Archive: May, 2026

This is just an anecdote, not a study, but I thought I'd share some recent observations about using AI for coding. While still firmly in the realm of being a great boost for productivity, I am a little worried about what happens with the folks, especially inexperienced developers, that just rubber-stamp whatever it comes up with. This is in the context of mature, larger code bases. The big design and architectural decisions have been made and it's well documented.

First, I ran into a UI bug where a disabled button still did something when clicked, and it was unexpected. There's a state box that says the button is disabled, so one would think that's how it would decide not to act. On the first try, Claude modified a huge block of code that was used to defensively work against a non-related problem (network latency or failure), confidently declaring, "The problem is clear." Wrong, revert those changes. Second try, Claude checked the CSS class on the button with magic strings to decide whether or not to do anything. Also wrong, because certainly the state of the DOM is not the source of truth. I just gave it the line number, and told it, "Check the value of this boolean, and if it's false, don't do anything." That was a huge bug waiting to happen if the CSS ever changed.

On another project, there is a reusable component that appears in three different places. What's different is the source of the data. Still, the AI agent keeps trying to make secondary versions of the component, or try to override and modify it peripherally. Again, the functionality never changes, but I've had to course-correct it over and over again.

Individually, these are not a big deal. However, this is how you get to the "death by a thousand cuts" scenario. And to be clear, this is no different than working with humans. The experienced folks need to guide those who are less experienced, who in turn do that for others down the road.

The argument that I keep hearing is that, "The models will get better." Will they? They're trained on code with the same problems. Because LLM's lack wisdom or judgment, they don't "know" what the best practices are. If human feedback is really being fed back into the machine, I'm seeing more slop, not less. And for those who suggest more rigor and process, haven't we spent literal decades trying to reduce process to get to market faster? Human curation and guidance, by comparison, are cheap, and I don't mind guiding the robots. I don't want to go back to armies of analysts and reams of documents to build something that makes countless incorrect assumptions before getting in front of users. Do you?

This has been the weirdest unemployment streak I've had. First off, I didn't even care for the first month. I was happy to take a mini-sabbatical. Then Diana had her appendectomy and related problems, with a few weeks of me quietly on high alert but not appearing overly concerned. Then I got a little more serious about looking, and there are so many messed up things about tech recruiting right now. That's a different post though.

Mentally, this has been a rough go-around, because I can't separate work from my identity, purpose and value. And to be fair, I was at a job for four years, longer than any previous job, with people that I really enjoyed working with. It was also my most successful run, no contest. I've got the hard data to back that up.

Identity is the least important to me, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't at all identify with what I do. This became more of a factor in the last job, because of the success. It's more of a cultural problem, as meeting people inevitably leads to, "So what do you do for a living?" Even my new doctor asked me this.

Purpose is trickier. We spend most of our adult life working, so like it or not, it's often the reason we get out of bed. When you combine this with midlife, yikes, talk about the classic existential crisis. This is why I've taken the position that true retirement, not doing any job at all, seems like a terrible idea. Even if it's volunteering 20 hours a week, you need something to do. Leisure is good, but to enjoy it you almost need something to balance it out.

But the hardest thing for me is value. Being valued is a basic human need. It's a reason that I'm careful to thank people that work for me at every turn. When you don't have that, it's weird. The recruiting mess invokes a lot of negative feelings, like, "Do they not see how awesome I am?" Logically, I can see and identify the structural reasons that things are broken, and not about me. But feelings are often illogical, so I struggle with this a lot. There's also some level of autism "can't reconcile this" stuff that goes on in my head. For the unfamiliar, that's the thing where you have two states, which in my case are unemployment and my awesomeness, that coexist when they shouldn't.

I got another solid referral last week, so fingers crossed that this is the one.

We've sailed on 34 Disney cruises so far, and today they emailed to say that they wanted to upgrade us for free. It's a win, but not as impactful had it been a different cruise. We booked the next one late last year, and we booked a concierge room to celebrate our 19th "meetiversary." We met May 1, 2007. Had we gone from a regular room to concierge, that would have been a crazy upgrade value. Still, what we're getting is a 1-bedroom suite, which I don't image we would ever pay for on our own accord. It's essentially twice the normal size, with two bathrooms, a hard door between us and Simon, and a double-long verandah. Now the 2-story suites, that would have been epic!

Of those 34, we did concierge four times. The first was just our fourth cruise, as I recall there was some deal. It didn't blow us away, because back then the Dream had a small lounge, but the upgrade wasn't that expensive. We did it again, first one post-COVID, the 20th cruise, on the Dream. The elevated service was nice, but still the small lounge and expensive fare made it a questionable value. They had been holding a refund from a cancelled March 2020 cruise, so with that money gone I was content to just pay the 35% premium.

The Wish changed the math substantially. We did the inaugural in 2022 at half-price, because it was delayed. Then, for April, 2023, I found a concierge offer that was almost twice the fare of a regular room, but still almost half what that last Dream concierge cruise was. And regular rooms on the 3-night trips were cheap then. The Triton-class ships have at least twice as many concierge rooms, so I assume that's why it was less than the Dream. But they have an enormous lounge, an open bar every night, a large two-level pool deck with two hot tubs and "wet seat" pools. This feels more premium, end to end, and the snacks are ridiculous. At the time, I figured we wouldn't do it again because of the questionable value, but I caved.

We did it again in April, 2024, and the fare was worse. But I had a huge bonus that year, and I just decided, fuck it, we deserve it. We booked the next one in December, pre-layoff, but the fare was mercifully not higher, because placeholder reservation discounts started applying to concierge rooms. Again, coming off of a difficult year, I just felt like three nights of total self-care and people caring for me were worth it. It's what I call "flip-flop bougie," which is the kind of bougie I like. And with the room upgrade, even more worth it.

As I described in 2024, these are the easiest vacations to do with Simon, because he can be independent and food is a non-issue. When we don't have to parent, it's a true vacation. He's two years from graduation, so as hard as these years can be, I'm happy to do a happy place for all of us.

I'm not a fan of the rise of so-called influencers. They tend to be inauthentic when hawking stuff, and the format in which they do so can be "cringe," as the kids say. But the real problem is that "influence" is not the same as "expertise."

I first started using AI agents a little over two years ago. It was pretty exciting, and super useful for figuring out a novel (to me) problem I was trying to solve for a code camp talk. I could see the potential, especially in writing tests. Today it's a night-and-day improvement, though it does feel like we've stalled a little in the last six months. My point is that it's been an important, dare I say dominant, part of my toolbox for quite a bit.

If I had to guess, most people have about the same amount of experience that I do. But LinkedIn is littered with AI titles ("AI Workflow Architect" is my favorite today). Have these folks really gained more experience than the rest of us? Isn't putting "AI" in your title a little like saying "Coding Coder?" Certainly I carve out space for people who actually build and train models, and write the algorithms that drive them, but I put those folks in the same category as OS kernel, device driver and 3D engine developers.

In record time, I think we've reached a place where we can just assume that software people use AI tools. It's no less common than using an IDE. This does beg the question, if everyone uses AI, and no one is special, how do you stand out? I think we need to get back to looking at outcomes.

I decided that it was time to change up my primary care provider. I felt like we were in a loop around my high triglycerides, and not getting anywhere. There's some kind of combination of things that are causing that, and it's time for fresh eyes. So I found a new doctor, and saw her for the first time last week.

The labs this year are same as usual, everything is excellent and in range, except the triglycerides (and by extension, VLDL). This year was particularly high, but when I graph it, it shows the inversely proportional relationship to step counts. New this year, she tested for lipoprotein, which is an indicator of heart disease and risks around your ticker. The result was pretty low, meaning my genetic risk is pretty low. There's heart disease on my mom's side, especially my grandfather, but it seems I was spared that gene. While high TG's can cause pancreatitis, kidney and liver disease, all of the markers for those are in normal range, so it doesn't seem like I'm in immediate danger. To make sure my heart is good, she also ordered a CT angiogram, so if I have any blockages, I don't have to wait for a heart attack to know.

One weird thing is that my Vitamin D is crazy low. This could just mean I don't get enough sun, but it's also an indicator for obesity, kidney and liver disease, Crohn's, but is also related to use of statins. The only symptom I outwardly show though is depression.

The thing that I hate is that I know this is related to a lack of exercise, and upping that is probably the best treatment I could have. I've known this for years (and written about it for years). It's just so hard for me. So much of it is mental. When I've been at my most fit, I was at my most content. Isn't that funny, because I feel like if I was more content, I'd be more likely to exercise. So chicken-and-egg.

I feel like I've managed to dodge serious illness for so long, and the labs continue to show that. But the bill comes due eventually.

More than 20 years ago, I built this site called CampusFish, which was kind of a blog/photo site/community thing. Maybe it was a little like LiveJournal, but I also remember being influenced by some other sites. I couldn't tell you where the name came from, other than I was targeting college kids as an audience. I also made the choice to charge money for it. I think it was like $15 a year or something. A small number of people bought in, and it was a nice little community.

TogetherLoop is not really novel at all, as it's social media the way it used to be. Just a plain old feed of people that you're friends with, newest post first and totally chronological. You can post text, photos and video, and send private messages (friends only). I'm not inventing a new format, because at its core, it seems to work pretty well. Everything new in recent years works similarly, only with algorithms, ephemeral photo/video, and sometimes you swipe instead of scroll. But it's all pretty much the same, just private and not enshittified.

My intent, if it were to get large enough, is to charge money for it, because nothing is really for free. People might be content to give away their attention elsewhere, but that's not what I'm after. I don't care about engagement, I just care about connection. The worst case scenario is that it's a hobby that me and like four other people use to keep in touch. The medium case is that it becomes a small lifestyle business. That's really all I want for it. It doesn't have to be gigantic.

Today I worked through a backlog of polish issues. Little tweaks and visual things that were kinda sloppy looking. Most people won't notice, but I do. It brings me joy to see the tweaks. I'm really happy with the way this thing came together, and as fast as it did. And to be clear, using an AI agent made it faster to "type" code, but the AI didn't make decisions. If left to its own devices, it would have made something that was hard to maintain, had crappy performance and definitely wouldn't scale. You couldn't "vibe code" it into existence and get to the same place.

Perhaps now I should try and button up some of the quirks in MLocker...

One of the little comforts in life that I enjoy is going out for lunch. I get something that I like, catch up on my Ars Technica headlines, and usually enjoy some time outside. This has been a routine for me for years, even in prior locales. I just find it relaxing, and a chance to escape anything in my head that's bothering me.

And boy is my head filled with things lately. I don't take the layoff personally, because you really can't when it involved 350 of your friends. But it's disruptive in a non-trivial way because I thought I knew exactly how the next two or three years were going to be. The last time I knew what the next few years would look like was when I started college. I knew that was going to take four years. Now I'm having to adjust when I was so sure about what was next. It's also crazy to see Diana be in the same place for a decade.

The first problem is job hunting, which is the most different that it has ever been in my career. Massive RIF's at big tech companies have flooded the market with people, and AI has broken the system of applying and screening. Instead of getting calls all of the time, recruiters are letting the wave of noise come at them. Interviewing is broken to the extent that it's by committee, and looking for reasons to disqualify someone for the interview, instead of leaning into their experience, ability and recommendations. (I've been in companies where they do this, and it's infuriating as biases creep in and it's more expensive than it has to be to hire.) Even when you can enumerate all that you've created and delivered, they're not looking at that.

I've got a huge runway, financially. I don't take that for granted. But this also creates a lot of math problems for me that I obsess about. I want to get Simon a cheap car, and I want us to continue taking robust vacations while he's with us, though neither seem wise unless I'm working. I also wonder if I have to truly do the tech thing or I can start over and try to get into entertainment work. I probably could, but there are other considerations.

We're meeting my retirement goals in a big way, though to be recession-resistant, that's where I get the idea that three or more years at the rate I was at would help a ton. So I look at what things we could cut, the impact of downsizing and how to bridge any gaps. More than 75% of what we've saved isn't liquid, because of retirement accounts, so milking the other 25% isn't entirely realistic, even in the currently irrational markets. I look at our spending habits over and over, looking at what we could reduce, moderate or cut, but making those adjustments isn't realistic until Simon is on his way. I also don't want to not travel. I don't want to skip substantial donations.

Above all, I feel shitty for even thinking like this, because it's about as first-world elite as it gets. I wouldn't say that it's a privilege, because I've worked my ass off to fix my poor decisions in early adulthood, but I have it good by most measures. I just want to make useful things, and if that's not possible, I want to make art or help people make art. I want to not live in my head all of the time.

I'm a huge fan of the new Blue Man Group show here in Orlando, which should come as a surprise to no one who knows me. Cultural commentary by this troupe has always been a little more subtle, unless you listen to middle part of The Complex, which still hits deep for me. But toward the end of this show, there's a video piece with people walking around heads-down looking at screens, whilst falling into manholes and such. There's an "A.I." character on screen that checks in at various points, until it starts thanking the audience for mindlessly plugging in and sharing everything, including endless attention. But there's a line that sticks with me:

"Interface is more meaningful than face to face."

I don't know if that's meant to be a scathing critique of our culture, but it lands that way for me. I think that's where we are. Life is measured in engagement, giving up privacy, becoming product for platforms, and that's gross. (My answer is TogetherLoop.com, obvs!)

Being out of work means that I'm not getting a lot of face time with humans. I may paint myself as antisocial sometimes, but really I'm just "discerning social." When Facebook killed my account, I felt FOMO at first, which gave way to the realization that it wasn't really giving me anything anymore. It forced me to lean into non-network interaction with my distributed social circle. Since then, every face to face interaction has felt vital and important.

I'm not sure that I have a point, other than we have to unplug from platforms that don't serve us. I'm not against "social" interaction via the Internets, but not like it is now. We need to get back to our niche online forums and communities. The more independent the better. We should give them a few bucks if they ask for it, instead of giving our eyeballs to Google ads. Because Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" is real, and feeding the interface will not improve our chances for meaningful face to face.

Last night, before our Broadway show, we went out to a corner pizza place and bar a few blocks from the theater. We used to go out for dinner more often, when Simon was younger, because when we had a babysitter we'd get the most out of the evening. Now he's fine on his own, but we haven't been going out. This was the second show in a row that we did this. It's a pretty great value, too, especially downtown. $39, with tip, for four cocktails and two (huge) slices of pizza. We each got a drink in the donor room, which cost a total of $43. And really, that spot is filled with old people that we don't really identify with.

At the pizza bar, we met a nice retired couple that actually lived in the building above. They were from Portland, originally, and enjoyed a weekly cycle around different spots downtown. On the other side of us, a couple that worked for an org that performs at the theater, so they already knew them. Of course there are all of Diana's former coworkers at the venue. After the show, there was a party for the touring company and some donors, and we got to spend a little time with one of our friends and meet a few crew folk from the show.

It was a lot of social interaction, concentrated in a pretty small time frame. Ordinarily, I think it might be too much, but I'm so starved for social interaction that it was great. If I were to point to one thing post-Angi RIF that is hard, it's the lack of social interaction. Even when you work remote, you do see the same people everyday, and they become friends. When that was yanked out from under me, I started to feel it almost immediately. I don't get out enough, and I feel it.

My opinion about the AI bubble, and there's definitely a bubble, is that it pops when people can run open source models locally, and they're awesome. For general AI stuff that isn't coding, the stuff that consumers do, we're already there. When the developer use case gets there, it'll be nuts. We're close.

About a year and a half ago, I bought a gaming PC from Lenovo. It's the first one I didn't build myself, and it's pretty great. It has an RTX 4080 Super in it, with 16 gigs of VRAM. Boy can it sling polygons. I got a stupid good deal, and it's fun to play The Last of Us. It also could, presumably, run a decent model.

So I tried the usual chat stuff with small models, and was surprised at how decent it was. I even asked it a programming question not specific to my code, and it gave me a correct answer quickly. Neat. Getting models to work right with Claude Code was janky, but I figured it out. It seems like the gold standard is qwen3.6, the 27B parameter model. I figured it would be too large, and it was. But I did let it churn (for an hour) on a task, and it was every bit as solid as the results I'd get from Sonnet.

Smaller models performed fairly well, but getting the plumbing to work right between Claude and the model is not straight forward. When I could get one to work, the results were just OK, and a little slow. Tasks with larger scope either failed to complete or neglected conventions that I'd expect it to use. I'd rather shell out the money than have to deal with that.

But I can see a legit future. If someone can make a model that works well on an Apple silicon MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of RAM, it's bad news for the companies spending gratuitously on data centers. And honestly, I think that's a better future.

The bigger theme of the last meeting with my therapist was about waiting for things, and how that can get in the way of living. It's not a good state to be in.

We tell ourselves that we'll be happy just as soon as some condition is true. Maybe it's not even "happy" that we're after, but you can go about your business once a box has been checked. Looking back at my life, I can see a number of times when I've done this. But I also catalog two instances where I was 100% doing all the things. The first was when Stephanie and I split, which is surprising because there's no time in my life where I was more uncertain about things. For whatever reason, I quit my contract job, started coaching full time, and just winged it. I had no specific plan, but I was spending my time doing stuff that I liked.

The second time I was in this zone was when we moved down here to the OC. Not even four years from the Seattle move, when I was constantly anxious, I was yet again in a new place, with a contract job that I knew would end, a house under construction, and no real idea about how things were going to go. But I went to the job, which I mostly liked, I got a ton of exercise in the humidity, and came home to my still relatively new little family every night. It was great.

In both cases, the future was ambiguous, but I was happy just to be. I was excited, energized, and felt like I was moving. Right now, that's not where I am.

I feel like I'm at a weird crossroad. The job hunt is rough, partly because the market sucks, and partly because I'm trying to be deliberate about not applying for crap. The other factor is that, financially, there is not a rush. I mean, if the market keeps being irrational, I could offboard and try to get into something in the arts, though that's a different kind of struggle. So I'm in a place where there are several options, but I can't really control the outcomes. I'm left being anxious and not able to act. I don't like it. Just not sure how to fix it.

On the bright side, I get to see BMG again tomorrow.

I was reading an article about a court case where a tech billionaire's musings had to be read in court. One of the sentiments that he made is that he "only" wanted to make a billion dollars, almost as if it was a foregone conclusion. I found that to be completely bizarre. Sure, people are wired differently, but I can't relate to anyone who believes that money is the goal.

With that in mind, I'm also not naive about the role money plays in everyone's lives. Having it can make a lot of things easier. Not having it can make life very hard. It affects everything from life expectancy to the ability to eat. But to me, it's always been a means to an end, and that end is to live in a sort of comfortable autonomy that allows me to positively impact people and the world around me.

I've told the story before about my 20's and early 30's, spending like a moron and saving nothing. I bought a lot of crap on credit, in the days when you could just keep moving balances around from one card to the next with 2 or even 0% APR's. Everyone told me that was dumb, but I didn't listen. So the last decade and a half has been me trying to be disciplined enough to make up for it. I was worth $0 when we moved to Central Florida, but that discipline has reversed the trend. I've even been able to judiciously budget for travel and some expensive hobbies. I've undone a decade and a half of fiscal irresponsibility, but I could have been much further along had I not erred.

Now, as I get more serious about playing out my third and final act, the goal hasn't changed. I still want that "comfortable autonomy" and ability to give. I'm ready to do all the things, like downsize the house and get as much as I can out of our cars. I also realize that saving enough money in just the right way so you run out when you die isn't a great approach. A better approach, and it's one of the things that my dad suggested when I didn't listen, is to essentially create your own endowment. You bank enough so that you can live off of the gains indefinitely. Of course, it's wildly improbable that there isn't a recession or market tank or something, so that means you probably need even more than you expect. But I love the idea of this.

It's strange how, when you're a kid, you think about how cool it would be to have a million dollars. That's not actually a lot of money in today's dollars, but it could be that endowment. The end game is to really live your best life, and not be stingy, but not be careless, when it comes to money. I don't think that's the kind of toxic relationship with money that the billionaire had, but it doesn't seem healthy either.

The bigger variable is if social security and medicare can hold. Regardless, we need better financial literacy in this country. Investing is treated like some illuminati shit that regular people don't have access to.

I mentioned the other day how relatively uninteresting it is to update all the things in your software projects to the latest things. Today I got knee deep in an even less interesting thing, which is the build automation stuff. The short story is that when you write code, a server sees that you committed it, builds it, and depending on how you have things set up, it may automatically deploy it somewhere. The test version of the forums works that way, for example. The real power in this is that if you send up something that ends up being broken, you can just go back to a previous build and send that up.

This is something that you generally set up once, and usually at the start of a project. I couldn't even tell you when I set up the forum stuff. Part of the current set up sends those test builds out as packages to a third-party service. That service seems to be melting down, or going out of business or something, so I've had to shift that stuff elsewhere. The reason that this is annoying is that I work with the automation stuff so infrequently that I have to partially relearn it, or lean on AI to figure out why it doesn't work.

There are people who just do this stuff for a living. That's great, but I do not enjoy it at all.

Listening this evening to INXS's Live Baby Live live album. It has a song in the middle that was not live, called "Shining Star." This song brought back a flood of memories to my freshman year of college. I kinda wish my classmates could read this.

My freshman year at Ashland University was interesting for a lot of negative reasons, but it was also a classic coming of age story. High school was fucking terrible, but here I was getting a fresh start. I wasn't new to TV production, because I had been working with my local city's cable TV department for two years. Sure, it was just city council meetings and public affairs stuff, but I was not a stranger to 3/4" U-matic tape. (Ugh, yeah, that was the pro thing at the time, unless you had Betamax in the field.)

I quickly made friends with a senior named Teri, who had been doing a show on the college station called Video Marquee for a few years. She didn't have time, and wanted to pass it on. Freshmen didn't typically take on shows as a director/producer, but I didn't know any better, or know any rules (#ASD). I told Teri, yes, I'd love to do it. It was a movie review show about home video releases. And they had a relationship with a local video store that offered the movies for free, provided we mentioned them.

The show had a set and everything, and it was straight forward enough to make. My first need was a couple of reviewers. I put out the call, but no majors answered it, other than one, my friend Pam. She was a transfer in, two years ahead of me, and I knew her because we did the late afternoon radio news show together. I eventually paired her with an R/TV minor, and we did the show. It was a lively, interesting combination, because Pam was a strong, beautiful woman who took no shit, and the dude, his name was Toby, was an arrogant pretty-boy freshman. They say that conflict makes for good television, and I think this is what we had.

The next year, I brought in a friend who was a non-major. I met Kam the year before when she toured campus as a high school senior, and we became friends after that. This led to more changes, and eventually, I fired Toby and brought someone else for a few final shows. I don't remember who.

Meanwhile, in my first year, I also started a completely new show that showed music videos. I can't remember the title, but this was a town that, for alleged moral reasons, didn't have MTV on their cable system. I was chummy with the theater professor, through my stage craft classes, so he gave me free reign to borrow a cyclorama and lights, which could be plugged into the TV studio grid. I hung the thing in an abstract way, put some colored lights on it, and we made the show. I cast my roommate as the host, because he was into alt-rock. This pissed off a lot of majors, for some reason. It's not that I didn't audition them, it's that they were inauthentic. I just wanted to make the best show. And yes, this is where the INXS video for "Shining Star" comes in.

This is an early example of me not understanding, or even seeing, the politics of a situation. College was easier than high school, but not without its blind spots. I pissed off a lot of upperclassmen just by doing what seemed like the right things to make good shows. But I have to point out that not everyone was like this. There were several people, including Teri and a number of other folks, who were advocates and cheering me on, helping in whatever way they could. It was a net-positive experience. If I could point at any negatives, it was that certain faculty were total dicks and not supportive. (Sidebar: This led to a lot of letters to department chairs and such, which may have unintentionally led to people being dismissed or reassigned. It wasn't my intent, but as a friend that eventually landed there as faculty told me, the changes were for the better of the program.)

Why am I writing about this? It reminds me of a time where I had impact, and could prove myself, despite friction and opposition. My people skills were certainly lacking then, but it was my first experience navigating human conflict in a signifiant way. In the long run, did it matter? My senior year, I checked out almost entirely. I still did a college radio shift, but every weekend I did "real" shifts at a commercial station. I did little TV at all. When I look back, the faculty could have embraced me, but they looked at me as a threat because I advocated for student involvement first. The faculty saw themselves as "station managers" instead of instructors, and I wasn't cool with that. It's not that I really knew what I was doing, but if I sucked at any of it, I wanted to try and fail, and have mentors correct me. I didn't have that opportunity until I started working at that commercial radio station. That's a failing of my education.

But if only I understood my own challenges at the time. ASD and ADHD require a different approach to learning, and that wasn't a thing then. Fortunately, I did learn from it all, but not without a lot of angst, disappointment and challenges.

I don't remember exactly how I got introduced to Blue Man Group. It was probably 2004 or 2005 though, and I remember getting The Complex Rock Tour Live DVD. Like any undiagnosed person with ASD, I'm sure the obsession annoyed others. That DVD also helped me discover Venus Hum, which I love and still treasure their Christmas Album. It also helped me get reacquainted with Tracy Bonham. Her Blink The Brightest came into my life early the next year and helped me through some really tough times.

In 2006 I saw my first show at The Venetian in Las Vegas, and I acquired music in the form of The Complex and Live From The Venetian. That year I also saw the arena tour, and then twice more the next year. Tracy was even on the first of those passes through Cleveland. I'd see the Vegas show twice more, and Diana and I got to see the Chicago show. The Orlando show at Universal opened I think in 2006 also, and my former girlfriend Catherine and I saw the first public show, in the first row, sitting next to the then-president of Universal Orlando. We would see that show a bunch more times, including the second-to-last show before the COVID shutdown. All through this time, especially as a young kid, Simon enjoyed watching the How To Be A Megastar concert DVD. I was sad when it didn't return to Orlando.

Fast forward to 2026, and Diana happens to see an opening for various roles at a new show starting in Orlando. All but the Vegas show have since closed, and Cirque du Soleil is now the owner of the company. She's ready for a change, after more than 11 years at our amazing performing arts center, and unsurprisingly, she gets the role as box office supervisor. When she joins, just a few weeks ago, they're still doing off-site rehearsals and getting the new theater ready. Earlier this week, we got to see two preview performances, and today is the first public show. I'm jealous about the culture and cooperation that goes into something like this, and she's happier at work than I've seen her in a long time.

I don't know to what extent I'll get to see shows or maybe learn about the lighting tech that I'm so obsessed with, but even being at arms length to something that I've been so into for 20 years is insanely exciting. At the second preview, I sat all the way in the back and just took in as much as I could about everything (with earplugs, as other factors seemed to make me extra sensitive that day). I could see lighting cues in my head, and how I'd program them (on MA3, though they're apparently an ETC Hog house).

In any case, this is the best of the stage shows, even without the scale that the Venetian show had. My reasoning is that this one has really long sections of music, which I like more than the various bits they do. One of the times they pull someone up on stage is to play with them, and it's gotta be one of the best things ever. There's not a person in the audience who wouldn't want to beat on something with a Blue Man. It's also some of their best music, starting with "Above," a classic like "PVC IV," and newer ones like "The Forge" and "Giacometti." But my favorite of all time is "Chant Jam" (dating back to The Venetian) which transitions you into the finale. It's so good.

I definitely needs these shows this week.