Archive: October, 2026

Imagine, if you will, it's 2012. Barack Obama is on the campaign trail for re-election. A female reporter asks him a question, and he responds by calling her "piggy," and telling her she's a horrible person and a joke of a journalist.

If you really believe that there is any chance that he would have been reelected, or have any relevance today, I would tell you that you're among the most intellectually dishonest people I know. You know that's bullshit. But today, it's standard operating procedure for Trump.

It's crazy to see Republican candidates talking about affordability and threats of "socialism," in light of the fact that their leader has openly been at war with the First Amendment and engaging in fascist tactics to quash disagreement and disloyalty. Those cats don't even understand what socialism is, whilst enjoying public schools, libraries, police and fire protection, etc. We've literally landed at, "Papers, please," as thugs in masks move about shooting citizens without accountability. Does that sound like anything you know from history?

The right always had certain undertones of "-isms," but at least they felt grounded, if not morally sound, in an intellectual argument. But ever since Trump came down his tacky-ass escalator, racism, misogyny and xenophobia has been blatant and uncoded.

It feels like we're on the verge of change. As inflation gets worse, pointless wars are waged, Americans may finally be realizing, this is not normal. It's a realization that should've happened when he was caught saying, "Grab them by the pussy," or he mocked disabled people. Honestly, it doesn't paint a great picture of American culture that it was ever OK.

The constant lying is the worst. The Florida governor's race has a new ad on the Dem side, where he flat out says, "My opponent is lying about me." I don't know if that sort of thing lands these days, but it's the most direct callout I've seen in years.

I am strangely not cynical, when the world has barely given me a reason not to be. The polls and prediction markets are really leaning toward a correction. We have to be better than this.

It has been almost a year since I involuntarily left Facebook, and it has been great for my mental health. There are some folks I miss seeing there, but there were so few of them left in the first place. What I have noticed, going to Instagram now and then (mostly for the cats), is that filters and glow-ups of humans have completely distorted the reality of what real humans look like.

Two examples immediately come to mind, and oddly enough, they were given to me by the algorithm. First, a tattoo artist named Pamela made a series of posts about how tattoo artists were touching up their portfolio pictures to the point that they looked like electronic drawings. Her policy is to post her work as-is. She pointed out that if you can't see the pores on the skin, it just ain't real. Skin is not a perfect medium, and that's a constraint of tattoo art. Another, more recent one, was a woman who calls herself "Saggy Sara." She captures the "plasticization" of people on the Internet in vivid detail, by showing before-and-afters of herself, filtered. She shows how the world creates unrealistic expectations about weight, skin, hair, teeth and the rest of it.

It got me to thinking about my earliest intimate encounters. What I remember most vividly is the textures, freckles, tiny hairs and the way that skin bunches up on itself. And mind, you, that was not-even-20 skin at the time! (Also, pre-WWW, because I ain't young.) But even daily dorm life painted a different picture than I expected. The archetypical "hot girl" from my high school ended up going to the same school as me, and lived one floor above me my freshman year. Seeing her without makeup, messy hair, in frumpy pajamas, totally reframed my understanding of her. She was human, like any of us. To this day, that natural, imperfect thing is what I find most attractive. Fake Internet people don't do it for me.

I'm not railing against makeup or fitness or whatever, or even the "influencers" (not a job) that peddle tutorials on the Internet. In some ways I admire the people who are good at that sort of thing. If it helps you feel good, more power to you. What I don't like is the fake, filtered view of humans. I saw someone famous on TV the other day, dealing with a bit of acne, and I thought, that's a real person. That's acceptable. I hope we can get back to that sort of thing.

Everyone knows that the facts are that voter fraud is exceptionally rare. The research says it's about 0.00004%, or 4 in 10 million. The system is surprisingly resistant to fraud, and the decentralized nature of it helps a lot with that. It's why the feds don't need their hands in it. And you know how the right says that gun control laws interfere with "law abiding citizens rights?" That's exactly what voter ID and other suppression laws do. Seriously, if you want to look into election manipulation, let's talk about gerrymandering.

I've voted by mail in all but a half-dozen elections since I turned 18. Actually, my first time voting was by mail, because I was away at college. It's convenient, sure, but the real win is that it give you time to look at the ballot and properly vet everything on it. That means you can look up information about every candidate and every issue. That's how it should be.

An informed electorate leads to better government. No wonder certain folks don't want that.

I remember when having a 10 Mbps Internet connection felt like something of a modern miracle. When we moved into our current house, nine years ago, I was excited that the neighborhood was wired with fiber. Until I learned that they were using RF-over-glass, which is to say the fiber got to your house, and a converter put the signal on good old fashioned RG6 coaxial cable, for a cable modem. Over the years, they kept upping the download speeds, and we were at 500 Mbps, but uploads were still a dismal 20 Mbps. Most people probably don't need more, but because I backup everything outside the home, things like video files have always been miserable to upload.

Then over the last month or two, that fiber-but-cable connection kept dropping out, almost every evening. I don't know the reason, but others in the neighborhood experienced similar. I called Spectrum once, and they gave me the run-around because their cable modem (which is locked down so you can't see what it's really doing) didn't report any outages. But I tried three different routers and a direct laptop connection, and it was definitely not my equipment. I kept meaning to call to complain more, but then a dude from Spectrum was going door-to-door, asking if folks wanted actual fiber connections. So duh, of course.

My concern was that they would show up and find some way to do it wrong. All of the houses in the neighborhood have two ethernet cables from the laundry or closet to the outside, one apparently for analog phone, for which there aren't any lines buried. Anyway, the ideal set up is that you have power-over-ethernet (PoE) sent from inside to a network interface outside, and then on the inside you connect your router. A neighbor who finally got fiber said they drilled a hole into his garage to set this up for some reason, which seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was concerned that this wasn't going to work.

So when the dude got here, that's what he wanted to do. The problem is that their network interfaces don't do PoE, they need to be plugged in to regular AC power. I explained to him that there was no power in the garage there, but that's also where my house backup battery is. Pretty sure the main electric lines are in the wall around there, too. I do have an outdoor plug there, so extension cord it was. He initially insisted that the interface had to be inside because it's not rated for outdoor, but I told him the old RFoG adapter had been in there for nine years in the weatherproof box, with four hurricanes. Fortunately, he went along with it.

A few months ago, they started using these "invincible" routers, which have an 8-hour battery backup and a 5G cellular connection. I don't technically need a router at all, since I have my mesh units, but the cellular is intriguing. As is the case with their other gear, it's locked down and you can only change a few settings via their app or web site. So now I have this router spewing wifi into my house next to my own router, because I can't turn off their wifi. Whatever.

The speed tests now run between 940 and 1050 Mbps in both directions.

I used the opportunity to rewire some stuff, and get my "network rack" out of my office. I previously had the cable modem in there, along with a switch, a UPS, my NAS and a Hue hub (for lights). I emptied it out, and mounted it high on the wall in my laundry room. It feels secure, screwed into the studs, but it makes me a little nervous. In any case, now I just have the single ethernet cable in my office and the second mesh node. The primary mesh node, the NAS and two Hue hubs, along with the switch and the Spectrum router, are all up there, out of the way.

It felt like the longest wait ever, but our Broadway season finally started this year with Hamilton. Our last show was Six on June 3. Typically we see the first show in September, so maybe that's part of the reason it felt so long.

This is a show that I've now seen eight times, mind you, but it was just staggering that after spending so much time in my head with all of the things that trouble me, I can't remember a recent time that I felt as present and in the moment. OK, seeing Come From Away with our local company down the street was close.

Live theater, which unfortunately can be pretty expensive, is one of, if not the best kind of entertainment. There is something about people pouring it out on stage, in front of you, in real time. It will never be done exactly the same way again. You're there for a moment that will live only in memory. There's something wonderful about that. This year we have three great returning shows, five we haven't seen (of various levels of acclaim), and, ugh Sound of Music.

We've changed up our routine, where we go to a local pizza joint and bar down the street before the show. Drinks are stupid expensive at the theater now, so we drop in the donor room for snacks and spend nothing there. The tickets are obviously paid for already. I like the vibe at the pizza joint, and the bartenders are pretty cool.

Still, I love being in that building. We've been going now for 12 years, and it's one of my favorite things about living here. It's just strange that Diana doesn't work there anymore.

I'm definitely at a point in my career where I don't generally see new things in my work. Sure, the tools change, but the people and process problems really don't that much. Even the technical problems, they haven't changed that much, not even with AI.

As I understand it, it's not unusual for people with autism to observe a situation and instinctively say, "You're doing it wrong." My kid is like that, too. The difference between us is that he will blurt out obscenities at poor drivers, whereas I'll take one of those work situations and say, "How can I help make this better?" The underlying sentiment is not that different.

Oddly enough, when I've been in a position to have more influence and responsibility, I didn't have the experience that I do now. I also realized at one point that I like being closer to the makers, getting into technical design and having real accountability in shipping stuff. Being a line manager is far more satisfying than trying to be a CTO. Still, I have this strong urge to fix things that I know could be better. But if I can get beyond the instinct to correct that which is wrong (in my perception at least), I still have the moral dilemma of whether or not I'm being professionally negligent.

At my last job, for example, there was an opportunity to greatly simplify system architecture by consolidating API's instead of having a ton of one-off things to maintain. One gateway to rule them all, without the complexity of dependencies and coordinated releases. This was not my problem to own, but it felt like an obvious thing to make life easier for many folks, and shut down a lot of redundant compute. However, the more involved that I got in trying to make it happen, the more distracted I got from my core responsibilities. Getting nowhere in building consensus and priority, this time I eventually walked away from it.

I think there are two things to think about. The first is that we rarely understand the depth of experience for any given individual. Sometimes we'll remember something on a person's resume from their interview, but most of the time, we just don't know. The second thing is that it's too easy to get sucked into the idea that we can solve all of the problems. It's not that we shouldn't leverage our experience, but changing lanes means you might not be as good at your primary thing.

The bottom line is that I need to learn to let go of some of the things that aren't mine. The idea that I can fix all the things may be hubris.

Diana and I went to our local Outback restaurant the other day, while Simon was at the parks. I don't remember how we ended up with a gift card, but ordinarily this isn't a place we would go. In fact, we don't really go to national casual chains very often in the general sense. There are just better options with better food (not to mention a ton of great restaurants on the theme park properties). Outback was fine. You can't really screw up chicken and a baked potato, as long as they're seasoned right.

There was a time though, in Cleveland, where I would frequently visit the big chains. This was before the foodie scene started to expand there, and before the chains seemed to mostly just microwave all of their crappy food. Stephanie and I periodically went to Outback as part of a cycle that included Best Buy. That was in my buy-lots-of-crap phase. And I know we went there on credit sometimes, too.

The crazy thing that I remember was putting your name in and hanging out, sometimes for a half-hour or more, to get a table. That's nuts. If we went anywhere today, if there was anything more than a 10-minute wait, we'd turn around and go somewhere else. We were so tolerant then of waiting. This would happen at TGI Friday's too (again, when the food was OK). I vividly remember going outside if it wasn't too cold, because I couldn't deal with waiting in a crowded, noisy area inside.

The other variable is the invention of fast casual, where it's not exactly fast food, but it's not a sit-down restaurant either. Chipotle is likely the most brilliant example of this, where they have real and fresh food, but there others. A lot of them have come and gone, but Pei Wei is still a thing, and locally we have a sushi/fusion place called Bento. These are not the crappy fast food stuffs like McDonald's or Wendy's. It's measurably better stuff, and oddly enough not that much more expensive than a McMeal. As a percentage, those places get more money from me than regular sit-down joints, and fast food is off the table completely.

I never really noticed the change, it happened so gradually.

I'm sure I wrote about it back in the day, but the merger of Six Flags and Cedar Fair was a terrible idea. CF was making some missteps, but generally the company was functional and making money. Six Flags was cratering with an already damaged brand and management that had no idea what it was doing. All of the people responsible for that train wreck are gone, but the new leadership is probably making things worse. I wrote some thoughts on LinkedIn that have had an awful lot of views given my limited network.

If you go back to the start of my roller coaster and theme park fascination, say, 1998-ish, there was a consistent, decades-long dominance for Cedar Point, the "home park," if you will. There were others, not part of Cedar Fair at the time, like Kings Island, Kennywood, Holiday World and such. In 2006, Cedar Fair bought the Paramount Parks, and the transitions was pretty rough. The CEO, Dick Kinzel, after decades leading a smaller company, engaged in hubris believing he could just apply the same practices to every park, which did not work out. He did the same with cross-town Geauga Lake. He kind of overstayed his time, instead of leaving on top.

But then Matt Ouimet lands the CEO job next, and brings a ton of Disney and hotel experience, unlocking a lot of the potential of Cedar Point specifically, but also finding the different potential at all of the parks. This is all through a stretch of time where I made a lot of friends working in various roles there, including the GM for awhile. It made me realize that regardless of the rides, it was the people that really made it special.

Since the merger, and a revolving door of leadership, the company has let go of so many people, that it's unclear who is still there to run the parks. For the first time in 28 years, I don't really know anyone at Cedar Point. That's pretty weird. Mind you, I don't live close, so the park doesn't nearly have the importance it once did. But it feels like the end of an era.

Amusement parks and theme parks are not a slam-dunk as far as success goes, but there are proven fundamentals that have worked for decades, and still work. The private park companies are all doing pretty well, and Disney is killing it too. Comcast says their Universal parks missed targets, but they're not hurting, as best I can tell. Above all, these are hospitality businesses, and those are built on people. Letting go of all the people will not make it better.