Banterability

Weeknotes 100: Two Years of Progress

2025-10-12T12:00:00Z

I have listened to podcasts since the name made sense (iPod broadcasts!) and you had to use ugly apps to mush RSS content into your MP3 player and, wow, it is weird to be nostalgic for that kludge. Get off YouTube! Get out of Spotify! Do not make me look at you! There should not be a credited hair or makeup artist for what is canonically a goblin job.
I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I’m deeply fascinated by the premise of Famous Last Words, the new Netflix show that got surprise-launched by the death of Jane Goodall:

a series of late-life interviews with famous people, whose contents — including their subjects’ identities — are kept closely guarded until after the subject dies. Goodall’s interview, which was completed in March, was one of a handful that have been sitting in a Netflix vault for months. She was simply the first among those interviewed to die.
Saw a post from the Chicago Transit Authority announcing that a new ‘L’ station was getting an elevator and realized that I hadn’t updated the station data backing my little toy CTA tracker Slow Zone in two years.
The process I came up with for this way back when was deeply tortured:
1. Download a CSV of stop data from the city’s Data Portal. This dataset includes stop locations, which lines they serve, whether they’re accessible, etc.
2. Convert that to JSON.
3. Transform that JSON using a bunch of homegrown functions to massage the goofy data types and create an object of stations containing their associated stops. Save that as a different blob of JSON.
4. Save that file in the repo and deploy the app.
Obviously, I never remembered to do any of this again. So this week I put together a GitHub Action to fetch the data and update it for me every weekend. Runs in ~20 seconds, opens a pull request if anything changes. Shockingly straightforward.
Behold: two years of infrastructure progress: four new elevators, one new station, and deleting a stray space.

Weeknotes 95: Prodrome

2025-09-07T12:00:00Z

Continuing to make up for lost time on the bike this summer. Took advantage of the long weekend to cross a massive item off my list: making it to the lake.
Chicago has a magnificent Lakefront Trail that runs from 5800 North to 7100 South. All that was left to add that pavement to my available routes was about a mile of Armitage Avenue through Lincoln Park I hadn’t ridden yet.
My darling wife, who does not yet have a bike, met me in the park and grabbed a Divvy so we could ride down to the planetarium together. Perfect little loop with a stop for ice cream. Best city in the world.
And just like that: off again to Toronto again for work. This visit’s select seltzer flavors: mangosteen; black cherry; yuzu blossom and pomelo. Unserious country. Bless them.
This trip was accidentally scheduled at the same time as the Toronto International Film Festival, which would usually have been a cool confluence of my interests, but in this case just meant that all the halfway convenient hotels were out of policy and I had to spend my last night back out at the airport.
Which worked out more or less fine, given that I had a Friday meeting that ran from 10 a.m. until well after midnight, so a quick cab ride back to YYZ and a couple hours at the airport Sheraton to set the tone for an extremely delirious trip back to the US, where I was glad to find a Chicago not yet occupied by the National Guard and weather still nice enough for another long bike ride.
I think part of me is just trying to get as much riding in as I can before the various shoes start dropping. Both airports, the office, and everyone at home are coughing and wheezing with whatever not-COVID is currently going around. Meanwhile, the pools are closing and the summer is winding down. Double meanwhile, we’re all pretending my beautiful city is a crime-ridden war zone desperately in need of occupation.
Illness looms. Winter looms. Jackboots loom. Damned if I’m not going to enjoy it while I still can.

Weeknotes 78: My Numbers Look Fine

2025-05-11T12:00:00Z

My goofy fitness ring has been pestering me to start tracking my blood glucose for my wellness, so I’ve been doing that for a few days by wearing a weird dot on the back of my arm.
Early takeaways:
1. Continuous glucose monitoring is an extremely cool technology. If I had diabetes or some other reason to stay aware of it, I’d be super grateful somebody thought it up.
2. I don’t have diabetes.
Friends who know more about medicine than me don’t seem very happy these devices are being marketed to people without any sort of indicated condition, but we just love quantifying ourselves, don’t we folks?
Pessimistically on the subject, via Luke O’Neil: “The appointment is this week and I’m worried she’s going to tell me all my numbers look fine. That there is nothing wrong with me that I have the power to fix.”
Pragmatically on the subject, via Eric Allix Rogers: “I too am biohacking, but my goal is to die at a reasonable age and not be miserable.”
First Sunday of farmers market season! Remind me that I should walk down here every weekend.
Please enjoy the mystery presented in the latest episode of Search Engine: “The Dave and Busters Anomaly”. No spoilers, but my brain is broken by too much time spent close to the computer, so I pretty much guessed it right.
Observation without context: almost every Airbnb story I’ve ever been told begins with “We couldn’t get into our Airbnb, so…”

Weeknotes 74: Controlling a Small Area

2025-04-13T12:00:00Z

Big week for watching the line go down and up. Apparently market turmoil brings out the good posts:
It’s always so strange to live through these times waiting for all the lagging indicators to catch up. “Dunkirk for treats” is already well underway, but it’ll be weeks before we start to feel it. March 2020 all over again.
Somehow failed at every single meal I attempted to cook this week. Regular things I can do in my sleep, all botched in a variety of bizarre calamities.
Amid the chaos, I’ve found myself drawn back into Stardew Valley in a big way. Just foraging the pixelated woods and petting my chickens, happily puttering on my little daily loop. Never underestimate the psychic balm of controlling a small area.
The finale of The White Lotus completely validated the feeling I’ve had all season: any marketing exec who agreed to a partnership cannot possibly have ever watched the show. Did the people co-branding suitcases and home goods forget that “guest at a White Lotus property” is not actually a desirable thing to be? There’s a measurable fatality rate! If you escape with your life, you’re still bound to leave your relationships or your fortunes in shambles. These are the baddies! An entire cast discovering consequences for the first time in their lives.
But hey, “it’s great exposure! What could possibly go wrong?”

Weeknotes 73: Wisdom TK

2025-04-06T12:00:00Z

Birthday! Another year older, another year where I don’t write a wisdom post. Don’t worry; I’m bound to learn something eventually.
Marked it with a lovely dinner at Swift & Sons. Maybe a bigger get together is in the cards for when proper patio weather arrives.
Apparently this Wednesday was “everybody release your new subway maps” day. New York’s is a triumph and I will hear no argument to the contrary. Chicago’s I’m a little more conflicted on; I like the new emphasis on the parks and boulevards, but miss the street grid on the previous version.
Finally got a chance to sit down and tear through The Unaccountability Machine^[1] by Dan Davies. Shocking that it’s taken this long to coin a term for “accountability sinks”, the policies and structures that mark the asymmetry of every modern interaction: “a state of affairs where [the company] can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.” Pretty sure I highlighted more than half this book.
This bit certainly seemed relevant this week looking at the big dumb tariff chart:

If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are relatively junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which are later adopted as fundamental constraints; to do otherwise would mean someone having to risk being criticized for making a decision.
The whole affair has me flashing back to my days working at Marketplace during the global financial crisis. I am certainly not an economist, but I think our fearless leaders may not have a strong grasp on what a trade deficit actually is.

Incredible subtitle too: “Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How the World Lost its Mind” ↩︎

Weeknotes 72: Weights and Measures

2025-03-30T12:00:00Z

Saw someone wondering when the DOGE teens might stumble across the National Institute of Standards and Technology, accidentally throw out a mass standard and prevent us from ever knowing what an ounce is again, which reintroduced me to these beauties:^[1]

I have never smoked cigarettes and I have never had an interest in smoking cigarettes, but damn if I don’t wonder if a pack of these would fix what’s wrong with me.
Is it worth it for a non-smoker to order two cartons of unsmokable reference cigarettes to carry around as a bit in case someone asks to bum one? Certainly cheaper than dropping $1,200 on technical peanut butter.
I highly encourage you to peruse NIST’s entire catalog of reference materials [pdf] for calibrating machines, validating experiments, and just generally allowing industry to function. It’s almost like having an existent government is useful. Balm in another week trying to remind myself that just because the clown car goes very fast does not mean it isn’t full of clowns.
This bit from Matt Bruenig’s review of Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance really resonated:

I don’t personally understand why policy arguments need to be coupled with historical narratives to be compelling. If some aspect of the status quo is bad, then that is true regardless of whether it used to be less bad and regardless of how it got to be that way.
Took a few passes at figuring out enough SwiftUI to make the little app I made last year to fetch cycling stats out of HealthKit prettier. Pretty happy with the results:^[2]
Starting to see little bits of green on the ends of branches. I hope the plants don’t get fooled again this year.
The laser printer I bought in an effort to never need to buy another printer suddenly gave up on life. This is the last time I buy a product called – I shit you not – the HP Neverstop.

Scrolling through my photo library to make this joke, apparently I saved this exact same picture back in June 2017. This reference is almost ready for second grade. ↩︎
Placeholder data in the simulator. I’m actually way ahead of where I was last year. Solid shot of breaking 1,000 miles in 2025 🤞. ↩︎

Weeknotes 71: Flipping Through the Stacks

2025-03-23T12:00:00Z

Excellent new-to-me term: “onceability”:

the quality in a technical system that prevents a user from restoring the system, once it has failed.

Everything feels like this now. All the cheap little Internet-of-Things devices that suddenly and irrevocably forget what Wi-Fi even is and repurpose themselves into expensive breathing orange LEDs. Overdue to go around plucking them off of power strips like gross little weeds.
Severance season two finale: 👍👍. The discourse around any popular show almost immediately gets exhausting nowadays, but they certainly landed the plane for me. Felt like a love letter to filmmaking.
Took advantage of a disturbingly warm March day to get the bike dusted off for the year. Turns out that despite being sunny, it was way too windy and I spent a good amount of the ride translating perpendicularly into the curb. Still a nice expansion of the places I know how to bike to well into River West.
Lovely walk down to the record store to pick up one particular thing, and absentmindedly flipping through the stacks like I used to so many weekends at Amoeba on Sunset. Picked up some nice surprises and completely forgot the thing I came for.
Which gave me an excuse for another bike errand the next day to the other location of the same record store, which was more successful in the sense that I bought the record I tried to buy the day prior, and dramatically less successful in that I had to fight against pouring rain and a splitting headache the whole way.
Still: biking outdoors in March. Who can complain?

Weeknotes 70: Queued Behind the TikTok Youths

2025-03-16T12:00:00Z

Stupidly lovely weather for March in New York.
Started the week off right with brunch at Golden Diner. The reviews we’d seen all warned to get there early and prepare to be quoted a two or three hour wait at the door, which is exactly what happened.
Please enjoy this from their Brunch FAQs under “WHY IS THE WAIT SO LONG?”:

Good question. We’re a tiny restaurant that can seat max 30 guests. Factor in TikTok youths and pancake bonanza, and you get the picture. We highly encourage making a reservation for literally any other time.

Comprehensive review: big pancakes good. Worth it.
Spent Monday night jogging through Life and Trust, the newish immersive theater thingy from some of the folks behind Sleep No More. It felt bigger and maybe a bit harder to follow on the first journey through, but well worth a trip.^[1]
Also saw Oh Mary! on Broadway which was unfathomably stupid (extremely complementary statement.) Betty Gilpin recently took over the lead from creator Cole Escola, and Tituss Burgess is also taking a run soon. Betty crushed it, and had a truly world-class Playbill bio:
My recently-reset Instagram algorithm has been feeding me nothing but ads for Broadway shows since I got off the plane, and honestly, I could live like this.
Finally made cocktail pilgrimages to Death & Co, Katana Kitten, and Employees Only. And a college-esque crawl through the West Village, closing out five(‽) different bars.
All this at the expense of forgetting to eat dinner at an actual restaurant at any point we were in town.
Ethanol and malnutrition aside, Manhattan does a body good, because I always seem to accidentally get 20,000+ steps a day when I’m here.
Always delighted and surprised at how quickly I can slip back into the energy of a place. Five minutes on the ground and I suddenly remember which subway entrances only go uptown and which streets are the right ones for jaywalking.^[2]

Beware: the masks are significantly shittier for glasses wearers than the ones at Sleep No More. An evening for contacts, if you’re able. ↩︎
An easy way to get your anarchist calisthenics in – and no better time to start. ↩︎

Weeknotes 69: That's Hypertext!

2025-03-09T12:00:00Z

Home alone most of the week. Always weird how I do a reverse-Risky Business and somehow forget to turn on any music at all. Just silently roaming the halls, supervising my unruly ward.
At least my tongue has already mostly healed. Bodies are truly wild.
Starting to tinker with the site again, and accidentally turned a minor change into a whole saga: When I reference a point from a previous week, I like to link back – that’s hypertext, baby! – but I’m currently just linking to the post and it feels like we can do better. What I want: when you follow one of these links, the page loads with the relevant bullet in the viewport, something draws your attention to the specific text I’m referencing, and things gradually return to normal so you can read easily.
First idea was the simplest thing I could think of: toss an ID on the bullet in question and link directly to it with a fragment (i.e. /posts/weeknote#clever-joke-bullet). The rub is that under the hood, I write these posts in Markdown, and adding an arbitrary attribute to an element requires me to drop down into HTML, which sort of spoils the “folder full of text files” I want to work with.
Next idea was text fragments, a newish syntax designed to let you deep link to content in a way that’s resistant to changing markup. These are kind of perfect: I can link to any text on another page and the browser will scroll there and (usually) highlight it. Try this one – pretty cool, right? There’s even a pseudo-element you can target for styling.
The good news is browser support is there for every user agent I care about. The bad news is the experience is wildly inconsistent. Chrome lets me style the highlight effect, but ignores any animations or transitions I put on it. Safari does a whole animation all on its own that I actually like, but either partially or entirely ignores any styles I provide. I haven’t even bothered checking what Firefox does.
It’s still an improvement from where we started, so I went back and updated all internal links to this format, but despite all efforts to use the platform and not write a bunch of JavaScript, looks like once again the only way to get what I want is to write a bunch of JavaScript.
I’ve already got a proof-of-concept change to my Markdown renderer on a branch that automatically adds an ID to every <li>. Once I have an animation I like working in all browsers, I guess I’ll go back and replace all the internal links again and be right back at my first idea: just tossing an ID on things.
Spent the weekend tidying up and packing our bags for a quick trip to New York. A friend from out-of-town had a business meeting in the middle of the week, and a variety of scheming transformed that into a good enough excuse for us all to get away for a few days.
Not really sure why I’ve gone so long without visiting again. There but for a slightly different coin flip, my adult life would have started in Manhattan, and every visit makes me think about what would have really been different and what would have worked out exactly the same.
Case in point: tonight we accidentally wandered into the same restaurant where we started dating all those years ago. Meant to be.
Settled in to the East Village and enjoying a nightcap at The Raines Law Room as I try to prepare my feet for what I’m sure will be a truly preposterous amount of walking.

Weeknotes 68: Impeccable Vibes (Ongoing)

2025-03-02T12:00:00Z

Weegee’s lives!^[1] Congrats to the former owners on their well-earned retirement and cheers to the new owners for not messing with the already-impeccable vibes. Looking forward to many more visits.
A few excellent nights on the town this week: dinner at il Carciofo (because you cannot keep me away from a Joe Flamm joint) and a Saturday night trip into the loop for dinner at The Gage, a show (Clue, which was more faithful to the movie than I imagined possible), and drinks at Cindy’s.
Started the weekend off right by absolutely destroying my tongue. I am an adult who has bitten his tongue many, many times before, but never with such gusto – drew blood and everything. Apparently this is just fine and my body will sort it out when it feels like it.
Feeling the itch to redesign this site again. Bigger text, better contrast and improved layout on very large and very small screens shouldn’t be too tricky. Images are still a mess, but I’ll figure it out. Watch this space…

Previously. ↩︎

Weeknotes 67: What They've Done to the Computer

2025-02-23T12:00:00Z

Read Ethan’s post about leaving 18F. It’s heartbreaking to see such a dedicated group torn apart out of nothing but spite, but you have no choice but to respect the hell out of folks like Ethan drawing a line and getting the fuck out when you see it being crossed. I can only hope I’d handle such a shit situation with the same amount of backbone.
I’d always planned on doing a tour at 18F or USDS, though the timing never quite worked out. It’s sad to realize that’s never happening.
I suppose the good news is that all the people who worked there are still people with all their skills and passion, and I’m persuaded that the next wave of civic tech will be built outside the government. Seems like a good time to connect with others who care. Chi Hack Night used to hold their meetings in my old office and I wish I’d gotten involved years ago.
Bless this attempted journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles using only public transit: part one and part two.^[1] I didn’t own a car at any point when I lived in Southern California, but I don’t think I was ever brave enough to try something like this.
From Taylor Lorenz’s User Mag: “What’s really happening on YouTube”, some grim stats:
- The median number of views for a YouTube video is 41.
- 74% of YouTube videos have 0 comments.
- Around 89% of YouTube videos have 0 likes.
So don’t feel bad; we’re all screaming into the void together!
Which really shouldn’t come as any surprise. These systems do not operate at humane scale and they never will. I like how Leah Reich put it in her newsletter, Meets Most:

No human experience has ever been designed for a billion people, and no human experience can be designed for a billion people. You cannot be a human in a system or on a platform that allows you to engage with thousands of people and millions of opinions, thoughts, ideas – especially when there are no standards or norms, no tools that help you moderate, mediate, disengage.
But that will never stop us from chasing growth and vanity metrics and higher multiples. Highly recommend Ed Zitron’s phenomenal Better Offline podcast as a lens on the widespread and persistent decline – it’s not just happening to you!
From this week’s episode “What We’re Fighting For”:

These ideas – a miniature little computer that sits in our pocket and gives us access to the world’s information, or an app for falling in love – they’re extremely cool! Yet the reckless incentives of the rot economy and growth have poisoned them.

The internet made me who I am, and it allowed me to thrive, both as a person and a professional, and it continues to do so every day, except now I have to fight seemingly every app and service to get them to do what I want.

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, as I love what the computer has done for me, and I hate what the computer now does to other people and myself because Apple, Google and Meta need to increase quarterly revenues.

Hat tip to Matt Haughey ↩︎

Weeknotes 66: A Peculiar Angle

2025-02-16T12:00:00Z

Doing a lot of “cutting the wings off while we’re still flying around” stuff at work lately. Is this why I’m clenching my jaw constantly? Impossible to tell.
Trying to increase my calm with a yoga practice has been complicated by the fact that I’m aggressively, cartoonishly awful at yoga. Hoping there’s still some physical or psychological benefit to just sort of gently vibrating while trying to hold my body at a peculiar angle.
Also deployed my other secret weapon for inner peace: rearranging all the furniture in a room for no apparent reason.
Lovely Valentine’s dinner at Obélix. Trying to make a habit of weeknight dinners on the town to limit the number of days this winter where I never cross the threshold of an exterior door.
Another entry in the “whatever your opinion on AI, people have no idea how to sell it” file^[1]: this Defector recap of Salesforce’s AI ad from the Super Bowl:

Nobody in this commercial, or anywhere, actually needs any of this shit. There is no evidence that the other, competent restaurant uses AI at all, or that the other diners needed an AI agent in a booking app to get themselves out of the rain, or that the Harrelson throuple did anything other than order their food off a menu like actual human beings. They are normal people doing normal things in a normal way; only McConaughey needs the power of AI to avoid rain and purchase food, two things mankind has been doing successfully for thousands of years.
A thing I’ve always wanted and might need to just make for myself: a fog of war map for where I’ve been in the real world. Just some little app running in the background on my phone all the time, gradually revealing a few hundred feet in all directions. Strava heatmaps kind of manage this for biking, but I want it all!
Of course, the biggest problem with building this now would be missing out on decades of already-revealed bits of the world. Maybe I just need to do it for a single year, Feltron Annual Report-style.
Life is short; lick the tape.

Previously. ↩︎

Weeknotes 65: Black Start

2025-02-09T12:00:00Z

Oh man, oh geez, it’s not getting any better out there is it?
Wired is absolutely crushing the “off-putting meritless teen plugging random shit into government computers” beat. Toss them a few bucks if you can.
To fully explore this week’s predominant intrusive thought, we have to start with the story of “Fogbank”, some sort of something that does something in America’s nuclear weapons:

The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.

Everything about Fogbank is so mysterious, in fact, that when we needed to whip up a new batch, it took millions of dollars and literal years to figure out how to make it again.^[1]
It’s the classic “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?” story. Put another way: are we, as a society, guaranteed to just keep getting hotter and smarter?^[2]
The last few weeks seem like a pretty clear arrow pointing at “no.” Sure, arc of the moral universe and all, but we obviously can and do go backwards, and the things you naively unplug because you didn’t understand what they did can’t always just be flipped back on.
In the world of the electric grid, they call this a “black start”: when all the power goes out, you can’t just spin any generating station back up in any order. It can take days to make your way through the right sequence of bootstrapping and feeding power around — and the food in everyone’s fridge is rotting the whole time.
And even that’s assuming that everything can be reinvented. It feels like some ideas can only take root in a very narrow season. The most depressing one I’ve come across: can you imagine someone trying to pitch the concept of a library today? There was thankfully a moment in time where we saw the value of broadly distributing knowledge and culture, but just think of the nightmare we’d create after mixing in modern surveillance capitalism and intellectual property law and concern trolling.
Library 2k25™ would certainly have subscription fees and ID requirements and complex business arrangements where authors saw some infinitesimal fraction of a cent per thousand checkouts. The books would all be split into premium tiers and Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders would be able to hop in front of you on the waitlist. Everything you glanced at would be categorized and sold to data brokers and the whole thing would somehow be brought to you by Draft Kings.
Needless to say, feeling a little precious about the systems we’ve built and immediately taken for granted. Ruminating on Salvatore Sanfilippo’s “we are destroying software” and Jonathan Blow’s “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” and the many books I’ve enjoyed over the years about how one might get society going again, whether you’d been thrown back before we figured it out in the first place or thrust forward beyond the point we forgot it all.
Have we drifted too far from the weeknotes format? Is this just a blog post without the pretense of paragraphs? Impossible to tell! I really don’t want these to exclusively be a chronicle of my declining mental state. Let the record stipulate that I am not enjoying watching the decline of the American experiment very much.
That said, if these weeknotes devolve into a bulleted list of headlines, someone please do throw a rock at my head.

If I’m reading the primary sources correctly, it seems like the “turns out” was that they did too good a job following what limited directions remained and accidentally removed too much of an impurity that the original inventors had no idea mattered. The whole saga is laid out in GAO-09-385: NNSA and DOD Need to More Effectively Manage the Stockpile Life Extension Program, but I recommend the shorter version in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Nuclear Weapons Journal, Issue 2, pages 20-21. Stay for the highly-sanitized-for-public-consumption process diagram on how to make your own Fogbank at home! ↩︎
This link is deliberately broken at the time I’m posting it, because Jenn deleted her Twitter (complimentary). Here’s a copy on Bluesky from many years later if you don’t know the reference, but pointing at the void where the original used to be feels more to the point. ↩︎

Weeknotes 64: A Rough Transition

2025-02-02T12:00:00Z

Woof, where to begin? What a enraging, embarrassing, cartoonishly stupid week. Not doing great on my promise not to let the cruelty and stupidity of everything suck up all the oxygen in my life again.
But the weeknotes go on. Can’t say it better than Ingrid did in her phenomenal Perfect Sentences newsletter this week:

Amidst a not-quite bloodless coup, attending to one’s diary can feel frivolous at best, at worst a self-aggrandizing attempt to render inaction as “bearing witness.” One worries about coming across as all talk and no action, especially when seeing people who seemingly have greater access to levers of power like Congressional Democrats post through it instead of, say, doing literally anything.

This is not a #resistance project, it is a personal and curatorial one. Maybe I will look back on the time I spent on this amidst collapse as denial, persisting in little routines when I should have been stationing barricades. But it’s not exactly an either/or thing (people certainly have kept diaries while at the barricades) and despite everything I want to believe it is worthwhile to continue paying close attention to language. It is, after all, a primary concern of the fascists who I expect might rename it the US Department of Portation given their childish fervor to erase all things trans from state speech.
Sometimes a picture really does tell it as well as anything:
If you’ve left X, I sure do not recommend poking your head back in to see how it’s going. Feels like we’re all gonna need to think long and hard about dealing with the implications of Brandolini’s law:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
The complete collapse of any fucks remaining to give drove me to another queue purge. Farewell to the 6,000 unread articles in my RSS reader and who knows how many hundreds of unlistened podcast episodes. May you each find your way back to me if you were super interesting.
Ok, this is an impermeable dismal tone barrier. Only trivial fun or interesting bullet points allowed beyond this point. I promise I’ll figure out how to just write about the week again eventually, but I anticipate we’re gonna have to put up with a rough transition here and there for a little while.
Speaking of precision in language: when something used to be on your boat, but isn’t anymore, you’ve got some things to consider if you care about choosing your words carefully. Did it fall off by accident? Did you push it off? Did it sink or is it floating? “Flotsam”, “jetsam”, “lagan”, and “derelict” are all at your disposal^[1]. Follow the rubric carefully.
You know that warning on a candle that you’re not supposed to let it burn all the way to the bottom? Found out why when one exploded on my desk and then all the broken glass pieces continued to be on fire for a while. Slightly takes away from the calming effects.
Nostalgic for those little headphone jack FM transmitters we used to use to listen to iPods in the car, but hate having to choose what to listen to? Why not simultaneously broadcast 100 different Taylor Swift songs across all available frequencies? Certainly not legal, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anybody else lately. If I haven’t done a fascinating, questionably permissible side project like this before the end of the year, please chuck something (soft) at my head.
Read this post by Matt Webb about “stuff that happened”. No summary, no spoilers. Just read it.
Schadenfreude corner: please enjoy this section of AI startup Anthropic’s job application (hat tip to Simon Willison):

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.

Why do you want to work at Anthropic?

Perpetually top of mind because “flotsam” and “jetsam” are my wife’s excellent names^[2] for whenever you have two identical versions of a thing you need to keep straight. Headphones, humidifiers, snow shovels – works for everything. ↩︎
My personal favorites: “eeby” and “deeby”.^[3] ↩︎
Yes, I just did this to see if nested footnotes worked.^[4] ↩︎
They do. ↩︎

Weeknotes 63: Greater Fools

2025-01-26T12:00:00Z

Starting off with a long weekend to contemplate the looming decline. As Matt Christman said on Inauguration Day in 2017:

This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.
Spent an upsetting amount of Monday tracking down an Amazon package from somewhere on the block based only on the blurry little hostage photo they send out on delivery. Thanks to our neighbor for having a distinctive enough shovel and doormat.
It got really cold really fast, which throws the delicate balance of the house into chaos. Gotta keep it dry enough that the windows don’t ice over, but humid enough that the floors don’t crack, all while making sure none of the pipes or vents freeze shut, which they absolutely did. Shoutout to having a drone in your homeownership toolkit so you can inspect the roof without falling off an extension ladder.
Flashed back to our late twenties with a celebration of gone-but-not-forgotten Balena at a pop-up where they played all the hits (including that Tagliolini Nero!) Even managed to close out Gilt Bar afterwards. Look at us, living large on a school night.
YouTube has a treasure trove of motivational videos for scammy door-to-door salespeople that I can’t stop watching. I first stumbled across them before we went car shopping a few years ago and figured I could use them as a sort of booster shot to build up antibodies to high pressure sales tactics, but they’ve become a weird fascination in their own right. Over the past few years, it’s been wild to watch as the overall tone shifted from “mildly sleazy” to everyone being a full-on predator doing pickup artist shit while shilling artisanal growth hormones and berating you to dominate the customer!!!
Maybe viewing the other side of your transaction as a rube to be fleeced has always been a part of a certain kind of sales, but the escalation still seems noteworthy. I think ripping people off has sort of assumed an air of legitimacy now. Like Hamilton Nolan notes in “The Land of Greater Fools”, “the assumption that scams are the way to get ahead has gotten so big that it now envelops something approaching the majority of this country.”
Not to mention that being scammed has become entirely unexceptional both in frequency and effort. Every day I get dozens of profoundly lazy emails, texts, and calls trying to steal my identity or renew the Norton subscription I don’t have or tell me how to bail my non-existent children out of a Caribbean prison that only accepts payment in iTunes gift cards.
Somehow the takeaway from this is just mild annoyance and “report as spam”, but it feels like there has to be a long-term psychic toll at attempted muggings via every communication channel all day every day. I’m sure someone has written a better version of this thought. Let me know if you’ve seen it.
Just barely warm enough Sunday to finally pull the Christmas lights down. Still January; pretty respectable.

Weeknotes 62: Wasting Metal

2025-01-19T12:00:00Z

Reached the very cool age where a week after you tweak your back a little, it gets worse instead of better. Neat!
Home alone for the middle of the week, which mostly served as a reminder that I do not remember how to do trivial things like go to bed before 3 a.m. without another person in the house.
Interesting week for rocket nerds like me, with New Glenn Flight 1 and Starship Flight 7 back to back. Both launches had things go well and things go wrong in almost opposite ways. Blue made it to the target orbit on their first flight (super impressive!), but failed to land the booster on a downrange ship, something they’re unlikely to dial in for a while.^[1] Meanwhile, SpaceX caught the first stage with the big motorized arms of the launch tower for a second time (one of the wildest feats of engineering I’ve ever seen), but lost the ship shortly before engine cutoff, a significant regression after the last three ships made it all the way through reentry.
Great example of the strangeness of assigning success and failure when companies are testing in the open like this. SpaceX has always gotten a lot of bad press when things go boom, and while there’s plenty of valid criticism about the wheres and the hows of their development program, the specific tag of “It didn’t work because it blew up” has always felt like it misses the mark. There’s merit to wasting metal instead of time when you’re still figuring out the broad strokes of the thing you’re building, and it’s certainly paid dividends for them.
So what’s the difference? Blue Origin did the mission and also learned a bit about something they’re still trying to figure out.^[2] All the experiments SpaceX had lined up for this flight – engine relight, payload deploy, changes to the aero surfaces & thermal protection system – were all precluded by the ship blowing up on the way uphill. It’s the unspoken corollary of the tech industry’s whole “failure is good actually” ethos: sure, as long as the failure happens during the part you’re trying to learn from. Take a risk on a new product or something, but your business doesn’t magically get better because you forgot to unplug a space heater over a long weekend and burned the office down.
Space billionaires aside, the people working on these projects are living my dream and the things that become possible when vehicles like these are flying regularly are pretty cool. Big rockets are so back.
Caught Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip in town for one night fresh off its run at Edinburgh Fringe. A masterpiece. Now this is jazz!

Falcon 9 botched the landing a bunch before the ~400 successful landings they’re racked up. ↩︎
The exact formula SpaceX used for F9: a free test flight after every paying customer got where they were going. ↩︎

Weeknotes 61: Before We Can Sit Back and Look at the Stars

2025-01-12T12:00:00Z

Eyes in for their regular check at the ophthalmologist and confirmed to still be eyes. For some reason, the dilation drops hit me extremely hard and I spend the next 18 hours in a useless blown-pupil haze. After the last few appointments, I’ve made a habit of spending it just randomly ambling home via whatever public transit I stumble across. Something to be said for a quiet, winter walk.
Whenever people say they love Chicago but couldn’t handle the winters, I wonder if they know that we get to give our snowplows punny little names. Not revealing all my favorites, but I will go ballistic if Make Snow Little Plans doesn’t join the fleet.
Gutted to hear our neighborhood bar may not be long for this earth. No kitchen, no credit cards; just stiff, solid drinks and a short walk home. Trying to take as many friends as often as we can until the end. I’ve always loved the way Time Out pitched it:

Ten years from now, when this strip of Armitage is populated with coffee shops and vintage clothing stores, this old-school, soul record–playing, classic cocktail–mixing bar will be overrun with hipsters vying for their turn in the photo booth. Start hanging out here now so you can say you knew it in the good old days.
My most unpopular opinion is that I completely agree with Simon that nobody’s listening to your microphone to serve you ads, and that this recent settlement will keep the urban legend alive forever. Beyond the catastrophe that would ensue if someone actually got caught doing this, the real “turns out” of it is that we all leak so much data about our interests and preferences through a million other avenues that can be collected more easily that there’s just no reason to bother 😬👍.
Started our rewatch of Severance before the second season kicks off next week. Immediately fell back in love with the tone and the whole world they built. I’m a sucker for any show that just lays all the pieces out for you without holding each one up to the camera and making sure you saw it while two characters say how important it is into the middle distance. “Every time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back.” So good.
Speaking of the dystopia of labor: hard to decide what to clip from this conversation between Ezra Klein and Oliver Burkeman on productivity and burnout. I particularly enjoyed Burkeman’s take here:

Klein: I remember wondering whether the issue people were having was an issue of expectations — this belief that our lives were supposed to feel good. They were supposed to be, if not easy, then manageable, controllable. Work was supposed to be a source of meaning and even pleasure, and if it was actually soulless and overwhelming and always wanted more of you than you wanted to give, that was a problem to be solved…

Burkeman: …Go back to the medieval period, when people would have lived in this situation of completely endemic uncertainty. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that they didn’t find the opportunity to be happy. I think the crucial distinction is that they wouldn’t have postponed that until they felt in control. They wouldn’t have said, “Before we can have a festival, before we can sit back and look at the stars, we have to know what we’re doing here and feel in charge and in control of things"…
All-dressed chips at the grocery store! This is not a drill!

Weeknotes 60: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Probably Do Again

2025-01-05T12:00:00Z

Happy 2025! Time for a fresh start^[1]:
Not really a New Year’s Eve person, but got lightly bullied into spending the night with friends at Beatnik On The River and had an entirely pleasant time (followed by a predictably miserable ordeal getting an Uber home from The Loop at 1 a.m.)
A nice week in the kitchen. We made our way through the holiday dishes we never got in our short trip home: white chicken chili, my family’s noodle casserole thing, and a spiral-cut ham, with many subsequent toasty sandwiches and omelets. Somewhere in the middle, I utterly failed at pan-searing some duck breasts, a task I somehow perform worse at on every attempt. Also tried a new Fettuccine Alfredo recipe with chili crisp: 🧑‍🍳💋.
As is par for the course with a quiet week, all other big plans went right out the window. Still only sort of unpacked from our road trip. All the Christmas lights are still up. The season lives on through us another week!
That brings the end-of-year liminal zone to a conclusion. Including the time I was out sick, I’ve been away from work for three full weeks. Wish me luck hitting the ground running tomorrow morning. What’s my password again?

The beautiful Every Day Goal Calendar from Simone Giertz. ↩︎

Weeknotes 59: Technology Fairy

2024-12-29T12:00:00Z

Second negative test Monday morning. A clean bill of health means the holidays are on! Hit the road for our annual drive to Minnesota and its usual garbage weather and semi truck roulette.
Lovely time with both our families. All parties were well-gifted, but it also felt like the first time we’ve successfully followed through on reining in the presents like we’ve all been threatening to do for years.
Highlight for me was replacing my parents’ nine- and eleven-year-old iPads with new iPad Airs. Sometimes it’s easier to just swap out all the Lightning cables for USB-C while folks are asleep. Everyone needs a technology fairy in their lives.
A very excellent road trip baby checked off two whole cities she’d never been to before:
1,094 miles later, we’re back in Chicago. Once again used the experience to vacillate wildly on whether or not we should go electric when it’s time for a new car. Briefly considered a plug-in hybrid, but for our particular lives, it seems like the worst of both worlds: dragging around an engine and tank of gas 363 days out of the year as we putter around town in full-electric mode, then hauling a dead battery 400 miles twice a year when it’s just being a regular car. Everyone I know who has an electric car has said that range anxiety pretty much isn’t a thing. Now that heat pumps^[1] are becoming more common to help with winter range loss, maybe we just take the plunge.
Celebrated the arrival of the weird liminal end-of-year zone with a trip out to Skokie to see Legally Blonde: The Musical and one last trip to The Meadowlark.
Whenever I’ve needed some long-running service like Plex or Channels or Homebridge running on my home network, I’ve tried to squeeze it in to the tangle of Raspberry Pis or the big Synology in my basement, but I finally put a proper computer down there. A little M4 Mac Mini running headless in my server rack that I can VNC into is so much easier to work with, and once you have an always-on computer, it’s not hard to find things to do with it.
I guess this is our last check-in of the year, so let’s do some 2024 housekeeping:
- Read 10 books (six for the first time, four re-reads). Rookie numbers. Please don’t ask how many books I’ve bought over the same time period.
- Watched 60 movies (19 new, 41 re-watches).
- Biked 730 miles. Fewer than the 1,000 miles I threatened back in May, but still 600 miles more than the year before. I bet I can break four digits this year.
- Discovered 1,391 new songs via my demented yearly “to be considered” playlist on Spotify:
Stumbled across this tidbit in the Times’ coverage of Jimmy Carter’s death:

A testament to Jimmy Carter’s incredible longevity: He outlived two of his obituary writers, at The New York Times and The Washington Post. Roy Reed, a Times correspondent who covered the South, died in 2017, at 87. Edward Walsh, a former Washington Post reporter who co-bylined The Post’s obit, died in 2014 at 71.

Journalism fun fact: this is incredibly common! Prewritten obituaries are often started decades in advance. The blanks get filled in when the time comes, but the credit for all the research, structure, and writing still belongs with the original author. It’s one of the most common reasons for a posthumous byline.

If you’re not in the cult yet, Alec’s excellent Technology Connections channel has the definitive explainer for heat pumps, why they matter, and how EV’s benefit from them. It’s free real estate! ↩︎

Weeknotes 58: In Exile

2024-12-22T12:00:00Z

This was my second go of COVID, and while it wasn’t too awful^[1], it still hurls an absolute fucking bowling ball through any sort of life. Supremely bummed about losing an entire week when there weren’t that many left in the year to spare.
The first time around, the whole house was sick together, but this time it seems like only I got dinged and had to try my best to keep it that way. No idea how I had the good sense to sequester myself in the guest room when I felt that weird little tickle in the back of my throat, but it was the right call. We managed to set the house up so I still had access to a bed and a desk and a bathroom and could have my meals dropped off at the door of my little isolation ward.
Primary symptom this time was a two-day fever where I was utterly convinced that my day job involved working on something called “The Device”, which was just a CAD model of a coffee cup that I rotated a lot in my mind. One day I will finish the work.
I dragged the projector I bought for backyard movie night in and watched a bunch of Succession and Mad Men on the ceiling while I barbecue-rolled in bed for a few days.
Also got to dust off a classic from the first two long-distance years of our relationship: we had a recurring date night where we’d both go to the grocery store, find a bottle of wine that was available in both places, and pick a movie on Netflix (from the “Watch Now” streaming section, in contrast to the main DVD-mailing business). We’d get on the phone, count “3-2-1-Go!” and watch together. I think there’s a bunch of technology to solve this problem now, but we know what we know, and can report that the old ways still work just fine.
So when does this end? The official guidance as it currently stands says:
You can go back to your normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, both are true:
1. Your symptoms are getting better overall, and
2. You have not had a fever (and are not using fever-reducing medication)
Skipping over “stop taking Tylenol to see if you are Ready for Commerce™” for a moment, there seems to be broad consensus that neither of those two bullets has any relationship to your ability to spread illness to other people^[2]. I was still emphatically positive on a rapid test for days after both the above points were satisfied for me.
Feeling pretty despondent about the you-do-you of it all. So bizarre to have developed incredible tools to detect infections and make indoor air cleaner and just sort of ignore them all because “get back to work.” When did we decide the job of public health was to try to predict everyone’s objections and bake in little carve outs versus just offering medical guidance? Let’s not forget that previous “isolate for five days” guidance was just a thing an airline CEO made up.
Even the steps in the right direction are just so half-assed. Every household in the U.S. can request four free tests – great! – though of course that isn’t even enough for each member of the average household of 2.6 people to perform a single round of repeat testing like the FDA has recommended for more than two years.
Decided that my own bar to avoid putting any parents or grandparents at risk is two consecutive negative tests 24 hours apart, which I currently have one of. Assuming the second looks good in the morning, Christmas is not cancelled. Fingers crossed.
Anyway, personally lucky to have access to pricier molecular tests (which gave me a positive result 18 hours earlier than the antigen tests and probably spared my wife and friends from being exposed) and good air purifiers and a house big enough to distance from each other and a decent employer who was understanding when I needed to just poof out of society for a week. But my biggest takeaway with this latest brush is that I just don’t understand what the plan is^[3] beyond “everyone keep weathering this forever, and try not to bitch about it too much.”
Apropos of everything, this stood out to me in Dan Luu’s “Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?”:

Something I find interesting about American society is how many people think that someone who gets the raw end of a deal because they failed to protect themselves against every contingency “deserves” what happened.

Read: I didn’t end up in the hospital. Thank you medical science. Get your shots. ↩︎
The fine print also says that while “going back to your normal activities”, you should consider masking, opening windows, and physical distancing for five additional days, but nobody seems to bother with that part. ↩︎
If you find my frustrations at all persuasive, I highly recommend checking out the Death Panel podcast. Their concept of the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic” and year-in-reviews are some of the best health reporting out there. ↩︎

Weeknotes 57: It's So Over

2024-12-15T12:00:00Z

Got my best start ever on Advent of Code this year – fourteen for fourteen so far! Sticking with Ruby this time. I don’t care at all about speed or getting on the main leaderboard, but we do have an internal one at work that you can actually make a dent on.
Lovely white elephant party with friends, with the twist that your gift had to be something you just had lying around the house. Congratulations to the lucky new owner of this gem from Read Receipts (sorry, it’s sold out):
Barely started on holiday shopping otherwise, which felt dire until I remembered that we all used to buy things right up til the 23rd and 24th every year, and “you need to be done by the first week of December” is entirely an artifact of the shift to e-commerce.
If I still had the hat, I’d be wearing it backwards, as the week ended with a visit from everyone’s favorite novel coronavirus. Wishing good health to you from my isolation cave 🤒.

Weeknotes 56: A Small Fire Nearby

2024-12-08T12:00:00Z

December, huh? The year really got away from me.
Trying our best to still get out even though it’s firmly coat season now. Saw a really excellent improvised murder mystery over at The Second City with friends and had some drinks down in The Drifter.
Mind blown by this Stuff Made Here video of a terrifying robot windmill death camera (sorry, you really just need to watch it). Reminds me of my all-time favorite SIGGRAPH paper Dual Photography, where cameras become lights and lights become cameras and nothing is what it seems.^[1]
Spent Saturday upgrading my Prusa 3D printer to their latest and greatest model, the MK4S. It’s not a trivial process, but pretty incredible in these times of planned obsolescence that they’ll sell you the parts to upgrade going back generations. Next year, I should be able to go all the way to the CORE One, a fully-enclosed model with totally different kinematics. Neat.
The “P” key on my MacBook Pro is slowly dying. I’m sure it’s a 15-minute walk-in fix at the Apple Store, but I’ve been burned too many times with a surprise FedEx roundtrip to some repair center in Texas and not having my primary computer for a week that I keep putting off bringing it in. How much of a roblem could it turn into?
I have become a candle person now, I guess. Do not underestimate the psychic balm of having a small fire nearby.

Presentation video mirrored on YouTube. Watch until the end for the best card trick 🤯. ↩︎

Weeknotes 55: Taking Back the Sparkles

2024-12-01T12:00:00Z

Small chance I’ll be able to look at Instagram again now that they’re promising to let you reset your algorithm someday. Gonna miss all my beloved influencer widows and their classes on grieving, with instructions on starting your own online business selling grief courses to next generation of photogenic widows.
Do we have a good word for the phenomenon where an industry term breaks containment? I’d been exposed to “BFCM” at various jobs to describe the time period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but this year I’ve started seeing that acronym show up in regular old consumer-facing email subject lines.
The other one of these that seems insane to me: ordinary people describing some laundry detergent brand setting up an RV at a farmers market where you can embroider your own hat as an “activation.”
While we’re on marketing, how is that despite all the investment in the AI-ification of everything, not one company has been able to conjure a sympathetic user of these tools?
- Apple took a bunch of cracks: we know you lazy, unprepared, inconsiderate, rude jerks will love this shit!
- Google had to pull their big Olympics campaign for Gemini because of an ad “for the people who think that replacing meals with pills is a prospect that fills everyone with delight”.^[1]
Sure, there’s something supremely human about finding a way to half-ass a thing, but nobody wants to be known as that guy. Just because something is relatable doesn’t mean it’s aspirational.
Also, we can’t let them get away with stealing the ✨ emoji:
Remember that mysterious film roll I found in a closet? Pretty much all 36 shots turned out! A bunch of lost memories from almost 15 years ago: moving into a new office in Pasadena, packing up my apartment to move here, and a random day at the beach with the person who went on to become my wife. Film is some magical stuff.

h/t national treasure Alexandra Petri ↩︎

Weeknotes 54: Surprise Time Capsule

2024-11-24T12:00:00Z

Mostly a week of deep cleaning ahead of hosting Thanksgiving next week. The war on dust is endless, and the lines are not holding.
Big dump of snow on Tuesday. Standard weird Chicago weather for this time of year: buried for 18 hours, nothing left the next morning: At least we can draw the line on lawn care and garden hoses and all the rest 'til spring.
Another banger from Anil Dash about the importance of talking about your work as your work:

We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Yet another misadventure into the bowels of HealthKit, this time to ask the seemingly trivial question “What’s the most steps I’ve taken in a day?” There are awards for things like “most calories burned walking”, but no way I could find to just spit out the biggest number without endlessly scrolling through a table. Went back and forth with Claude for a while and eventually got a working app together^[1]. Why is this so difficult?
Every once in a while, I’ll be looking at my Finder sidebar and discover that the “Desktop” folder has gone missing. So I’ll add it back, only for it to disappear again. This has been going on for at least two years. This apparently affects a ton of people. No explanation, no end in sight – madness! Finally decided to try trying and erased Finder’s .plist. Five days in, so far so good…
Found an old roll of black & white film partially shot in the Pentax SLR from the 70s that got me through college photography classes. It has to be at least a decade old and I have absolutely no memory of what might be on it. Who knows if it’s salvageable, but finished it off anyway and dropped it off at a local film lab just for funsies. We’ll see!

Answer: 24,875 steps on June 4, 2015. ↩︎

Weeknotes 53: The Juice

2024-11-17T12:00:00Z

I haven’t posted anything on the website formerly known as Twitter in over a year and a half, and every time I’ve glanced at it since it’s been a little grosser. Running it side-by-side with Bluesky on Election Night was the perfect contrast of just how bad it’s gotten. I deleted the app from my phone a while ago, but this week I finally marked myself private and pulled one last archive so I can finally kill it once and for all.
The best part is I didn’t even have to update my bio: “What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.”
Kinda sucks to feel run off^[1] of the online community that’s brought me the most joy for something like 17 years, but you don’t get extra credit for being the last to leave the Nazi bar and Bluesky finally feels like it’s got the juice.
If you’re facing the same migration, Sky Follower Bridge is a pretty good way to try to salvage your connections, though I really wouldn’t recommend hitting the big “Follow All” button. This is the new world! Try something new. We’re not just moving the whole town five miles down the road.
Also finally gave up on Threads and its baffling algorithmic timeline. Honestly feels kinda good pruning back my footprint and focusing on the places I control (👋). The radical act of “wherever you get your podcasts”, as Anil would say.
Quick weekend trip back to Los Angeles for the first time in seven years (how?). Apparently I have been out of college for fifteen (HOW‽). I was expecting everything to be unrecognizable, but I was mostly surprised how similar things were. Sure, you can take the light rail to Expo Park and the school has gobbled up all the land to the north and replaced the laundromats and tire shops with Sephoras and Starbucks, but campus itself is exactly how I remember it. And downtown still seemed utterly dead on the Saturday and Sunday.
Finally got to ride in a few Waymos. So damn pleasant. I can’t wait to never drive again.
Other initial takeaways: never had to wait more than a few minutes for a pickup; cheaper than Uber/Lyft; a surprisingly aggressive driver (though not in a scary way). More than anything else, it’s wild how quickly you just sort of get used to a car driving itself once it demonstrates baseline competence.
Cheered on a nice victory at the Coliseum, enjoyed a nice day wandering the beach in Santa Monica, and now waiting on the red-eye home for (what should be) my last flight of the year.
If you’re struggling to keep it together, don’t forget that even multimillion dollar airliners need to be propped up with a little stick sometimes so they don’t tip over on their asses.^[2]

Why should I leave? They’re the ones who suck! ↩︎
Yes, this actually happens. ↩︎

Weeknotes 52: What Did We Learn?

2024-11-10T12:00:00Z

So Tuesday sucked. Wednesday too.
What did we learn? Wildly vacillating between gutted and exhausted at all the takes so far. I don’t know the answer on where we go next either, but I’m confident it isn’t “stop believing in all the stuff we believed in last week.” But no, let’s all just be loud and confident about which of our friends belong under the bus. Ugh. I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
(Desperately grasping for regularly scheduled programming…) Uh…, new Kindles? The Paperwhite seems like it got a nice bump across the board: a little bigger, a little faster, a little longer battery life. I still do miss physical page turn buttons and especially Whispernet, which made those early Kindles seem like magic.
I really wish I had one of those first-generation Kindles for my little shelf of old technology. It looks like it belongs in a shuttlecraft. What a gem:
They may all just be buttonless roundrects now, but hey, we can have color!
Oh wait, oops, they’re all broken, mine included. Reached out to customer service a few times and got that standard Amazon handwavey “we know all about it; we’ve made a note on your account; don’t call us, we’ll call you”, which doesn’t instill much confidence. I think Amazon support has proactively contacted me one time in twenty years: to tell me that ice cream I bought from them 18 months earlier was full of listeria. Thanks; I’ll go ahead and take that pint off display in my dairy museum.
Gathered up every table and chair in the house for a little friendsgiving potluck. Once all the frantic cleaning fades out of memory, hosting is really a delight. Good company, good food, good wine. People, what a concept!

No Surprises

2024-11-06T12:00:00Z

Nobody thought to pause the emails.

Waking up Wednesday morning to “📣 60 months interest-free on select Samsung TVs” and “Every kitchen needs a signature color” and all the other regularly scheduled programming.

Nothing’s the same; everything’s the same. Metabolize the horror, move on.

Trying to check in on folks you care about while avoiding the shit-eating grins of the worst people in the world taking a victory lap. Stumbling across elated business ghouls who’ve been hiding in plain sight – it’s safe to take the masks off now and those tongues are hungry for boot.

There’s no space this time for “this isn’t who we are.” Nothing to be surprised by. “Everyone knows and nobody cares”.

If I’m wishcasting, I cling to the idea that they still have no idea what they’re doing. Each individual monster has their own pet project, sure, but none of these guys are team players. The cartoonish demise of each bromance can’t come soon enough.

But obviously things will get worse. There was no effort to hide the playbook. The pain will be unevenly distributed, the consequences cheered on by the jackals. Conditions will decline, whether through malice towards some subset of our neighbors it’s become tasteful to vilify, or through gross incompetence, playing Chesterton’s fence with the entirety of the administrative state until the millions of little balls quietly juggled by civil servants start falling out of the air.

Even if we’re overwhelmingly lucky and nobody’s learned a thing about enacting policy, daily life still feels bound to get infinitely stupider. The full-scale institutionalization of AI slop. “Do your own research” on the glowing ooze we decided it’s cheaper to let leach into your pipes. A federal fiefdom for each and every one of the dumbest fucking nephews alive. From Twilight of the Elites to triumph of the small-business tyrant.

I let the clown show dictate the shape and tenor of so many of my days last time around, and I know I can’t do that again. None of this to say I stick my head in the sand, but watching the returns come in last night, I couldn’t get over the galling lack of seriousness in so much of the coverage. Palace intrigue. The horserace. Sports for nerds.

I don’t really have the appetite for “who fucked up” yet, but I am fairly confident that doing more politics at them is not the next step. We’re not voting our way out of this anytime soon. And no won’t somebody please think of the norms?! kayfabe either. It’s just gonna have to be looking out for each other. Being the sand you wish to see in the gears. Giving time, giving money, giving voice without sucking all the air out of the room or reinventing the wheel:

Look for the people already doing the work. You probably do not need to invent your own new organization or group. Find the people already doing it and join them, listen to them, learn from them.

There are already abortion funds, resistance orgs, abolitionists, mutual aid groups, people who have been fighting for years, decades even. Join the fight. It has existed for a while, and it is time to honor that expertise and community.

I don’t think we really learned anything we didn’t already know.

The cavalry isn’t coming; we keep each other safe.

Weeknotes 51: The Slow Unwrapping

2024-11-03T12:00:00Z

We get a monthly box from a local butcher shop, and we’re coming up on the third consecutive “weather somehow still too nice for soups and stews; here’s some grillables!” November brats – what a time to be alive.
Fine-tuning my perfect bike route to and from the West Loop that keeps me away from the most harrowing traffic. Managed one way in 22 minutes, which is just about as fast as I’ve ever managed in a car.
Our street’s apparently not much of a trick-or-treating destination, so for the last few years, we’ve set up camp in the front yard to try to draw in the hungry hordes. Graced with a few dozen kiddos this year.
Frantically cleaning and catching up on some overdue decorating in anticipation of end-of-year gatherings. I hung a big heavy mirror, which I’ll spend years eyeing suspiciously, waiting for the drywall to give out.
No, nothing I have hung has ever fallen down. Doesn’t that mean we’re due?
As we prepare for the return of the cursed needle next week, a worthwhile reminder from Matt Glassman:

A reminder that there’s no horserace aspect to counting votes. No one “pulls ahead” in the count or “makes up ground” or “loses their lead” in any real sense. It’s just an artifact of the process, the order in which votes are counted, an order part mandated and part random.

You can’t win or lose in the count. It’s not a football game with an outcome yet to be determined. It’s the slow unwrapping of a present, the awaiting of knowing the actual and unchangeable state of the world.

Weeknotes 50: Baboon County USA

2024-10-27T12:00:00Z

There’s this scene towards the end of an episode of The Simpsons^[1] where, after a dramatic standoff with zoo animals on a little amusement park train, our characters make a dramatic escape, passing under a sign that says “Leaving Baboon County USA.” They cheer, they lay out the moral of the story, and everything goes back to normal. Just as we’re about to cut, the little train finishes its loop and passes under another sign:
Guess what the new house shorthand is for a week when every crisis leads directly into the next? Yeah, we’re having one of those.
The vibes are once again in shambles in journalism town, as the editorial boards of both the L.A. Times and The Washington Post had their presidential endorsements spiked at the last minute by ownership. We need to amend the billionaire fantasy of buying a struggling newspaper with “…and just sign the checks and leave it the fuck alone.”
Dropped off our ballots. Ours always have like 100 appellate judges that you need to individually vote to retain or kick off the bench. So grateful for Injustice Watch for pulling together all their histories and bar ratings so you can make some kind of informed decision.
Tried out the hearing test in iOS 18.1 with a decent amount of apprehension, but turns out my ears are still in okay shape! Guess I have to attribute my total inability to process any information in a loud room to something else.
Got the reminder to renew my authorizations for Movies Anywhere, a service so good it feels like it must have been court-ordered into existence to avoid an antitrust lawsuit. I honestly can’t believe it’s a Disney joint. You log in to all your media libraries (Apple, Amazon, Google Play/YouTube, etc) and suddenly all the movies you’ve purchased on any of them show up on all the others. It just works.

S8E22: “In Marge We Trust” ↩︎

Weeknotes 48: User Error

2024-10-13T12:00:00Z

Bopping around the house this week as part of my usual don’t-get-sick-right-before-vacation cooldown period. Life changing strategy.
Almost thought the flawless system had been compromised when right in the middle of the week, my inability to read the instructions for a combo COVID/Flu test led to a 90 minute catastrophic freakout. It was trying to communicate “I am a broken piece of garbage; please ignore me” by blinking the little lights next to both “Pos +” and Neg -" at the same time, but my brain just processed a blinking “POSITIVE” as rather insistent.
Hat tip to my darling wife for asking “if you’re sick, why is the negative light blinking too?” The instructions are actually super clear about this:
How many dozens of these things have I done mindlessly in the last four years? I don’t even read the directions anymore. Complacency breeds contempt, et al. Time to go watch a bunch of Air Crash Investigations and U.S. Chemical Safety Board videos.
My penance for panicking myself for no reason: building four different Home Depot shelving units to try to make some sense of the unfinished closets in my office and the guest room. We should eventually install some of that generic white wire hanging stuff, but for now this gets things off the floor.
Rules to live by: 1. Everything has a home. 2. Nothing’s home is the floor.
And with that, away to London. Hello from a shockingly on-time flight, somewhere over the Atlantic.

Weeknotes 47: Catching Vibes

2024-10-06T12:00:00Z

Mourning the mysterious disappearance of the blue USPS collection box that used to live across the street.
It is surprisingly hard to figure out where a mailbox is and if it even exists. The official USPS location search still thinks ours is still there, but MailboxMap somehow knows it’s gone.
This is the kind of public data thing that I would get obsessed with for days at a time in my previous life as a journalist. Who is responsible for knowing where all the collection boxes are? Who decides to move them? Where do they sleep when they’re not bolted to the sidewalk? Do I need to remember how to file a FOIA request?
Now that Chicago’s pulled the plug on ShotSpotter, let’s dedicate that hardware to a higher purpose.
No seriously, I’m pretty obsessed with Bop Spotter. Don’t miss the details over at 404. This is what technology is for. May it never be found.
Lots of things in small improvements corner for this website this week: upgraded to the official release of Eleventy v3, started self-hosting my fonts, put proper cache headers on all the assets, reworked contrast on the color palette, and finally got brave enough to let my deploy script delete files. It’s almost like I’m about to be away from a computer again for a little bit…

Weeknotes 46: Dirt from the Ground

2024-09-29T12:00:00Z

Finally made it to both Common Decency and Cara Cara Club. Many reasons I love living in Logan Square, but high up that list is that you’ll never want for a good drink.
Thankfully watching the latest round of return to office mandates from the sidelines. Oxide and Friends’s latest episode has a good roundup.
At the end of the day, whatever: just tell me where to work and I guess that’s the deal. The thing that’s been truly baffling is the laziness of the sales pitch: “Come on back! We sublet two-thirds of the space, you can’t have a little plant or a keyboard anymore because you don’t have an assigned desk, we got rid of all the food and coffee, and none of your teammates are here. Or you’re fired 😊”
iPhone 16 Pro, One Week Review: I keep forgetting the camera button is there. I hope I remember it eventually, because it seems like a nice idea. I am glad I am not a case manufacturer who got blindsided by it. Otherwise: I can report that it is a phone™.
One thing they don’t tell you about having a yard is that sometimes you will need to drive to the hardware store and pay like $50 for a bunch of bags of dirt. Like dirt from the ground. And you put the dirt in your trunk and you drive the dirt home and just pour out all over the place. You will do this several times a year.

Weeknotes 45: A Bespoke LED Problem

2024-09-22T12:00:00Z

Binging through Jamie Loftus’ Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) podcast, revisiting all of online’s main characters. We’re playing all the hits: coffee in the garden with my husband, slide cop, curvy wife guy, “Suck my dick and balls I’m working at NASA”, 30-50 feral hogs…
If these references mean nothing to you, your mind might not yet be clogged with internet-poisoning microplastics. There’s still a future for you; run while you can!
Wandered around the house Monday afternoon loading the new software on all the things. Best new feature across all platforms: subtitles automatically turn on in tvOS when you skip back 10 seconds or mute.
Saw The Matrix in theaters on Thursday night as part of its – memento mori – 25th anniversary. Truly wild how hard it holds up, both in terms of effects/production, and just as a good fun movie.
My Gen 2 Tidbyt finally showed up. I’ve been a huge fan of my original one, and I knew they were aiming for a slightly different look with the new version, and boy did people get mad.
I don’t necessarily mind the new squarer vibe from a few feet back, as they intend for you to view it from, but I’ll grant that a head-to-head comparison with a Tidbyt Classic (on the bottom) is pretty rough given that “sharper, crisper, clearer” was the pitch to Kickstarter backers:
You know who totally hit it out of the park in this category? Tuneshine with their album art display, which is beautifully constructed, syncs smoothly with every music service, and is basically as close to perfect execution on a product as I can recall. I adore this thing:
Do I have a small bespoke LED display problem? How dare you; I need all of these^[1] for my work:

c/o traintrackr. They also make them for many other fine transit agencies, and have some beautiful live weather maps. ↩︎

Weeknotes 44: Accidental Garbage

2024-09-15T12:00:00Z

Up to date on all our vaccines. Sore arm is a small price to pay to be freshly inoculated against the ever-present horrors.
Happy iPhone announcement day to those who begrudgingly celebrate. I’d love to be the kind of person who just uses a phone until it doesn’t work anymore without another thought, but I’ve given up on that dream.
Also, I feel like I have an excuse this year: the battery on my 15 Pro has truly just given up. I haven’t been able to make it through the day for months. It tuns into a death spiral pretty quickly: dying earlier, which means more frequent recharging, which means more heat and more cycles on the battery, which wears it out even faster. Somehow this phone has 450 full charge cycles on it in 11 months and the health is in the mid 80%s.
I really don’t think I’ve been using it any differently than any other iPhone I’ve had, so I’m just assuming this particular lithium cell is haunted.
Only other Apple note: Proud of myself for keeping the betas off my phone all summer. Learning and growing.
The Power Broker is finally available as an e-book starting tomorrow, if you’re the kind of person who values portability over the other uses of this particular book. Also still plenty of time to catch up on the incredible book club from the 99% Invisible crew.
A pox on the house of people who put USB-C ports on things without actually reading the specification. I broke open a cheap little cabinet light that wouldn’t take a charge to see in what novel way it had failed only to realize it was just one of these cursed objects missing whatever magic little resistor lets a C charger actually start sending juice. It was completely fine, but had been disassembled by a brute (read: me) in such a way that it was now accidentally garbage.
I’ve started putting little stickers on all the “looks like C, but you have to use a cable that’s A on the other end” so I stop throwing them away by accident.

Weeknotes 43: Over the Air

2024-09-08T12:00:00Z

This week in “corporate mom & dad are fighting”: Disney & AT&T are having a disagreement which means we can’t watch ABC or ESPN anymore, I guess? It also means getting targeted ads on every platform that feel like they’re part of a public safety scare campaign from the 70s^[1]:
All this just in time for the start of fall sports and the finale of The Bachelorette, so I had to frantically come up with a backup plan. It was finally enough frustration to blow through the separation energy and get a $20 paper antenna.
I have known for a while that the story around OTA channels was pretty good now, but really wasn’t prepared to pull in over 100 of them from the basement with basically zero effort.
Side benefit: all the streaming TV providers are minimum 30 seconds behind live (usually closer to 90 seconds), which is pretty brutal for a nail-biter of a game or when you’re chatting about some live event. Nice to be living in the now.
Given a few days to overengineer things, here’s where we ended up: there’s an HDHomeRun tuner hooked up to that antenna in the network closet under the stairs. That’s paired with Channels DVR running on my Synology. So now we can watch and record four different things from local TV and stream it to any of our devices anywhere in the world. Neat.
Recommended reading: Jaya’s When Did All the Recipes Get ‘Garlicky’? over at Eater. May we someday be brave enough to retvrn to the “Eggs Obstaculos” era.

“Nevertheless, some New Yorkers do manage to survive…” The Guardian has a great history of this wild moment in time. ↩︎

Weeknotes 42: Cognitohazard of Filth

2024-09-01T12:00:00Z

Took my first ride on the Dickens Greenway to get home from an errand in Lincoln Park. So nice to have a safe(ish) bike route (almost) all the way to the lake.
We got a new vacuum that came with something called the “Fluffy Optic™ cleaner head”. It’s actually a pretty clever idea: cast a bright light at just the right angle so that the tiniest particles of dust cast massive shadows. The only trade-off is that using it once curses you with the knowledge that even things that look clean are caked in a thick layer of unescapable filth.

You should seriously need to be cleared by a therapist or sign some kind of waiver before you’re allowed to purchase this thing. It’s pure cognitohazard.
Rounded out the weekend with trips to the farmers market and bringing home entirely too many grillables from Publican Quality Meats.
A very brave dog is all caught up on her shots for the year. Her people should follow in her brave example now that this year’s COVID & flu shots are out.

Weeknotes 41: Housekeeping

2024-08-25T12:00:00Z

Some background: gotta keep track of your recurring shared household tasks (replace the furnace filters, clean the toilets, etc.), right? Keep everyone in the family on the same page and make sure you don’t forget until the dust bunnies take over?
Apple Reminders does sync within the family and generate reminders, but things left in there bounce wildly between undiscoverable and “you may not use your phone until marking this complete.” The scheduling/recurrence system also isn’t flexible enough for the realities that sometimes you do stuff a few days late, which should influence the next due date.
So I did a homebuilt to-do thing a few months ago that keeps track of what’s coming up and fires off an email to everyone each morning with what’s on tap.
Which works just fine, but also leads us to this week’s diversion: I personally don’t use my email inbox as a to-do list. When I want to see what I have to do today, I go to Things. That’s really where I’d prefer tasks show up for me.
Oh hey, Things supports a custom URL scheme for editing tasks, so I could just put “Add All” links in my morning emails!
But of course, that doesn’t work, because Gmail on iOS & Android strips non-HTTP(S) URLs out with no indication they were ever links at all.
The eventual workaround: the “Add” link is actually an https:// link back to an endpoint on my own server with the smallest amount of data required to generate that things:/// URL and do a redirect.
All of this is actually very satisfying! Yet another recurrence of the realization that computers are fun when you use them to solve a small problem with tiny bits of glue.

Weeknotes 40: Tuning the Algorithm

2024-08-18T12:00:00Z

The Democratic National Convention is in town next week, so we’re getting Ospreys practicing high-speed passes a thousand feet directly over the house.
Really enjoyed this interview with game developer Zach Gage, most recently of Puzzmo fame. This part especially resonated:

I never want people to be playing one of my games and go, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now?”
I start every day with Puzzmo’s Crossword, SpellTower, and Pile-Up Poker, and never feel sucked in to my phone like I do with Instagram et al.
Still desperately trying to retrain my Instagram/Threads algorithm into something enjoyable, but seems like a lost cause. For reasons totally opaque to me, it’s exclusively clips from TV shows I’ve never watched and stories of medical tragedies from inspirational widows I’ve never met. All efforts to mark everything “not interested” have bore no fruit.

Weeknotes 39: Back in the Saddle

2024-08-11T12:00:00Z

Somehow this week was my first time back on a bicycle since Norway. It feels amazing to be able to use a bike to do useful work like running an errand or getting to an appointment faster than you could have driven.
Still well over 500 miles cycled for the year. My original goal of 1,000 is starting to fade a bit out of sight as colder weather looms, but who knows!
Beautiful weekend for the Air and Water Show. This year, we set up camp on the beach with a bunch of friends.
I spent a good chunk of the night before frantically digging through my closet for my old cameras and big glass, most of which hasn’t gotten a workout since our trip to Africa almost five years ago. A good reminder for me that a camera is like a hammer: a study, reliable tool that wants to be used, not babied.
Batteries, on the other head, are fragile volatile babies. Shockingly coaxed a few of them into taking a partial charge, but they’ll be treated with the side-eye any old lithium pack deserves going forward. Terrified that they’d just been slowly degrading in a bankers box for half a decade.
I really missed the feeling of a full-size SLR body with a big chunky battery grip that fits perfectly in your hand and just happily machine-guns 10 RAW frames a second all day long. It’s hard to imagine ever going back to carrying that kind of kit around, but I don’t see how I’ll ever be able to get rid of any of it.
Really need to rethink how I handle images on this site. Even a simple little lightbox would be a nice improvement. Add it to the to-do list…

Weeknotes 38: Boredom! At the Transborder Concourse

2024-08-04T12:00:00Z

Finally made it to Whirlyball, a local office-teambuilding-event mainstay that I had somehow never done. It’s basically lacrosse in bumper cars. However bad I am at sports in general is multiplied when I have to do many of them simultaneously.
Rounded out our hosting duties with a few more lovely stops at Momotaro, Lazy Bird, and Lonesome Rose. Open offer: we will use your presence as an excuse to execute an ad-hoc progressive dinner.
No sooner than our guests left for the airport, I was right behind. Off to Toronto again for a few days of work.
My team continued its proud tradition talking about a bunch of interesting places we could check out for dinner, and then ending up at another Kinton Ramen, which seem to be every 500 feet downtown.
This visit’s new taste experience: Amaro-flavored seltzer. Review: 👍👍.
Both trips through YYZ this year have included hours of delays. Even when I was booking flights, most of the options had a historic on-time performance somewhere around 30%. As a result, I’ve gotten very familiar with the F gates: the liminal space between U.S. Customs Preclearance and your plane. The America Jr. Autonomous Zone, if you like.
It’s a cool idea – clear customs where you are and arrive back in the U.S. as if you were on a domestic flight – though it does create a ton of edge cases that I can’t find any real answers to. You pass through customs and the associated opportunity to make a declaration before you arrive in the holding pen with nothing to do but browse the duty free shops. What happens if you go wild and just careen past your allowance of tax-free maple syrup? There’s nobody left to declare to!
As best I can tell, the limiting factor is just “what you can carry” since your checked bags are already on the way. I leave it to a greater criminal mastermind to evolve the concept.

Weeknotes 37: Between Meals

2024-07-28T12:00:00Z

Friends in town this weekend! And lovely weather for it too.
One of the best things about our neighborhood is that there’s so much to do that our radius with visitors keeps getting smaller. On your first trip to Chicago, sure, we’ll take you downtown, but after that, we almost never need more than a 20 minute walk to anything.
This time around: brunch at Etta, pasta at Daisies, and an indecisiveness-fueled side-by-side between Detroit-style pizza from Jet’s and tavern style from my beloved Pizza Matta. We also managed to squeeze in drinks at Best Intentions and continued chipping our way through Volume 3 of the menu at The Meadowlark.
Clearly we have not yet discovered the answer.

Weeknotes 36: Strike Two

2024-07-21T12:00:00Z

Oops, forgot again.

Weeknotes 35: A Synonym, Except When It Isn't

2024-07-14T12:00:00Z

Our triannual guilty pleasure franchise is back with the latest season of The Bachelorette. We’re in a fantasy league with a dozen other friends: the winner gets some cash, the loser gets a truly horrible thematic prize, and we all get something to chat about on a Monday night.
I actually hate the concept of a “guilty pleasure.” There are not good or bad things to like. Enjoy the things you enjoy!
Words are outstanding:

Triannual is commonly used to mean one of two things: occurring once every three years or occurring three times per year. It is a synonym of the less commonly used triennial, which can mean every three years or lasting for three years.
See also: “Bi- vs Biannual vs Biennial”

Weeknotes 34: Blue Beanie Emeritus

2024-07-07T12:00:00Z

Enjoying the full-artillery-barrage energy our neighborhood always brings to the 4th of July. Keeping the garden hose nearby…
Rounded the week out with a lovely little backyard party with friends. Never let me forget how perfect Chicago is in the summertime.
Small website improvements corner: fiddled with the markup with microformats in mind. Should be a bit easier to pluck out locations, dates, and other attributes now, even though I think we’ve all given up on such things long ago.
Really feeling nostalgic for the web standards community I came up in: reading Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer and flipping through the CSS Zen Garden and thinking about progressive enhancement and polyfills.
We’ve just made everything so much more complicated and lost so much empathy. Computers can be fun when you use them to make things easier!
I am in a mood apparently!

Weeknotes 33: Assaisonnées

2024-06-30T12:00:00Z

Spent the first 36 hours of my business trip quarantined in my hotel room waiting to see which way my post-nasal drip and sore throat were gonna go. Thankfully not flu or strep or COVID and cleared up pretty quick. Be careful out there folks.
Bless Canada’s willingness to sell you pseudoephedrine without a cavity search.
Looking forward to spending more time in Toronto in the coming years. I was pretty heads down this time, but still managed to wander around the waterfront a bit. Any town with streetcars is a-ok in my book.
Every time I will smuggle back a mind-boggling quantity of all-dressed chips:

[The flavor is described] as a mix of ketchup, barbecue sauce, sour cream and onion, and salt & vinegar.

We really can have it all!
Home just in time to enjoy a little bit of Chicago summer at the Logan Square Arts Festival and the patio at Parson’s.

Weeknotes 32: Travel Curse Redux

2024-06-23T12:00:00Z

Cycled 140 miles through Norway. 11,600 feet of elevation gained over five days. Not a flat country.
E-bikes have come a long way. The Cannondales we were riding weighed less than 40 pounds and still (mostly) managed demanding days on one battery. Unfortunately, they do not yet provide any kind of assist to an ass that’s unaccustomed to hours in the saddle.
A few highlights: jumping into a fjord from a floating sauna, experiencing true innovation in things you can put salt-dried cod on, and waking up in the Juvet Landskapshotell, which you might recognize from Succession Season 4:
The journey home started Thursday at 3:45a. Careful readers will recall that this is the point I’ve been expecting the trip to go off the rails for months now. A recap: after landing in Amsterdam, we’d need to ride a little bus back to the terminal, meet our bags at the baggage claim, recheck them with United, clear security and passport control out of the EU, and get to our other flight. We had about 45 minutes to get our bags turned over, and another hour to manage the rest.
…completely uneventful! Bags turned in with 10 minutes to spare, bodies at the gate almost an hour early. Then the rolling delays started.
Our flight eventually cancelled a few hours later. It took another four hours at the airport to get a new booking (for the next day, with a cartoonishly optimistic 65-minute connection through Newark), reenter the EU, and summon our bags back from the bowels of Schiphol.
But hey, on my fifth pass through Amsterdam, I finally left the airport! We made an evening of it with drinks at Tales & Spirits and dinner at Balthazar’s Keuken.
I accidentally ordered an America-coded cocktail at the former and it came with a little diecast General Lee that blared Dixie every time the waiter bonked it, which was roughly once every four minutes. Lesson learned.
Also, we eventually made it home ~40 hours late and United owes us €1,200. Know your rights when you’re traveling in the civilized world.
Thus began 36 frantic hours at home: Pick up puppy, water a very thirsty lawn, sleep, unpack, laundry, repack, make sure I didn’t catch COVID, back to the airport.
A general observation: everyone, everywhere, seems to be a little sick right now. I’m not sure if its just heightened awareness and it was always like this, but all public spaces, whether in United States or Norway or The Netherlands, are a gauntlet of coughing and runny noses.
And just like that: away to Toronto.

Weeknotes 31: Plague Delay

2024-06-16T12:00:00Z

Small improvement corner just in time for being away from a big computer: this site now publishes itself on pushes to the main branch, just like I threatened back in December. Six months of thinking about doing it; 15 minutes to get it hooked up. Computers!
Wednesday & Thursday spent in transit to Norway. The trip itself is worthy of its own post, so let’s do some travel whining instead…
The way there was supposed to be the easy part, with a five hour layover in Amsterdam. We boarded our first leg on time, but as soon as they disconnected ground power, the entire plane went dark. After a few more tries and a visit from maintenance, the mystery was solved: the intake for the Auxiliary Power Unit was completely blocked by cicadas. In fact, the entire duct was stuffed full of plague insects.
Sidenote: this is entirely incompatible with what little I knew about cicadas, chief among which is that they only travel about 15 meters in their life. Unclear to me how several thousand of them braved the ramp at O’Hare, but that’s a mystery for an entomologist.
A few hours of noble effort (I presume with a leaf blower or a broom) got nowhere, so that Dreamliner got pulled out of service for delousing and we finally left on another piece of metal almost four hours late.
This is where me being a certified idiot factors in, because I booked two different round trips on either side of Amsterdam since no airline would sell us a reasonable itinerary on a single reservation. Which means our formerly five-hour, now just-over-one-hour connection was unprotected. As “self-transfers”, our luggage would not be checked through, but waiting on the belt on the far side of passport control. We’d have to leave the secure area, check our bags in before the cutoff, go through security again, and get to the opposite side of Schiphol.
A Home Alone-esque sprint and many extremely lucky dice rolls found us and our bags onboard our connecting flight with a few minutes to spare. The way back is just as tight assuming no delays; wish us luck.
But we made it to beautiful Ålesund late Thursday afternoon to begin our Scandinavian adventure. More on that to come.

Weeknotes 30: The Local Hill

2024-06-09T12:00:00Z

The calendar for June is daunting, so this week was our last chance to get the little life stuff out of the way before a brief don’t-tempt-the-fates pre-travel lockdown.
We used to have this whole distinction between “trips” and “vacations”, where the latter is sort of a test of exclusion that only “laying very still by a body of water while being handed little umbrellaed beverages” satisfies. I think my personal definition is shifting as time goes on, and I reluctantly acknowledge that its often not worth trekking all the way to a place without doing and seeing the things you’re supposed to do and see there^[1].
To channel John & Merlin^[2], I mostly like being places, I don’t particularly enjoy getting to places, and I’m especially not wild about being away from my place. There’s just too much ambient anxiety to channel into if the flowers are getting enough water or the basement is getting too much.
The especially annoying thing about an anxious mind is that if something actually does go wrong, you just sort of effortlessly shift into that higher gear and smoothly solve the problem. It’s the maybe that kills you.
Speaking of: we’ve got some daring flight connections coming up, so pray for Mojo.

My mother calls this “being taken to the top of the local hill.” ↩︎
The relevant segment is in the member-only bonus section, so throw them a few bucks. ↩︎

Weeknotes 29: Chekhov's Heel

2024-06-02T12:00:00Z

Puppy went in for annual maintenance and got all her fluids topped off. Every time, we marvel at how the vet is more thorough, compassionate, and engaged than almost any of our human healthcare providers. No rushing, no dismissing. Referral to a specialist? Sure, how’s tomorrow? Lucky dog.
Speaking of human health: my heel has been ever so slightly sore on and off for a few weeks. This is not interesting or important; just putting it here apropos of nothing so when it becomes a major plot point months from now, I can point back with a big “welp.”
Birthday weekend for my darling wife! Highlights: new cocktail menu at The Meadowlark, channeling our inner 20-somethings with friends on a rainy evening at Federales, and dinner at Tre Dita.
Inverse review: long video good!

Weeknotes 28: Airport Hubris

2024-05-26T12:00:00Z

Snuck back to Minnesota again to surprise my dad for his birthday. 🎉
The surprise went flawlessly, but the entire journey there was a comedy of errors. Our hubris getting to the airport a little later for each trip finally caught up to us. Highlights: a few extra laps through the parking garage, a security checkpoint in shambles, a hobble through the wrong terminal on a tweaked ankle, and a Shining-level nosebleed right on rotation. But we made it.
Most of my air travel growing up was non-revving, a perk for airline employees and their families where you could ride in otherwise-empty seats for a few bucks. There was a dress code (in case the only seat was in First Class) and you just sort of showed up at the airport at 5 a.m. and lined up at one gate after the other until you lucked out. I imagine this doesn’t work at all anymore, since I don’t think I’ve seen an empty seat on a plane in fifteen years.
Needless to say, my instinct for always wearing slacks and arriving four hours early has completely dissolved. Time to go back? Reject modernity; embrace sitting around at an Auntie Anne’s.
We usually fly United (because Chicago) and they’ve ordered a lot – no, really, a lot – of new planes with the realistically-sized overhead bins^[1] and seatback entertainment with Bluetooth and the whole nine yards. But in the meantime, you get the oldest domestic mainline fleet imaginable. If you’re lucky, you end up on a plane so old that it skipped the early-00s refresh that squished all the seats too close and tore out all the TVs and instead get the dying gasps of 30-year-old leather and all the potato-ified DirecTV you can handle.
Spotify is killing my sweet boy. Was it ever useful? No, not really, but it served nobly in our non-CarPlay-capable car for a few years until I got worried people would think it was a phone and bust a window trying to take it. Now it lives on my desk as a deeply clumsy music remote. Big fan of niche hardware experiments though. Extreme bummer to push a deliberate “turn this into e-waste” software update for a thing that currently does its dumb thing just fine.

“Oh. Wow. Oh. Jeez. We didn’t think everyone was gonna bring a bag!” ↩︎

Weeknotes 27: Seasonal Bandana

2024-05-19T12:00:00Z

It’s Farmers Market season again! Always nice to get a good walk in, eat some treats, and incidentally come home with radishes.
Spotted a weed growing through the fence from the neighbor’s yard that shot up over my head seemingly overnight. Turns out it was poison hemlock and I simply do not think that things that can kill you should just pop out of the ground at random; just my opinion.
Underappreciated trade: when we send our dog in for a grooming appointment, she comes back with a seasonal bandana. Every time. And yes, there is a bandana for all occasions – no repeats in 10 years.

Weeknotes 26: How to Remember

2024-05-12T12:00:00Z

Spent the back half of the week in southern Minnesota with family. Unexpected perk of being in the middle of nowhere: no light pollution to get in the way of enjoying the surprise aurora:
Hoo boy, have I missed working with Ruby on Rails. Generators! Inflectors! Convention over configuration! Good stuff.
I have not missed getting a working Ruby setup on the Mac. This guide did the trick in about 30 minutes. Maybe harder than it used to be, but at least you own the universe at the end instead of constantly trying to sudo and chown your way around a bunch of increasingly locked down system files.
Always sit on the left side of the plane when you’re flying into Chicago^[1]:
Aside from this Adam Savage Q&A that’s stuck in my brain:

“One of the key things magicians do is not tricks in front of you. One of the most important things they’re doing is happening commensurate with that: they are telling you how to remember what they did.”

At least during the ~60% of the time when they’re using the 27/28 runways in West Flow. Otherwise, enjoy your view of Schaumburg. ↩︎

Weeknotes 25: Microtransactions

2024-05-05T12:00:00Z

Been making a real habit of riding the bike more this year, outside when I can and on the Peloton when I can’t. HealthKit works well as a central source of truth but really doesn’t make it easy to answer a question in any form other than a bar/line graph.
Kellan had the same problem and put together some Swift that I was able to fork to add a few other time ranges I cared about. Apparently, I cycled about 88 miles last year. So far in 2024, I’m sneaking up on 300 miles. Gonna see if I can break 1,000 before year’s end.
Wow, I sure do not know iOS development! I’m not the biggest “AI-all-the-things!” booster, but I will admit it’s occasionally handy for “I know what I want, and I know how I’d ask for it in three other languages, just not Swift.” Put another way: if and only if you have sufficient context to understand when the response is just completely wrong, it be can a helpful way to get unstuck.
Every month, Amazon Web Services, a division of a company with a market cap of just shy of $2,000,000,000,000.00, sends me a bill for $0.02^[1]. Presumably I’ve left something rotting in an S3 bucket for a decade and forgotten about it. I get the email, and I think “Hmm, I should figure out what that is,” but the time it takes my brain to formulate that is already worth more than two cents of my sweet precious life.
Compare that to Fly.io, where I host a few Remix projects, which sends me this email once a month:

We don’t collect bills smaller than $5.00. This month, your bill falls below that threshold, so we’re discounting it by 100%.
Small improvement corner: posts have always had a location associated with them, but it wasn’t exposed anywhere. Now it is. It’s basically always gonna say “Chicago”, but there are a few treats sprinkled in some earlier weeknotes.

I guess they didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks. ↩︎

Weeknotes 24: Smooth, but Not Powersmooth

2024-04-28T12:00:00Z

Busy getting up to speed at my new job. In case I never mention it again, let it be known that everyone I’ve met has been great and the amount of thought they’ve put into onboarding is really something special. Extremely excited to dig in.
If the first rule of the Internet is that we can’t have nice things, the first footnote is that sometimes we accidentally have them for a very short time. That’s why I’ve made a habit of ensuring that the really, really, really^[1] important videos fall off a truck and find their way to my Synology. I’ve always just tried to remember to do this occasionally, but I finally took the time to automate it. Now I can add a video to an unlisted YouTube playlist and it’ll eventually find its way into my Plex library. Always be archiving, folks.
I know exactly enough math to function, but occasionally I dip my head in to see if I could have made more of a go of the theoretical bits, and the answer is always no. Did you know numbers can be smooth? Too visceral? Perhaps you’d prefer an untouchable number. They can also be extravagant, betrothed, or just plain weird (abundant, but not semiperfect, obviously). This week’s entry: the interesting number paradox:

if there exists a non-empty set of uninteresting natural numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number – but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number.

They have played us for absolute fools.
Invasive fact I was recently exposed to: it doesn’t say anywhere that Humpty Dumpty is an egg.

Turns out JaNee does in fact know what she’s doing ↩︎

Weeknotes 23: I Hope I'm Good at This

2024-04-21T12:00:00Z

Final week of funemployment in the books. What did we learn? There were some good bike rides. The dog is sick of all the attention. Sort of cleaned the garage, but then mostly made it worse again (do not start down the rabbit hole of Akro-Mils bins). Will try to stay employed going forward. Alright, good retro.
Small improvement corner: Reworked image handling pretty significantly using the handy eleventy-img plugin. Previously, I was just dropping files in a folder. Now we’re outputting both jpeg and webp in a bunch of smaller sizes at build time. There are a ton of bugs to squash and room to optimize the output sizes, but it already feels more considered than just dropping a 24MP image (sorry!) in the middle of a list. A reminder that I need to brush up on the latest & greatest thinking around resolution-independent images and srcsets. Will probably start here; Jake has never steered me wrong.
Remember NPR First Listen? They’d post entire albums to stream about a month before their release date. This was largely before the subscription music app days and I know it drove a ton of purchases on iTunes for me. I was completely obsessed. I even ran a Twitter bot to grab new posts off the NPR API and announce them back when that was a thing that was allowed. Seems like it died a quiet death at the beginning of the pandemic. RIP.
It really makes me nostalgic for how much more enjoyable discovering and listening to music used to be, even if it was arguably harder to find and certainly more expensive. What I wouldn’t give to have Rdio again, or even go all the way back to a carefully curated collection on an iPod. I know there are at least a few folks retrofitting old iPods with fresh batteries, giant SSDs, and even Bluetooth. I am deliberately avoiding any more research into how to get one of these because it is catnip formulated exactly for me.
A friendship thought technology from my wife: always end plans with friends by making your next plans.

Weeknotes 22: 93.9%

2024-04-14T12:00:00Z

Eclipse! We flirted with the idea of driving down into Southern Illinois or Indiana to try to catch totality, but made no real arrangements and both the weather and the roads looked like they were in rapid decline Monday morning, so we enjoyed a beautiful day in the back yard instead.
Chicago still got to enjoy 93.9 percent of the eclipse, though as Annie Dillard said^[1]:

Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.
Though really, why wait for something so majestic to come to you? Anyone up for Iceland or Spain in 2026 or Sydney in 2028?
Getting ready to get back to the working world next week. Prepared myself emotionally by putting together a new keyboard, which is clackity like a bingo cage and weighs north of seven pounds for that authentic top-of-the-line hacking deck feel.
For the detail lovers: it’s a Mode Loop TKL with Tomorrow Tactile switches and MV Terminal (R2) keycaps.
Now I just need a clean desk to put it on. A project for the coming week for sure.
72° on Saturday. 82° and sunny today. Remarkably lovely for early April. Trying to enjoy every second of it out in the yard.
Small improvement corner: Added an About page. Just a colophon and a few links for now, but eventually, when a moment without shame emerges, I’ll try to write a proper bio.

Hat tip to Ingrid Burrington’s Perfect Sentences newsletter. ↩︎

Weeknotes 21: 37

2024-04-07T12:00:00Z

I am a year older.
Highlights: a lovely surprise steel bracelet for my beloved Oak and Oscar Olmsted watch and the tasting menu at Smyth with some friends old and new.
Camera Corner (cont.): got my hands on a Q3 and found the tilting screen to – surprise, surprise – actually be kind of handy. That and not needing to carry a charger could actually add up to a day-to-day difference, assuming my Q2 has held some resale value and I can ever find one in stock.
The weather was finally nice enough to get the outside bike up and running for the year. I was pretty maintenance-avoidant when I was shopping (belt drives are amazing!), so with some air in the tires I was up and running. It feels great to not need the car for those two-miles-away-with-an-awkwardly-sized-box errands.
I’ve always wanted to write one of those “things I’ve learned this year” posts around my birthday. Maybe in 2025. In lieu of that: a partial list of words I have never spelled correctly on the first attempt: maintenance, initialize, gauges, rendezvous, precedent, separates, rehearsal, repertoire.
One more thing: Once again gainfully employed. More on that soon…

Weeknotes 20: A Vote for Anarchy!

2024-03-31T12:00:00Z

Finally got confirmation that our Illinois ballots were counted in the primary. I used to be a lot more of a politics junkie before all the **waves hands around wildly** and wow, I do not miss the March Madness of it all. Can’t help but think of The Simpsons with every campaign ad I’ve seen from both parties so far this cycle:
Played with a Leica M11 for a few days and I can see why people say the Q is a gateway drug to it. Not quite a fit for how I want to use a daily driver, but I can see the appeal of a slower approach to photography.
Completed the bidecadal replacement of all the eyeglasses in the house. For somebody who cannot cross a room without aid, it’s wild how resistant I am to ever getting a new pair. Got two pairs of sunglasses this time. Living large.
Yes, they are basically identical to the glasses as I had before. This will happen whether I try to avoid it or not, so I’ve learned to just let it go.
Culled a bunch of parked domains, including a handful that were runners up to host this very website. Farewell to some real gems.
I’m “banterability” pretty much everywhere. I was lucky to grab a unique word^[1], even though it is long and awful to read. Wondering if today’s kids get training in username selection the same way they tried to teach us how to use paper checks.

The key to having a word all to yourself is making it up. ↩︎

Weeknotes 19: Meant to Be Used

2024-03-24T12:00:00Z

Mom and Dad stopped fighting! You can finally use Sonos Voice Control with Spotify as of this week. It’s one of the least fussy interfaces in what it accepts, and it responds as Giancarlo Esposito for some (delightful) reason. Grateful for whatever cursed defensive patent trading happened behind the scenes to make two things that have always worked together in every other respect finally do so here too.
Weird restrictions like this always make me think of the Web 2.0 days where everything was a beautiful jumble of services working together against their will. Yahoo Pipes! HousingMaps! Heck, let’s just bring back frames.
Rented a Sony a7CR to fiddle around with for a few days. Wild that you can walk around with a 60+ megapixel full-frame sensor in your hand.
Shoutout to LensRentals for being a reliable and affordable way to try out preposterously expensive toys. I’ve somehow been a customer for over a decade.
48-hour review: Image quality was excellent. The interface does not at all map to what my brain is used to from Canons and Leicas. The flexibility of changing lenses is nice, but the opposite of what I’m looking for in a travel camera; my years of carrying a bag full of lenses, filters, and hoods are over.
Hard to imagine replacing the Q2 as my favorite piece of kit. The Q3 does fix my biggest gripe (you can charge it over USB-C) at the expense of adding a fold-out screen I vigorously do not want (and being basically impossible to purchase anywhere.)
As I start carrying a camera around more again, trying to take after Harper:

My goal is to break my cameras while using them. My biggest fear is that they will get broken while they are sitting on a counter or a shelf. They are meant to be used.

Weeknotes 18: Fool's Spring

2024-03-17T12:00:00Z

Downright lovely outside. 72°F in the backyard on Tuesday! All the plants are starting to bloom. I feel bad that they don’t know what’s coming. Really looking forward to spending every late afternoon and weekend out back gardening and grilling. When did I turn into a lawn dad?
Last summer, we started composting with WasteNot. They bring out a five-gallon bucket for your food scraps, paper bits, and a surprising amount of other stuff (their rule of thumb: “If it grows, it goes!”). In a week or two, you put it out front and they swing by (in an electric van!) and swap it for another empty one. You can even request an allotment of the finished compost for your garden. We were truly amazed at how much less trash we were generating after we started, and just upped to weekly service. Cannot recommend them highly enough.
Reminder to myself: It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die:

There is no point in time where we have had more access to information than we do now. You could cut out every single possible nanosecond of silence and never make it through.
Met a very good cat named Pound Cake.

Weeknotes 17: Desk Rainbow

2024-03-10T12:00:00Z

Surprise redesign! Still some work to do on the index page and handling layout for very wide screens, but I think things look a little cleaner now. Also got rid of the reset sheet and a lot of the asset bundling that was just overkill for a relatively small stylesheet.
Is it too orangey? Maybe. Mostly trying to push back on my natural instinct to make everything blue.
Last note in small improvement corner: Realized I wasn’t shipping any diacritics in my font stack, and we simply cannot live without umlauts, can we Mötley Crüe?
Pouring one out for A Book Apart winding things down after 14 years. I’ve collected at least two dozen of the physical editions in a beautiful little rainbow over my desk. Reflecting fondly on the number of brilliant thinkers they gave a megaphone to over the years to preach a more thoughtful approach to frontend.

Weeknotes 16: Plate Lunch

2024-03-03T12:00:00Z

We got back from Hawaii at the crack of dawn this morning. Hello from whatever time zone my brain is currently sliding through on the way back to normal.
Beyond just being a pleasant place to spend some time, we’ve got a lot of history on O’ahu. My dad grew up there, and it was the first place I ever travelled as a baby. We’ve still got family there and they were nice enough to let us housesit.
Could get used to being woken up by the breeze and wandering down to the beach to watch the sun rise every day.
It was basically my perfect idea of a trip: one or two touristy things max, lots of walking around looking at stuff, no conception of what time it is at any point.
Contrasting with our previous discussion of insulation, enter Hawaiian construction: no heat, no air conditioning, lots of windows that you never close. My grandmother’s old house even had a big cutout in the middle of the living room ceiling where it just rained into the house.
On the flight out, I watched more movies than I have in the last year: Dumb Money (ok, but I maybe knew too much of the story going in), Pitch Perfect (always a banger), Pitch Perfect 2 (our friends are back, with a few new faces!), Pitch Perfect 3 (a loose collection of events occurring somewhat in chronological order).
Also finished two books: Test Gods by Nicholas Schmidle and Extremely Hardcore by Zoë Schiffer, both of which were really good. Maybe I will even read a fiction book someday, who knows!
Koi get much bigger than I would’ve thought.

Weeknotes 15: Coding Olympics

2024-02-25T12:00:00Z

Starting to have some conversations about where I end up next and getting acquainted with what the interview process looks like from the other side of the desk nowadays.
Basically everything in this article.
I do think that things like take-home assignments can be used thoughtfully, like as a hedge against nerves coding in front of an audience or working in an unfamiliar development environment, but wow that is not how they’re being used by most.
The good news is that so many places doing such a weird job makes it easier to spot companies that are being thoughtful and it reflects well on them.
Much to consider from somewhere warmer. Let’s see if I can do a deploy of this site from an airplane…

Weeknotes 14: Button Surgery

2024-02-18T12:00:00Z

Look at me, puttering along in my little routine! Spent a good chunk of the week cleaning out my office so interviewers aren’t transfixed by the mess.
I usually run the MacBook Pro on my desk in clamshell mode with an external display, mouse, and keyboard, but it’s a bummer to not have access to the Touch ID button. You can use one of Apple’s Magic Keyboards, but they leave a lot to be desired typing-wise.
This week’s side quest: Performing surgery on a Magic Keyboard to yoink the little nub out for a standalone Touch ID sensor. Huge credit to this guide, this video, and this 3-D model for keeping me on track.
And now I have a dedicated fingerprint reader in a 3-D printed enclosure so I can enjoy typing on my lovely clackity little Mode Envoy. Always nice to find a project that bundles up as many hobbies and tools as possible.
Small improvement corner: hey look, pictures! I need to spend some time with eleventy-img and think about how I’d like to optimize things, but in the tradition of this project, doing the dumbest possible thing first and getting around to the smart thing down the road.
Also finally fixed the weird bug where links had inconsistent colors. I was trying to be too clever in my reset stylesheet.
Related: remember CSS resets? Probably not.

Weeknotes 13: Funemployment

2024-02-11T12:00:00Z

First full week of surprise funemployment. What have I been doing with myself? Cleaning mostly!
Very deliberately avoiding creating a bunch of large-scale life projects to complete with my newfound free time. I would not mind coming out the other side a little more organized/a little smarter/a little healthier, but trying not to make it something I can fail at.
Calling it a win if I find a new job before the dog gets sick of all the extra attention.

Weeknotes 12: The Next 16 Years

2024-02-04T12:00:00Z

Welp: layoff season got personal.
I said it on LinkedIn, but I’ll repeat it here: Don’t sleep on any of my Braintree/PayPal colleagues who were also impacted. Really incredible talent and just genuinely great people you’d be lucky to have on your team.
I’m really appreciative of all the former coworkers who reached out with suggestions and support. Grateful to have left a few bridges unburned.
Trying to be thoughtful and considerate about whatever comes next. If history continues, I seem to stay at each job for double the time I was at the last. Any hot tips on where I’d like to be in 2039?

Weeknotes 11: Factory Original Eyeball

2024-01-28T12:00:00Z

I’ve really enjoyed reading folks saying exactly what I’ve been thinking about the state of React lately. Both Cassidy and Tom capture more eloquently than I could how strange it is to watch our tool flourish internally while completely stagnating to the outside world.
In case my priors aren’t sufficiently clear, there’s a reason this site doesn’t have a spec of React on it, but I still spend more time in that universe than anywhere else, especially for my day job, and I certainly respect what it’s capable of. I just wish I didn’t have to handwave bugs away waiting for the elusive 18.3 drop.
In other “mad at technology” news: Thank you to Apple Vision Pro™ for making it once more time for me to selfishly root against all things 3-D / VR / AR / XR / face computers.
My particular physiological affliction has made all of these technologies at worst completely inaccessible and at best just boring. I spent quite a bit of time with a Meta Quest 2, and the overall effect was just like having a heavy TV on my face.
There was already very little risk I was going to drop four grand on an Apple Vision Pro, but it helped that it 1. doesn’t support my prescription 2. is extremely unlikely to know what to do with the one eye that’s not factory original equipment and 3. would require me to buy a whole extra screen that I wouldn’t use.
In case it’s unclear: I don’t expect everything to be for me! Google Glass was kind of cool (even more so if it hadn’t shipped with a camera) and accidentally sat on the side of my face that worked for me (yes, I have one, which lives in my little museum of ancient technology alongside the Palm VII and a third-generation iPod that might still be my favorite consumer electronics object). I don’t begrudge anybody enjoying a cool fun time, but I can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief every time we all move on without embracing this.

Weeknotes 10: Rescue Mission

2024-01-21T12:00:00Z

It cold! I don’t envy the things that construction in this part of the country has to be ready for. In August, we topped out at 101°F and just five months later it’s -10°F. Somehow still cozy. Not too bad for wood and old newspapers.
Friday, we saw a little dog doing laps through the alley behind our house several times throughout the day. We eventually determined it didn’t have a person attached and set out on a rescue mission. After about 15 minutes of searching the neighborhood, another 30 of gentle coaxing, and a tactical pincer maneuver, we managed to lure them into our garage to check for a tag or a microchip (thanks Flipper Zero).
Fast forward to this evening, when we finally got word that the little critter had both a name (Coco!) and a family, who they had been successfully reunited with!
Everything that happened in between those two bullets is deeply frustrating. Trust that many mental notes have been made about the various public and private entities who failed us monumentally as we tried to help a small creature that couldn’t help himself on a cold night. Every step of the way, the most obvious thing to do was made either needlessly complicated or impossible. I honestly don’t know what other people do in situations like this.
Godspeed, Coco ❤️. May this weekend’s odyssey be the entertaining anecdote you tell all the other dogs at the park for the rest of your long, happy life.

Weeknotes 9: Ope

2024-01-14T12:00:00Z

Only took nine weeks for me to forget to write this. Strike one. On we go…

Weeknotes 8: v3

2024-01-07T12:00:00Z

Small improvement corner: this site is now running on a prerelease version of Eleventy 3.0, which was unsurprisingly smooth. What a great project.
I’ve been making the transition from CommonJS to ESM in all my little side projects over the last few months and it really hasn’t been all that painful. Looking forward to being on the far side of that transition across the ecosystem.
Trying out Bookwyrm as a way to keep better track of my reading without directly funneling it into another Amazon data center.
Note to self for next year: take more time off around the end of the year.

Weeknotes 7: Food Option™

2023-12-31T12:00:00Z

Final car news: It’s a holiday miracle! The morning we set off back to Chicago, the check engine light had gone off by itself and the door ding had undung itself overnight. The car got some fresh brake fluid as a treat for putting up with our mistreatment.
Spent a little time in the office this week. I think it’s always pretty quiet, and with holiday PTO on top, there were so few of us that all the lights kept turning themselves off every few minutes until you flailed your arms around and demonstrated some sign of life.
Given my distributed team, I really don’t feel any loss continuing to work remotely myself. If anything, I’m pushing for an off-site or two where we can see each others faces this calendar year instead of just doing Teams from a bunch of conference rooms instead of a bunch of houses.
The biggest thing I do miss about going to work in a building every day: food options.
Set foot in one of the Amazon Go robot stores in our building. I’m increasingly becoming a conspiracy theorist that the technology behind it didn’t pan out and they’re just faking it with someone rewinding through security footage. When the first Go stores opened, I remember getting a receipt almost instantly as I walked out the door. This time, I was in the store for 48 seconds, picked up a single item, and didn’t get a receipt for over three hours.
Coincidentally related: enjoyed Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil, which seems like it’ll be my last book of 2023. I only finished a half-dozen books this year, which might be an all-time low. I sure did start a lot though, so partial credit.
And that’s a wrap on 2023! Thanks for being here. Hoping all of us make it through 2024 any which we we can.

Weeknotes 6: Gamer LEDs

2023-12-24T12:00:00Z

Rough week for our car just in time for its one big road trip of the year. My bike fell off the wall and put a nice big dent in the door, and the check engine light came on just as we started our outbound leg.
When it’s time for a replacement, we are the perfect candidates for an electric car. If we drive at all, it’s maybe two or three times a week, rarely more than 10 miles. Our only longish drive is less than 500 miles each way once a year along a well-electrified corridor.
All I really want is my exact car, but with batteries instead of a gas tank. It even exists, but the manufacturer just doesn’t feel like selling it in the US for some reason. Most of the comparable options are bizarro future concept cars with gamer LEDs everywhere. See also (listen also?), this discussion on a recent episode of ATP about the state of modern EVs, starting around 1h19m.
Given the entire industry’s planned hop to the Tesla/NACS connector in ~2025, I also don’t want buy the last car sold in the United States that needs a dongle forever.
Anyway, I guess this has been your episode of Car Talk for the week. Don’t drive like my brother…

Weeknotes 5: Slender Screws and Large Ants

2023-12-17T12:00:00Z

A few days in Mexico celebrating our friends’ 10th anniversary. A very nice break from the holiday rush.
A lot of stuff claims to be “water resistant” now, but I still always assume its just a matter of time after getting anything electronic wet. So when my Sonos Roam made a brief visit to the bottom of a hot tub this weekend, I was ready to say goodbye. But it’s still going strong a few days and charge cycles later. Way to go, IP67 rating!
Ingress protection codes are a whole journey. The first number is resistance to solids, which usually means dust (though the standard does also describe things like “fingers”, “slender screws”, and “large ants.”) The second number is for liquids, with ratings for everything for drips & splashes up to high-pressure, high-temperature water jets. Thorough.
Tiny improvement news: look at those fancy ordinals up in the first bullet.
I still need to look into why link colors are behaving inconsistently on here. I’m not sure how the convention of breaking the browser-default behavior of visited links being a different color came about, but maybe I should just bow out and let the browser do its thing.
“Let the browser do its thing” is as close to a development philosophy as I have these days. Static sites as much as possible; frameworks like Remix when they’re warranted.

Weeknotes 4: The Good Old Days

2023-12-10T12:00:00Z

Gray and rainy. Not quite winter, but definitely not fall.
Interacting with the medical establishment for a minor concern a.k.a. making a phone call to schedule a appointment to visit an office and request permission to make another phone call to schedule another appointment.
Advent of Code usually builds up to the point where a naive solution takes too long to run, but I can’t remember the last time it was already like that on Day 5. Brutal.
I’m still publishing this site manually: running the build on my laptop and syncing the output up to a server with Transmit. It’d eventually be nice to cut out a few steps and just be able to interact with the repository. I know a ton of the newer crop of hosts can watch a repo and publish every time there’s a change, but I’m strangely attached to this site living on a little shared server like the good old days. Will probably play around with GitHub Actions and see if I can rig something up myself.

Weeknotes 3: I Promise I Will Be Good

2023-12-03T12:00:00Z

Decorated the front yard for the holidays. In matters like this, my contribution is logistics: how to attach things to walls without making holes and figuring out where all the extension cords go.
In an effort to keep holiday gifting from going exponential, our generation of kids and their spouses does a secret santa exchange. I’m nominally responsible for pairings, which means an opportunity to overengineer the whole thing. For the last few years, the assignments have been sent out via SMS, but that’s gotten much more complicated apparently! In my frustration with Twilio, I rewrote the code to send emails with SendGrid instead – which I forgot is also owned by Twilio, and also required new compliance checks since I used it last. I wish more services had an account flag for “I am going to use this to send six messages once a year; I promise I will be good.”
Speaking of overengineering, Advent of Code is back! I haven’t finished the last few years, but it’s always fun to use as an excuse to try new things out. Played with Bun for Day 1 and really enjoyed not having to spin up all the scaffolding the modern JS ecosystem seems to require to start fiddling around.
Small improvements corner: The <link> tag for this site’s RSS feed no longer 404s. The feed itself is no longer full of escaped HTML tags.

Weeknotes 2: Taupe Warriors

2023-11-26T12:00:00Z

Spent the back half of the week visiting our families in Minnesota. Both flights were only slightly delayed and we did not poison a large group with undercooked turkey. Calling it a success.
That was my 14th flight of the year, which is nothing compared to serious business travelers, but a collection of pandemic exceptions and grace periods means I’m somehow still holding pretty high status on two different airlines. In practice, it just means that when things inevitably go sideways, you might get a bit of eye contact while they tell you there’s nothing they can do to help, but the small trappings of it (someone saying hello to you, not getting nickel and dimed for having the audacity to travel with luggage) do make things slightly more pleasant. One more trip this year to enjoy being a taupe warrior before the rules go back to normal and it all comes crumbling down.
Related: Airlines Are Just Banks Now. They’re logos on credit cards sitting on Scrooge McDuck vaults of made up points who only incidentally provide global transportation.
In tiny improvements news, the theme selector in the top right of this website now remembers your preference on subsequent navigations. There’s a bit of a flash if your preference doesn’t match what your system is already asking for. Will get around to that eventually.
Did the thing twice. Well on our way to a habit.

Weeknotes 1: A Rare Lack of Sentimentality

2023-11-19T12:00:00Z

We’re doing weeknotes now!
Except I’m not going to talk about work at all.
Couldn’t I just scribble these in a little notebook and keep them to myself? Sure! But I really enjoy following along with folks like Alice and Ian and Jessica and Simon and Tom each week. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too? No pressure.
I’ve been stalling on relaunching anything here for actual years and am so happy something is finally out there. I’ll eventually get around to the self-indulgent post about why I started posting here again, but for now, let’s just agree to let it be what it is and (keep our fingers crossed) that it’ll will get better over time.
I have a bad habit of treating any site or service with the ability to bookmark a thing as an opportunity to build another precious little queue of things I’ll never get around to. Taking advantage of a rare lack of sentimentality to delete without remorse. Still 1,500 things in my “Watch Later” playlist on YouTube, but I’ve gotten my Overcast down into the realm of “could possibly listen to these before the heat death of the universe.”
I’m never really prepared for how quickly “a week or two into November” becomes the new year. Let’s see how startled I am this time next week.