Ever have a fair amount of energy to do something, like write a long blog post or tackle a long term project for work and get interrupted just 10 or 15 minutes into the flow and completely lose it?

I was really getting going on something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, and all it took was Elsa asking me to help her with something for a minute and I’ve lost all motivation.

I don’t blame her– I was helping her do something that falls right into this category of a project we’ve been putting off (although in this case, it was something that literally took less than 20 minutes) that needed to get done.

But it’s so frustrating how fleeting energy and attention can be.

I’m not sure if it’s just the nature of my brain, the nature of knowledge work, a symptom of burn out, or what. But some projects just take a special combination of time and energy that cannot be conjured, just used when it it hits.

Police don’t solve crimes. They don’t prevent crimes. They mostly pull over black people for traffic violations.

In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.

Reuters

Hi Jason,

Your mention of Philip K. Dick got me thinking about my reading list. Most people have a “nightstand” stack of books they intend to read. I do also. Stacked up in no order are Amusing Ourselves to Death, How to be Normal, Algorithms of Oppression, Doorways to Transformation, Caste, Reality +, An Autobiography of Skin, To Fall in Love, Drink This, and Exhalation, by Ted Chaing. I’m reading that collection of stories now. Brilliant. I have his earlier collection on hold at the library, and just picked up The White Album by Joan Didion from the library, which I will get to. Spare is on my Kindle, on loan from the library. I’m reading Digital Body Language on Kindle for work. On my Kobo to-read I have How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Ubik (a great Philip K. Dick novel I’ve read before), Murakami’s The Novelist as Vocation, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Perhaps I’m overly ambitious about this reading list? But I don’t think there’s such as thing as a to-read list that’s too long. My books-to-buy list is longer.

If a book is mine, I pencil notes in the margin or start an index of my favorite parts. I copy Kindle and Kobo highlights using Readwise.io. Every Friday I load all the digital notes into DEVONThink. I get a lot of pleasure out of reading and I like to remember it all. I’m pretty agnostic about digital or paper. Digital is good for work and note-taking. Paper is best for pleasure reading.

Do you have a to-read list, and if so, what’s on it?

Lee

Hi Lee,

Just as I received this letter I started getting walloped with a case of food poisoning. My third time in about 8 months. Not fun. It slowed me down responding to this letter and also making progress on Living in Data by Jer Thorp, a rare non-fiction book to make it from my “to read” pile to my “reading” pile. Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse is right next to it, ready to go.

I don’t keep a “to read” list per se, but I do have stacks of physical books, and an entire section of our bookshelves that are “to be shelved” which means “to be read”. When I buy a physical book, it goes there, and when I actually read it, it’s stored away, alphabetical by author, with fiction in one section and non-fiction by topic in other shelves.

I’m not near my desk at the moment which has a stack of books on design, managing programmers, and running development teams stacked up on it to read. I’ve also got quite a few sequels on that “to be shelved” shelf.

About 70-80% of my book reading is on my Kindle, because I travel a lot for work and it’s simply too convenient versus carrying books and risking reaching the end of one without another ready to go. I like to, when possible, use Libby to take out books from the library first on my Kindle, then buy them from my local bookshop if I really liked it. Of course, I simply preorder the stuff I know I’m going to read and love.

I’ve never been a good highlighter. I try with my Kindle, but instead, I actually find it interesting to see other people’s highlights. I’m not often drawn to the same lines as others, but sometimes I feel like I may have missed just how interesting a particular line or passage really is without the queue that 500 other people highlighted it. When I do remember to highlight, I quite enjoy looking back. I often still love what I found worth noting, though I also feel like when I get to the end of a book, reviewing my highlights doesn’t really capture how I felt about it. I guess part of reading a book is my total immersion in it, and even the best moments pulled out don’t make me feel what the book made me feel.

My best friend loves Joan Didion. I’ve never read any of her pieces. I hope my friend is not reading this blog post, because I’m quite positive I’ve never actually told her this.

I think it’s important to have stacks of books as a reader. Losing momentum with reading is something I’ve found can happen shockingly easily if you don’t have a couple of choices lined up to feel out. I never finish a book and go to bed— I always try to find the next book and read just a little bit of it so that I keep my groove.

Well maybe not never— those nights when you make the mistake of picking up your book with 3 hours of reading left to go at 11pm and realize at midnight there’s no way you’re not finishing it— I let myself crash after those “mistakes”.

Jason

As a reminder, this month I’m also writing Jarrod letters.

Hi Jarrod,

Thanks for the kind words.

At home, my world is ruled by my dogs. Gracie is a 13 year old Pomeranian-Beagle mix. We got her when she was about 8 months old, right as Elsa and I were going to start living together. In fact, the weekend I closed on my first condo was the weekend Elsa picked up Gracie. A month or so later, Gracie mostly moved in with me and Elsa was shortly behind. She was my first dog since my childhood dog passed away while I was in college. She’s intelligent, loyal, and loving. This summer is almost certainly her last, and we’re doing our best through a lot of money and care to give her as much quality time left as possible. A few weeks ago we thought that would be long gone by now, but I’m happy she’s rebounded pretty well at the moment, so we’re just trying to enjoy our remaining time.

Brandy is a terrier mix of some kind. She moved in with us when Elsa’s mom, also Elsa, moved in with us 7 or so years ago. At the time, she was about 2 years old. She is mostly deaf, very low energy, and incredibly caring. She will take constant rubs, and will kiss you endlessly if you let her. She’s a true lap dog.

Martina was my dog growing up, who we got when I was 4 or 5 and had for a little over 14 years. She was much larger (70-80 lbs, versus Gracie’s 20-21 and Brandy’s 16) and a yellow lab/golden retriever mix. She was a classic American family dog of her breed. My parents never got another dog after her, to my father’s disappointment. As a result, they love Gracie about as much as we do.

So what about the work world? What is “education-finance-technology”? Well, as it turns out, most finance and accounting software is built for finance and accounting people. And it’s mostly built for large businesses or “public sector” in a broad way. But it turns out, schools have lots of specialized needs and there are tons of people in school districts— principals, central office department heads, school board members, and even teachers— that need to be involved in decisions about how we spend public dollars to impact kids. So we sit on top of all that software that’s specialized for GASB accounting and treasury functions and do analytics, budget planning, and resource allocation modeling that makes sense to everyone who didn’t get a degree in financial management. Most of what we build is behind log ins and not super shareable, but this year we built a transparency portal for the state of Arizona that’s pretty cool if you want to poke around.

Being a part of something from the beginning is pretty special. I feel fortunate, not just because I was there early, but because I feel like we built this company deliberately (and sometimes far too slowly) such that I have experienced running a company at three or four distinct phases. I know what it’s like when everyone is an individual contributor doing everything. I know what it’s like when you first start to put a team together and figuring out basic people-management and collaboration. I’ve experience building a company to more than one team that has to collaborate across functions. And lately, I’ve been working on scaling my own function to many smaller teams working independently and collaboratively. So many of the folks I know who have worked for start ups get in when things are pretty good and spend a huge portion of their time hiring as they just keep growing. I feel like I actually learned how to run things. I think if I started at a company with 100 people that scaled to 1000 two years later, I would have learned significantly less about leading teams and managing people and how to build and execute on strategy. In fact, I’m pretty confident I could lead a team that had hundreds of people in total because of what I’ve learned here.

I don’t talk a ton about my work. I don’t think I feel like I’ve found my voice as a product leader outside of my job. In many ways, I can do what I do because of subject matter expertise. But I’m starting to get myself comfortable with the idea that I’ve built up skills specific to product management and even CTO-type skills, since I’ve been managing the engineers for 5 years (maybe more?) now.

I do think a way of bringing passions together is the key to success. Being a mountain guide is something you can bring to your site that no one else could. Maybe “bringing together” just means putting them side by side, two paths running in parallel, never meeting. Maybe there’s a way to braid the two lines together at times. For example, what does it mean to build community among mountain guides and enthusiasts? Where are those folks? How does being outdoors or at the gear shop influence your time with technology, or ability to be without it?

I wonder, as a mountain guide, do you build expertise on particular trails or a particular place? For you, what’s the balance between experiencing somewhere new and exciting versus a deep relationship to a single place? Maybe there are some parallels to my experience getting the time to experience different phases and sizes of my company versus simple scaling the experience of being a guide in a particular place versus further exploration. Maybe not.

I look forward to finding out.

Jason

Hey Jason,

It sounds like you enjoy a pet-heavy home. In my opinion, the best kind of home. Animals — particularly the ones that you can tell actually care about you — bring a sense of welcoming and belonging to a place. Judged by the sheer amount of time spent there, my pets are the true owners of our house. And they’re always visibly happy when my wife or I come through the door. They welcome us, and everyone else, in with attention and affection. We, humans, could learn a few lessons from our pets.

Gracie and Brandy sound like such sweethearts. That Brandy is “a true lap dog” rings true here. Our Golden Retriever, Phin (Phineas), loves nothing more than to be snuggled up with us. He’s about four years old now, but seems to think he still has the body of a much younger, smaller dog. He’s goofy, rambunctious and protective, but also a scaredy-cat, lazy and pampered. He contains multitudes. My wife and I got him as a puppy about a year into our marriage.

Ollie (Ollivander) is our Maine Coon cat that we’ve had together since back in 2015 when we were dating, but he also seems to think that he’s a dog. He chatters back and forth with us, will (sometimes) walk on a leash, and used to play fetch before doing so would get him pounced by the real dog. He’s the sweetest, most loving and affectionate cat I’ve ever come across. If he can see you, he’s purring. If he’s close enough, we’ll rub his face on yours. And although he’s coming up on his ninth birthday, he looks and acts as young as he ever did. I’m convinced he’ll live forever.

Our final pet is Remus the turtle. I picked him up (literally, off the ground while on a hike) when I was doing an internship down in Alabama in 2014. I was desperately lonely in a new state, living all by myself in a house that would usually have housed nearly a dozen interns. I needed someone — well, some thing — to talk to, and happened to spot a baby turtle. I’d wanted a turtle since I was a young boy, so he came home with me.

Remus, like my other pets, has lived through an identity crisis. You see, I thought he was an aquatic turtle when I first picked him up. So for the first few weeks of his life with me, he lived in my bathtub with a little rock to lay on until I could get him a proper tank. And then when I got a tank, I likewise mostly filled it with water. He seemed to thrive! He would even sleep underwater. But, as you can probably guess, Remus is not an aquatic turtle. He’s an Eastern Box Turtle, which, despite the name, is a land tortoise. When I finally realized that and switched out his living environment, he did seem happier. But I think he sometimes misses his swimming pool. He was a personable young turtle, very curious and cuddly. Not words I ever know to be associated with turtles, but he was! These days he’s going through what I think is his teen years and is being, in a word, an asshole. I hope he’ll grow out of his grumpiness, and will perhaps be happier again when we can move him into a bigger habitat when we move to our new home soon.

Wow, I didn’t expect this letter to turn into pet central, but here we are!

Your work sounds really important. Many professions and industries seem inaccessible to outsiders because their language and processes are so specific. For example, the medical field, law, software development, and, as you say, finance, are all black boxes. We put things in, we get things out, but your everyday person probably doesn’t have any sort of understanding about how it actually works. Building tools that are more accessible to the public must help them out, but — I imagine — also make the work of finance professionals more pleasant. Kudos to you!

Do you have aspirations to lead a bigger team of your own, perhaps at a different company as a new challenge? The way you talk, it sounds like you feel competent to do so. Does that confidence get you wondering if you should try?

Thank you for your insightful recommendations about blending my interests to showcase on my site. I think you’re right, I don’t see a lot of outdoor and tech enthusiasts out there. Perhaps this isn’t quite what you were suggesting, but maybe the key idea is just to write more about what I’m doing, things I’m trying out, and what’s working. I think, perhaps, I’ve been putting too much pressure on needing an angle for my writing. (Related, I feel conflicted about having two places to write, in general.) Maybe my writing would flourish if I aim for it to be less about what’s “right” and more just about me.

Since I’ve been guiding here in the Adirondacks for only as long as we’ve lived here (about a year and a half), it seems like I often get to experience new and exciting places right alongside my clients. Everywhere is new! That novelty will wear off. In fact, it’s starting to as I begin to take clients on the same key hikes or climbs here — the ones that have a particularly friendly approach or offer a wide range of opportunities for folks at various skill levels. But what’s never the same are the people. They each bring their own unique blend of history, interests, ambitions, challenges, and talents. I love sharing my passion for the outdoors with others, and try to inspire some in them.

But to keep things fresh, I do personal trips with friends and other locals. I never want to guide something that’s at the edge of my ability level, so I always feel like I’m holding back to a degree with clients. That’s a good thing because it means I have some margin to get us out of sticky situations should they arise. It also means that if I want to challenge myself, I can try crossing the same terrain faster, link hikes together to push the mileage, or try for climbs that get me a little scared. And I feel like there’s so much opportunity, even just here in the ADK, that I’ll never run out of things to try.

Thanks for coaxing these thoughts out of me.

Following that train of thought, I’d love to hear — if you’re willing to share — about some things that scare you and how you deal (or don’t deal) with them.

Until next time,

Jarrod

For all the criticism about school opening or closing decisions, my impression is largely that districts were responsive to their parents. The thing is, not every district serves the same parents, and with big race, income, an education differences in preferences a lot of folks got really confused reporting on these stories.

Most of the tensions about school opening and closures came from one set of parents arguing what should be done for an entirely different set of parents.

A strong public health response, both in terms of what we did to help people not get sick or die from COVID and educating the public, would, hopefully, have smaller gaps between parent groups and their preferences for reopening. At the same time, in a country as large as the US, there were very few moments where a single response or narrative made sense in all places at all times.

I’m left thinking about the classic conundrum taught in every single education survey research course. Ask someone about how public schools are doing, and they’ll tell you they’re terrible. But ask someone about their neighborhood school, and satisfaction always seems quite high.

I bet the COVID response largely functions the same way.

There are basically two things that are interesting to me about Threads so far:

1. I’ve discovered more photographers¹ on there in one week than I have after years on Instagram and my year on Glass.

2. Some friends of mine are posting there who never “got” Twitter, but their posts would have been great tweets.

Hi Jason,

When it works, Slack is great. I use it for clients and projects. Sometimes it gets a little noisy for me, and I have to remind myself that I don’t have to respond in real time to everything Slack offers.

Your writing about walking in the real world and using paper for thoughts reminded me of a book by a researcher/writer I know. It’s called The Hand and it’s by Frank Wilson. Frank makes a pretty compelling case about how we learn with the hands. Holding things and interacting with them with the hands, he says, helps babies connect words to objects. He interviews jugglers and all kinds of people who work (and entertain) with their hands, to show how rich their lives, their intellect, and their use of language has become because they interact with the world in a tactile way. Great book, if you’re looking for something thoughtful. There are other arguments, too, in books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Shop Class as Soulcraft that make the case for a deeper connection with things when we make them with our hands.

This brings me to AR/VR, goggles and all the rest. There are some smart people, like artist Chris Milk, who gave a TED talk about VR media as an empathy machine, who believe that we’re all going to be running around with goggles pretty soon. I hope not. Companies like Meta and Apple have a business model that depends on us using their products and remaining in their world as often and as long as possible. If they can manage to get us all wearing goggles, disconnected from the actual world around us in favor of a digital one, well, that is their dream. But it’s our nightmare.

Even though you can rapidly spin up empathy by being in a world with someone else, and especially if you feel that you are sharing that world with them, I don’t think it’s smart to do this at the expense of spending time in our real world. The real world is in trouble because of the climate crisis, and we need people to pay more attention to it, and appreciate it, so they will be motivated to protect it and protest, and stop the fossil fuel companies from further destroying it.

For me, no amount of the cool factor of AR/VR is a solution there. Exceptions might include museum exhibits, education applications, and helping people with sensory limitations connect with the world around them. So I’m not proposing a blanket ban on goggles, but am raising my hand to note that we can’t let the cool factor and newness take over.

Lee

Hi Lee

There’s pretty strong evidence that we remember things better when we write them out by hand than when we type them. I think there’s quite a bit to the idea that some kind of embodied physicality is important to learning and processing information. It’s kind of what we’ve been made for.

I find it hard to muster a strong take on AR/VR like others. There are tons of folks out there with hopes— that it will be huge or that it’ll go away. Riccardo Mori was repulsed, and apparently received lots of low quality, negative feedback. I think a lot of people want to see some philosophy in this. I’m struggling to get there.

Maybe it’ll be cool. Maybe it will stink. Maybe it’ll be so cool that we retreat from other things that seem healthier to me personally. Maybe it’ll be so cool that it replaces things that are even more anti-social and unhealthy today and not encroach on “better” activities. I don’t know what I’d use it for, but I know enough from past experience that I have to use the word “yet” at the end of that sentence. There has been a lot of technology I didn’t think would exist, or I didn’t think would appeal to me, or I didn’t think would represent a meaningful jump from where things are today that turned out to be all of those things. There’s also been a lot I was excited about that just, fizzled.

There’s been a great body of “history” found on the internet, mostly on Twitter threads I care not to find, where someone will take a series of concerns about technology from letters written to newspapers over two centuries and find the exact same concerns and predictions over and over again applied to new technology, none of which quite come to pass.

I guess that’s all to say that I’ve learned that trying to be a “futurist” is somewhat of a fool’s gamble.

I do think there’s a benefit to experiencing the world through another’s eye. Mercerism may have been a lie, but the idea of an empathy box is quite powerful ¹. I’m just not sure any of our technology comes even close to generating that kind of closeness and fellowship.

At the same time, here I am, writing these letters each week. They’re often quite personal and revealing. I suspect someone reading along might develop quite a sense of who I am and how I think. Their ability to empathize or care for me is almost certainly increased. So who am I to say what will happen if we increase the ability to be present with strangers?

Jason

And now for something not entirely completely different…

I’m writing a letter to someone else this month. So without any further ado, a double dosing of Letters for July.

Hi Jarrod,

It’s a bit strange to be starting one of these. For those that don’t know me who are reading along, and as a reminder to Jarrod, I started writing Letters on my own blog this year. I wanted to have a different kind of online social interaction, and I wanted to do it with people I may not really know. I thought it’d be a nice way to build up a dialog, be a part of building an Internet more like the one I wanted, strengthen some para-social relationships, and make sure the “long form” content on my blog kept flowing.

Jarrod reached out early, but not early enough for me to have booked up my year. But I’m glad that he decided to do his own project on his blog. I agreed to be a part of that project, so here I am, following my own rules, and writing the first letter for the month of January to Jarrod.

By way of further introduction, I’m the Chief Product Officer at an education-finance technology company, leading engineering, design, and product management. I love what I do, because I get to bridge problem solving and consultative work in my area of expertise (education policy), my skills as a data practitioner, my danger as a software developer, my taste (which exceeds my talent), and my never-strong-enough management skills to solve real problems for K12 schools. It’s wild to be a part of a startup for the last nine years from pre-product, pre-revenue, pre-Series A to now being a “real” company with over 50 employees.

I moved to Baltimore, MD about 7 years ago where I live with my fiancée (which I still have to look up how many “e”s each time), her mother, and our two aging dogs. Prior to that, we lived in Providence, RI for 10 years, and I grew up on Long Island, NY.

These days, besides work, I’m focused quite a bit on volleyball. I played (poorly) in high school, and I play now (slightly less poorly) in adult recreational leagues. This was one of my “I’m vaccinated, let’s go!” activities I reintroduced into my life after 17 years away from the sport. It’s been a ton of fun (and exhausting) and at this point it feels essential to my mental health. I also read quite a bit of fiction (or at least I think), typically hitting between 30-40 books a year. I love to travel, and travel quite a bit for work. Recently, I spent a week split between Portland, OR and Seattle, WA and had a great time getting out of my own routine for a bit and wandering. My style of travel is what I call “urban hiking”— I choose a spot for each of my meals in different parts of a city and wander between them all day long and see what I stumble into. I love getting a feel for somewhere different, and I love to walk.

I’ve been lightly following Hey Dingus, largely impressed with your consistency and keeping an eye on the “Projects” page especially, which is the type of thing I’d like to expand on my own site (see /books, /letters, etc). How do you feel like it’s going? Is it the outlet you hoped for? What’s success for you?

Looking forward to our month.

Jason

Hey Jason,

Oh boy, I’m going to have to step up my game this month. That letter had me in awe of your skill as a writer. It flowed, man.

Thank you for that fun introduction. Given the room to stretch out their descriptions, I’ve found that everyone I’ve corresponded with so far has highlighted such interesting parts of their lives. You are no exception.

For a brief introduction of my own, I’ll say that I like to exist at two ends of the spectrum of “extremely online” and “completely disconnected”. Often flip-flopping between them with little warning.

Perhaps a little more explanation is necessary. My day job is as a mountain guide and gear shop specialist, I’ve spent most of my summers as a camp counselor, and I spend much of my free time outside. I’ve spent months (years?) of my life in a tent, gleefully leaving the internet-connected world behind during those times. But I’ve also been a certifiable nerd and Apple enthusiast for as long as I can remember. In fact, in the time between being a full-time camp director and my current job, I spent a few months working as a Technical Specialist in an Apple Store. Technology engages the part of my lizard brain that loves shiny things in a big way. So anytime that I’m not working and I’m not playing in the woods, I’m probably devouring the latest tech news, spelunking the web, or – as of the last few years – sharing that passion through writing my blog.

Lately, I’ve been considering more about how I can build a better bridge between those two interests. Sure, I get into all the topographical navigation apps, track my rock climbing fitness and routes, try the latest camping gadgets, and am generally known as the “tech guy” in my outdoor circles. But I can feel that there’s more to share. I’d like to write more about my experience in the outdoors – to share how and why they make me feel so alive – but it’s proven difficult to break into that genre.

Honestly, that’s one of the reasons I was so eager to follow in your footsteps for this project. I saw it as a way to try out a different kind of writing.

But enough about me, you offered so many jumping-off points about yourself that I want to explore!

What does it mean to work at an “education-finance technology company”? Do you create finance software for K-12 schools? I was corresponding with Chris Verbree last month about how special it is to be part of something – a company, organization, community – from the very beginning. We agreed that having the opportunity to influence the movers and shakers (and sometimes being one yourself) is compelling. What have been your takeaways seeing that company, and your role within it, grow from its infancy?

Your “urban hiking” approach to traveling sounds like the perfect way to explore a new city. I get intimidated by big cities and tend to stick close to my hotel or AirBnB. Case in point, I recently visited your old neck-of-the-woods, Long Island, for the first time but didn’t get out to see hardly any of it. We used DoorDash for a couple of meals and wandered only once. But with a plan and destinations in mind, I could see enjoying the exploration much more.

Your excitement for volleyball is palpable, and I’m so happy you’ve found your way back to it. I strongly believe that having a hobby to stretch your body is as good for you as having one to stretch your mind. Like you, all kinds of foot-powered travel appeal to me. I went for a 10-mile run just this morning that I only intended to be a 5-miler. I just felt so good to be out and moving that I couldn’t stop. A mental health tonic, indeed!

Thank you for your readership of HeyDingus. “Consistency” is my theme for the year, so I’m quite tickled to hear that it has been noticed. After several years of stasis, my appetite for new side projects there has grown considerably. I’m not holding myself to them all going on forever, but they sure are fun to toy around with. My /lists page has been a creative outlet in particular.

Oh, and I’d love to hear more about your pets and what you love about them. I saw your post at the end of June that Gracie’s health hasn’t been the best. Allow me to offer my condolences. It’s so hard to see a family member in decline. My wife and I have a cat, a dog, and a turtle that we call (and treat like) our “fur babies”. They bring us such joy and it’s hard to imagine our family without them.

Finally, I’d like to offer my gratitude for kicking off this Letters project movement (can we call it that?). You nailed the allure of it when you said it was to build up an Internet like the one you want to see. Thanks for putting it out into the world.

Talk to you again soon,

Jarrod

This month I’m writing letters with @leeS.

Hi Jason,

The irony here, to begin with irony, is that your email to me reminding me to start writing my side of this correspondence got lost in my email. We all have a firehose of info coming at us; nothing new there. For me, the dividing line between finishing work at a reasonable hour and staying at it all night has become dictated by the efficiency of my filters.

I’ve thought long and hard, sometimes literally falling asleep to, various mental exercises devoted to creating efficient filters for my emails, workflows, and projects. I could regale you about the efficiencies of Apple Mail vs. Spark vs. Superhuman vs. Hey vs. Fastmail, and on the project side, of Todoist vs. Things vs. ClickUp vs. Sunsama vs. DevonTHINK; and on the short-form writing side, of Bear vs. Ulysses vs. Drafts vs. IA Writer vs. Evernote (Evernote!), and on the long-form writing side, of Ulysses vs. Scrivener. I’ve tried them all, and while fun to work with, and even more fun to port all your data from one to the other in a semi-useless exercise, they all lack something.

They all process my thoughts but none can do my thinking for me.

Let me branch off to another idea before coming back to that. When Threads launched, I was flung into another this vs. that thought cyclone. It went something like this: Should I crosspost on micro.blog and Twitter, vs. crossposting on micro.blog and Mastodon? And if I did that, which Mastodon instance should I favor in my crossposts (I’m in two instances), vs. posting to LinkedIn, vs. Instagram, vs. posting on Threads? And should I post the stuff I used to post on Twitter on Threads, or create some new magical identity that will gain me followers faster than Paris Hilton? And, if I could drink some magic elixir that would turn me into Paris Hilton, with all of her popularity on Threads, would I want to do that anyway?

In the middle of these various thought cyclones, I tested positive for Covid, which has left my mind in a state of crystal clarity. ( Not really.)

What I need, and what everyone needs, is a digital machete to slash our way through the info-forest. But then, I wonder about that. A blunt-force instrument, even if elegantly constructed of software, would cut away stuff we would need. Example: I was recently promoted to assistant professor at USC. My new contract went into spam. Doh. [Head slap evoking Homer Simpson.]

I think the solution is in stepping away from the mechanics that have brought us so much efficiency, and taking a moment, pausing, creating some space by breathing, walking, staying in the shower too long, or by staring into any distant mountains you may happen to have nearby. There is a superb filter already installed in the mind, always auto-updating to its latest version. I find I can turn it on by asking “Does this matter to me?” And being ruthless about the answer.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Lee

Hi Lee,

A funny thing happened in my life about nine years ago. I started working for a startup that was using Slack, way back in the early days of Slack. And starting at that moment, email got quiet for me.

Sure, I have a lot of junk that comes in that I have to clean up from time to time, but I don’t live or die by email. Email that matters to me is rare, and the process of “doing email” is largely unimportant.

Slack didn’t eliminate email for a lot of folks, but for me, it sure quieted it enough to separate signal and noise pretty effectively. Well, that, plus aggressive unsubscribing from various advertising emails and a few well designed filters on emails from popular political campaign donation software.

Personally, I’m back largely on pencil and paper for the true “management” of my time. My tasks are written on Ugmonk Analog cards or in a Cortex Sidekick, depending on my mood. Sometimes it’s not written down at all. My work and life is sufficiently chaotic that there’s often little mystery where my attention needs to be at any given moment. Taking the time to write down a list, and then paying attention to that list, can feel like a luxury.

Walking is my solution. I’m a big fan of taking multiple mid day walks. When I worked in an office, I would often head out to Walgreens or 7-11 a block or two away for a Diet Coke. Yes, I wanted the caffeine, but doing that a couple of times a day and taking the “long way” back around the block cleared my head. My partner, Elsa, doesn’t leave her office in our home the entire working day. I don’t understand how she does it. I routinely have 5,000-7,000 steps already at the end of the work day even though I have a desk job. I need to get outside, I need to think a bit. I even like to take my meetings as regular phone calls (how not-millennial of me) so that I can walk through the park across from our house while talking through a problem.

We get lost in the tools and the mechanics all the time. But the work I do is knowledge work, and brains need rest just like physical muscle. And brains don’t active best sitting and staring at a machine that flashes lights in my eyes.

Perhaps you’ve heard of forest bathing? Or A Need to Walk? I believe in these things so much, it’s one of the only links on my vanity site. To me, a great vacation is 25,000 steps every day without even trying. Seeing a new city is walking its neighborhoods.

For all that time I spend on the computer and on the internet, for all my posts about the social web, I’d trade all of it without a seconds hesitation to take walk on a pleasant day with a friend.

Congratulations on the promotion, and I hope you have a swift recovery from COVID.

Jason

If you had asked me this morning, I would have told you that the US almost certainly was continuing to increase its greenhouse gas emissions over time. But it turns out, I would have been wrong. We have actually managed to decrease emissions 12% from peak– and that’s total emissions, not per capita or adjusted for GDP.

Turns out, even with very little meaningful policy supports, the transition from coal has been meaningful and fairly dramatic. But we have continued to expand emissions from natural gas, which are quite considerable, and have made only a little bit of progress in transportation.

Transportation emissions are particularly disappointing. We have done quite a bit, seemingly, on EPA standards for car emissions and increasing mileage, as well as introduced major technologies such as hybrid and electric vehicles. I’m not sure how much of this is due to increased vehicles-miles-traveled or the shift away from coupes and sedans to heavier vehicles like SUVs and other light trucks.

The path forward for rich nations like the US on emissions is clear though– continue to phase out coal and start to reduce reliance on natural gas through the use of true renewables and clean energy, make big investments in increasing industrial technology breakthroughs, and reduce dependence on cars.

This is the low hanging fruit we need to start working on right now, because even doing all of that will not be enough by the end of this century– but it might buy us the time to get that far.

I’ve been using the Godspeed caps for a really long time. It was time to clean them up, so I decided to switch keycaps for a bit. Feels weird.

Before

After

Riccardo Mori often has something interesting to say. He recently took a bit of a hiatus, and in his return post he wrote:

A tweet from back in March — So much tech today feels more focused on the creation of ‘digital toys’ more than on innovation that can actually, unequivocally positively help and advance humankind. And [I feel] that a lot of resources are being wasted on things whose real usefulness is debatable, e.g. self-driving cars.

A lot of unease I’ve been feeling in recent times boils down to what I perceive to be a widening disconnect between the tech sphere and the world at large, the real world that is going to shit and down the drain day after day.

The tech sphere looks more and more like a sandbox for escapism. Don’t get me wrong, some escapism is always good and healthy as a coping mechanism, because otherwise we would be in a constant state of depression. But — and I may be wrong here — the kind of escapism I feel coming from the tech world is the sort of ‘bury your head in the sand’, ‘stay entertained and don’t worry about anything else’ escapism that want people to remained hooked to gadgets and digital toys in ways that at times feel almost sedative.

I think this all comes down to software. Marc Andressen’s well-known article, Why Software is Eating the World, from 2011 is often cited, but I think that Ben Thompson is the much better read on this topic. In 2019, Ben asked, What is a tech company? and identified five key features:

Note the centrality of software in all of these characteristics:

• Software creates ecosystems.
• Software has zero marginal costs.
• Software improves over time.
• Software offers infinite leverage.
• Software enables zero transaction costs.

The question of whether companies are tech companies, then, depends on how much of their business is governed by software’s unique characteristics, and how much is limited by real world factors.

There’s a pretty broad set of industries that were full of distribution and production costs that software can eliminate. That’s been the primary engine of economic growth and “innovation” for the last 30 years. On the back of manufacturing breakthroughs in battery and semiconductors, computers kept getting more powerful, less expensive, smaller, and connected. With each step change in general purpose capability and availability, a new set of industries and practices became vulnerable to being eaten by software.

The last decade we have begun to see the end of this parade. Companies often claiming to be software companies these days often do so to pad a longshot investment thesis (the motivation for Ben’s article), but we’re well into the long tail of the “real world” that is not so easily disrupted by bits.

We saw when Apple and Microsoft and Amazon were exciting and watched them topple past giants in money, power, and cultural influence. But they’re big and mostly boring now. It may be some time before more exciting stuff starts to happen, and maybe they’ll never be as financially valuable as the first set of companies to ever dominate a zero marginal cost, zero transaction cost market, but they will exist.

It’s true that we build a lot of digital toys. I don’t bemoan the toys. They’re not interesting, but capitalism builds lots of toys hoping for a market. It’s been the easy path to money. ¹ But I also think that it’s easy not to see some incredible things happening.

I remember in the mid 90s when my grandfathers both needed angioplasty and stents put into their hearts. These were routine, but quite serious surgeries. They were life saving technologies not available to even their parents. But they were in the hospital for days and it was quite nerve wrecking. These days those procedures happen in a catheter lab as soon as problems are noticed. We check your heart and just fix things up while we’re in there and send you home just a couple of hours later. Advancements in laparoscopic surgeries are incredible. mRNA vaccines are real, big time, and absolute remarkable. Solar power has gone from something people laughed at Jimmy Carter about to the most cost effective source of utility scale power that you can also install on your home roof.

There have been advancements in science and technology.²

The problems we face as a society and a culture are not software or hardware problems. Our challenges are fundamentally rooted in hierarchy, power, and inequality.

We’re not really lacking in some fundamental technology we need to address climate change. We lack will. We lack the ability to convince others. We lack the ability to combat misinformation and fight a system that fails to incentivize the longer term and the bigger picture.

We’re not lacking in some fundamental technology to address inequality.

We’re not lacking in some fundamental technology to address racism, homophobia, and an anti-trans movement.

The “technology” we lack is empathy.

I’m disappointed in our society and technology is no longer an effective place to distract myself with optimism and a sense of progress. Riccardo laments, “the kind of escapism I feel coming from the tech world is the sort of ‘bury your head in the sand’” – but hasn’t that always been true? Maybe Riccardo had a different experience with technology than I did. Or maybe he bought into some of the industry hype that rang hollow for me. But I just feel like if what you’re worried about is that “the real world that is going to shit”, and I am worried about that, I’m not sure why you’d look to the computer technology sector for solutions.

Tech world has no solutions for our bigger problems. Tech world is all about making it easier, faster, and cheaper to impose our will in the world. But our social-political-cultural problems are matter of what we will, collectively.

No one needs more meta commentary on the social web this week, but here I am with thoughts and a blog so…

1. My technical and nerdy community fully moved over to Mastodon over the course of the winter and I have a pretty great experience there.
2. A significant portion of the education policy, social science, urbanism, local news, and general policy advocacy world remains stubbornly on Twitter. I use Twitter far less than I used to, and it’s value has declined significantly, but I still find that scrolling for a few minutes a few times a day surfaces stuff I wanted to see and read.
3. I have no interest in Bluesky as an also-ran. I have considered snagging an invite just to hold onto my identity and because crossposting from Micro.blog is easy, but I have no reason to believe that it will be worth investing in.
4. I don’t really get why the folks in (2) find Mastodon hard, despite all of the commentariat constantly talking about how confusing it is. This is the curse of being a technical nerd. But honestly, you just sign up on a webpage or in an app and then everything looks at feels 95% like Twitter.
5. Threads, so far, is filled with lots of content I don’t want. The combination of the Instagram social graph (mostly people I know, not people I’m interested in, per se), the weird algorithmic feed shoving empty brand and influencer crap in my face, the lack of web app or Mac app and lack of iPad app… it’s clearly very popular, but at least right now it’s like a packed Spring Break party on the beach in Miami— not somewhere I’ve ever wanted to be.
6. I love having my own blog, on my own domain, pushing stuff out over RSS, and where possible, into other platforms that make it convenient for folk who want to read what I write to find it and me and engage with me.
7. I am sad that so much of the social internet has closed off the ability to automate posting from outside of their products. Syndication is the solution to widely and natively using everything.

David shared some thoughts on our month of letters. I find the format similarly constraining, but part of what I enjoy has been how the conversation has to be different as a result.

Each letter is shorter than addressing everything could be. And we often have to let a thought from the other person drive by or fizzle out, lest the letters end up endless bullet points hopelessly attempting to recreate synchronous conversations.

As bandwidth increased, the internet moved us from asynchronous by default to synchronous by default. We went from websites, journals, blogs, and forums to feeds and streams.

I kind of like the idea of finding a different resting place than the heights of Facebook and Twitter for my own communication. That’s part of why I blog. Letters, in many ways, has been a project to have a different kind of communication, facilitated by blogging, that I don’t always get as a result of writing here. I’m lucky if a post gets one reply. Long posts almost never get any kind of response. That’s fine– but part of what I want out of blogging is for other people to write about things that I’m writing about and vice versa. A broad, loose “conversation” that isn’t a direct exchange, but a diffuse space with lots of folks contributing thoughts and ideas about similar things that I’m interested in.

Letters is not quite that, but it’s helping me to exercise that possibility.

Part of why I haven’t wanted to update my Now page is I really like the last update. It was calm, hopeful, and transitional, which makes for a great page.

But we’re halfway through the year and almost five months out from my last update so it’s time to talk about what’s going on.

Without a theme this year, I feel a bit less about writing just about “now” and a bit more about what the trajectory of the last five months has looked like and what I’m hopeful for in the remainder of the year.

In my last update I noted:

I never did rewrite my resume like I planned last year. I want to do more to write about things I know this year instead of things I feel. Part of working on my own self-image includes getting over the part of my that places my professional knowledge under the category as uninteresting because it’s unimpressive and not novel. Of course, that’s true of literally everything I write in public, yet it doesn’t stop me when it’s not about work.

Reading this made me feel a bit disappointed. I don’t think I’ve delivered on this front. In fact, I forgot all about this sort of “commitment” to myself. Yet, reading it back now, I can’t help but to feel like I was on to something. Maybe I’ll do a bit better in the back half of the year.

Reading

January has historically been the month I read the most. This month I finished no books. In another sign of growth and changes, I don’t seem to find this concerning at all. I will read again soon, when it feels like the thing I want to do, for as much as I want to do it.

I definitely have gotten back to reading. Maybe not quite as voraciously as I have in years past, but I’m still well on pace for around 30 books this year. Importantly, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read and I’ve enjoyed the act of reading when I’ve done it. I think this makes clear that the years of motivating myself to stick with something I enjoy has clearly engrained reading as a habit that’s hard to break. I have done the work to change myself, and this is a part of me that has not yet changed into something else. I remain a reader.

Movement

Yeah, I did take a break. And when I came back from Mexico, I did, in fact, return to the gym and mostly return to volleyball. I’m playing less than I did at my peak– closer to twice a week versus almost always 3 and sometimes 4 times a week– but I’m still making sure it’s a part of my routine. I was largely maintaining my health overall until April. I got hit really badly with allergies in San Diego. They didn’t really let up for a couple of months. That, coupled with what I can only describe as a bit of a mini-depressive episode led to pretty substantial decrease in overall activity and increase in eating. I gained a lot of weight over 6-8 weeks. I’m feeling better now, and I’m working hard to fight back to a body I feel more comfortable in. It’ll likely take all summer, but that’s ok.

Importantly, movement remains a key part of my mental health. And although I moved less, I never stopped going to volleyball at least once a week. I never stopped going to the gym to lift weights three times a week. I mostly kept up my habits, having largely lost my day time walking and other parts of my motivation, not the bigger parts of my commitment to health.

Letters

We’ve hit six months of Letters. Although I haven’t yet added it to my navigation as I rethink my site, I have collected all of the posts. I continue to enjoy this project, and recently posted some thoughts at the halfway mark.

Gracie

Our 13 year old Pomeranian-Beagle mix is at the end stages of her life. She’s in chronic kidney failure as well as having liver issues and gall bladder issues. After significant time in the hospital, she’s home, she’s happy, and she’s comfortable. She’s not all the way back to herself, and she will never get better. At this point, we’re caring for her best we can, loving her best we can, and in the process of preparing ourselves to say goodbye. With the rate I update Now posts, I suspect that she will be gone long before my next one.

Future

I am trying to find some different adventures to take. I had a week of solo travel due to some circumstances that meant Elsa couldn’t join me on planned trip. It was good for me. I needed that reset and change of scenery. I needed a couple of days outside, post allergies, where I walked 20,000+ steps a day by “mistake” and just did only things I enjoy with myself.

I need more time away from work and away from my existing routines. It’s too easy to find myself feeling trapped in the same worries and anxiety. I feel a heaviness creeping in that I associate with a lot of midlife crisis behavior. I can see the shape of the things I’ve laid down in what feel likes concrete. I need to remind myself that the concrete is an illusion. I can change my life to be more of what I want it to be at any time. I can make different decisions. I get one shot, and I shouldn’t keep doing things just because.

Am I itching for change? Maybe. So much of my life is better than I hoped for. At the same time, I need to know and feel and experience how much change is still possible to give myself the confidence to adjust when it’s necessary.

I never did decide on a theme for this year. But I think maybe I have now.

I want to Lighten.

So much of my stress and anxiety comes from my desire to be able to predict everything. I’m afraid of the uncertainty when things fail or just fail to meet my expectations and how I imagined things would be. The things that feel like the weigh me down and don’t let me make different choices– the heaviness – is imaginary. I want to find a way to feel nimble. I want to feel less anchored by past choices. I want to feel more capable of being tossed in the winds with the confidence I’ll remain aloft, just floating somewhere unexpected.

I want to accept that failing at something is not failing at everything. I want to feel like new opportunities are possible, even if I fail to get everything out of opportunities from the past.

Things can be less serious and more fun.

I need to lighten up. I need to lighten my burdens. I need to lighten my life so that I feel free to seize new things. I need to open myself up to changes that scare me. I need to lighten the pressure I put on myself and the things I care about today. I need to lighten the load I place on those who support me so that I can stand with a bit more confidence on my own.

Hi Jason,

I will likely get back into D&D soon. Once a few things settle down at work I’ll have a bit more energy to play.

Hobbies come and go. I’ve known that for a long time. I’ll have interest in one, then move to another, and another, eventually coming back to the original. Often I max out on one as it has my interest, then I move one.

I’m a couple of days late on this one. Will just make it within the month of June. Time since the Covid lockdowns has been weird. I had a keen sense of time beforehand and that has gone now. Getting older brings with it the sense of time going quicker. What I’ve lost is my sense of distance with time. An event that’s 2 weeks away feels like it’s later than something 3 months away. Makes me a little sad. Makes it hard to look forward to something.

Today has been a long time in the car. 5 hours as I headed NW to visit a couple of clients and return home. Good audiobook time. I’m listening to “Three Body Problem” off the back of the Netflix trailer. I read the book just 18 month ago and couldn’t have told you what it was about (yeah, ok maybe there is a pattern here) but the memory is returning as I listen to it. Years ago I would have dismissed audiobooks. Now I enjoy them, blending with my Kindle reading and my podcast listening. There is something different about a story being told to you. The slower pacing, even for a book I’ve read, means I often pick up nuances I missed first time around.

I will write up some thoughts on our letter writing in a separate blog post and send you a link when done.

Thanks for the conversation, David

Hi David,

It’s funny, I have been talking a lot about the Three-Body Problem lately. Must be due to the trailer. The idea of the dark forest haunts me.

I have never been able to get fiction audiobooks to click. I listen to tons of podcasts, and I can listen to some non-fiction audiobooks (sped up), but my mind drifts while listening to fiction. For some reason, it doesn’t stick, even though I much prefer to read fiction. I think it’s that slower pace causing me not to focus on details I missed, but instead, drift into the my own thoughts.

One hobby I’ve been dong a bit more of lately is cooking. Of course, I am always at least cooking sometimes. What I’m doing now is taking care when I cook. I’m not slapping cold cuts on cold bread. I’m spending that extra time making a small sauce, toasting my bread, chopping veggies to go inside of it. I’m just being a little less lazy about my food. It feels good. Sometimes I forget that it takes less than 10 extra minutes to make something that’s twice as good.

Sorry I’m late on this response.

Last weekend, this time, I was pretty certain our older dog Gracie had just days to live. She’s home now, comfortable, after 3 nights in the ER followed by a couple of days spending 8am to 6pm at the vet. She’s reached the point where she’s not going to get any better, but she’s mostly stable and seems to still have some time with reasonable quality of life. Thankfully once she was home for a couple of days and out of the anxiety of the overnight pet ER and vet, she seems to be about 80% her normal self. We have to give her fluids at home and she’s on a host of medication. But she’s eating, she still likes going for walks, and she loves us.

All that to say, I’m a bit late at least in part because other than work, the gym, and volleyball, I have done little else lately. My thoughts are, well, preoccupied.

Thanks for chatting with me in June.

Jason

Hi Jason,

My gaming took the opposite track to you in the early days. Funnily enough, games then were 2 player at best and unlike the Internet multi-player games we have now - which I tend not to play. In the days of the Commodore 64 we’d sit around and take turns. There was also a large social aspect in “swapping games”.

We were lucky to have the C64. Dad won it at work as a prize for sales I think. That wasn’t his job, but I expect in early 80’s few knew what the prize was. And it was a doozy. A Commodore 64, TV, printer and 5.25" drive.

Fair to say the opportunity was my gateway drug into my career.

I got back into tabletop role playing a year or so before Covid. I’d wanted to play again for a long time. With nobody to play with I headed into my local gaming store and asked if there was a game going. I enjoyed it very much. As an adult there was so much more I could bring to my characters. Covid and anxiety had me pull out. I was playing and DM’ing. It became too much. As a DM playing on Sunday afternoons, not thinking about the game all week until the next Sunday morning and then politely swearing to oneself is a sign of too much. I’m reluctant to get back into it because I’m concerned I’ll end up leaving again at short notice and that’s not fair on others.

I like your guitar story. Justified embellishments aside, were you that self aware of the decision at the time? I’m not sure that I would have been. Hobbies are wonderful things. We each get deep into what calls us and that’s often to the bewilderment of others. They can bring us together in weird and wonderful ways.

Two of my workplaces have had a “What was good last week?” check-in and depending on the cohort in the meeting I’m met with crazed looks or murmurs of appreciation.

Changing habits. Let’s not mention that.

Cheers,

David

Hi David,

I think my awareness on guitar went as far as this: I am enjoying playing music with friends in all forms, whether with my nascent band at the time or in jazz band and wind ensemble at school, while the video games feel less and less present to me. It just wasn’t a thing I was reaching for with my friends or a thing I much felt like talking about or engaging with anymore. My love of computers didn’t change, and this was an era of all kinds of horrible skinning you could do on Windows and futzing with Linux desktop and the like. But games just fell away, maybe because of shifts in friends or just shifts in priorities. I don’t think the awareness extended to “this is a thing I can do with my friends now” but it definitely was an awareness of “this is a thing that I love doing that energizes me, that is not”.

My early computers was not from the Commodore 64 days– I was at the very early Windows 3.11 Gateway 2000 club. The new hotness was the CD-ROM drive where I had Dinosaurs and Encarta and I spent tons of time browsing through both.

Things come and go. Sometimes I like cooking, sometimes it feels like a chore. Sometimes I like playing guitar, other times I haven’t picked it up in a few months. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it, but I do try and remind myself that these things bring me joy, and sometimes I don’t feel like doing something because I haven’t done it in a while. Sometimes, I’ve forgotten what things mean to me, and I have to force myself out of a bit of a slump. The activation energy is hard, because remembering the joy can be really tricky.

I think you should head back to the TTRPG world. Just take it easy. I have found that it was way too easy to leave things behind due to COVID that I actually don’t want to leave behind. It has taken real effort to re-introduce those habits and hobbies, but also a great reminder of why they’re important. You need to fill that bucket up. Maybe being a DM is just not a thing that you can keep doing at this stage, or maybe joining an existing campaign will make you realize how much you miss it and give you the motivation to not feel like DMing is Sunday anxiety and drudgery. Or maybe you should try something like a trading card game or board games to see if that can generate a similar joy and social connection without the pressure of DMing each week. I think part of why I have moved away from, and stayed away from, video games is because most of the games I liked were huge commitments. I just didn’t have the energy to play like that anymore, and that’s why it became a chore.

Jason

For years, folks complained as companies like Meta shut down or never provided true API experiences. They came out in a time where everyone thought APIs were table stakes and important parts of the web and demonstrated they could ignore that and make a big business.

Now that Meta is talking about building on top of existing interoperability standards, rather than praising this new era of data portability, folks are talking about taking their ball and going home.

Do we want open standards, interoperability, and data portability or not?

It sounds to me like some folks haven’t grown past their teenage anti-establishment, anti-corporate punk phase and just want to “damn the man”. To the extent that I’d like to do the same, I’d rather structurally reduce their ability to amass power and control in the first place.

Social standards and data interoperability were always the best way to do that.

I’m glad to see the old version of the new web start to emerge. I hope we’re not too childish to embrace that and see where it takes us.

I’ve been putting off a project I set for myself a few years ago where I really work on my personal narrative about my professional work. I struggle to describe my role and it’s the source of a lot of anxiety. I just realize I should just work with my executive coach to write a new résumé.

I’m not looking for a change, but I’ve been terrified that when that time comes, I will have no ability to describe what I do. I often find myself leaving huge chunks of my job out. It’s challenging because as an early employee and officer/executive, a lot of my job feels informal or at least easy to forget about. It would be a mistake to not talk about the fact that I play a role in sales and support or representing the company externally at industry conferences as a subject matter expert. I’ve also never really talked about management or leadership in prior job searches because this is my first role where I have managed people and had a formal leadership role.

After 9+ years it’s strange to think that some day I’ll do something else. At the same time, my own anxiety has me preoccupied with being worried about what will happen when that time comes. A fresh résumé with some outside help from someone who knows what I do feels like it could be an easy relief valve to crack open.

Ok, the lasagna at The Pink Door was excellent, I only wish I was hungry enough to eat the whole menu. Solo dining can be wonderful, especially when you have a view of the water, a nice breeze, and a good book. But it’s a real bummer when you’re eating alone instead of with someone who is willing to share half the menu with you.

If you ever want to know the secret to becoming my dear friend, be the kind of person who goes to a new restaurant that’s supposed to be wonderful and order as much of the menu as possible to share. In fact, order more of the menu than is reasonable.

Hi Jason,

Funny that you should say “You can’t dance with someone who walks on the floor with the purpose of making you look bad”. I think of conversation as a dance where both people have to be willing to move back and forth, even if there is a stumble from time to time. It’s also similar to something I’ve often said about trying out new things at work. “You can play by new rules if everyone insists on playing the old game.”

Speaking of games, I’ve finished playing The Last of Us Part I this week (4th time through) and have started on Diablo IV. Gaming has become much more acceptable than it was when I was a teenager in the 80’s. Still get weird stares from a lot of people, but not as many now. Like anything else it’s a hobby and I would guess closest to reading - though more interactive. During the Covid lockdowns it was gaming that allowed me to travel to far-flung places and other worlds to escape.

This week I’d like to focus on changing some of my habits. Some work for me and others don’t. My task is to identify the cues that cause a bad habit to kick in and leverage that into a new habit. There are some where it feels like the cue is just the day. “Oh, it’s Monday night so off to the supermarket for a bag of chips.”. I’ll need to be a bit more precise if I’m going to shift things in the right direction.

Tomorrow (if not Wednesday) is going to be a hard day. As a family we made the decision yesterday that it’s time to let our 15 year-old dog Sam pass on. His health has deteriorated over the last 12 months and is accelerating. Most of the time he looks miserable and pleading. Sam came to us at 4 years-old as a second time rescue dog. We believe his first owner abused him and his second was a single male who, because of the way Sam had been treated, wasn’t able to connect to him. I can understand that. For years, Sam would not even come near me. Originally an outside dog, I found out the girls had been letting him inside during the afternoon, and then swooshing him out before I came home from work. Now, he’s as indoor as they get. I’m glad we’ve been able to give him a better life than he started with. If only everyone’s life could work out that way - getting better all the time.

Regards,

David

Hi David,

It’s funny– I fit all the trappings of a gamer as a mid-30s white guy in tech who was an absolute nerd my entire life. But, I actually stopped playing games around high school. I remember selling all of my video games to buy a guitar. It didn’t feel like a statement moving away from gaming. In the past, I’ve taken creative license in this re-telling to claim that I was making some kind of move to make myself more attractive or fit in better or something in a self-deprecating way. But honestly, I was just less and less interested in games, even as an avid Nintendo Power reader and someone who woke up to play RPGs for an hour before school, and more and more interested in music. I think it was less about rejecting being a nerd– I couldn’t shed that identity with all the money, dedication, and time in the world. I think it was more about being lonely, and gravitating toward thing that were more social. Playing guitar was something I could do with my band (I started just singing and learned guitar to add that to the mix). Playing video games, at that time, was not something easily done with friends. I wonder if I would have made different choices if I grew up when online gaming and voice chat and all of that were around.

Habit changes are so hard. I have been on a mission to be more healthy since the start of COVID, really jump-started in part from my dad’s heart attack that happened in the first year of the pandemic. I’ve found it’s easier to build new affirmative habits–“start doing this”– then to discard bad habits– “stop doing that”. It’s especially true when the new pattern I want to establish takes something from being an easy default to something that requires attention, intention, and energy. Adding “start going to volleyball” is a lot easier than “stop eating a full pizza every time something bad happens as a coping mechanism”. I hope you find some success in changing your habits. I’ve made it at least part of the way, but I’m currently in a back slide. What I’m thinking about now is how I may need to do more to do less. If it’s easier for me to start something new, maybe I need to fill my time and energy with new things to crowd out what I want to stop. If there’s no time for bad habits, I won’t do them.

Letting go of a loved one is hard. I grew up with a golden retriever/yellow lab mix Martina, from the time I was about 5 until I was about 19. She had a really tough last couple of years, but I think overall had more good than bad in that time. It was very hard to let her go. When I was 24, my partner and I got a dog together, Gracie. She’s now starting to show some real signs of aging, and it’s been really hard on us. The vet visits increase, the vet bills increase, and although she’s absolutely still having a happy life, it’s also clear that there’s less quality. She’s able to do less and is motivated to do less with the passage of time.

Sam knows he is loved, and Sam had a life that was better because you and your family were a part of it. I don’t think that’s enough, but it’s something.

Jason

Jess and I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM, on I think Mallory’s recommendation, in November 2019. It was an absolutely wild and cool experience and one I thought about a lot during the pandemic. I remember thinking about how that bizarre experience may never exist again while wrapped in a bubble of fear during the early parts of the pandemic and I remember being grateful for the experience.

It’s so cool to see it continue, expand, and receiver accolades.

I haven’t read the new CREDO study, but the results are not all that surprising.

Taken from Kevin Drum’s summary:

Generally speaking, the study shows positive charter results for:

• Black and Hispanic students
• Students in poverty
• Urban students
• Schools in northeastern states
• Charter Management Organizations (CMOs)

… It’s not clear why the results line up this way. Poor urban charters are probably almost entirely Black and Hispanic, so the strong results for these groups are likely because urban charters are systemically different from suburban charters in some way. The report doesn’t speculate about what this difference might be, and I don’t have any guesses myself.

I’m more than willing to speculate.

1. Charter management organizations professionalize central office functions like school districts spread over multiple schools versus replicating administrative functions at a single site at high cost. This leads to both higher quality staff and operations and lower operational costs that allow for greater investment in student learning. Also, expansion as a CMO, in at least some states, requires a track record of success generally.
2. Northeastern states have more robust charter authorizing policies from the perspective of ensuring quality. They tend to be stricter about opening new charters and likely disproportionately have oversubscribed charters only.
3. Urban students are coming from school systems with lower absolute performance and growth is asymmetric. It’s likely that it’s easier to grow from low baselines (we see this with “most improved” on absolute scores for things like NAEP or international comparisons like PISA almost always happening in lower, absolute, performers). So improvements should be more pronounced from lower baselines.
4. The same argument for urban students applies to students in poverty and Black and Hispanic students, all being highly correlated. There’s also (in Northeastern urban charters) a reasonable likelihood of a more diverse teaching force and more direct focus on improving achievement for these specific subgroups of students (sometimes it’s a part of the process of getting a charter!).

Places like Ohio look bad because Ohio lets lots of people who have no idea how to run schools run schools with no meaningful consequences. The charters there seem to routinely go bust on financial mismanagement. Bad charter law (re: no accountability, few limits) results in bad charters.

I find discussing “charters” frustrating because the term itself lacks a universal definition. The legal structures governing charter schools vary greatly from state to state. Some of these structures are effective at producing higher quality charter schools, others, not so much. Unfortunately, each interest group involved in the charter school debate has their own agenda. As a result, their assessments of high or low-quality charter laws are often misguided. I believe charter school success should be measured by the educational outcomes they provide for students in underperforming school systems. However, the focus of groups assessing charter authorizing laws tends to be on factors like sector expansion, alternative notions of “choice” or “competition,” or even a desire to eliminate charter schools altogether.

One more thought– suburban charter schools primarily cater to students already enrolled in well-performing schools. These charter schools are established to address the specific preferences of relatively affluent parents who, for various reasons, feel that their needs are not being met by traditional neighborhood schools. For instance, in certain states (which will remain unnamed), it appears that the charter school sector exists with the purpose of segregating white students from their Black counterparts. These schools serve students who are already academically successful and, in many cases, prioritize fulfilling parental preferences that are unrelated or even contrary to educational outcomes.

I haven’t even watched the Vision Pro part of Apple’s announcement video yesterday, but this morning I cannot shake one thought.

I really hate how central our television is in our main living area. We absolutely could rearrange our household to have it be a more communal living space oriented around people and not a screen, but it would not reflect the way the members of my household live in practice today. I acknowledge that.

But I am now wondering, are we just a few years away from an experience with Apple Vision that leads to a television being largely replaced?

My living room is the best home theater I can afford, because while I’m not a fan of the casual daily television experience, I do want to turn off the lights on a Saturday night and watch Dune. Maybe some combination of Apple Vision and iPads means no one needs that television in the living room for any of our practical viewing experiences.

It is tempting to jump in now and say, “But with Apple Vision strapped to each of our faces, aren’t we even more disconnected than watching TV? Does this actually solve the problem?” To that I say that I’m unconvinced that the experience of Apple Vision won’t permit the same level of presence as shared television watching. And importantly, the fact that you can easily put it away and reorient the whole room can help adjust viewing to more of an appointment than a fallback. When the whole room is not setup to encourage falling into television, behavior change becomes just a bit easier.

Here’s a thing you should totally not do.

Manton has made an archive of the posts from App.Net (App Dot Net?) available.

Normally I’d download my own posts with something simple and fast like wget. But since I’ve been trying to write more code in Elixir, I decided to write a small script to download my posts using that.

This script is a .exs file, meaning it is not compiled, and is meant to be run as elixir adn_download.exs with one argument, your user name.

For me, it’s elixir adn_download.exs jbecker.

This will create a folder in your current directory called posts with a JSON file for each post.

I’ll probably do something to parse and make that JSON useful in Elixir later too, but for now, my Saturday-morning-avoiding-responsibilities computer time is over.

Code below in line, and also here in a gist.

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Mix.install([{:httpoison, "~> 2.0"}])

defmodule ADNDownloader do
  require HTTPoison

  @base_url "https://adn.micro.blog/"

  def get_posts(user_name) do
    url = @base_url <> "users/" <> String.at(user_name, 0) <> "/" <> user_name <> ".txt"

    %HTTPoison.Response{body: body} = HTTPoison.get!(url)

    post_urls =
      body
      |> String.split("\n")

    post_urls
    |> Enum.reject(fn post_url -> !String.match?(post_url, ~r/json$/) end)
    |> Enum.map(fn post_url -> @base_url <> post_url end)
  end

  def get_json(url) do
    %HTTPoison.Response{body: body} = HTTPoison.get!(url)

    file =
      Regex.named_captures(~r/\/(?<post>[0-9]*\.json$)/, url)
      |> Map.get("post")

    filepath = File.cwd!() <> "/posts/" <> file
    IO.puts(filepath)
    {filepath, body}
  end
end

[user_name] = System.argv()
posts = ADNDownloader.get_posts(user_name)

File.mkdir!(File.cwd!() <> "/posts")

posts
|> Enum.map(&ADNDownloader.get_json(&1)) 
|> Enum.map(fn {filename, contents} -> File.write!(filename, contents) end)