Our first long, tired day in Paris.

Via @jarrod, originally from Kev Quirk:

🔗 When Was the Last Time Tech Blew Your Mind? // Kev Quirk

The first time I sent an email was really cool. The performance and battery life of my M1 Mac was (is) very impressive; far better than any laptop I’ve ever had before. But I’m not talking about impressive. I’m talking about the kind of impression that makes you say, “holy shit, that’s fucking incredible!”

For me, it was the Vision Pro introduction. The interaction model, the visuals, and the use cases were utterly compelling, and the raw technology necessary left me astonished. Can’t wait.

Kev’s bar is pretty dang high– the first time he saw text messaging? I have had my mind absolutely blown multiple times since then. Off the top of my head:

1. The iPod Nano (more than the original iPod– I had a Archo Jukebox and knew what carrying a harddrive was like)
2. The iMac G4
3. The first time I saw the Compiz rotating cube when switching desktops on Linux
4. Opening a bash terminal on Mac OS X
5. Retina displays, but especially when they came to Mac
6. HDTV, and then again with OLED and 4K.
7. The iPhone– literally everything about the iPhone through the iPhone 5, and then again around the time of the iPhone Xish when the cameras got truly great. I remember watching cyberpunk anime in the 90s that invisaged things like the iPhone and an always connected internet and thinking that the beige computer in my household den with a dial up modem would never fit in my pocket– not in my lifetime.
8. TouchID and FaceID
9. Distributed version control systems

I could go on and on.

A ton has happened in my life time that absolutely blew my mind. Most of the time, I suspect Kev might look at the above and say “something like this could have been imagined before it existed.” That’s true! I did imagine some of this! But also, most of these things executed something I had a fictional version of in my mind that I thought was impossible– and then the real world out did that.

Jarrod, on the other hand, seems to have a bar that’s a bit low for me. I might be blown away by the Vision Pro. I kind of hope I am. But I find it hard to get excited about things I haven’t touched. Maybe that’s because I read far too much Popular Science as a kid and a lot of what I have expected to see in the world never shipped.

But what’s my actual answer?

I had to think for a bit. Funny enough, I think both of the experiences that come to mind are Apple Watch related, even though I think it’s my least important device.

The first was using Apple Pay from my Apple Watch. Double tap, no phone in sight, fastest payment experience I’ve ever had at a store. The second is using my Apple Watch with a Home Key lock. Just raise my wrist, no other input necessary, and my door opens, fast. Small, delightful, fast interactions with the physical world seem to be the technology innovations today that feel the most impressive.

I was at a conference this week that really served the rainbow for lunch.

This tree has been gorgeously overgrown for quite some time.

Caught a bit of nature before two straight conference weeks.

For all the methodologies, crappy business books, and numerous project management/product management/brain storming/planning software out there, most of it fails at deep thinking on how a product should work.

My number one tool remains a notepad and a pen. When we had an office, it was a white board and as many markers I could find that still work.

This isn’t in praise of the blank slate of analog tools. This isn’t a comment on the tactile nature of physical things. What I actually want to do is highlight a process I go through.

The most important “tool” in product management is writing things down over and over and over again until they feel right. Write down a flow chart, vocabulary words, diagrams, paragraphs, or whatever it takes to describe a problem and one possible solution and then stop. Think about how it feels. A few days later, don’t review what you wrote– do it again.

Do it again.

Do it again.

Every time I write it down, I either become more convinced that the rough edges are not so rough or I find my way to a slightly different perspective on a problem that leads me closer to the answer. The end result may look exactly like the first thing I wrote down. Maybe the language is a bit different and there are fewer squiggles as I got to my end state more assuredly. But the thought process that took me from my “guess” to my “solution” is a powerful one.

Through repeating my thought process, I become powerful at objection handling. I see the false paths I have already traveled. I become confident in the trade offs I am making along the way. I don’t know the answer to every question about what we’re about to build, but I come to believe that there are answers and that the problems which remain are relatively small. I have avoided the essential pitfalls that lead to us being stuck with no way out but to scrap all our work.

At this point, I have something damn near a “rule of three”– if I haven’t tried to work a problem from a blank page three times, I haven’t thought about it enough.

Happiness is a pickle bar.

Baltimore, where it’s 80 degrees at the end of October and the trees are doing this.

Yesterday was breezy, though you can’t tell from the photo.

New Greek place was chef kiss.

Hotels still have 30-pin connectors.

We started the second day of our executive retreat with an hour long walk in Baltimore City where we hung out with these two.

26 hours in Denver.

Not at all indicative of what my time in Jamaica was like, but this abandoned hotel (transitioning to office space) was pretty neat.

Gracie is still quite old, but having more good days than bad. The good days are not as good as they were 6 months ago, but she’s got some happy life left in her.

It makes things like what happened this morning so much more meaningful to me. She has gone through many phases of level of independence– sometimes never being ok being alone, other times liking to be on her own. When she was first getting sicker, she spent quite a bit of time alone on the second floor in the living room. She was tired and seemed less interested in everything. It was one of the signs that felt like the end was near.

Lately, while still tired, she’s spending most of her time during the day with me. This morning, even with her grandma on the second floor eating and messing around in the kitchen, when I left from upstairs to get a coffee, she followed me to the second floor. When I returned, she waited at the stairs to see if I was going up, and when I did, followed me right into my office.

She didn’t want to be pet or paid attention to– or at least she didn’t give any indications of that. She just wanted to lie down in one of her three spots (in her bed, by my feet under the desk, or across the doorway) while I do my thing.

There are lots of ways that dogs can show their love and affection. Gracie is different with Elsa than she is with me. She’s different really with everyone. Her spending time with me is the perfect way to show her love. I’ve always been a “quality time” person. Somehow, she gets that about me.

I had some heads down time working at a coffee shop this morning. When I came home, Gracie was sleeping on her bed in my office, waiting for me. It has become her favorite day time spot, whereas she used to stay alone on the couch downstairs.

All summer there’s been construction work along Falls Road. Early on in the project, I thought about how much they were ripping up the street and hoping that we’d finally get something better than a thousand bits of patchwork and properly repave the street. To my surprise, a few weeks back, they cut the telltale grooves into the street that indicated we were going to get fresh, curb to curb, asphalt.

Imagine my delight when we had new street after extensive construction.

This has only been met by sheer rage, as just a few weeks later, a new crew shows up and cuts a huge trench right down the center of the road. They have been laying down metal plates since, and I’m sure when they’re done they’ll fill it like a pot hole.

This entire road was torn all the way down for work, and no one could coordinate with the next guys? They just show up a few weeks later and fuck it up?

This kind of every day incompetence in planning and coordination by local governments drives me insane. It’s the kind of low quality services that are unacceptable at $22.48 per $1000 property tax rates.

We need people who care enough about government services to do them better.

It didn’t feel disgusting outside today for the first time in a long time.

The number of showings makes it clear as day, it’s Barbie’s world, and we’re just living in it. Nice to see a female-forward movie getting all of the time.

I’m at a bar alone. I have one non-fiction and one fiction book with me. Lethal Weapon is on one TV; Happy Gilmore is on the other.

A rare event— a new US city for me.

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

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.

After three nights in the ER, Gracie came home the other day. Her condition is not improving, so we’re moving to a different phase of care here. It seems pretty certain I’ll have very little time left with her. Our hearts are breaking.

First night with all green rings since May 27th.