Archive: October, 2025

A month ago, I wrote about how school is both better and harder this year. Yesterday perfectly illustrated that phenomenon.

Grades came home, and they're the best that they've been since elementary school. Most astonishing was an A in biology. The rest were a couple of B's, and one C. That's a far cry from worrying about whether or not he would pass the grade last year. I'm surprised because the year started with us having to supervise and nag constantly. Now, Simon is autonomous with geometry, mostly. Actually, we're working with him less than the start of the year, which at the time felt like it would be constant. I've been jumping in for the game development virtual course, and Diana assists mostly with geometry and reading.

On the other hand, yesterday also came with a parent-teacher conference that was mostly about behavior. That isn't surprising, because we're having the same battles at home. He has somehow become this angry kid, always deferring his problems to someone or something else, and never owning them. He insists that we don't listen, when listening isn't the point. When adults ask him to do something, he's supposed to do it, no explanation needed. I know it isn't that simple, I suppose because I've always questioned authority, maybe not always at appropriate times. And something about autism seems to come with a desire for social justice, so when something seems "unfair," it triggers us. The difference is that I understand when I just don't like the response, he does not. He doesn't understand that adults are not his peers.

Certainly, the academics matter the most, and this is a huge relief. Granted, he isn't having to do as much work as he would in the big high school, but from the testimony of his teachers, he does get and understand what he's learning. I'm very distressed about the behavior, but he's in therapy for that. We're also trying to get another doctor, because I get the feeling that amphetamines and stimulants are not right for him. We took him off a booster dose of Adderall, because it seemed to cause rage and all of the negative side effects.

So the highs are higher and the lows are lower. We're doing all the things though, and this school represents a huge opportunity. I can't predict where he'll land in two and a half years, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be on solid footing, whatever it is he chooses to do.

Back in 2009, as we were packing up to move from Cleveland to Seattle, I regrettably sold my Jurassic Park pinball machine from 1993. When I bought it used in 2000, for a comparatively reasonable $2,000 I think, the inside smelled like a bar (read: cigarette smoke) but it operated fairly well. It required a little maintenance from time to time, but I really got to know it well. It was a huge hit at parties. I always said I would get another one someday, but I didn't realize that it would be 16 years.

I've favored experiences over stuff for years now. I think this approach to life has generally served me pretty well. I've made some big purchases for hobbies, usually in the service of making stuff. But this is something that is purely for entertainment. While there are a ton of used machines, and I still love the old JP machine, I wanted something totally new, from the box. There are just two manufacturers now, and Stern has the legacy and history of the old Sega and Data East machines. They launched a new platform, which they call Spike3, with a new Star Wars game, Fall of the Empire. Incredibly, the designer was one of three guys that designed the '93 JP machine! Stern also has the press used to mark the playfield boards for every one of those old machines. So this new thing has ties to the old thing. I decided that it was long overdue. I've been looking at the new machines every year at IAAPA, but never pulled the trigger.

I bought the premium version, which is a step up from the pro, but not as expensive as the limited edition. The pro lacks certain mechanical ramps, movement and the "Force" magnet. The LE has blue paint and more lights, but I like this one better. It has a very classic Vader and Luke with lightsabers illustration on the side. What they all have now is online accounts that save your stats and achievements, and you can scan your QR code on machines anywhere. For the home machine, you can add your accounts directly to the machine so you don't need to scan them. It's very cool. I'll write up a review of the machine eventually, but so far I really like it. It can get very fast, especially with various multi-ball situations.

I waited to write about it for about two weeks, because I had an issue with it. A short somewhere in the lighting was causing the controller for the lower part of the machine to keep resetting. I was able to narrow it down to one of the "general illumination" strings (i.e., playfield lights), and specifically a socket that got hot and seemed to be shorting out. I could still play it by unplugging these, but it meant the bottom half was dark. The distributor came back out today and replaced it, and everything was good.

It's not the only quality problem. Someone failed to put a wrench on the bolts around the coin door, and one had come completely off in shipping. I found the nut inside. There's also a bracket around the Death Star opening that is too narrow, so the ball doesn't make it in as much as it should. It sounds like this is a known problem, and some enterprising folks have used a Dremel to widen it. But they may end up shipping out replacements.

All things considered, the architecture of the modern machine is pretty clever. Some things are radically different, while others are the same as they were 30 years ago. And while I'm sure that some of the parts are made off-shore, the machine is mostly made in Chicago. American companies are still pretty good at making certain niche things, and this is definitely one of them. I don't give Stern a pass for the QC issues, especially given the cost of these very expensive toys, but they are remarkably mechanical and physical machines. It's not like a game console, which likely works or it doesn't.

And therein lies the biggest challenge for Stern. The machines tend to find their way into homes more than commercial settings. It's not that there aren't any arcades, but no one wants to maintain these things. And your average D&B is mostly redemption crap now. So the growth is among collectors in the home. Selling a commercial product to consumers is tricky. The expectations are different. Things like copy machines and coffee makers are expected to require maintenance, as are pinball machines. But consumers want stuff to just work.

The other interesting thing is that the software isn't actually complete. They aren't to v1.0 yet, and apparently that's normal these days. The rulebook has blank sections! I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Still, there is I think a certain level of satisfaction that people get maintaining these, and I remember that was true for the old JP machine. In particular, I remember having a problem with the switches in the ball chute. One of them didn't line up right, so the machine thought a ball was missing. It took a day of messing around with it to fix it, but it was satisfying. Now they use optical sensors, which are way more reliable.

The best part is that Simon is totally into it. Diana is too, though she's the undisputed Galaga queen. I can't wait to have people over, as I'm sure they'll congregate around it while I pour them cocktails. As I said, I'll review the game after I've had more time with it. For now, let me say that I'm thrilled to begin my second pinball era!

Two months ago, I rambled about the strange ways that your brain did or didn't work on Spelling Bee, the game from the NYT. I have more thoughts.

First off, it seems like it does get easier, almost as if you just need to exercise your brain to make it work better. Some of this is just because certain combinations of letters yield the same results. You see I, N, G, plus a B and a T, and you get fun words you don't ordinarily use like "beignet." But then there are certain combinations that just don't make sense to you. And that's interesting because Diana obviously gets the same letters that I do, but the puzzles that are hard for me are easy for her, and vice versa. Talk about the different wiring!

But I'm generally to the place where I can get "genius" four times a week, and the rest are (usually) "amazing." Again, some of it is just repetition and training your brain to see things in those seven hexagons. The annoying thing is needing that center letter, because my brain gets stuck on the words found around the outside.

It's a fun distraction, and beats dicking around with anti-social apps.

Simon and I have been talking about emotions, and how we regulate them. It also seems that we have some things in common as far as being stuck in our head, thought spirals whirling about and going in some suboptimal directions. Our dumb lizard brains tend to go toward the fear and anxiety stuff, I suppose as a means of staying alive, despite there being far fewer threats to our persistence compared to hundreds of years ago. Why can't our minds go to puppies and rainbows?

I worry about that for him, because he hasn't had the experience of developing decades of coping strategies or self-regulation. I also know how not self-aware I was for a long time. And if there's one "advantage" that I had it was not knowing about my autism diagnosis. A lot has been written about that lately, because it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, you go through a significant portion of life thinking that you just suck at some things, with all of the self-loathing that comes with that, but on the other hand, you have the diagnosis and just kind of feel broken, with all of the self-loathing that comes with that. There's no winning either way.

The other thing that we may have in common is that we often feel like the world is against us. For me, I complained about it a lot when I was younger, but was mostly able to channel that into determination that led me to success in my field (before I decided it was shitty and changed careers). Simon is not there at all. He immediately deflects every challenge to others, rarely acknowledging that some of it might be him. I think I might be reaching him on that, but it's tough to walk the line of not invalidating his feelings and still holding him accountable.

I hate that I kind of frame everything about Simon's way of thinking to my own, but it's the only reference that I've got. The more time I spend talking to him, the more I get these little glimmers of hope that I can help him. It's hard at that age though to be most concerned with the present, because the past and future seem so important. Heck, it's not easy at my age! But living in your head all of the time is exhausting.

Last night I was YouTube surfing, when I saw that Bill Murray was on Kimmel. I was struck by how old he appeared, having just celebrated his 75th birthday. There was a part of me that was thinking, gosh, he might not have a lot of time left. Or he could live for another 20 years. I felt unusually sad about the passage of time.

On one hand, I feel pretty good about having purpose in life, knowing it is limited. As I've said before, be kind to others, make art, help out, leave things better than you found them. But sometimes it does feel as if I have to write like I'm running out of time, as per Hamilton. And then there's the perception of time passage, how that changes as you get older. You have all of these markers in your life, like relationships, jobs, moving, kids and such.

I've lived in Orange County for 12 years now, eight of those in this house. For someone who used to be adverse to change in my younger days, this feels strange. These 12 years have felt "faster" than others, despite having a pandemic in the middle. Consider the decade prior, which included three serious relationships, six jobs, 6,000 miles of moving and one child. The decade before that was one relationship, but included the end of college, a career pivot and 9/11, plus I was younger so most experiences were new. I haven't been static in "the Florida era," but it seems to have happened so fast.

Now I'm doing all kinds of rationalization about time. For example, half of my life gets me back to 1999, which seems impossibly distant, so that time hasn't felt fast in that context. And if I were to go 26 years forward, I would be older than Bill Murray, so that kind of feels like I have lots of time. But you never know, because you're one Florida driver away from your demise, or one cell that goes rogue and causes cancer. On the other hand, life expectancy keeps getting longer, so maybe Bill Murray isn't old at all. When I'm looking at quarter-centuries, it's possible that I'm entering Act III, but in a four-act play.

Aging is so weird. But given the relative brevity of life, it sure is hard to understand how so many people can be so hateful. Who has time for that?

Diana and I had the opportunity to see Joss Stone on Sunday night (with Rocky Horror happening in the other big theater), and she was "lovely," as she would say. This is actually the second time I've seen her, and it made me realize that she's still relatively young.

"Right To Be Wrong" is a pretty great song, one that she often ends with. It's wisdom is surprising, since she was probably 16 when she wrote it. Then it occurs to me, she was still a teenager when she started. That's why it feels like I've known her forever but I've got a decade and change on her. You wouldn't know it by listening to her music, or in conversation. She can sure work a crowd, especially when she goes out into it.

This tour she decided to strip it down a bit, and had three backup singers, a guitarist and bassist. There were just a few tracked bits, some basic percussion, or maybe it was played back by the guitarist (he had a rig on the floor of stuff). The result was a performance that was more natural and laid-back. As she put it, "Welcome to our living room." She played quite a few songs that were from her first two albums, which now are 20-ish-years-old. She's so good live. Her guitarist was very good as well.

And of course, we got to see her in Steinmetz Hall, which is always a delight. Usually we see orchestras and such in there, but this time they had the proscenium flown in. I hope she had a good time in our venue.

The NFL recently announced that Bad Bunny would be doing the Super Bowl halftime show this season. It hasn't even happened yet, and it's landing with certain white people about as well as last season's show with Kendrick Lamar. The response to that was gross because there was a theme that implied people of color should just play their sportsball and sing their songs and entertain us. Gross.

Some faction that is essentially composed of white nationalists declared that they should have their own substitute halftime show, with someone who is "truly Christian, American." I couldn't tell you how football became political, or a magnet for racism, especially given the fact that three-fourths of the players are not white. It builds on last year's ick factor. This year, I'm not sure what they're even talking about, since Bad Bunny is apparently Catholic, and certainly American, being born in Puerto Rico. He just happens to rap in Spanish. He's not my thing, but I don't expect every bit of art to be for me.

A central tenet of fascism is to declare that minorities or other people not conforming to whatever doesn't scare them are less authentic to whatever nation they're talking about. Considering this country was founded and built by immigrants, many of whom were slaves, it seems like an historically poor choice to be ranking who is more "American." Even if you could make a case for religion as core to the nation's identity, which you can't because it's right there in the Constitution, it's also laughable that you could make any claim in the name of Christ, who was a leftist brown person in an occupied territory whose teachings were the opposite of everything these racist folks seem to stand for. (If you doubt that, or want to call out people don't get it, I encourage you to read Separation of Church and Hate.)

The hate and bigotry is bad enough, but this phenomenon is also another indication that American citizens suck at civics. They don't understand their own country or what it's supposed to stand for. It's not just that it elected a felon and conman, it's that they don't understand the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, how laws are made, how the courts work, etc. When I was on my HOA board, I couldn't believe that people didn't even know what municipal jurisdiction they lived in. Most recently one didn't even know if they had gas or electric (do you pay a gas company?). Being patriotic apparently involves being willfully ignorant, which is another tenet of fascism, along with going after free speech, attempting to regulate higher education and attempting to prosecute your political enemies.

There are good reasons to feel dread about all of this, for sure. But history shows that things inevitably turn around when bigotry and wealth inequality start to reach a limit. And when minorities collectively become the majority, some time in the next 15-ish years, do you want to have left a trail on social media that you were on team bigot? All of the silly "woke" accusations in the world aren't going to excuse you from that. The Internet tends to not forget. I mean, look at all of the social media posts by current officials saying things that completely contradict what they're doing now.

Enjoy your sportsball.

A few days ago I registered my annoyance with Tesla Energy and their shitty support, over what I perceived to be a problem. As it turns out, it's working as designed, but I learned this entirely from unofficial sources.

My solar wasn't generating when I was off-grid, which seemed like a problem to me. Then I learned that this was by design in the event that the Powerwall state-of-charge is higher than 90-something-percent. This makes sense, because if the battery is full, there's nowhere for the solar energy to go. Because the solar inverters are not an integrated part of the system (they're made by another company and do not communicate with the Powerwall's energy gateway), the system has to trick them into not generating. Inverters have to synchronize their frequency with the grid, running at 60Hz, so that your sources of power all run at the same frequency. When it disconnects from the grid, and your battery is full, it fakes out the inverters by boosting the frequency over 62Hz, and I guess there are regulations that require inverters in the US to not generate if the frequency is that high. So when my battery was full, it was running at around 62.5Hz, effectively shutting out the inverters.

I confirmed this by running down the battery and manually going off-grid. Sure enough, the solar was generating power and feeding the house and battery.

Here's the thing though, this is not explained in the consumer manual or the installation manual for the gear. I pieced this together by reading Reddit posts. And the fuckwit support people either don't know this, or they did and instead of sharing it just disappeared my support case. This is on brand for Tesla's energy division. It's terrible. The techs in the field are good people, but getting one to your house is nearly impossible. There was the original solar and battery install problems, the time I got stuck off-grid a few years ago, and then this year's failures. And one of the inverters stopped talking to their old school communication bridge, so depending on which thing is the source of truth, the bridge or the gateway's metering, they don't have an accurate picture of my generation. That matters because there is a guarantee that they have to meet for ten years.

So again, I do not recommend Tesla for solar or backup power. They're just not very good.

I'm trying to engage in a project that I started five years ago. Yes, it's a private social "network," which is to say, it's not really a network if it's just for me. And probably my friends. As Meta gets further and further into the territory of "no consequences," and fails to be social in any way, I want to move on. I'm already just posting and rarely reading, so why bother? It's little more than a contextual journal at this point.

All of those years ago, I sketched out some data structures that would make it pretty easy to adapt to various post types (text, photos, links, etc.), but at some point it became pretty convoluted. Reasonably, it gets out of the over-normalized relational stuff and adopts more serialized bits as they relate to sub-types of content. But also, it makes some decisions about when to serialize or deserialize and send it over the wire. Whatever my thinking was when I started that, I do not recall. So as I come back to it, none of it works. This week I've sat down to look at it three times and lost interest very fast.

It's so clear to me why I didn't have the output of my peers when I was writing code as my primary job. Now I know it's the ADHD, but at the time I just thought that I was lazy. That's definitely not the case. What's interesting though is that when I have a clean start, I go for super simple everything. As it turns out, the non-neurotypical nature of my brain prefers simplicity, limited scope and much more readable code. When I encounter something in code that I wrote more than a decade ago, it feels over-engineered and gross. I wonder now if the simplicity would make up for the output if I were doing this as my primary job function.

In any case, I've resolved that I just need to start over with the end-to-end transmission of data between the client and the database, with all of the stuff in between. The database is fine, it's everything in between. If you write code, then you've heard of "data transfer objects," or DTO's, which I've always found to be cumbersome and often not necessary. My forum app doesn't have them. And part of the way that you get away with that is server-side rendering of user interfaces, which in this case isn't what I'm doing. So you add this go between over the wire, and then you're in the business of optimally shaping payloads. What I'm starting to get is that payloads are just wrappers around those entities that you already have. Duh. So if you have a text post, for example, and it has links, you're just optimizing that graph and sending that. I'm sure day-to-day code monkeys laugh at me for this realization.

Sometimes I'm amazed at how much I know, and how many dumb things I do anyway, when it comes to this craft. And boy does AI give you a lot of dumb options, but I'm trying to get more out of it.

Sometimes the weirdest things bum me out. Right now, I'm quietly raging about house problems.

First off, in my ongoing issues with Tesla's shitty energy products, last week we lost power for an hour, and the battery kicked in. That's the first time since the switching bits (to isolate you from the grid) broke in July. Now the problem is that when the system goes off-grid, the solar fails to synchronize with the battery. (The TL;DR is that alternating current in US houses runs at about 60 Hz, so the solar inverters have to match that so the power can seamlessly flow between solar, battery and house.) When this happened, I was in a long chat session with various support people and they opened a support case. A few days later, the support case disappeared as if it never happened. Remember, it took them six weeks to fix the last problem, and prior issues in prior years took as long, if not longer. They're just the fucking worst. I detailed the problem in email, so we'll see if anything comes from that route. I doubt it. I'm sure I'll have to call, and they'll do everything they can to avoid the problem.

Also last week, the TVX valve on our downstairs AC broke, so it failed to cool the place down. This is very consequential for my office, which is the furthest from the blower and with the door closed, gets no residual cooling from the upstairs units. At the time, and what made me realize something was wrong, is that the blower ran the entire night and the system used about $15 worth of electricity blowing hot air around. The tech believed that the motor had to be replaced, which on this old crappy Lennox stuff has an integrated controller, thus the whole thing has to be replaced. But as they quoted a repair, it didn't exhibit the behavior, so I passed on it. Two days later, today, it did the same thing, running all night. When it's cooling, it does cool, but it gets stuck blowing even when the compressor outside is idle.

So all in, these HVAC repairs are going to cost nearly $2k. It's an awkward spot because replacing the whole thing would cost just under $8k, so it feels like throwing bad after good. We did replace the upstairs last year, with a correctly sized (larger) system that is far more energy efficient, using more than a third less energy. It works so well. That cost $6,500 after a $2k tax credit, which of course the fuckwads in Washington have repealed, so there's no getting that again. We just need the downstairs system to work for another five years or so, when we might bail from here.

Look, I'm acutely aware that I have the good fortune of being able to save for crap like this, but it's that category of stuff that just feels like evaporating money. It's not like new carpet or cabinets or something that you can use and enjoy. As a colleague once put it, these are "in the wall" improvements that you don't see, and those hurt. Then pile on the incompetence of Tesla Energy, and I hate that I can't just rip everything they put in out and get my money back. The solar plant, at least, hits its ROI point next year, meaning all energy after that is "free" relative to the cost of the system. I guess that's something.