Archive: August, 2024

Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, recently said in a live stream that when he first visited San Francisco, he knew it was where he belonged. He was there for a wedding, and it just felt right. A year or two later, he moved there, and it's been his home ever since. He's fields a lot of questions like that, including those about feeling like he was supposed to be at a specific job or whatever.

I've started to write some flavor of this post a dozen times. Maybe I even finished one in some form and just don't remember. I've thrown it away time after time, because I was worried that it sounded sad or pathetic, or maybe just noise. But I'm going to put it out there anyway.

I don't think I have ever really felt like I belonged.

I mean that in almost every context, whether it be in work, geography, hobby endeavors... all of it. I think about it a lot lately given Simon's entry into high school, and his own social difficulties. When I first realized this some time ago, my initial reaction was one similar to the stages of grief. I had already been in denial, then I was angry, I skipped bargaining because it's probably attributable to ASD, then I was depressed about it, and these days I just accept it. I am wired this way, and it's not really anyone's fault. Sort of.

What does it mean to really belong? I think at the very core of things, it means being respected, valued and appreciated. Outside of my romantic relationships, I don't think I've ever really felt all three of those things. Some of my former volleyball "kids" have voiced these, even a few of their parents, so I guess it's not completely rare. But I've never really had it in work or family situations (not counting current scenario as the parent of a teen, because teens).

I believe that it's also about your identity. I'm not even sure what my identity is, which sounds a lot like I don't know myself. That's not it though, because to me identity is about how you fit and find purpose in your world. I can't say for sure that I've ever found "my people," or been in a place where I really fit in. I think the closest I ever got to it was when I started working in commercial radio, though when I accepted how terrible that business was, that sense of belonging disappeared very quickly.

This experience begs the question of whether or not it even matters if one must feel like they belong. If I've gone this long without, do I really need it? I don't need a ton of deep relationships, and I don't have the mental bandwidth for tons of trivial relationships, so I don't think that belonging is important to me in a social context. Maybe that's a lonely place to be, but maybe not. Being respected, valued and appreciated is also something that I've just adapted to not getting, so my motivation toward most everything is intrinsic and internal. Admittedly, this is something that wears on me over time. I don't need a high five for doing my thing, but I do want one now and then. External validation feels good, even when we're predisposed to relying primarily on ourselves for finding worth and satisfaction in our environment.

In Adam's description of belonging, he specifically talks about the feeling of exiting a building, looking around, and being overwhelmed with a sense of finding the right place. I've had that feeling so few times. And I want to be clear that it's not the same as feeling confident, though I imagine that's certainly easier when you feel like you belong. I don't think that I could have gotten this far in my second career if I didn't have some measurable confidence, especially given all of the rejection in various job searches.

What have I been doing with this? Nothing, really. I accept it for what it is. But I do think about it in terms of whatever my third act really entails. In not-too-many-years, I hope to be in a place where I can walk away from my career and try something else. Maybe that's where I belong. In the mean time, don't feel bad for me. I don't feel bad. Maybe my intent is to point out that if you are in a place where you truly feel like you belong, appreciate it. It's not a given.

For as much as I think about the time involved being on the "back nine," my acceptance of the ephemeral nature of my being, and try to work on being present, I allow frustration to build and stress me out in a great many areas of my life. I've never really understood how to let it go.

I have a disconnect between the necessary perspective (the gift of your impending demise), and the necessary response. The hardest thing for me to do is let go of things that I can logically rationalize have no bearing on anything long term. Today's problems mostly don't have long-term concerns. There are exceptions, like health things, but I suspect most problems don't matter. Do you remember that time at that job that there was a thing and you went home frustrated and angry? Of course you don't. What about that time your kid did that thing and it was a whole thing? Same.

I wonder if it's because of my thought spirals. Is it hard to let go because my brain is always circling back to everything? The only escape I have from that is to dive into something that is probably self-serving and anti-social, which is probably not ideal when I think I need more people time.

One of the little miracles of modern medicine you discover as a new parent is Orajel, the goo you put on your baby's gums when they're teething. We got to know that pretty early, because Simon was cutting teeth basically the day he came home from the hospital. Most things aren't that easy in those first days and weeks.

When your kid gets older, a lot of the pain is emotional, or at least it can be if they face challenges that are not easy to navigate. Unfortunately, there is no Orajel for the soul. At younger ages, I guess ice cream comes pretty close, but if there's a teenage equivalent, I'm not yet aware of it.

Simon tells me that today was better than yesterday. And that's the closest thing that either one of us will get to today in terms of relief. I'll take it.

It's a little weird, in a good way, but a lot of cultural things come up on CoasterBuzz periodically, especially as it relates to the cost of roller coaster nerding and traveling. After Disney's last earnings call, citing a "moderation in demand," many in the press have run with this idea that Disney vacations are too expensive and that this will hurt the company. To be clear, this has been going on for years, and yet, the parks look insanely different from the way they were just ten years ago. They're still making more than enough to keep improving them.

What often comes up in those discussions though is the issue of expectations as they relate to income and affordability of everything. For whatever reason, Disney vacations seem to be aspirational to Americans, as the ultimate thing to do with your kids. That always seemed weird to me, even before I lived next door, and after I had a kid of my own. We have a great time there, don't get me wrong, but the world is a pretty big place with an awful lot of cool things to see. I wouldn't prioritize it.

But mostly, those conversations get into financial realities. The first thing is that obviously this is a discretionary expense. No one needs to take a vacation. There's also this thing where you keep seeing stories about people who skip what I call the "roommates and ramen" stage of life, which is to say that you start your adult life kind of poor, and so you have to make some compromises about your lifestyle. My roommate happened to be my then-girlfriend-future-first-wife, and we didn't have a lot of fancy things or eat fancy food. That seemed reasonable to me, because college degree or not, I hadn't really done anything in life yet. Without experience, I wouldn't expect to be well-off financially.

This comes up a lot in the context of student debt. It also gets conflated with the cost of college and ease of borrowing, and while I don't want to trivialize those issues, they are different from the expectation problem. Maybe there was an expectation that if you just go to school you'll be better off, but that was the story when I went as well. What changed I think is that the expectation also started to include the idea that you'll have nice things and do nice things right away. I know there are memes that mock the expectation involving avocado toast and $8 Starbucks iced coffee, but I can't imagine doing that sort of thing when I was 22. It's even worse when people get a masters degree (MBA's especially), and they think that they should be living large immediately. But like me after school, they haven't actually done anything. Education isn't the same as experience.

The worst example is the asinine articles where they find some family that together makes $500k a year, and they're "struggling" to make ends meet and pay off their student loans. Naturally, they live in expensive markets with huge houses, obnoxious cars and a nanny. I mean, buy what you can afford, but if you're struggling and buying things you could easily do without, you made that situation. I bring up this example because I want to illustrate that the expectation problem is not just a facet of recent college grads. It seems to be a much wider cultural issue.

I first went to Walt Disney World as an adult four years after graduating college. And when I say we went, I mean Steph's grandparents, who were snowbirds, had a friend that was a retired Disneyland mechanic, and he front-gated us (got us in for free), and we park hopped between three parks in one day. Not exactly a dream vacation. At least I had moved beyond ramen at that point.

After yesterday's rant about school, things got worse. Simon's anxiety went off the charts last night, and there were a lot of tears. He went through the new schedule today, with some class changes, and he was in full meltdown by the time he got home. Some of it was the discomfort around change and uncertainty, but the sheer volume of homework overwhelmed him completely. Diana was able to chill him out before dropping him off for math tutoring, and he was better when I picked him up. I was able to get him to copy some definitions to a typed up worksheet, but he was done.

I don't want to make it about me, but hearing this going on while I'm in my office working, is a lot like the feelings you get when your baby is crying at night and you don't know what they need. Even into the teenage years, there is a point where something chemically changes in your brain, and you flip from "learn a lesson" to an intense need to protect. This happened as recently as our DC trip in the spring, when he thought that he lost his earbuds in the Jefferson Memorial (they were in his pocket the whole time). He got so upset that I wanted to comfort him instead of lecture him about responsibility.

His feelings and concerns are legitimate, but it's increasingly hard to separate the discomfort issues from making sure that he gets what his IEP entitles him to. Diana is going to at least bring up the latter and the class schedule stuff with his guidance counselor tomorrow. In a couple of weeks, he has another IEP meeting. Fortunately, Diana is excellent at advocating for him at these. I wish that I could also be there, but in a short work week with stuff happening at work my anxiety will already be high, and I don't know how constructive I can be about making sure he gets the services that he should. (I have baggage here... During the pandemic, one of the people in these meetings, a professional, allegedly, suggested that he just had messy handwriting because he was a boy. I barely held it together, but called her out that, "Testicles have nothing to do with his handwriting." And here we are years later getting him tested for dysgraphia.)

Like Simon, I can get overwhelmed at times too. The smaller, tactical steps to resolve things are difficult to see. My head is already at, "OMG these years are going to suck for him." Getting him the right level of help and way of learning is hard enough, but getting him to the point where he can just be happy in school feels impossible. This was a big talking point in my last therapy session. I can solve all kinds of complex problems in my work, but I can't apply those same skills to my child's wellbeing. To be fair to myself, I'm not an educator, let alone an expert in developmental learning challenges. Knowing that doesn't put me at ease.

Ten days ago, I was like, "This might all be fine." That was awfully naive.

Already, it feels like we've fallen into all the old negative habits of school. Simon does not take initiative to do homework, he wants an assist before trying. My reflex is that it's because he'd rather be at his computer doing things that he likes. We've tried before to enforce a no-screen rule before the work is done, but the only thing that does is cause him to be immediately overwhelmed at the volume of work, and the delay it will cause in him doing what he wants. So the next logical thing is to simply prohibit computer time during the week, which he will take as a punishment not associated with any specific negative behavior, because that's what it is. It would only be a preventative measure to take one desire out of the equation, which he would not understand. It's a no-win situation.

My dark sense of humor is to joke that Simon inherited all of my worst traits. And I can see, with vivid clarity, the ways that he's the same. I didn't know about ADHD or ASD as a kid, but by high school, I wasn't that interested in the process of learning things that I didn't care about. I have to keep in mind that I don't think it was a personality thing, it was the way that I was wired, and that's probably the case with him. I should have aced geometry, but I hated it, and didn't take the time to really learn. I did better with trigonometry, probably because I just had the right teacher to reach me. My senior year, I don't remember what the class was, maybe an AP class, but the first week was about proving that 1 was greater than 0. What the actual fuck? It just is, I don't care the reason. I dropped that class like a bad habit.

This continued into college, where I did enough to get by, even in classes like TV production, where I frankly learned nothing new because it was just emulating what you could see on TV. (My instructor, may he rest in peace, was shocked that I used lighting for my half-hour show, because he didn't teach that, and no one else did it. I was just imitating "real life.") But I busted the curve on broadcast law, because I was infatuated with the subject. I see this pattern everywhere in my life. I never really learned electronics theory, despite the kit, because I just wanted the outcome, where I could make an LED blink or whatever. My eventual primary profession, writing code, took me years to get proficient at it, especially debugging, because I just wanted the outcome, not the learning process.

It's certainly possible that I'm projecting on to him, but when he's saying in the first week, "When will I ever need this in life?" all I can think of is me at the same age. What's different is that I was able to fake a lot of things on instinct, which I don't think he has. To be clear, he's not being an obstinate dick (at least, I don't think he is), he genuinely finds certain things challenging. Next month he's supposed to be evaluated for dysgraphia, which would certainly provide some answers, and hopefully a strategy to roll with it. This is the struggle, because intelligence has nothing to do with things like dysgraphia, autism or ADHD.

My therapist says that, if we can afford it, we should try to find someone who can tutor him after school. Diana has tried in the past to find people like that, but the schools can't even find enough qualified teachers, so where does that leave us? We are sending him to Mathnasium, which does seem to help with math, but it's the writing and basic problem solving that we're struggling with. Combined with a temperament that goes off the rails when software doesn't work the way he expects, things escalate quickly.

My way of helping sometimes is to just let him flail, but that results in output only if he's comfortable enough to at least start his assignment. There are so many things that he does that trigger me and I respond emotionally. I can be clinical for about 15 minutes, then I'm making it worse. It sucks. I don't know what to do. He's checked out after school, and frankly, I'm checked out after work. It's a toxic combination.

This is largely an unstructured rant. I'm not looking for feedback, because from others looking in, it's usually non-useful. I just need to get it out, write it down, revisit it, and hopefully have better ideas the next day.

I don't even remember now when the last time was that I bought the whole Adobe Creative Suite, but I think it was 2011 or 2012-ish. I was, to that point, buying it every few years, because new features were rarely compelling enough in one release to justify upgrading over and over, even with upgrade pricing. I think it was north of a grand, but amortized over two or three years, I could roll with that. I think the software was certainly valuable enough.

But then in 2013 they switched to a subscription model, meaning they wanted to extract money from you monthly, and in return, you would always have the latest versions of everything. At $60 a month (maybe it was $50 then), I couldn't really justify it. I hung on to those last purchased versions for years, which was also super weird because the UI on most of the apps wasn't updated to use the newer, high resolution screens on Macs. The text was all chunky and gross.

Eventually the apps showed their age and lacked some of the cooler features. Adobe Premier Pro, for video editing, in particular had come a long way. I was using Photoshop and Lightroom a fair amount, Illustrator rarely, and Acrobat even more rarely. I eventually caved and bought the Photoshop and Lightroom subscription, because it started out at only $10 a month. Later, they offered a $30 rate for all of the apps, and I was on that for a long time. When you went to cancel, they offered the $30 to renew, and given that they could see how low my usage was, that sure makes sense. But this last time, a few months ago, there was no discount, and in no universe was I gonna pay $60 a month. Even the Photoshop/Lightroom sub was $20, and I skipped on that too.

These days, I'm not cutting a lot of video (though I should be, because of that doc I shot), but when I do, I'm using DaVinci Resolve, for which I have a perpetual license because I bought an edit controller. For photos, I'm mostly resizing images, which you can do natively in Windows and Mac. I'm a little ashamed, but I don't think I've taken a photo with my Canon since Europe, a year ago. Ugh, I'm starting to feel bad about it. Anyway, my point is that there's little value in the Adobe suite, even though it sure is nice to have when I do need it.

The funny thing is, I'm OK paying for web apps that run in a browser. I'd probably pay for the Google stuff if I wasn't grandfathered into a free plan. I pay for things like the New York Times with games, Vimeo (just on principle, because I like what they do), obviously streaming services. I get value out of that stuff. I got value from the Adobe stuff, but not relative to the cost. So now I just go without.

I've been having variations on certain kinds of dreams for my entire life, which kind of makes me wonder if I have things that I need to somehow resolve. The radio dead air dream has mostly subsided, and I haven't had that in a few years. This morning I woke up to the restarting college or back-to-school dream. The scenery looked really different this time, and I think I was returning to a school in Georgia or the Carolinas or something. The feelings were different this time, so I wanted to write them down while they were fresh. Most notably, I was thinking in the dream about what the feelings are in the dream. That's super meta.

I do think these dreams are rooted in anxiety, but it's almost reassuring to see that the anxiety isn't rooted in a social context, like it used to be. It was less about wanting to belong. Now it's more about obligations, like I need to finish this degree. This time I even explained to someone that I had to take a few more classes to finish, then realized that I already graduated, and that this was for some bonus qualification. I got lost in some building that was half closed, but I needed to get to the registrar's office before it closed to drop a class that I didn't need (probably because I already graduated). A group of people were counting on me to set up some kind of outing with reservations and stuff for that evening, which is obviously a tie-in to work responsibility in real-life. The vision of a campus was so vivid. Unlike the last time I had the dream theme, a few months ago, I was not an RA.

The stand-out feeling was about the start of something new, and the relatively unlimited potential about what that means. Despite my feelings about the way actual college went for me, I always had a very optimistic outlook at the start of each year. In the dream, I thought, what can I get involved with that will feel validating? I leaned into certain things with confidence, like doing radio or coaching volleyball. That's the thing that has changed the most in these dreams over the last two decades. Anxiety to succeed and be a part of something used to be the driver, but now I seem to be confident, and the anxiety is just about completing more mundane tasks. I guess that's some kind of weird progress.

There is a life transition that's not as far away as it once seemed. My view on what "retirement" means has changed dramatically, and now it's a thing where I'm not so much going to stop working, but feel financially secure enough to try other things part-time, with no real risk. Loafing will be possible, but not entirely likely. I'm trying to set this at seven years from now, which is doable if there isn't some huge market crash and I'm working consistently. I think this version of the dream I had plays into that, the movement toward doing something else in a new period in my life. That will be exciting, and involve staying in this house at least a year (to not be in the tax bracket where gains in selling the house wreck me), then moving... somewhere. For now I think it would be in the area still, but it's still a ways off.

Leaning into what I know, acknowledging that with age comes wisdom and abilities, is kinda neat. I think we tend to treat life as a place that you're going, with certain outcomes, and it feels good to think that you actually have some of those outcomes. I hope that it makes it more possible for life to be a place that you are, instead of an endless cycle of milestones to reach.

I've said many times that I was deeply moved by the musical Hadestown. The touring musical came through here in 2022, and I was completely enamored with it. I walked in intentionally avoiding any understanding about what it was, and it just wrecked me in all good ways. I remember at intermission thinking, "Holy shit, this is so good!" And what's unusual about it is that it's a tragedy. It does not have a happy ending. But to the point of Hermes, the narrator...

Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time

Even the most cursory understanding of Greek tragedy means you know that Orpheus loses Eurydice (spoiler alert!). That's how it ends. It sucks, but you can't look away, and the pain is deeply understood. More importantly though, you have to believe that there are better outcomes possible.

American politics has been, to say the least, really fucking weird the last few years. Everyone, objectively, could declare that fascism, hate, incompetence, committing felonies, is bad. But somehow, a non-trivial portion of the electorate believes that it's OK to overlook all of that provided the guy on "our team" wins.

There's this crazy cognitive dissonance that tries to separate all of this horribleness, which includes dismantling democracy itself, from the decision about who to vote for. It's not like anything that I've ever seen in my lifetime. And yet, I feel like, we're better than this, it doesn't have to end this way.

The classic Greek tragedy is rooted in something noble, something beautiful. Orpheus got a raw deal, and we're attracted to the story because it's rooted in love.

The aforementioned cognitive dissonance is not rooted in love, it's rooted in hate. It quietly started when Obama was president, when the GOP, including Mitch Fucking McConnell, decided to make the party's core policy to be nothing less than, "The opposite of whatever the Black guy in the White House wants." Now, a significant portion of the population has subscribed to this belief, that they're victims and at a disadvantage, just because people who want to be treated fairly, not at an advantage, exist.

This is not the American way. Well, it kinda is, because the European settlers obliterated the natives, and then had a history of discrimination against African-Americans and even white Europeans how immigrated here. But the core sentiment with the founding of the nation was to reject the control of its people by oppressive regimes. It isn't right to advocate for people who want to continue to repress others. But here we are.

I've written before about the perceived passage of time, and how there is actual science that suggests routine, as you get older, makes time pass faster. Deviating from routine does the opposite. I think this may play into feelings of burnout, too.

Last year, we had that trip to Europe, and it was two weeks. Obviously visiting a half-dozen countries that you've never been to before is about as non-routine as it gets. And doing so in July, sort of opposite of the December holidays, makes for a well staggered change of routine. This year hasn't had any equivalent travel or routine breaks. 2024 feels like it's happening really fast. And the "grind" I think is contributing to an increasing feeling of burnout.

The weird thing is that I typically associated burnout with work that I wasn't crazy about, but that isn't the case right now. I'm leading a team that's totally killing it (without killing themselves), and I'm wielding some amount of influence, to various degrees of success, beyond my immediate sphere. Work is good. But I'm still kind of tired, like I need to get away from it for awhile.

We booked an "emergency cruise" coming up soon, which is the usual long weekend variety where we only have to take Simon out for one full day. These definitely help, because even though there is some flavor of routine to them, they're infrequent enough that they feel like positive disruptions. Again, it's not adventure travel, it's turn-your-brain-off travel where people are there to take care of you. I place a lot of value in that.

Next year, I'd like to do another two-week trip, and we're starting to talk about what that looks like. A long cruise would definitely make it easier with Simon, but we could in theory do a long run in one or two countries if we can map out the feeding our teenager angle. I'm excited about that. We sure loved London and Copenhagen, and while we haven't been to Oslo, it's on the table too.

For now, I have to figure out what to do this year. I just hate taking time off during the school year, because it never feels quite like a vacation. I have the advantage of having "unlimited" PTO, but in practice, that means I can take about five weeks without my job performance hurting.

For the last four or five years, I've taken some amount of pride in the fact that I've made a lot of things. I want to take a break from that, sort of.

Maybe the way I really need to frame it is that I want to stop measuring the value of my non-work time by the output of making stuff. The truth is that I really like watching movies, and I've been doing a lot of that lately. I like it, and shouldn't feel bad about it because it's a passive activity. I like playing video games, and I've done a lot more of that this year. It's semi-passive, of course, which is to say that it still involves riding the couch. And of course, there are so many shows on the calendar. I like to be entertained.

Don't get me wrong, there are still certain things I will certainly pay a lot of attention to that are creative, if not necessarily result driven. I'm enjoying the lighting stuff a great deal. I'm thinking about volunteering to help out a volleyball coach if they'll have me.

The one thing I must do is edit that damn short film. I know why I haven't done it, it's because I think it's going to suck. Maybe it will, but I have to just be OK with that. It wears on me that it's sitting in pieces on my computer.

As the Olympics wind up this weekend, I am completely enamored with the diversity of people from around the world. There is great beauty in the differences between our cultures and customs, and indeed, the colors of our skin. I see this every couple of years in these games, but especially in the summer Olympics (because I watch them more closely).

If I had to choose one thing about my career that I love the most, it's the diversity of the people who work in my field. You must view the world differently when you work with people from China, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. It has always been so interesting to hear about the places that they come from, the things that their families do as traditions, etc. It's so interesting to me.

My world growing up was definitely not that of a typical white kid, because I grew up in the midst of desegregation in Cleveland, and my neighborhood was primarily Puerto Rican and to a lesser degree, Lebanese. But it wasn't until college, then work, that I learned about the largeness of the world. It's so fascinating when I think about how different my day to day was while I grew up.

So you can imagine my frustration and confusion when I look at the extraordinary proliferation of xenophobia in the United States. I don't understand the fear. Even more, I don't understand the accusation that my feeling is "virtue signaling," as if appreciating people of diverse backgrounds should be something that shouldn't be virtuous. I can assure you that the sentiment is not performative.

It's part of the general disbelief that half of the American electorate is drawn to people who are only interested in tearing others down, supporting people who falsely believe that they are under attack.

Simon begins high school on Monday. The passage of that time alone is hard to handle, but I worry so much about how it's going to go for him. Admittedly, some of that is me projecting. I didn't have a good time in high school. I never really found my tribe. I had a strange mix of casual friends ranging from coworkers at the Ames department store I worked at, a couple of cheerleaders, a few volleyball players and some video nerds. And I didn't exactly nail it in terms of grades. If it weren't for my ACT score (98th percentile), getting into any school may have been challenging.

My boy shows signs of great intelligence, but he has my biggest weakness, perhaps worse. I did not engage in things that I was not interested in. It's why I got an F and an A in the same semester in American Lit. At the very least, Simon has his ASD and ADHD diagnoses, so that's a known that I didn't have. He's going to be tested for dysgraphia in October, which would explain why it's so hard for him to write. It would make so much sense, because with the extra tutoring he gets in math, he gets it. Making him write long form narrative is the problem.

Socially, in a larger school, I hope that he can find "his people," though it didn't really help me in a school of 2,000+. Diana and I are going to offer help in the theater, and I'm trying to offer help with volleyball as well. Maybe that peripheral involvement will help him. He's shown a little interest in my lighting obsession. I need to be more deliberate in trying to teach him things. Also, as a student, I can probably use his ID to get the dongle to use the software that they have at his school. At the same time, I don't want to force it. I want him to do what he's interested in.

A lot of my anxiety here is certainly caused by the unknown. He could thrive, we don't know. But as a parent, I'm also thinking longer term. Will he be prepared to enter the workforce? Will he even consider college? I don't know.

Yet another phase of uncharted territory for this parent.

I'm kind of a black sheep in management circles (in software), because I instinctively resist anything that means more process. I suppose that some combination of my general skepticism toward authority, and not being a Type-A, are partially responsible for this. But it's also experiential, because I've seen over and over again that more process doesn't result in better outcomes.

What I've struggled with for some years is understanding how to account for success if process isn't the winning thing. Recently, I've noticed that there are themes that influence decision making and operational direction. These are decidedly harder to codify and communicate, which may be why translating my instinct into institutional action has been so hard for most of my career.

It's a work in progress, but there are some things I can write down that are independent I think of any specific industry.

• Focus on outcomes. A lot of processes do not serve outcomes, they only provide structure. When you start to look at every action and whether or not it really benefits the outcome, it's amazing how many things just fall away as unimportant. If the outcomes aren't clear, then they need to be better defined so you're not just throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks.
• Use delivery as a constraint. This helps you focus. If you're doing thing that you don't need to deliver the thing, maybe you don't have to do them at all.
• Momentum over status quo. It's shocking how often people will double down and defend "we've always done it that way," even though the trajectory that isn't that shows how you don't need the old way. This theme is a way to foster innovation, which by definition is not doing the same shit over and over.

There are some software specific things too...

• Bias toward working software. The best way to get over assumptions and complexity is to just build working things, as fast and simply as possible. I'm always surprised by the desire to fight this. I don't think you have to work in the field very long to know that the more you try to account for All The Things up front, the more wrong you are. If you try to get the first 80% right without spending 80% of your time on the last 20%, the outcomes are better.
• Don't be dependent on the world as you know it. Everyone works in an enterprise that has baggage, and it's hard to change. When you look for solutions that don't require you to commit to the legacy you're working in, everything is easier, faster and has an eye toward the future. Another way to look at it is, don't bolt on the thing you need to build to what already exists. Look for ways to build it in a way that it could be plugged in anywhere.
• Observability isn't optional. If you can't measure all the things, you don't know if what you have is viable. Software people get hung up on how well the hardware works, which isn't useful because in a cloud world, scale is easy. Measure how fast your thing responds to requests, how long it takes to work with other services, how often it does certain things, when it fires off business events.
• Performance is a feature. If it needs to perform at a certain level, you need to design for that outcome. It's easy to build something that sucks in terms of performance, so understand up front what your objectives are here.

Again, these are themes, directives, ways to do stuff. They are not really processes, the go-to thing that managers tend to lean into. Stop that.

Facebook is mostly useless in terms of facilitating anything actually "social," but the thing I still find value in, the memories, has been showing me all kinds of Europe stuff for the last two weeks. Naturally, it has me thinking a lot about the trip. I can't believe that it was already a year ago. I don't know why we didn't do something similar this summer.

To recap, we did a Northern Europe cruise. We started in the UK and France, then Iceland, Norway, ending in Denmark. The cruise was aboard the Disney Dream. It was the first time that I've ever taken two consecutive weeks off from work, and I also can't understand why it took that long to do so. Despite the dense activity, especially on port days, it was easily one of the best trips I've ever had. It had the intended effect, that I could sample many countries and think about which ones I'd like to revisit.

The UK is sometimes written off by travel snobs because it's the "easy" country for Americans, but in a lot of ways, it's like New York. You see so many movies there that it feels familiar, but when you get there, you desperately want to explore as much as possible. We were in London for less than 24 hours, and so jet lagged and sleep deprived that we didn't really get a proper shot to enjoy it. A year later, I'm still troubled by that. In the evening, we ended up having dinner at the hotel, then walked around the immediate area (from the London Eye to Westminster), before getting back to the hotel around 9. We intentionally played this by ear, but I had ambitions of seeing a show on the West End, given our likely Eastern time bodies. But we were fried, and had to get our car to Southampton at 8 in the morning. Also, I have an Ohio friend who has been living there for a few years, and I'm jealous of his adventures.

One of our port days was in Ålesund, Norway, and it was absolutely beautiful. It was also a Sunday, so our interaction with locals and local businesses was largely limited to our bus tour around surrounding islands. The people we did meet were lovely, plus one gigantic dog. It made me want to see Oslo (where we have friends), and maybe even do a driving trip around the country. It's like a different world.

Ending in Copenhagen was also special. Consider just the initial impression this city left us. We got on an electric bus at the port (and tellingly, almost everyone else, Americans, waited for cars), alone, and transferred to the metro, both using the Copenhagen Card that gets you all-you-can-eat transportation and attractions. There are no gates, just a trust that you tap your card on and off the busses and trains. Sometimes, an agent would roam trains to confirm legal usage. Once in the city, we learned that half the population commuted on bikes. It was like visiting a different, better world. We were only there, also, for about a day. Again, wonderful people, wonderful city.

The challenge in European travel is a combination of the cost of the flights and the time required. You effectively lose a day in each direction. You can't do it while school is in, so you have a three-month window. These are more excuses than anything. I suppose the other challenge is that we would have to choose one destination. Also, we'd like to do a similar cruise around the Mediterranean, and see Spain, possibly Portugal, plus Italy and Greece. Maybe we need to commit to that.

To be clear, despite my recent disenchantment with the American political situation, it's not that I dislike our country, it's just that the more I see of the world, the more I appreciate a wider view of the world and its many cultures at large. When your history is only 250 years, it's crazy to learn more about histories that are four-digit numbers. And I haven't even scratched the surface of Africa, South America, Asia and Australia...

I saw in the news today that restaurant chain Buca di Beppo filed for bankruptcy. I was never a fan, and I don't even know if they're around me here, but it got me to thinking that we have so rarely gone to sit-down chain restaurants in the last decade plus. The idea doesn't even appeal to me. Every few months we'll go to the local Ford's Garage, but it's rare. There have been some local independent places, but menu and price changes kind of put us off to those as well.

So what happened? The thing that I believe that has fundamentally changed is that the fast casual category is better. I don't eat fast food almost ever, unless it's just a last resort situation. Similarly, I've been to places like Friday's or Chili's so infrequently that I can't tell you the last time for either one. They lost me like 15 years ago when everything turned into microwaved crap. (My most viewed post ever is about Applebees.)

I don't know that everyone would agree with me, but Chipotle was the pioneer in fast casual. The quality is fairly consistent, everything is well seasoned, the pricing isn't bad. Some locations are better than others, definitely, but it's usually solid. The other one that I've enjoyed since is Pei Wei, the Asian fusion joint. They've been less consistent over the years, but the closest location to me does pretty well. A locally owned chain called Bento makes a solid katsu rice bowl, and sushi if that's your thing. We just found another Tex-Mex place called Torchy's that's good. It seems like those two genres are most common for fast casual. Compare anything from those places to a shitty McDonald's burger, or whatever that shit is that they call chicken. It's not even close.

I kind of wish this wasn't always the case. I miss going to a restaurant on a date night and relaxing and having some drinks and stuff. We still do that sometimes, but the good local joints aren't close to us (they tend to be north of downtown). Closer to home, it's more likely to be a handful of places on the Disney property, like Three Bridges at Coronado. Otherwise, the Epcot festivals are just as good as any fast casual, with a ton of choices.

But yeah, I do not miss the Apples and Bees or the Wendy's.

A week ago, I didn't know who Lindsey Stirling was. Well, technically I did, because Diana got tickets to see her last Friday, and it's been on my calendar for awhile, I just forgot. But then we're watching the Olympics, and US gymnast Suni Lee has this really cool music for her floor routine, and Diana explains that's Lindsey Stirling, who we're going to see. Friday morning, I listen to a couple of her albums, and buy Duality, her latest. Two listens through, and I'm hooked. I look online at various clips of her performances, and she's insanely dynamic, with a very dynamic lighting design.

She starts the show with "Eye Of The Untold Her," the one from Suni's routine, and already it's clear that this is gonna be a great show. That piece is so epic. She's in motion so much of the time, whether she's doing high kicks or being flown above the stage. She's ably backed by a small band and dancers. The lighting rig is relatively simple, but expertly used. It didn't matter that I didn't really know most of the music, because you can feel it. She's so good.

Her backstory is that she was on America's Got Talent and was kind of put down by the judges, that her thing needed a band and a singer. She does collaborate with others, but mostly it's her stuff, with the violin front and center. Her thing, as it turns out, works, really well. This show was sold-out, and that's apparently the case on much of her tour so far. She's doing her thing.

The only bummer is that I can't see the show again!

When we last left our hero (me), I was making rainbow swirlies. The programming model for Grand MA3 finally clicked in a meaningful way.

I'm in a weird place, because while I can, in theory, build virtual rigs in the software, and program those, it's just not the same as seeing the real thing in the room. Even more so, it's not the same as real lights in the room with fog. Part of the reason that's problematic is that six fixtures doesn't exactly give you the biggest playground to work with. Also, having them set up somewhere isn't exactly economical in terms of space.

Meh, I bought a truss anyway. It's really robust and fairly inexpensive, and I dig it (price went up significantly since I bought it). I put it upstairs over the living room during our last party. I didn't bust out the fog machine, because of the smoke alarms, but it was still effective for showing patterns on the wall. Getting what I had in my head took minutes to do, whereas two weeks ago I'd be messing with it for hours.

Last Friday, we saw Lindsey Stirling, and she puts on a fairly insane show. The lighting was next level, the sort of thing I'd expect at a proper arena rock show, not a violinist. It inspired me quite a bit. What I'd like to do is try and recreate that rig virtually to some degree, and try to replicate some of the looks. I remember watching the show and thinking that I understood how some of them were done (and I could see the MA board in the back).

I'm wondering if I can fit the truss into my office, because I can definitely use fog in there. No smoke detectors! However, no room in the house gets as warm as that one does, and those lights put out a lot of heat.

Ad revenue for CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz took a real dump last year. It hit a new low in January, reaching only $156, and that's before sending Walt's share (he's my partner on PB). Google switched to a CPM (cost-per-thousand) model in February, meaning that you get paid for showing the ad, whether it ever gets clicked on or not. That's far better than CPC (cost-per-click), which always seemed terrible for publishers and great for advertisers. Even if you don't click, for serious brands, they're getting seen, just as they would on TV or in print.

The sites together generally show 20,000 to 30,000 ads per day. You can see then that if the rate was consistently $1 CPM, I'd make $20 in a day, which is $600 in a month. That's a long way from the two grand I'd make back in the day, but fortunately my costs are no longer a grand per month, and I don't need the money to pay the mortgage. Lately, the effective CPM is in the high 70-cent range, putting me around $400 per month. This puts it firmly in the category of "meh," but it's an improvement anyway. At least I'm not subsidizing the sites out of pocket.

I outlined the costs last year, and now that I'm redundant on the primary site, my costs are around $260/month. I know that some people ask why I have the redundancy and that high of a cost when there are cheaper alternatives, and it's a valid point. However, given my line of work, I care about everything being fast and up, and this buys that. I've had a dedicated server die before, and another time a fire in the data center knocked me off the air. After 25 years, you're bound to see bad things happen. Besides, consistent uptime and speed reflects better on your Google juice, and the long-tail value of having tens of thousands of indexed pages is the reason that the sites still get the traffic that they do in the age of everything-is-on-big-tech-platforms.

Heading into an election season, there is typically a little boost in revenue, though in 2020 I didn't see it. The 2022 midterms were actually stronger. I don't take Trump's money, but the weird thing (everything is "weird" about the GOP these days) is that he's not running a lot of campaigns anyway. The only thing I see is some random campaigns from backwater towns in Michigan running for state representatives, not selling policy, but being "100% pro-Trump." That's sad. It's like pitching yourself for a job by saying you 100% back your local sportsball team.

I hate the Google monopoly on ads, but there isn't much I can do about it. Fortunately there's still a core group of people who pay for CoasterBuzz memberships, just for the ad-free experience. There's more money in video, but that's a lot of work, and I'm not that interested in feeding that algorithm constantly. I see how exhausting it is for others, and I don't need that.

I had my annual physical last week. It was pretty much the usual thing for me, which is to say all of my numbers are good other than triglycerides. They were in fact a little worse that last year, which is not surprising. I've had a somewhat bad relationship with food in recent months, which is to say it's too carb heavy, while my physical activity has been dismal.

Almost every year, I get into a mode of self-loathing over this same thing. Well, not last year because I was somewhere between France and Iceland when I got the labs back. Solid distraction. But again, the reason for the tri's is not complicated. I don't eat enough fiber, too many carbs, not enough movement. I've got 10 years of Fitbit data that I can correlate with tri "scores," and more activity matches lower numbers. I know how to fix it, but I haven't, so why?

This leans well into mental health, which I'm excited to say is something that I think is getting better. I'm back into a monthly rhythm of seeing a therapist. Mostly I'm trying to figure out how to manage anxiety, which makes it hard for me to commit to regular activities. I also think I have some kind of weird damage on the subject of exercise that I can't explain. My diet isn't great, but I haven't had red meat in almost 20 years, I don't usually eat a lot of over-processed packaged food, I don't drink soda at home, we don't consistently have junk snacks (not those that I want to eat, at least). It's less about removing things than it is getting the mix right. Lately I can't stop eating rice and and potatoes.

With that in mind, this year I don't want to get into the self-loathing cycle. I recognize that a lot of my anxiety starts with poor sleep. I'm finally beating that with edibles, and after six months, find that 5mg of THC is the sweet spot to make me tired, reduce the "thought spirals," but not cause a high feeling. It has been a game changer for me, and I'm sleeping now like I did pre-pandemic. Since I can't leave the state/country with it, I know how well it works from traveling. That rest is the foundation on which a lot of other things... rest on.

I still feel good about being "over" depression, feeling deeply about things, but the anxiety is still tough. I don't think it's something that I can easily treat with meds, so I haven't pursued that. I'm finding relief from it by listening to music, and trying to lean into things that trigger my ADHD hyperfocus. The latter is the thing that I don't find enough of, but it's coming back to me. I feel like I'll be able to get on that treadmill again, because my best window is first thing in the morning, and I'm waking up feeling good again.

Aside from escaping my own brain, other things are still mostly good. All of the other labs are normal, including low LDL, and the thyroid numbers are right where they should be. That's what rosuvastatin and levothyroxine get done. I'll have to take those for the rest of my days, but they work so amazingly well. I take 4g of icosapent ethyl a day for the triglycerides, but it's not magic like the other things.

Age isn't being terribly unkind yet, which is to say that the only thing that really comes to mind is sore knees in certain weather. I don't get winded doing normal things. What hair I have left is mostly not gray. My near eyesight isn't what it used to be, and I notice it has a lot to do with how tired I am, or how much screen time I have. It gets noticeably better after a week of vacation. Minimum distance is still shorter than my arm, for now, but I don't do well in dark situations.

Is this the year I crack the numbers game? Maybe. Some things feel more urgent than they used to be.