Today might have gone differently.

Greet a few friends with a hug as we arrive. Meander to the bar for a drink while we wait to get seated. Order a round of oysters. Get to our table, refresh our drinks, order more of our favorites from the oysters we had at the bar. Maybe a couple of recommended starters. We’ll figure out the rest later. On drink three we decide it’s worth ordering at least one or two entrées for the table to share. Another round of drinks. Struggle to share a dessert. A digestif to end the evening. No fuss about it being my birthday, but still a time with a few friends and great food.

This year I sat at home. We ordered in pizza. The world watched America demonstrate it is a white supremacist state. The police murder instead of protect. They conspire to remain blameless for all their actions, no matter what our own eyes can see. The white supremacist leadership of this country calls for violence against people of color protesting state-enabled murder. The white supremacist leadership claim to support non-violent protest, even after they made a spectacle of rejected non-violent protest. The liars lied about whether they lied about directly undermining US foreign policy.

We are sheltering in place. We are shattering in place.

If you’ve ever heard of the “white noose” here in Baltimore, here’s another great demonstration.

Pooling local revenue with Baltimore City’s two nearest neighbors results in $3,717 more funding per student for BCPSS students.

If we pooled the whole state, that increase grows to $4,963.

Without including wealthy DC suburbs or the Eastern Shore of Maryland, roughly 75% of the gap in funding for Baltimore City is covered just by stepping across a border designed for segregation.

75% of the gap.

That’s the legacy of state sponsored segregation. That’s what you choose when you live over the border.

Via Ed Build’s Clean Slate

I have been waiting for about 2 years for a coffee shop to open around the corner.

They’ll “open” for pickup only for the first time Wednesday.

It’s heartbreaking to think about someone pouring their savings and time into opening up shop only for a global pandemic to hit.

I don’t think we’ve come close to grappling with the lives lost, and we certainly haven’t understood the economic devastation caused by the twin diseases of COVID-19 and an utterly failed government.

It’s Memorial Day in the US. We are supposed to honor and grapple with the sacrifice of soldiers lost at war today. In reality, we celebrate their deaths with cookouts and sales. I can’t help but feel the parallelism in our failures to understand the cost of war and our failures to take seriously this pandemic. The numbers are too large to understand. The costs incalculable. Scale overwhelms and whites out our ability to perceive.

So I think about this coffee shop. It was someone’s dream. It was their big risk that they hoped would define their life. “I have decide to be a coffee shop owner.” Now, through no fault of their own, their grand opening will involve masks, gloves, and paper cups passing quietly across a door frame. Instead of hearing, for the first time, that glorious din of pen to paper, fingers on keys, friends talking, glasses clinking, milk steaming, and the cheery greetings between staff and regulars, they’ll open quietly.

They may not survive long enough to be what they hoped. Neither might we.

I used to be a heavy Google Reader user. Besides the joy of going one place and reading my whole internet, I took a lot of pleasure in sharing great things from around the web with friends. Some of this happened within Reader, but mostly I was a prolific emailer in college of interesting things.

I miss the correspondence my friends and I had over email about interesting block posts or stories or funny things I found all about the internet. It was one of the joys of email, and the joys of leisure time.

I continue this practice somewhat today— if you’re unfortunate enough to be a close friend you probably get some combination of iMessage, Twitter DMs, Instagram messages, or Slack messages about the things I find. But it’s all scattered and sent through highly disruptive mechanism.

I don’t really like to link blog because half the fun is curating who I send things to. And I miss spontaneous groupings of my friends who might like the same things.

I think within all this is an inkling of an idea for a web app/service only useful to me that I’d like to write. If I could collect interesting things in a queue almost like Buffer, and then at a set interval, empty that queue. It would send off a custom email to each person collating the items I selected to share with them. The result is almost a newsletter, but actually a collection of “fun things Jason thought you’d like or would love to talk with you about”.

I think I could maintain a lot more of my friendships with this package. In many ways, sharing the fun stuff I find on the web or debating a news article or blog with you, probably because I thought you’d have interesting things to say or it would challenge your thinking in some way, is my love language.

I missed it by a couple of days.

After years of conflicting advise and being bounced from specialist to specialist for keratoconus, I finally seemed to have found a set of doctors I trusted and who gave me a solid course of action.

The news was not great– the scarring on my left eye was fairly severe, dead center. My right now, now also presenting with keratoconus could not receive corneal cross-linking, a promising laser-based treatment to temper the progression of keratoconus, because my left eye vision was so poor the risks outweighed the benefits.

The hope? Improve the left eye, hopefully before summer, so that I could get corneal cross-linking before the right eye got as bad as the left. How would we do this? After years of not having corrected/correctable vision in that eye and all blur, it was time to take seriously my need for a partial corneal transplant. My hope had always been to avoid this, because I’m young, there are risks, they don’t last forever, and artificial corneas seem just years away.

This latest doctor though gave me some hope– they would be willing to do the partial transplant, but first they insisted I try scleral lenses. I had been offered lenses in the past, but with caveats. I was told they were expensive, that my keratoconus was so severe they’d need to order whole new fitting kits, and that the likelihood was I’d get only modest vision improvement. My new doctor said that she thought we’d have much better luck focusing through (around?) the scarring. That if she could get me to 20/40 vision with the lenses, we would have some options to do a “scrape” to try and remove the scar tissue instead of a full transplant.

This whole course of action was a bit time bound– we wanted to see if we can’t get to the crosslinking before the right eye got worse and risked scarring.

And of course, my follow up was the first week of quarantine.

Today, I got to go to that follow up appointment. And to my delight and surprise (and even to my doctor’s surprise), we did better than 20/40 with the scleral lens. For the first time in 5 years, not only could I make out shapes with my left eye, I achieved a “blurry 20/20”.

I’m frustrated. I have had doctor’s telling me about scleral lenses for years, but making clear that I should only expect modest improved vision and that it was a pain in the butt and expensive. They are expensive. And I don’t know yet how much of a pain in the ass they’ll be. But at least for now, I won’t need a transplant and starting in a few weeks, I’ll be using both of my eyes to see again.

First, this inexpensive stud finder works pretty great.

Second, this self-leveling laser makes the job easy once you find a stud. Just line up the cross hairs and you’re ready to go.

Finally, I’ve always sworn by Ook picture hangers. Super easy to install, never fails, easy to remove.

I started counting calories again in mid-January with pretty good results. I had even been keeping up with it as the world shut down. But this week with Passover alone and the accumulated anxiety of the world I got off the wagon. I didn’t “blow it”, but the mental energy to keep track just hasn’t been there the past few days.

That’s ok. I’ll start up again tomorrow.

This is my reminder that I can be kind to myself.

From @atomicbooks

I played in a couple of bands back in high school, but haven’t really been singing or playing much lately. Haven’t had an audience in over a decade. And while I’m not proud of this take per se, step 1 is get on the horse and put something out there.

What I’m thinking about and working on right now. This page will be updated semi-regularly as seems appropriate. The post date reflects when this was updated, and all Now pages will be archived and linked to from this page.

Here we are in 2020 facing down COVID-19 and expecting to spend the next several weeks if not months primarily at home. Luckily, we have a room in our home I was able to turn into an office, and I can comfortably work from here. Still, it’s hard to stay productive and keep my fears and anxiety even as we face so much uncertainty. For now, I’m taking some solace in the fact that I can continue to work, I am safe, and my family is safe. But I am afraid that a lot of change is coming, and it won’t result in a safer and better world– that’s the kind of too-honest, invasive thinking that I’m hoping to ignore for at least a little longer.

I not-so-recently got engaged.

I had spend the last couple of years working out quite diligently, lifting weights three times a week about 80% of the time and twice a week the remainder. In the end, although I enjoyed it, my inability to control my eating saw my weight and health decline to where I wasn’t happy. I started counting calories again and I’m seeing results I feel good about. I’m going to try and reintroduce exercise now that things feel a bit more under control, and I’m hoping to have finally turned a corner on a lifelong battle with weight. I’ve done better than I’m doing now before, but this time feels easier and more sustainable than it’s ever been.

Some of that is helped by my obsession with the Bon Appétit cinematic universe, which has me enjoying cooking again, something I lost with the move from Providence to Baltimore. It’s kind of amazing, but the stress of the year we moved combined with spending a year in a kitchen that felt cramped really hurt my enjoyment of cooking. But slowly in the last two and a half years since we moved to our current house, I’ve felt more and more interested in being in the kitchen and eating food we make again. It’s a big difference.

And in truth, as difficult as this period of social distancing will be, the end of work travel for a prolonged period of time for the first time in six years means that routines are going to be easier to build and easier to keep than ever before. I miss the travel– a lot– but if I have to create some kind of silver lining, I think it has to be that routine feels possible again.

Current home screen

Top Ten Artists (Last 90 Days)

Previous Now Page - November 2018

We hastily moved some things around at home in preparation for both of us needing to work from home full time for the foreseeable future. I still have a lot of work to do in this room, especially considering we started to move post-isolation protocol time, but thought I’d share a look at my current desk setup

Some notable gear:

• 13" MacBook Pro (about 3 years old now)
• LG 5K monitor
• Amazon Basics monitor arm
• ScanSnap S1300i
• Ergodox EZ Keyboard with Godspeed MiTO MT3 keycaps
• Logitech MX Master 3
• Rode boom arm
• Audio Technica ATR 2100 microphone
• Kanto YU5 speakers
• Philips Fidelio X2 headphones
• Steelcase Gesture chair

There’s some stuff not pictured key to my home technology setup, including a Synology 1810+ disk station and Ubiquiti networking gear.

The wiring is a mess, but overall, this set up has worked quite well for the past few days. When I am at my office, I bring the Ergodox and the laptop and that’s it– I have an LG 5K there and MX Master 3 there as well so my setup is fairly “drop in”. I also use my Sony WH1000XM2 headphones there since the office is loud. Ideally, I would have a second Ergodox, a second boom and ATR2100, and a better pair of closed-backed headphones, but I can’t complain.

Oh, and here’s the guitars (pedalboard and Weber Mass 50 attenuator not pictured) that I have behind me in case I need to unwind for a bit.

• Valvetech VAC22
• G&L Legacy with Fralin pickups (SP43 in the hum bucker)
• Fender 48th Street Special Strat (with the G&L pickups)
• Larrivee DV-03R

I think it’s fun and funny to joke about delaying a task you dread only to have it take far less time than you expect. I just posted about that the other day.

But the truth is, problem solving is hard cognitive work and all that time in dread was my brain wrestling with the problem on some background cycles.

If I got started right away, the task would be tedious and hard, and I may not come to an answer I’m comfortable with. The right time to solve a problem is when it comes surprisingly easy and feels like the “right” way to do something.

In truth, I celebrate that I am getting better at identifying the right time and conditions to sit and work on a problem and seeing an elegant solution unfold quickly.

What I am struggling with is not feeling so bad during the waiting period when I haven’t quite figured out what to do yet.

A lot of white people in America who don’t support progressive taxes, and don’t support various ways government can redistribute wealth point to one thing: they have earned what is theirs. When we talk about reparations— they didn’t own slaves.

How many of them know the history of their wealth?

This story about two Baltimore neighborhoods is just one small example of how explicit government policy and action created and sustained a racial wealth divide just a generation or two ago.

Because I grew up in the New York City tri-state area, I frequently heard from people whose families, like mine, emigrated to the US with little, long after slavery. These immigrants and their descendants made clear that because they didn’t participate in slavery or the Jim Crow South and they came to the US with little, they had no reason to have to pay taxes that supported black people in America to correct for our original sin. It seemed preposterously unfair.

They were and are blind to the ways their own family wealth in America was created and supported through explicitly racist policy programs that lead to affordable home ownership for their families. They have benefited from white supremacy all the same.

I love living in human scaled places, but I’m surrounded by hostile roads in every American city. I’m thankful both Roosevelt Park (pictured) and a Wyman Park are within walking distance.

After the final version of SAFE is published, it will go to the courts. Its odds of survival are unclear. Historically, regulatory agencies win about 70 percent of their court challenges, Lienke said. Yet under the Trump administration, agencies have lost more than 90 percent of their cases, according to an ongoing tally from the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Many of those losses came in cases like this one, in which agencies published false, misleading, or fundamentally erroneous explanations of their own rules. In June, the Supreme Court held that the Trump administration could not add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, because the Department of Commerce’s internal motivations did not match its publicly stated reasoning.

Agencies must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “The explanation provided here was more of a distraction.”

– We Knew They Had Cooked the Books by Robinson Meyer

The frightening thing about Clearview is not that it works, and it’s not that we rely on them to not sell to bad actors.

Today’s episode of The Daily makes clear that its founders are not especially gifted at image recognition. They were not the top talents in this field. These are script kiddies who grabbed tons of data and implemented freely available methods and algorithms to build a terrifying product.

Scraping is not an advantage— any government (or private) actor can easily construct the same database. Training their dataset requires the know-how to implement published models and algorithms, which is not a unique enough skill to protect us.

We need to move past attempts to stop our technology from invading our privacy in this way– we’re way too late– and move on to finding ways to protect ourselves given this new reality.

We all need to adjust our threat models to assume our faces and photos are public and easy to access for anyone who wants to target us as individuals. Adopt new laws, policy, and personal security practices for this world.

Proxima Centauri is not just the closest star to our solar system. It’s turned out to be a fascinating system of its own, with now two planets like those we find in our own system.

I remember the disappointment I felt when I realized the stars of science fiction would probably remain unreachable, and that it wasn’t really clear that those we might reach some day would be worth visiting.

The last 10 or 15 years of astrophysics and planet hunting has thoroughly dispelled the idea that our solar system is one of a kind. It’s one of the most exciting discoveries made in my lifetime.

I hope we’re not one of a kind either.

This was in response to a tweet that has since been removed

Our schools can be improved. In too many places, the quality of instruction and quality of operations is far from great. I don’t think we have to fix poverty to fix schools.

But if we shift focus to quality outcomes for kids and not quality systems of education, it’s quickly intolerable that one in six kids live in poverty, many more live on the margins, and our social safety net is as byzantine as it is inadequate.

Semiosis was one of my favorite books from last year, so I’m not surprised I really enjoyed Interference. I think I’ve got a thing for first contact books and non-human narrators, considering how much I loved Children of Time and Children of Ruin.