention to their Workspace product.

Way back in the day, you were able to host your own domain email (in my case, popw.com) in Gmail. Later they added all of the apps for docs and spreadsheets and such. It was great because it was free, and why not, since Gmail on its own is free. There's no added cost beyond the code that recognizes the domain name. Two or three years ago, they declared that they were going to stop doing this for everyone grandfathered into it. That was a bit of a panic moment for me, because I've got a bunch of family and friends using it. Not having a good migration plan, they decided to just let it keep going. My thinking was that they should have brought back what they did at the start, which was limit the number of accounts.

A condition of the continued use was to not allow commercial use. OK, technically I have an LLC, but with the ad market being trash, it's not really a business anymore, it's just a hobby that costs $100 and change a month. Well, they (or the AI) thinks that I'm using it for commercial purposes. I appealed, and they (the AI) did not change its mind. No recourse, no explanation of how they arrived at this, nothing. If I want to keep using it, I've gotta pay for it.

Now, I do understand that I was getting something for nothing, for an awful lot of years. But was I? Gmail is all the same stuff. I can see the mailbox size of the users, and it's tiny. This isn't a company with a hundred employees neck deep in email and documents. The way I see it though, Google could cut me some slack when it gets to measure all of my traffic (Analytics), keep ad revenue from my video (YouTube) and get my ad inventory for basically nothing (AdSense). I don't get back what they take.

The worst part of it is that I'll pay the money for two accounts, at least.

Or at least, they have pending appeal. They say that I broke some rules, and I think (but am not certain) that it's from a post I made showing how Google's search summaries are apparently directing fans of child porn to our web sites. As it turns out, "Cedar Point" isn't the only thing with those initials. Anyway, I'm skeptical that an actual human will get involved.

Either way, this presents me with an opportunity to do an inventory of sorts. I mostly just post stuff, not read, because it's mostly garbage. It's videos of young women doing TikTok dances and political memes. Whatever friends that are still there, I don't see much of what they post. To that end, I suppose it's like a way to keep in touch with people from all over, given my moves around the country.

But is it? I've been saying for the last few years that the "socials" aren't social at all. I'm a remote worker, and because of that, my social interaction in real life is not robust. In some ways, I'm sure that I make online presence out to be some substitute, that casual, virtual contact is the same as real social contact. Certainly it's not. Yet there are still some feelings of FOMO, but for what. What am I really getting out of it? Some vague notion that I know people?

I think that there are two impulses that I have to examine more closely. The first is to share thoughts and articles about everything. I post all kinds of links to science stuff, but I'm pretty sure no one cares. I imagine they care even less if it's political stuff. The other impulse is to share mundane thoughts, which similarly have little value. The impulse that I think is valuable, to me at least, is to post photos as a means of journaling. Sure, others can see those, but they're mostly for me.

Really though, I just don't like the idea that some dumb AI "thinks" that I did something naughty, and that pisses me off. Plus I can't look at cat videos.

I installed a shaker motor in the pinball machine today. It's a pretty straight forward affair, since the mounting holes and electronics are already in the machine. The only thing difficult was understanding that you shouldn't crank up the power because it just rattles everything. You can keep it pretty low to get the desired effect. These guys come with the limited edition version, along with a special lighting package and different color legs and armor, but at a cost of $3k extra. I wasn't going to do that. Honestly, I like the premium version better (what we have) because the cabinet art is more of a classic Darth vs. Luke scene, instead of a Hoth battle. But I really like the tactile feedback of the shaker. For $140, it's not a huge upgrade.

Modding and augmenting pinball machines is apparently a pretty huge thing, with a ton of aftermarket stuff out there. This motor is an official Stern part, but there are others. You can get chrome legs, anti-reflective glass, the limited edition lighting packages, art blades for the inside of the cabinet, extra figures for the playfield, custom toppers... there is a lot out there. I am curious about the cost for the additional lighting, which isn't out yet because this is the first game on their new platform, but I'm not super married to it.

Because pinball is so kinetic in the real world, I get why it's becoming so popular relative to things on screens. Nothing on a screen, especially a phone screen, feels and looks like pinball. That's why I was attracted to the shaker. After playing the LE version in the arcade, I remembered how great it felt. My Jurassic Park machine had one back in the day.

There's also a maintenance commitment, but one rooted I think in a joy that's similar to what people used to feel when tinkering with cars. I've had the "hood" up on the machine a ton. At first it was to diagnose the short in the general illumination loop, which I wasn't going to fix because I didn't think I should have to on a new machine, out-of-the-box, and also because I didn't have a replacement lamp socket. But diagnosing it made it easier for the distributor to fix, so it helped. I also got in to figure out what the problem was with the Death Star ramp, because it was rejecting balls and almost impossible to hit. It's a narrow ramp, but the real problem was the alignment, which I fixed by loosening the screws, and jacking up one side by putting a washer under it. (Stern is allegedly working on a real fix, because it's a common problem.) Most of the time though, you slide off the glass to clean it. We've already logged more than 800 games, and it started to develop ball trails in the various lanes. You can also see the normal "dimpling" in the playfield start to develop, which happens when a steel ball is moving 70 mph+ and impacting a wood surface. Eventually, you need to replace the linkages on the flippers, which are like changing your breaks. The rubber bits also eventually need to be replaced, like tires.

Admittedly, I'm a little disappointed about the lighting short and the ramp alignment, but with so many moving parts, it's not that unusual to have some initial problems, especially with the first runs off the line. That's why arcades (I'm looking at you, Dave & Busters) often don't have pinballs, because they require techs to keep them running. The arcade we went to last weekend had a guy working on one in their large collection. Stern machines are cool too because you can login to them with a QR code, and they have leaderboards in the venues.

I don't have the electronics expertise for these, but I imagine that most of those parts are simply replaced entirely. Their platform consists of a central CPU, and then nodes on a bus that in turn connect to all of the lights and mechanical bits. I get switches and solenoids and stuff! I shouldn't have to spend a ton of time maintaining the machine, but at the rate we're racking up plays, I imagine there will be regular cleaning and certain parts replacements.

It's hard to believe that we've now been in this house for eight years. It's almost the longest that I've lived anywhere in my adult life, and will be in a few months.

Houses for me have been about as utilitarian to me as cars. While some might see home ownership as a life milestone, or source of pride (or ego), I see it as a place to live. I am not particularly nostalgic or attached to the place. I was excited about the construction, but that's because construction is interesting. Once it was done, it was kind of a buzzkill. When we moved in, it was just a relief to have more office space as a remote worker. When the pandemic came along, I was even more happy about the amount of space, and our ability to keep some space from each other.

To that end, it is absurdly large for three people. It has appreciated about 80%, and I wouldn't consider living around here "affordable" anymore. We got super lucky that we were able to move here when we did. We also refinanced only three years in, when rates were stupid low (2.875%). The taxes keep going up too, but they're not nearly as bad, relative to size, as they were/are in Ohio. Insurance is ridiculous. I don't know how long we'll stay here, but with Simon graduating from high school in two and a half years, and a strong desire to not have a mortgage, it won't be forever. We have enough equity that we might be able to find a smaller place that we can buy outright.

Pulte built the place with some serious crap. The carpet looks as if a dozen people lived here for two decades. We've entirely replaced the upstairs HVAC, and we're trying to bandaid the downstairs. We repainted the exterior at four years. There were a ton of warranty issues in the first year. It seems structurally durable, with no issues through four hurricanes, but I credit the building code with that win. The solar plant that we installed is in the "paid off" phase, which is to say that it has generated as much energy in terms of cost relative to the cost to install it.

The neighborhood itself is solid. Simon didn't really fit in with the other kids, but they too have kind of grown up and gone different ways. We have great neighbors, who have a pool now. Some "arts friends" live a couple of blocks down. There were people in a rental a few down that partied loud, but they moved out. There are plenty of places now to go to eat, and we're close to at least four different Publix locations. And yes, we have fireworks every night, and we enjoy a few specific resort locations to feel like we're on vacation when we're not.