Archive: September, 2019

I've generally refrained from writing about the president in the last year or so, because there's little I can say that hasn't been already. And while the man is unquestionably immoral, my real frustration is with the tribalism, which I distill down to an equivalent sports rivalry, that causes people to accept behavior from the leader of the free world that would get any of us fired from the simplest McJob.

As the Ukraine scandal seems to get worse by the hour, first with the clear ask of a foreign government to investigate a political foe (the quid pro quo implication doesn't even matter at that point), then the allegations of covering up the call, it's mostly forced the hand of House Democratic leaders to start the impeachment ball rolling. I've felt all along that it was a horrible idea to go down that road unless there was something that was clearly illegal, but this is it. This is the responsibility written into the Constitution. The nonsense about Democrats just being butthurt about the election three years ago is insane. This is actual collusion to affect the next election. Can you imagine if Obama did something like that when facing Romney?

So while some are cheering with "finally!" on the Internet, I would argue that it's not a reason to celebrate. Impeachment, successful or not, is a last ditch effort to correct where democracy has otherwise failed. The election of Donald Trump is not really about him, or Hillary Clinton, or any other figure. It's not unfair to consider him the disease that has brought racism out of the shadows. I do think that he's set us back a few decades. I hope we can jump back ahead once he's gone, but there's real damage there. Still, I believe that he's the symptom of a number of problems, not so much the disease itself. A relative minority, mostly white people who feel disadvantaged and seek scapegoats for their state, got this guy elected while a larger majority let it happen. He didn't have the popular vote, and only 27% of eligible voters actually voted for him. That small percentage of Americans voted for a reality TV personality who had never held a public office, sexually assaulted women in his own words, disparaged veterans and their families, mocked people with disabilities... all before he was even elected. That's the real failure.

Unless this keeps getting worse, and who knows, maybe it might, I don't see a world where the Senate would vote to remove the guy from office. Although, it doesn't hurt to get Senators on record. This will all shake out while the planet keeps burning, Americans go without healthcare and prescription drugs, we accept mass shootings as routine, and the federal deficit and national debt keeps getting worse.

Nobody wins. We get the government we deserve.

In the last few months, I've noticed that my eyesight has changed. When I'm tired, I find it hard or slow to focus on things that are closer to my eyes. The optimal minimum focal point has always been less than a foot away, but now it's more like 14 or 15 inches. This isn't a big deal for most anything that I do on a day to day basis, but sometimes now the small print on a product label has to be a little further away. Everything is otherwise sharp the way it has always been, and far away things I can generally read without any effort. This is actually amazing, because genetically, I should have terrible sight. Both of my parents wore glasses very early in childhood, and my boy started wearing glasses in the last year.

This degrading of sight happens normally after 40, I've learned. While it isn't functionally troubling, or requiring glasses yet, it doesn't feel good to know that it's happening. To date, the only age-related thing I've really been able to complain about is controlling ear hairs. But this feels like a betrayal by my body, and I don't like it. Sometimes I find my knee hurts for no apparent reason at all (likely all the volleyball stops and jumping back in the day), and that's even more scary because I saw what bad knees did to the quality of life of my step-father. I worry that my body could do something else terrible, like make cancer or reject my appendix or make carpal tunnel come back or make my mind go soft.

I really do try to be zen about aging. I'm likely halfway between diapers and diapers again, and I can't do anything about it. I'm just not arrogant enough to believe I'm so important as to be bigger than the circle of life. But I want all the parts to work as well as possible until such time that I don't need them anymore. Dare to dream, right?

On the surface, that's what you'd call Downton Abbey, now a movie taking place after six insanely great seasons of television. But if you're a fan, you know that would be over-simplifying things a bit. The series is really about the slow decline of the aristocracy in the early part of the 20th century, and the complexity of a social class system that would eventually break down. The film goes a step further by including the monarchy this time, as the plot revolves around a royal visit by the king and queen to the estate.

The thing that I loved dearly about the series was that, while the people upstairs and downstairs lived in seemingly different worlds, they were all troubled by the same human problems. The writing was skillfully composed, because with few exceptions, people at both ends of the class system were fundamentally good people, a trick that was easy to demonstrate with a number of characters who crossed the barriers of status. Whether you're an immigrant cook looking for your place, or a wealthy daughter of an aristocrat, everyone seeks meaning and purpose in life.

The movie chases that theme of purpose, just as the TV series did. It's even more clear, by the late 20's, when the film takes place, that the way of life that had been in place for generations was changing, as the world itself rapidly was. There are some surprising parallels to our own times. Technology was making the world smaller for them, especially with transportation (Lindbergh made his trans-Atlantic flight the year the movie takes place), and machines were becoming common place in most facets of life. The Internet, for better or worse, has changed the size of our world. Technology, more than ever, changes how we exist in the world.

I don't know what the budget for the movie was, but it is beautifully shot. The glamour shots of the building are there of course, as the opening sequence cleverly leads to it. But it's everything else as well... the costumes, the countryside... it's all quite lovely. Sure, it's a lot of comfort and nostalgia for fans of the show, but it's still wonderful. It won the weekend box office, which is probably not a shock when it was up against a Rambo movie (seriously, with Stallone). A good showing means we might get another movie, even though this one, like the TV show, seemed to have the intention of being an ending.

My time working at Microsoft was extraordinary. There was so much change, so fast in my life then, with the getting married, procreating and moving 2,500 miles to a new city all in the course of one year, that I'm not sure I really was able to take everything in. The seeds of the amazing transition that the company would make were already planted then, even before Satya took over as CEO. I saw it here and there, and it was exciting.

One of the lingering problems at the company was its stupid stack ranking system for its employees. The short version of the story was that it deliberately looked at churning the "bottom" 15% or so in terms of performance reviews, where managers would fight for the people they thought were the best. I don't have to explain to you why this was toxic and gave people incentive not to collaborate with their peers. It didn't really adversely affect me in my two years there, but I saw how it could if I didn't find an ideal path for myself. This was made worse by the expectation that if you weren't moving up in the company, you were destined to be in the bottom of the stack rank. What that meant, essentially, was that you had to eventually be a manager if you wanted to keep in it.

There was a program manager (a title that means a million different things) that I worked with who was enduring this kind of nonsense, and eventually he left the company. He enjoyed his job, he was good at it, and he had no interest in managing other people. He was a maker, not a manager, and that was OK. It wasn't so great for his career within the company in that scene. They did ditch the stack ranking after I left, and from what I understand, there is room for makers to be productive contributors for the long haul now.

Still, that observation really affected my world review. Year's later, when I read The Manager's Path, it became even more clear that there's a larger cultural expectation that you have to be a manager to succeed and advance. Heck, some professions arbitrarily pin "manager" on the title of beginners, even, when frankly they don't really manage anything, they just do a job.

There are a couple of problems. People advance in their career and often are promoted to a manager position arbitrarily. We do this in technology constantly (something Path points out plainly). How often does an amazing sales person get promoted to sales manager, and they suck at it? We do the same thing with software developers. And then we pin the failure on the person, who frankly may not have wanted to do that. Indeed, they are makers, not managers.

I struggled with this for the better part of 10 years. I've been in software for nearly two decades, so if you're doing math, yeah, that's half of my career. At some point, I had to think very hard about what I'm good at. As an in-the-weeds software developer, at least with the technologies and platforms that I'm intimately familiar with, I'm a slightly better than average developer. It took me a long time to get there. Back in 2009-ish, I discovered that I was really good at assembling a small team and delivering stuff. Since then, I've bounced back and forth between maker and manager, sometimes doing both, until I landed where I am now, and have to be mostly manager with a much larger team. It hasn't been easy, but I can see now that it's the right future.

This doesn't change what I learned in Redmond, though. In any profession, we have to respect that makers are vitally important to the success of any organization. We put a lot of faith and emphasis on managers to deliver, as we should, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that they're more important than makers. It's just a different role. You can't have one without the other.

I've really got a drive to build out a software project that I've been thinking about for awhile. I've been committing a lot of time to it because I now have a practical use for it. One of the early steps you get into on these kinds of projects is setting up all kinds of automation to build and deploy it all. That's particularly relevant because we're doing some of the same things at work right now on some new and replacement stuff (when I say "we," I really mean my team).

This kind of set up seems like something I do only once a year at best, and usually it's even less often. Even when I was working consulting gigs, most of the time all of the magic was set up for me already by a previous team, so it's like I have to relearn it every time. It changes a lot, too, so the infrequency adds to the friction. But once you get it all done, you feel good pretty much every time it runs. For the non-technical, what this work really means is to write some code, and when you save it, it triggers all kinds of magic that makes it run on the Internets.

The coolest thing about this is that it's all pretty much free. I use a product called Azure DevOps, and it can literally do anything that I need it to do to get bits on the air. In fact, the lack of constraints is one of the things that sometimes makes it hard to learn, because without a box you have to really think through what you intend to do. But now, when I commit code, within about three minutes, the web app, the functions and the database update are all done with no manual intervention. We live in the future!

I'm also amazed at how far we've come in terms of the cost of the technology, and the speed with which you can start using it. I can provision all of the databases that I need, and my code runs on Linux, which is a big deal for a guy who specialized on tech that used to only run on Windows. And even then, it doesn't really matter, because with cloud services, all of the underlying details are abstracted from you anyway. All I know for sure is that it lights up way faster.

I'll share more about the project when it gets further along. I've been so excited about it that I've actually asked a designer to make a new logo for me!

About six years ago, I bought the tiny little Fitbit One. Moving to Orange County, Florida, was something of a life reboot, and holding myself accountable to regular movement was something that I felt strongly about. I really wanted to improve my eating habits as well. The little fitness tracker and the app where I could log food made it non-ambiguous about how I was eating and moving. Two months in I could demonstrate weight loss.

I have stuck with the movement tracking, but have wavered in commitment to exercise and eating. The last year in particular was bad, because I did a whole lot of stress eating. That means that the measurement mostly serves to shame me, which doesn't feel good, but I'm getting to a point where I can simply treat it as self-awareness. I really like having it, because even on relatively inactive days, I know what it means to be truly sedentary, as I often was in my early 30's. I'm never like that anymore.

This tiny thing cost $90 back in 2013, and I struggled for days about whether or not to buy it. But a few weeks ago, it had very suddenly given me a low battery warning just two days after charging it, which was unusual because I used to go three weeks between charges. Then the other day, it outright died the same day that I charged it. It appeared that six years was the limit. Diana, who bought hers about six months after I did, lost hers a few months ago. She replaced hers with one of the newer models, now $70 and with a wristband and some notifications sent from your phone. I was reluctant until I found they had an optional belt clip this week so you didn't have to wear it on your wrist. I bought the replacement.

In six years, I might have had one or two days tops that I wasn't wearing it. In that time, I logged 13,047,796 steps, or 5,814 miles. It also includes 18,945 floors (I'm sure hundreds of which include cruise ship climbs). Unfortunately, the new one does not track stairs, but that's OK.

These trackers are valuable, because as they say in business, you can't improve what you can't measure. A lot of technology has questionable value (like 90% of the time wasters on smartphones), but there's little question in my mind that these devices and software are valuable.

We're a couple of weeks into school now, after Simon missed the entire first week due to illness, and already, it's like a completely different world. What a difference the principal makes in setting the tone. He switched schools this year because the constant growth had us rezoned to yet another new building.

First off, there isn't any homework. Well, not technically... there is some social studies reading and writing they have to do on Fridays, and if they don't finish it, they can take it home. But that's it. He gets to come home and be a 4th grader and do kid stuff instead of more school stuff. I'm not categorically against homework, but having it every day in grade school strikes me as silly and there's no real proof that it changes outcomes.

More importantly though, there is zero emphasis on standardized testing at this school. It's just not a thing. We were incredibly fortunate that the new principal agreed to attend Simon's IEP at the end of last year, at the previous school, and she was in total advocate mode. In the course of that conversation, we talked about his anxiety, to the extent that he's medicated for it, and how the FSA testing pressure kind of wrecked him for the better part of several weeks. This was not the fault of his teacher, mind you, it was a school-wide thing. The new principal, maybe as a dig to the previous school, said something to the effect of, "We don't use the letters 'FSA.'"

If you're wondering, Simon got a 3 for the reading part of the FSA, the average and the automatic pass beyond having to prove other ways to be promoted. For math, he got the maximum 5. So explain to me again why all of that fucking pressure is necessary and comes at the cost of real learning.

The net result is that he at least seems to be pretty engaged, and even excited to learn. He has his subject preferences, for sure, but we know they're never going to cut science time to teach test taking strategies. He still has his social challenges, as I'm sure he always will given the ASD, but there's little doubt in my mind that hating school the way he did last year, despite having the sweetest, most caring teacher, would do him harm.

Now if we could just find kids that he really identified with. I know it's hard. I had very few friends in school. It's still hard for me to form deep friendships.

Android 10 came out today, so I updated my phone once I was done for the day. I haven't quite had it for two years, but I seem to recall it shipped with 8, so I'm glad that it's current. Unfortunately, that's not the case with stuff as it gets older, and I'm kind of annoyed with that.

First off, I went to get the Lego Powered Up app to put on Simon's iPad, because it controls all of the new train models. I went to install it, and it couldn't because it doesn't support the version of iOS on it. I wasn't paying attention, but it looks like it stopped updating the OS quite awhile ago. This iPad came out in 2012, so yes, it's 7-years-old, but so what? The thing about computing devices is that, computationally, they tend to last way longer than they did back in the day. This is especially true for tablets and phones.

While I'm picking on Apple, I also flattened our aging first iMac, as it's getting close to 10 years now. It's been on Simon's desk for years, but since I built a desktop I wanted to pass down my 2015 iMac to him. I couldn't update that older iMac to any remotely recent version of MacOS, and that's super annoying. That computer is still viable considering almost everything you'd do with it these days is in a browser anyway. If you don't develop software or play games in 4K, you don't need a ton of hardware. (And soon, you won't need it even for those tasks.) Stop making stuff disposable!

I complain about Windows and all of the baggage it still carries, but I hilariously still use QuickBooks'99 to keep the books for the business, so there's something to be said for that. We don't have to throw away technology all of the time. Phones aren't making any serious improvement year to year. Computers last five to ten years. I think this unnecessary upgrade cycle is forced by the companies who sell the gear and our irrational consumerism. That's gotta be legit if me, the technologist, feels that way.

One of the cool things about spending a lot of time seeing musicals is that the people in them tend to be interesting, and often young artists. In the last year, we've started following a number of people who were on the Hamilton #PhilipTour, and pretty much most of The Prom original Broadway cast. A number of people from the Ham tour just peeled off (those guys are endlessly entertaining on Instagram), and Prom just ended entirely, prematurely, if you ask me. That group in particular was pretty emotional about it, because it was an important, almost universally loved show. I was catching up on my RSS feeds and found a blog post from one of the women there who found that closing the show was pretty much the worst. There's a lot of intense feelings there. I imagine that working on a show is a lot like a really long summer camp, sometimes for years. Making a movie seems like that too, only shorter in duration as far as the actual shooting goes.

Art makes us feel, for sure. For me it can be pretty intense, and I'm just consuming it, not making it (most of the time). The thing is, I love that feeling, and it's the thing that makes me feel alive. Certainly live musical theater does this better than anything, in my opinion, but even a good 4-minute song can have that effect. If this feels so good, or bad, as the case may be, and that's what makes us feel the most human, do we try to find it in everything we do? These musical theater folks, they're a wreck, a lot, but not in a bad way. I'd love it if my day job made me feel that intensely. (I think... maybe it would be a bit much.)

Some parts of life are inherently prone to intense feelings, starting with parenting. Sometimes, when I put Simon to bed, and we're lying there for a minute talking about our day or whatever, I run the whole range of feels, from the wonder that he quite literally did not exist ten years ago, and now he has opinions, to the reality that he won't want to talk like that for many more years. Then as I'm walking away, I wonder if the things I did today helped him, or just irreparably fucked him up. There's stress or psychic weight around that, for sure, but I'd rather have it than not.

Work was this way more when I was doing more creative work, in radio and video back in the day. When I flipped to software developer, getting laid-off two years into it, I was guarded for a very, very long time and cautious not to get too emotionally invested in the work. In more recent years, I've injected more of that into it, but almost to a fault in some cases. Being more manager than technologist makes this even worse, because I'm responsible for the livelihood of a bunch of people. That's weird, having the intense feelings without the primarily creative intent.

This is a weird thing to ponder, because I'm simultaneously frustrated with the willful ignorance that people engage in, especially with science, and a general lack of critical thinking. But deep feeling is good when it makes us better people, to ourselves and others. I'd like to have more of that.

We got pretty luck with this hurricane, largely at the expense of the northern islands of the Bahamas. Had the track from last week stuck, we probably would have seen a direct hit on the coast in the category 3 range, which is really bad news for the coast, but for us would have just been bad... -ish.

When Irma hit almost two years ago, I confirmed what I already kind of knew. The highest recorded sustained wind speed in Orlando proper was about 86 mph in 2004, with Hurricane Charley. That was pretty serious, certainly, and I remember seeing all of the blue tarps on houses on my next trip here. But while roof damage is possible, maybe even likely if you have an aging or poorly built roof, new construction since 2010, as a result of that year's hurricanes, prompted higher standards for much of the state. Andrew already in 1992 prompted higher standards. For us in most of Orange County, new houses have to be able to withstand 3-second bursts of wind at 130 mph. The science suggests this is a "700 year" scenario, where sustained winds would likely be around 100 mph. Again, the recorded history tops out at 86 for Orlando (presumably measured at MCO).

That's why Walt built his theme parks here. There's a good trade-off between the risk of serious weather and endless summer. Heck, if things were to get super serious, I'd consider a stay on-property, because they have their own power company and it's unlikely that their Internet would go down. They also happen to be in the business of feeding tens of thousands of people at a time.

So it's not really a place that you evacuate from. It doesn't mean your house, even if it's new, won't take damage, but having built two of them now down here, I understand some of the fundamental design considerations that make them pretty durable. The roofs are tied down all the way to the foundation with a series of beams, straps and such. The first floor is all concrete block, the exterior is stucco. The difference compared to a Midwest house is staggering. You also don't need to stock up on gas and food this far inland, because it's unlikely that you're going to go weeks without. This is the opposite of being on an island. There won't be shortages or any real delay longer than two or three days. Heck, the Amazon Prime delay would be even shorter.

That said, you don't want to be cavalier about the safety or short-term potential for pain. Power can and will go out, maybe for days, so you have to plan accordingly. You could lose water as well for a few days, so you fill a tub up so you can at least flush your poop. You definitely bring in everything from your patio or porch. Plan on being inside for at least 24 hours, maybe 36, because it's not the wind itself that's dangerous, it's the stuff that gets airborne.

For Irma, I believe our sustained winds were in the mid 50's, gusts in the 70's. That was certainly "exciting." A direct hit from Dorian would've likely been a little more intense than that, but not seriously so.

We have a beautiful sunset right now, with the clouds moving by incredibly fast. Our sustained winds are about 20 mph, and it's gusty on top of that. Morning will bring the peek, probably not more than mid-20's. We got lucky this time.