Archive: July, 2026

I'm alone this Friday night. Diana is working which is fairly typical. But Simon is, for the first time, at the parks by himself, having driven himself. Yikes.

Things are strange. But it's not really bad strange, and in fact I've been kind of craving change after the last six months. Simon being mobile isn't something I necessary looked forward to, but at least in the last few days, he's been uncharacteristically responsible. He emptied the dishwasher without prompting, and helped clean up the garage a bit. We've sent him out to drop some things off to be recycled, and he picked up groceries.

I'm in my second week at a new job, which is equal parts exciting and terrifying. Diana is in a new job too. My neighbor moved out, which means we can open those blinds in the side windows. I have a new car, which is symbolic of a lot of things, and would be a little midlife crisissy if it weren't a Hyundai. The kittens are growing up fast. It seems like a political correction is likely, too.

It's not all good. One of my college classmates, a guy everyone liked, died this week of a heart attack. We're at the age now where that sort of thing will only become more frequent. Our movie stars and musicians are passing as well. We get weird pains we didn't have before. We see doctors to manage conditions.

It's all about how you view the world, I suppose. Time is coming for all of us, and the only way to live for whatever time you have left is to accept that. Combined with gratitude toward the people who make your life amazing, and the good things you've seen, I believe that it's possible to live in a content way. You can decide to go to bed with a smile, and look forward to the day every morning. The decision is easy, but the follow through can be tough. I gotta work on that.

I finally landed a car, and it ended up being new. It was an exhausting process. But whatever, I think with the year I've been having, I deserve it.

I actually got a pretty good deal from one dealer, but the car I wanted was spoken for. Then looking around town, they were generally in short supply. I settled on a Hyundai Ioniq 5, with a Kia EV6 as my back up plan. They're built on the same platform, but the latter is a little smaller and sportier. The wrinkle is that I wanted the highest trim, because of all the tech and stuff that comes with it. That includes upgraded sound, digital (phone) keys, ambient lighting, among other things. Oh, and ventilated seats, which are life changing. Can't believe that didn't become a thing sooner. Anyway, I was looking as far away as Gainesville for these things.

(Sidebar: There was an article today in the NYT about Detroit's failure to get any foothold at all in the EV market, especially outside of the US. Yet another industry that cedes leadership to the rest of the world.)

Eventually, I found a local dealer that had the car in the trim I wanted. They're one of the non-negotiating shops, like the one that made the earlier deal, but this one was effectively a grand and change more expensive. Given my general exhaustion in the process, I just gave up and bought it. Almost a week of looking was enough, especially since I started with the asshats selling used cars. None of them are honest, and they're all terrible. The dealer I bought from worked entirely via text message, and when I got a number I could live with, we drove out to get the deal done.

This is the first car that I've ever bought outright, which I'm very proud of. Even ten years ago, I couldn't imagine doing that, but the saving discipline has been worth it. Well, technically I did finance it, because that knocked $7k off of the price that I couldn't negotiate. So I'll just pay that off immediately. As the AI bots warned, the finance guy made up some stuff about bad things happening if I paid it off too fast, but that's because they just lose whatever margin the financing enabled. But they're not going to lose money, they just won't make thousands. This particular contract had a "gotcha" in that there's a $75 fee that they "may" charge you inside of six months, but it still beats thousands in interest. Rates suck right now.

The car is quirky as hell, in good ways mostly, and with a few minor annoyances. I'll write more about it after I've spent some time with it.

I did the math, and I've bought 13 new cars. That's nuts. Of those, I had to negotiate a deal for 10 of them (the other three were Tesla online orders). The first one, a Toyota Corolla that I leased right out of college, was not a very good deal, because I didn't know what I was doing. But my dad filled me in on all of the dumb shit that they do after that, and I'd consider him an expert since he sold retail loans through a bank. My next car was also a Corolla, and it was an OK deal.

Car #6 was actually Diana's Hyundai Elantra circa 2008. We were living together by then, but just starting to commingle our finances. It was her name on the loan, but I kind of took the lead on negotiating because, well, I just found it sporting. The circumstances that day were ideal though, because the dealer wasn't busy, it was late in the day, late in the month, and instead of doing the "ask my manager" dance, the manager sat down with us. We got it below the invoice, knowing what the dealer incentives were and such, and I had worn down the guy. As people started disappearing, he got pretty candid. "Look, this is the margin we're going to be left with, and I gotta give this guy [the sales rep] something, and we need to pay for the Taj Mahal here [the new dealership]." I felt pretty good about it, and I think he just wanted us to get out of his showroom. We had that car until 2014, when the transmission blew, but was replaced under Hyundai's excellent warranty. That's when we experimented with our first EV, the Leaf.

That was a pretty terrible experience, but it ended right. A young dude was doing "Internet sales" at the time, and he wanted to do right by us. We were going to lease, because going electric, with a car rated for an 84 mile range, carried some uncertainty. I was all-in, because average American commutes can easily accommodate that range, which is what you do 99% of the time. And you could squeeze out 110 miles when you weren't using AC. You charge at home. In any case, we left that dealer without a deal, and the three of us went to a Tijuana Flats down the road. While eating, I got a text from the dude, saying that his manager agreed to the cap cost I wanted. That's the actual cost of the car, plus fees and tax and such. (Pro tip: If you're gonna lease, don't even bring it up... negotiate the price of the car only, regardless of trade and financing, then use that as the cap cost for a lease.) I think I agreed to put down $6,000, and our lease payment was like $105. And what we got is what I hoped for... they let us keep extending the lease. Our per-month cost was stupid low.

Anyway, I'm in a spot now where I have to acquire another car. My kid is 16, I don't think he'll go to college, so I have to figure out how best to set him up for success. I know that part of that absolutely involves him having reliable transportation. I got along without a car until late in my junior year of college, but my (home) parents never even pushed me to get my license, and that's still infuriating. He has his license, because we pushed for it, and now he needs a car, even if it's just for school. Ideally for a part-time job.

Before I got laid-off, my intention was to buy a sweet car for me, and give him mine, which is now 5-years-old. While I wasn't working, I hoped that maybe I could just find him a cheap-ass EV, like a first-gen Leaf. Going down that road has been difficult, because used car dealers are shitty and shady. So I'm back to looking for a replacement for my car. Disenchanted with Tesla build quality and screens and capacitive buttons, I'm targeting a Hyundai Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6, which are built on the same platform and roughly equivalent. At one point I thought about something more luxury, like a BMW i4, but they discontinued it in favor of a future i3, and it's still too expensive. The Hyundai/Kia is stacked with cool tech, which is what I'm really interested in over luxury.

So today's work is to try and land one of those. Going back to those earlier experiences, the reality is that my brain is wired to want the thing, but not make it an emotional issue. And that's real, because even going back to that experience with Diana buying the Hyundai, I was ready to walk away at any point. The dirty little secret is that while it's not emotional, per se, it is not without cost. My brain considers any challenge or not getting what I want as a personal affront to me. I logically know it's not, but some combination of my teenage bullying and my wiring to be logical and right feels shitty. The whole thing is not without cost.

I'm at a good news/bad news situation. I fully understand the scenario with Hyundai for what I want, but the two local dealers I was talking to don't have the cars in the trim I want. One gave me a full on offer with the right numbers that would ultimately allow me to buy in cash (a lifetime first, I would add). The details are unimportant for now, but I "won" as I wanted to. A legit EV and the deal I wanted. So I've started to look toward the Kia equivalent, which is the same "skateboard" but with a somewhat different shell on top. Three players in the Orlando market, but the first one I contacted is bullshitting me to the nth degree and kept insisting that I come in to chat, which I absolutely will not do. I'm trying to hand them a softball, with all of the right terms that make it (theoretically) a profitable score for them. (I'll come back to that if I can land what I want.) And this fucker wouldn't budge.

Again, in the long term, I know that I can likely get what I want, but the psychological overhead is taxing to say the least. The explicitly logical part of my head is pleased at doing the right things, but the feeling that I'm being fucked with is expensive. I just don't like being fucked with.

Hopefully I'll soon have a good story to share at the end. Mind you, that good story will be loaded with detail about how fucking expensive it is to have a teenager who drives. The upside is that the various AI agents have the ability to discover all of the angles and coach you on this. Maybe I need to just have them outright work on my behalf.

Honestly, I'm still trying a little to reconcile the loss of my previous job. I've never been in one place for four years, and I miss the people. But what I found seems to be a better job with better opportunities and pay, so I'm happy with how it ultimately turned out.

I started on an odd week though, because it's the week that they take off to do a massive hackathon. Mostly small projects by small teams. I didn't have a lot to contribute, because I know so little about any of their systems, but I got to know a couple of people I wouldn't otherwise talk to much, so that was cool. Next week I still have onboarding sessions to do, but I'll begin the fan-out to meet all of the people that I need to know.

I haven't had a cold start like this in, well, four years of course. It's funny how it still reminds me so much of starting a new school year, only without the bullying and hormones. It's exciting, though a little stressful, because you generally want to prove that you're adding value quickly. But tomorrow, things will start getting real, and I have people to hire! Haven't added a new person in two and a half years, so it's been awhile.

Now that I'm employed, of course things are coming up, going down and breaking. I mean, sure, better now than a month ago, but I can't catch a break.

First off, our fridge is toast. After de-icing it twice, I figure the heating coil is dead. And then, speaking of ice, the ice maker stopped working. It turns out that this KitchenAid model, along with Whirlpool and other related brand models, have a fatal flaw in the bottom of the door hinge, where the wires eventually crack and break, killing the ice maker and eventually the controls. I tried to put some wire lever nuts in there, but there's almost no room to work there. So F-it, I'm done trying to bandaid the thing. Annoyed that the thing didn't even make it to nine years, and that I only bought it so the handles matched the other appliances that came with the house. Ordered a basic-ass LG to replace it. Our washer and dryer are LG, 15 years and counting, with only a leaky valve replacement that I was able to fix myself.

Now that Simon is 16, it's time to get him licensed. I knew the insurance would be bad, but didn't realize it would be double what we pay bad. That more than reverses the recent rate recovery we got here in Florida. It's going to be about $2,800 annually. We want to get him a cheap used car, and it looks like we can score an old Nissan Leaf for under $5k, which would only be $100/half to insure. And he won't be able to go very far in it either. At one point, I figured that I'd get a new car and give him mine, a 2021, but I don't want car payments anymore. We have EV's in Florida, so no rusting, no real maintenance, and they should last a very long time.

We've been putting off carpet replacement for a few years, but it looks so bad that I'm starting to hate my own house. "Builder basic" doesn't even begin to describe the crap that Pulte used. It looked bad after five years, and now we're at nine. I guess we'll probably start with my office and the front room, and if we like the service from the chosen vendor, we'll use them to do upstairs. That's not gonna be cheap. We have some rugs that are in pretty sad shape, too, but those are hopefully cheap fixes.

Owning stuff is expensive, but I suppose it's better than renting or leasing stuff. Well, cars are always a losing proposition, and I have to try hard to resist new cars. I get a lot of joy from driving, but not all of the time. And I'm a gadget nerd, and they're basically big gadgets. At least I'm not a car status guy.

It's not uncommon for people to frame history relative to their own experience, and I suppose I'm no different. US history isn't very well taught in school, let alone local or state history. Growing up in inner-city schools in Cleveland, especially during desegregation, exposed me to a lot of things I probably would not have learned in the suburbs, and I'm grateful for that foundation.

Being a Gen-X'er is interesting because our historical frame is so different from the generations before and after. Those before us knew war in a different way, and were witness to the civil rights movement. Those who came after didn't really know life before the Internet. We got to see top-40 radio at its best. We lived under the constant thread of nuclear annihilation, but also saw the Berlin wall come down. College education grew as a viable and meaningful way to transition to adulthood. The AIDS epidemic hit. We had a front row seat to the birth of the commercial Internet. Then 9/11 happened, just as we were figuring out adulthood. Years of war with little to no benefit ensued, but unlike wars that came before, this one had no draft, vague goals, and it cost more than all of our previous wars combined, adjusted for inflation. They were funded entirely by deficit spending. Meanwhile, a combination of private and public efforts made extraordinary advances in science and medicine. For awhile, we led the world in this way.

The preview for negative change started with the erosion of journalism, the fundamental means of keeping government accountable. The Internet broke local journalism entirely. Local newspapers, even if they did online right, struggled to survive. There wasn't much money online for the coverage of city council meetings and high school sports. At the national level, there was also a shift underway. I remember when the bombing began in Iraq, I was channel surfing through cable news channels. Fox News was showing a waving flag banner, which I read as taking a side, not reporting. People were dying, live on TV, and they were quite literally waving a flag. Suddenly the "news" that questioned the government was telling you not to question the government. I dismissed it as a fluke at the time. Surely the institution of the American press was not going to radically change.

But something changed specifically in 2008. It was subtle at first, and it had something to do with the election of a black man with a somewhat unusual name. Politics were always somewhat divisive, but the election of Barack Obama inspired a new divisiveness that we had not seen in our lifetime. People were already angry at the state of things, with the Great Recession, ongoing war and a housing crisis that persists today. The discontent among many Americans was rooted in the feeling of being unseen, of government not serving them. Fiscally, this was likely somewhat universal, but starting with the Tea Party folks, they saw an opportunity to leverage the discontent of a portion of that cohort through coded racism and culture wars. The same people that leaned into personal responsibility started acting as the victims, blaming people that were different for everything that ailed them.

So Americans decided they wanted change again, and you know how that went. The change came with a basic lack of decency and decorum, and the racism, antisemitism and xenophobia stopped being coded and started being blatant. We voted against our own self-interest again, and now, with a pointless war and inflation out of control, we have a government that tears down parts of the White House, obsesses about things that don't matter to regular folks, and we have a congress that let's it happen. Indeed, at this 250-year point, I wonder if we'll see 300. I don't recognize the country I live in. The vice president actually said that if Nixon were to commit his crimes today, it would be no big deal. That doesn't land the way he thinks it does.

Despite this, I remain optimistic. While the cult of personality suggests that embracing the contradictions in our history is unpatriotic, I argue the opposite. In fact, it's time to take patriotism back to mean something more than a campaign slogan. Many of our founding fathers were slave owners, yet the America that they wrote about celebrates its ability to improve. These were flawed men that sought a higher ideal. Continuous improvement was always the goal, because they knew that "all men created equal" didn't really mean "all men" at the time. The Constitution and the system that it lays out is meant to change, because the authors were self-aware enough to know that they couldn't get it right all at once.

We must also look to history to observe the causes of societal failure. Autocracies do not endure. Wealth inequality contributed to the end of the Roman Empire, third century China and the French monarchy. We are not infallible, and yet we seem willing to embrace these qualities for the moment. But again, our system allows for course correction, and there's evidence that we're headed in that direction.

Our nation was founded and built by immigrants. The vitriol pointed at the immigrants of today is misguided. Again, history shows that our greatest eras of prosperity happened during the heights of immigration. It has never come at the expense of those born here. They're historically less likely to commit crimes than those born here. And of course, more people mean a higher GDP that benefits everyone. It's just math.

We can't celebrate freedom without allowing for freedom of the press, health autonomy, the ability to vote without burden and the ability to move freely without fear of arrest for the color of our skin. These should not be controversial.

With two and a half centuries under our belt, we can be sure that we're only caretakers and stewards of this nation. We're ephemeral. The question is, what will people say about us when we're gone? Did we live up to the promise of America? It's not too late to make sure that we do.

I return to work on Monday, so today ends the unjobbed time. Technically, it's as long as the six-month lapses in 2001 and 2009, but those were a lot different, with recessions in play. This time, I didn't even spend much time looking for almost two months. I was ready for a little sabbatical. Then Diana's appendectomy and subsequent related issues came next. I would measure this more around four months, which is maybe a hair longer than normal. When I look back, gosh, it happens a lot in my line of work.

Time moved kind of slowly this time around, which is welcome for anyone middle-age and feeling like time is getting away from you. The absence of routine always slows things down. Psychologically, it was challenging for different reasons. The financial situation was better and worse than previous. With a fat severance, there was no hurry. I never applied for unemployment. On the other hand, I also started to game out what offboarding from my tech career really looked like. I solidified the idea that I don't want to wait for "retirement age," which is still so far away. I did the math, and I'm realistically in "FIRE" range by a year or two. Provided that Diana had health insurance for us, I could have possibly made it work today, but our investments aren't liquid enough. That, and the volatility caused by an unstable guy in the White House means the market is constantly up and down. So I was simultaneously in great shape, and not close enough to make a safe change.

I had no problem finding purpose. Building out TogetherLoop was super fun, and I really shored up all of my coding projects. I made the most of my $20 monthly Claude subscription, and I've never had more fun doing this sort of work. I wouldn't want to code full-time again for work, but AI makes it so that you can concentrate on technical design and architecture, which is the stuff I'm most interested in. I also spent a fair amount of time building LEGO, playing video games and hanging out with Diana and Simon. We had two cruises already on the books, so we did those, too.

My biggest source of angst and anxiousness came from the job hunting itself. The job market has technically been stable, and the reporting around "tech layoffs" tends to be more with the giants than medium or small companies. What has changed in the four years since I last had to look is the way recruiting and interviewing goes. It has not changed for the better. That alone is worth its own blog post. I'm certain I applied to 200 job listings, and scored zero calls from them. The action that I did get was all from referrals. Some of those interview loops were as broken as the rest of the process, and even though I knew it wasn't personal, it really wore on me. Combined with a very challenging parenting season, especially with me being the most accessible to Simon, and I got to be a hot mess at several points.

That's all behind me now, and for the first time in my life, I have an idea of where I expect to be in five years. People ask you about stuff like that all of the time, and I never have a very specific answer. This time, I do. And the job I landed has so much potential, and I'm already seeing it just in the onboarding and setup prior to starting. It's pretty exciting. I haven't looked this forward to starting a new job since Microsoft.

Like many software people, I often play the role of tech support at home. My experience means that I can generally imagine what went on at the company that made it, and why it sucks. And by the way, most of it sucks. I'm not sure why we tolerate it, other than there's little incentive to make it better if you're competing against more suck. It's infuriating.

Most recently, my wife got a new phone, and the credentials for the Ring app didn't transfer over. She's been trying for weeks, and the requirements to unlock her account were ridiculous. Even better, when you try to recover your account, it spawns a help page that tells you to enable recovery options. In the account that you can't enter. I can't make this stuff up. And don't even get me started on the trash in the academic world. Our school district does their best at integration, but much of it is garbage. That makes my kid rage. Speaking of rage, try making anything with Google's FamilyLink work right or in a predictable way across Google products. Total trash.

So I call upon my fellow software people... we must put an end to crappy software. Enough already. I keep seeing all of these hot takes about productivity and how everything is easier and faster to make (and somehow more expensive, too). The outcome least spoken about is making software better. No one cares if you can sling 20 agents at a time churning out code based on incorrect assumptions. Agent slinging is not an outcome or a functional requirement. It's not in your product requirements at all. It's not in your mission statement or business plan. No one ever said, or will ever say, "I love this software, they must have made it faster with AI!"

If your software does not delight, turn on the red light. Get it in front of people early and often. Feel the customer pain. Listen to what they have to say. If we're going to leverage this new found power of agentic coding, let's use it to make software better. That should be the goal.