My bicycle is in the shop. The chain had been skipping and also wrapping around the main cog. For $20 I replaced the chain myself, but the problem persisted. I enlisted the fine minds at the bike shop. The two bigger cogs on the crankshaft are worn out, and given the nature of how it is built, they need to replace the crankshaft. Can I do it myself? Installing the crankshaft is easy, but removing the crankshaft involves a special tool. I’ll leave it to the experts. Officially, it will be done in three weeks. Unofficially, based on prior experience, I wanted to believe three days but not everything I want to believe comes to fruition.
As far as my Garmin Watch is concerned, my exercise is whenever I track a bicycle ride. Since I am not tracking bicycle rides, Garmin has declared me a slothful, indolent creature, detraining at an exercise load of zero. Yeah? Well. I do feel a little crispier than usual about the various frustrations that come along at work!
A thought comes around: purchase a spare bicycle? As a good suburbanite family we own three cars. (The old gas minivan earns its keep a few times a year on behalf of the Scouts.) Two bikes is not so extravagant. But I’d want to kit it out with tough tires and something that can hold a backpack. Out the door for under $1,000? I met up with the Bike People the other night. Everyone has a spare bike, and the warning I anticipated: because you have a spare bike there’s no pressure to get it fixed up until your main bike needs service and now you have two bikes you can’t easily ride! Yeah I kinda figured.
Six years ago: the younger child waits for the daycare commute in his bicycle seat on the Blue Bike I Gave Away to Free Up Garage Space.
And I do have a spare bike: the big red cargo bike. But since I’ve coaxed the youngest into pedaling himself, the big red cargo bike has become a big red shelving unit in the garage that requires some “garage cleaning” to become rideable, and for the effort I get to pedal a truck of a bicycle.
And of course, you gotta check with your spouse. “I thought you already had a spare: that blue one?” “I gave that away to free up space.” So, I guess the spouse had already mentally budgeted a spare bicycle. A new pedal bike would still consume less space and weight than the old RadWagon did.
Really, I gotta find someone who wants an old bucket e-bike.
They say “infrastructure is code” – the DevOps Mantra. I say it myself.
I don’t call myself DevOps. (My employer does and I don’t argue with a paycheck.)
I write code to manage infrastructure. I am a DevOps Practitioner.
But …
I am large.
I contain multitudes.
I call myself a Systems Administrator.
Because, really:
Infrastructure is computers
Computers are largely code
Computers are more than code
There are cables and latches and screwdrivers involved
Infrastructure is also power, network, site planning, service agreements, security standards and processes and audits, recruiting, staff training, on-call schedules and standards, vacations, physical and mental health, procurement, shipping, payments, budgets. Infrastructure is so much more than code.
(On my current team we also advertise: Engineering Support services, Information Technology services, Audio-Visual services, Bicycle Maintenance, and Wildlife Removal. Multitudes!)
Infrastructure is not code; Code is infrastructure
And yeah you need to manage infrastructure resources effectively. Managing the code infrastructure means source control, automated tests, validation, pull requests, managing build/deployment infrastructure, &c.
There are cloud-only DevOps who wash their hands completely of the physical realm. All hardware is just an API. Good for them. They seem to spend a lot of time in meetings.
This is what you might see one day if you are a server who has been having an especially rough time.
For me … I’m a “full stack” engineer. Maybe I’m a full rack engineer. I have, in my career, managed most of the infrastructure components listed above. I’m grateful to work on a growing team that allows me to focus somewhat.
I keep a broad lens.
I enjoy managing infrastructure with code.
That frees up time and attention for the rest of the adventure.
I had some errands to run so I ran them on my bicycle.
The ride up to OfficeMax was uneventful for the most part. In Mountain View, El Camino has a mostly very nice protected lane. At one point where the protected lane becomes a dashed green mixing zone, a Tesla tried to merge into me so that they could make a right turn. It was slow enough that I just yelled and yelled and yelled until they stopped. Something like “HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY!!!!!” I saw everything happening and didn’t feel endangered. When you’re riding on the street, you ride with hyper awareness.
Along the way, I also managed to share a thumbs down with a Nazi-era Tesla, and even flip off the cyber cab. You know: a great ride.
An intense ride to fulfill a dull mission.
I found the pens I wanted to buy. My current favorite is a Tul fine point gel. Specifically, the fine point gel pen they sell near the register for $1.70 versus the fine point gel they sell from the pen section at 4/$10. What’s the difference? No idea! But the one in my pocket looks like the cheap ones so I stick with a winner.
Next stop was Best Buy, just where the protected bike lane ends at the Sunnyvale border. I returned a hard drive the younger son had wanted, but which proved incompatible with their frankensteined donated Linux gaming rig.
I decided to take El Camino Real just in case I saw something tasty for lunch. Normally I would not ride my bicycle on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, because there’s no bicycle infrastructure. It is a grim place to ride. But I felt it was my right.
I took the right lane, as one should. This ensures that I am highly visible, and my behavior is consistent versus riding along in the gutter and weaving into traffic whenever there’s a parked car or other road hazard. Right away, I heard honking in the distance. It was a blue Tesla purchased since Elon did his Hitler salute. The driver for which I have the least empathy. He got closer and honked some more. So I stopped. In front of him.
“Go around!” I gestured.
He put his hands up in frustration. What is going on here? This bicyclist is telling me to use one of the other three lanes of traffic!?
“Go around!”
“Go.”
“Around.”
“Fricking Nazi,” I mumbled as he merged into the next lane and I resumed pedaling. He turned right two blocks down, heading for an apartment building. For the next few lights I noticed the same gold-colored car following me. I was glad because it meant that in traffic, and with a shot of adrenaline, I am just as fast as any other car in the right lane. I sped right past The Greek Spot which I had had in mind. I was too full of speed to make room for gyros.
A Cadillac SUV honked its horn as it passed me in the next lane over.
“Fricking Slowpoke” I yelled as I rode past their open window, turning left at the next red light.
I cruised up to a four-way stop, and someone in a minivan who had the right of way tried to wave me through but within half a second realized that they would pointlessly hold up waiting traffic. I was proud of them for their awareness. They went on their way, and I resumed pedaling.
At Evelyn, near Murphy, as is often the case, some poor rideshare driver was waiting to do a pickup in the bike lane. As I do so often, I rode up to their open window, and at the volume of a bicyclist accustomed to conversing with automobiles on busy roads, explained to them that this was a dangerous situation, and that there were several parking lots and loading zones adjacent to where they were sitting. They politely agreed as I yelled “thank you for your cooperation” pedaling away towards home.
I arrived home wearing a sheen of well deserved sweat. A great ride! Time to settle in to a quiet Sunday afternoon.
A theme I experienced yesterday is the human need to make.
Justo reached into his pocket and gave me a bracelet. Orange and black, woven tight from plastic bags — the ones the men inside Alligator Alcatraz repurposed with their own tired hands, because human beings will make something out of nothing if you give them nothing long enough. They make them for each other. They make them because making something is the one thing a cage cannot take from you.
You can read about Justo Betancourt, and how our government forced suffering upon him and continues to force suffering on our “unwanted” people. The barbarity and cruelty is sadly familiar to any American who is paying attention. We each resist in our own ways. We each must maintain our own sanity.
Sam Hamper has a very nice video about how he likes to sketch things, not in order to produce content, but just because the process of paying attention is gratifying in itself. You don’t take a walk to achieve something: you take a walk because it is something you need to do. Similarly, spending time observing things is something you need to do to feel whole and human. He notes that attention is rated as a most valuable “commodity” these days, and that you don’t have to sketch to focus on the moment: but sketching is what works for him.
I likened his sketching to taking notes at a meeting. I don’t usually take notes. Most meetings I tend to be checked out. When I do take notes, they are rarely useful beyond the moment, but the habit helps me focus my attention on what is happening. Some meetings I care about.
There’s a larger thing afoot with AI. I find it to be one of several handy tools in my day job: how do I correctly iterate through a dictionary list in this context? Other folks use AI to do the job of junior engineers. That sounds powerful but lonely. I believe that if you’re going to mentor something to do the work, empowering a human to grow is amazingly gratifying. I doubt work styles like mine are going to be replaced overnight, if ever, but … as a 50 year old tech worker, I have lately taken an interest in hand tools.
Watch Rex Krueger explain how to plane a board flat. You could run that board though a pair of machines or a table saw lickety split. But there’s something enjoyable about the process. Maybe. But you have to get the right tools and you have to make them sharp. What I did manage last night was to practice sawing into the end of a few boards at an angle. I am a couple of chisels away from attempting a dovetail joint. For practice. To see if I like the process.
Surprisingly not as scary as vi. I doubt the rest will come too easily.
I have a modest collection of power tools, but the hand tool thing feels “Unixy” to me: a collection of small tools that aren’t without a learning curve, but with a little practice you can get up to speed and enjoy the work of building useful things.
Tonight is the last night for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I’ll watch it tomorrow on Paramount+. I canceled my annual subscription, which would have renewed in early June.
I never used to be a late night TV watcher. It is a nice format, though. Especially when the news has become such a grind. A friendly face samples the day’s crimes, chews a few bites into a bolus of rage, breaded in wry humor with a tangy glaze of hopeful frustration, and pops it down my exhausted, slack-jawed maw. Between All the Star Treks and Stephen Colbert, the Paramount+ subscription made sense for me. But I have watched All the Star Treks and tomorrow I will have watched All the Colberts.
Thank you for the past decades of entertainment, Stephen Colbert! I am going to miss you!
Here’s my gripe with how the show has been distributed. I’m not staying up late to watch. I’m not sure I can even get CBS on my antenna. I know we do get NBC because I “stay up late” to watch Saturday Night Live during the national broadcast at 8:30 pm Pacific. If late shows did that … I mean it is pre-recorded anyway … maybe just post the episode to the paid streaming service at air time?
… I wait until the next day. But why, as a paying customer of Paramount+, can I watch clips of the show on YouTube for free tens of hours before I can watch the show on Paramount+? Why the delay? Why? And what I would really really have enjoyed, since the show on Paramount+ has no commercials, why not let me hear the band play through the breaks? I assume that was a hassle with potential royalties if they played covers. “Move On Up” …
On Monday, they did at last let the band play on, by posting a full, un-cut episode, which you can watch for free … on YouTube. The band improvised and jammed and it was wonderful:
Oxide.computer will sell you an on-premise cloud. Type some commands into a great big computer and it will build you a network of smaller computers inside the big computer. That is an exciting idea for an old Systems Administrator like me.
Oxide recently shared their internal guidelines on using AI. Good stuff here. The LLM Anti-Patterns are especially decent: don’t mandate that anyone use LLMs, don’t shame folks who do use LLMs, and, this shouldn’t need to be said: don’t date your LLM!
What Oxide advocates is responsibility. An AI is a tool to build things. What you build represents you. LLMs can generate code very effectively, but that needs to be code you understand and vouch for. Because, at the end of the day, it is your code and you are responsible.
It is all too easy to ask AI to take away your responsibility. When the cartoon or the video clip or the email was obviously penned by an AI, we can tell you aren’t representing yourself. Is your audience not worth your time? Worse: do you feel unworthy of being yourself? We can’t see you through the slop!
At the other end are the “never AI” folks. On Mastodon I see posts float by from people who grouse every time an Open Source project reveals that it will leverage AI to expedite the unrelenting work of building, reviewing, debugging, shipping, and supporting free code. Surely, some projects will incautiously ingest “vibecoded” AI Slop, but in general, Open Source maintainers are passionate and responsible volunteers conscientiously leveraging new tools to deliver a better service to their community. We owe these folks respect and good faith.
Use the tools. Or don’t. Both choices are correct. The wrong choice is to be the tool, by letting the tool be you. Having a “relationship” with your AI is a sad move, and expecting other people to have a relationship with your AI’s slop is disappointing and creepy. Step away from the keyboard and spend some time with a kindred spirit. Head outdoors to feel the sun and the cool breeze tango with each other across your skin. You are too beautiful and too precious to be outsourced to a GPU farm.
NOTE: in the spirit of exploration, I sought feedback from an LLM, “Kimi K2.5 (reasoning)” on how to make this post more readable and engaging. It suggested some early revisions to this post, but every word remains my own.
Tagging a bug “Won’t Fix” doesn’t mean it isn’t real and it doesn’t mean nobody noticed; it means the cost of fixing it exceeds the benefit, or the fix would introduce worse instabilities elsewhere, or the system has already built so many dependencies around the bug that it’s become, functionally, a feature. Every codebase of sufficient age accumulates these. They’re documented, acknowledged, and largely left alone so the engineers can go build something useful.
Note (and this is important): you are a codebase of sufficient age.
[…]
Won’t Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you’re trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the “focused knowledge worker” spec but might be a feature in the “person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly” spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won’t Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.
I remember a quote I can’t find, the gist of which was that “prior to the advent of modern psychology, people’s personality disorders were just their personalities.” Older folks are unlikely to “rewrite” their core functionality, but you can tweak around the surfaces of the system to ensure better compatibility. We can also learn not to take other folks’ unintuitive quirks personally.
I have long noticed that I am interested in things for somewhere between three days to three months at a time before my interests move elsewhere. The light of my attention blinks in and out, so I try to bring it around like a lighthouse in hopes that the various ships can course correct before they crash into the boulders.
Anyway, even if you’re not going to rewrite your Being from scratch, you can always work at experimenting with new features. I know some folks like to try a new idea for a month at a time, and evaluate whether this new could-be habit is worth trying to perpetuate. One month is a decent time to road test an idea and also to begin forming a habit, if that is a habit you want to have.
There is a cloud of dread I can sense in the Bay Area. A shadow ahead of the Super Bowl, which will be hosted this Sunday a few miles from my house. Today it was the “nuke sniffing helicopter” zig zagging around a colleague’s house. Another friend reported that their car was searched by dogs on the way to the UPS store, as they live near the stadium. There’s a general dread of ICE and a surge of Federal Law Enforcement conducting raids while they are in town for game security. Now there are reports of pro-ICE billboards having gone up in San Francisco.
Today I headed home from the office not long after lunch, as I had some tasks to complete at the datacenter. I returned to the office for a spell because Caltrain was effectively shut down. I recognized a familiar pattern: delay due to police activity and single-tracking at the two stations in Palo Alto. I dreaded what that meant: another young person had succumbed to the worst decision they could make. The dread was later confirmed via Reddit.
Keep your eyes open for your neighbors. Ask for help when you need it. Be kind.
I heard that with the Super Bowl coming to Santa Clara, we could expect a rush of federal Law Enforcement, so I signed up for Santa Clara County Rapid Response Training. That was my Saturday morning. A room full of volunteers and a word at the start that an observer had been murdered in Minnesota the same morning. We learned a bit about how ICE has been functioning locally, and how Rapid Response works. We signed up.
Back to the house and switch to the minivan to schlep the Pinewood Derby track over to the Pinewood Derby. “Have you seen the video?” “No, and that’s just as well.” I helped set up the track, then excused myself. “I am crashing. I need to eat.”
I ate and then climbed into bed. I rested but couldn’t nap. I missed most of the Pinewood Derby. I had just run out of energy. Not a physical thing so much as a state change. National despair. I can’t explain it but there’s a good chance you understand.
I caught the tail end of the Pinewood Derby, helped pack up the track. I stopped at Trader Joe’s for some non-alcohol Hazy IPA. The Family had eaten at The Derby. I dined on candy and fake IPAs for dinner. I don’t recommend that. But that’s a Sometimes Saturday Night. We watched Saturday Night Live. No mention of Minnesota and I understand why.
Come morning I couldn’t sleep. I really like to sleep in when I can. That’s what Sunday is for, right? I got up and went to the computer. The letter E in 700 point font. Two of them. And N, D, I, and C. I taped up the old sign: END ICE. I dressed warm and headed out.
Around the corner a guy walking his dog encouraged me to be a dumbass and go get shot by federal agents. He seemed good natured about it. I walked down to the crossroads where other protests have been held. A few cars tapped horns quietly in the residential neighborhoods but as I got to crossing the streets of the main intersection over and over, many enthusiastic honks. Kind words out of windows. Hand gestures of solidarity. A ride share driver pulled over and handed me a can of Red Bull. Another man, who looked a little like a priest, beckoned me over. He had an orange juice, a Kind Bar, “a chocolate milk, for later” and a $10 gift card for the coffee shop. He thanked me for what I was doing. As a son of immigrants. Rene nearly brought the tears to my eyes.
I did my thing for about two and a half hours. My first solo protest. I think organization is generally a better thing, but when people start coming out spontaneously, the mood has shifted. I didn’t mind being alone. I wasn’t. Most folks saw past me but plenty knew that I was there for them. We don’t want to live in a country that is ruled by Fear. I don’t want that for my boys. I really want my country to be that special place where people come to escape Fear, and for opportunity. Death in the streets is nothing new, but blessing Federal Police with power to murder people at their own discretion? I can not live with that.
Walked downtown for brunch. On the way home a lady asked if there was a protest. “It was one guy,” I said. She pointed me out to the kid as an example of a good person. What made me good, in my book, was heading home to plan out and run a Den Meeting for the Cub Scouts. We talked about pets, but mainly we enjoyed being kids together.
When this post is published, I am fifty years old.
Go me!
Thanks, Mom!
This website is about thirty years old.
Go World Wide Web!
Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I have spent just over half my years in California versus Illinois. It is where we raise our kids, and where we own our home. Chicago and the Midwest will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have become one of those sunshine people who are just an earthquake away from sliding into the ocean.
Go Bears!
Thanks, California!
Our marriage, like our older kid and our mortgage, not to mention our cats, and my current job tenure, are all just over a decade old. (And the younger kid is closing in!)
I recently heard it said that your first decade is the happiest. But my forties have been really great as well. What makes a good childhood — being surrounded by loving people who support your growth — can really come back to you when you work to be a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend and a good citizen.
Buddy Guy started Down South, picking cotton, as his ancestors had done for too long. He loved playing guitar and made his way up to Chicago. Worked a long time to get The Industry to dig his sound. Got some help from the English, who were more directly inspired by and keen on promoting Guy’s rawer, more energetic style of Blues.
About twenty years ago my father came to town to re-wire the recording studio he had wired up decades previous, and they put him on the guest list at Buddy Guy’s. I joined him and his wife and we listened all through the night, moving from standing around the perimeter, as is common in Chicago blues clubs, to sitting at a table once the crowd thinned. There was a blind organist that Dad’s wife had grown up listening to. It was a long loud night. Afterward we piled into Dad’s car. The wife wanted popcorn shrimps, so we cruised through the night to a stand that sold popcorn shrimp in paper bags.
They had the original Charlie Brown Christmas on Apple TV, which is a sweet little thing I re-watched with the family. But you know what is a Christmas Movie we had never seen before? Die Hard! You know? That is an amazingly great movie. Another perfect action movie. If you haven’t seen Die Hard, go for it. You needn’t wait for Christmas.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Because it was referenced in “Americana” and because I remember enjoying it decades ago … once upon a time, a mafioso saved the life of this weird kid who was into Japanese culture. In the present day, that kid, now a grown man, lives alone on a roof with pigeons, working hits for the mafioso, His Retainer, in the spirit of the Samurai.
A gimmick in the film is when he chats with the Ice Cream Truck man, who only speaks French. They each speak in their respective languages, arriving at the same conclusion. This probably illustrates something relevant about perceiving the world beyond the limits of language. It is a fun movie and I’m glad I watched it again.
The Samurai is a way that is no longer followed, and the mafia in this movie also understands that it has lost its spirit and is also on the way out. Ghost Dog came out in 1999, when the world was changing quickly into the Brave New Digital World of today. It feels like every day, I see a bit more value in bringing back some Older Ways.
Le Samouraï
A loner hitman lives upstairs with a bird. He is very careful about his work and covering his tracks. He steals cars with ease. License plates are swapped. When a female witnesses his work, he takes no action against her. His client turns violently against him. Ghost Dog clearly drew some influence from this 1967 film, where everyone speaks French.
The Cops feature more in this film. Dogged Big City Cops. The boss detective is trying to pin the protagonist down: his alibis are too perfect. But the beautiful piano player lady swears absolutely, this is not the guy.
There’s a lot of hide and seek on the Paris Metro. And vintage French cars with headlights so dull that every not-young person would swear “aha! they have gotten so much brighter!” The plot is engaging, but the movie tends to drag a bit, in my esteem. Yeah, you’re doing a Noir crime chase but a lot of the scenes loiter too long in the dark.
I also learned that the 1967 Paris Cop term for a surveillance bug is “walkie talkie.”
The Apartment
This was playing at Alamo, but the online seat selector said there were no good seats to be had and the weather was crap so I pulled this up on Fandango at Home. 1960s Manhattan. A guy works on the 19th floor of an insurance company: a vast open sea of desks crammed together beneath a ceiling of fluorescent lights. But he has a scheme to advance his career: he makes his apartment available to executives who need a place to bring their mistresses for an hour or two.
This, of course, is a logistical hassle and often a great inconvenience. I like his apartment. Pre-war. Cozy. Nice architectural details. An air conditioner and a pathetic kitchen. Anyway, he has a crush on the Elevator Girl and as his prospects improve so to does his confidence in courting her. Of course, she’s working through her past(?) fling with The Big Boss … long story short, the protagonist comes home to find the Elevator Girl in his bed overdosing on pills. The neighbor, a Doctor, helps save her life and counsels that he needs to closely monitor her recovery.
It was a wonderful movie. Suspenseful and humane. One scene that caught in my attention is earlier when he’s trying to impress her by explaining “I know everything about you. Where you live, your family …” and he explains that he pulled her policy card to learn more about her. She takes this creeper news in stride. Either folks thought somewhat differently about privacy and ethics back then or we’re being told that her standards for decency in men have been lowered below the horizon. Point being that it can be really hard in New York to sort through all the ambitious young men and distinguish the ethical lapses of the over-eager from the bald lies of the truly rotten.
The Hospital
After “The Apartment” Fandango suggested “The Hospital.” Another hectic Manhattan workplace in 1971: a busy teaching hospital. The protagonist runs the place. The hospital is a giant complicated mechanism of endless headaches and his life and mental state are both badly on the slide.
There are people picketing outside because the hospital’s expansion plan requires the demolition of tenements across the street. At one point they have a meeting with the protestors and everybody wants something else. I have experienced enough public meetings to know that scene. Oh and it seems that maybe the medical staff are being carefully murdered.
Pairs really well with The Apartment. This time, the workplace affairs are conducted in broom closets, or, when a patient dies, in an empty bed in a room shared by a comatose patient. Young Doctors have no time for the shenanigans of Insurance executives.
Whether you gauge the temperature with an F or a C, 40-something is nasty. That’s what we had this morning. I rode my bicycle as far as Caltrain, and figured that I could dress better, but I could just as easily hop on the train, in hopes of decent afternoon weather.
Casually sloppy: all these bikes are just riding to Palo Alto.
Today was also our “End of Sprint” which is weird becauce every other Tuesday feels like a Friday? Whatever. I had things pretty well wrapped up by shortly after 3pm, and announced I would head home.
“When you bike home all the way, how long does it take,” asked a colleague.
“I dunno: about an hour? Google says an hour. But I can just ride as far as I feel then hop the train.”
I got outside into around 63F and it was amazing! So, I started to pedal, not towards Caltrain, but home. And not in a very straight line: I had time to meander. A new hobby the past couple of years has been wandrer.earth, where I gradually fill in the map with places I have walked and biked. I pull the phone out, stick it in the handlebar mount, set Wandrer to full screen, and work my way towards home, favoring “red streets” where it doesn’t know I have been.
“This charming old house could fit in my backyard!”
Gotta stop at every Little Free Library along the way. At least half a dozen. And a table of free stuff where I picked up a black light for finding the mystery cat urine. (TMI? Sorry, toots!) And of course, making extra turns and rolling down red-lined cul-de-sacs. Is that a gorgeous house? I’ll need to stop and take a picture. Never went anywhere near Caltrain: things were too amazing out there. But as I neared the house and sunset, I decided some red routes can be saved for future adventures as I would prefer to get home before dark.
“Oh no wait, this is the house, scaled down, that I want to ask an architect to squeeze into an ADU!”
Total moving time? Around an hour fifteen.
Total elapsed time? Near an hour forty.
I gotta take the road less traveled. It is a habit my loved ones mostly tolerate. That’s how you can tell they love me.
Visiting the Upper Peninsula as a kid, we spent a lot of time relaxing on the beach. One time it was told to me that there was a fine collection of Model Ts at the bottom of the bay. “Why would you try to drive across the bay,” asked I? Well, you see, folks had been used to crossing the ice on foot or wagon–it saved a lot of time versus going the long way around in the snow. Unfortunately, combustion cars are heavier than some early owners reckoned, and the ice would give way.
Driving over ice on the road, I have learned, takes a special form of sangfroid. I have recently been thinking about the will and skill with which my people of the Upper Midwest drive over ice, and of how some folks are eager to tell their own version of a story without concern for facts.
I heard on that ultra-trendy news site, NPR, that Social Media is On The Way Out in 2026. What comes next? Well, I kinda like blogs. And I’m not the only one. Joan Westenberg wrote a kick-ass piece here: The Case for Blogging in the Ruins about the long view of how sharing knowledge works and how social media kinda pissed all over things … I’m going to just drop some excerpts …
Before social media ate the internet … blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages.
When I write a blog post, I’m writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they’re interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who’s made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.
When I write for social media, I’m writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. … The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.
She explains the origins of Essays: provisional attempts to try out ideas.
Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.
I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they’ve moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. … It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.
The capacity for hot zingers like the symphonies to ringtones analogy are maybe something we can thank our social media experiences for.
She’s got some advice on what makes a good blog and how to get started, and how to address “the Discovery Problem” with the observation that blog entries get indexed and surfaced over time, where social media disappears. I have to admit, though: since Social Media came about, this humble blog has received about zero comments over the past decade. Kind of a bummer. But the quiet exploration over here in my own space beats The Monetize Everything Hate Machine.
Around the end of the year, I sort through the photographs that have accumulated, and recall Things That Happened. Here, I will share, mainly skipping things I’ve already written about this year.
January
On January 8, I attended a City Council Meeting. Thanks in part to District elections, Sunnyvale sat its most diverse City Council ever. Eileen Le explained how to pronounce her name. Larry Klein explained how, as Mayor of Sunnyvale, he had to try 23andMe (a local business) and consequently discovered his birth family, who showed up to swear him in.
For my birthday, we took an overnight trip to Suisun City, pronounced “Susan” to visit the Western Railway Museum. I had a nice time riding an interurban trolley out and back with the family, then touring a car barn, which featured 1870s New York subway cars that had been refurbished into commuter service for the Richmond shipyards in WWII. They have the last remaining original BART cars, which, due to being computerized and broad gauge, will become static museum displays.
Wooden cars built in 1872, originally pulled on the New York El system by steam engines. Electric motors and controls were installed in 1902. They were in service in New York City until they were brought to California during World War II, to provide commuter service for the Richmond ship yards.
They have a couple of 80s-era San Diego trolleys that were built in Germany, and the control panel features mysterious pictograms that don’t make any sense to North Americans. The computer systems in those trolleys will be hard to maintain. It turns out that it is easier to restore and operate very old trains, because mechanical and electronic parts can be fabricated, much as they traditionally had been across the country. Advanced electronics and computers, however, are not (yet) something that craftspeople can build in the workshop.
The more things change …
I avoided Inauguration Day but I couldn’t help but notice our tech company CEOs made a special effort to show up together to be photographed in the front row. I understand that business needs to make an effort to have decent relations with the government, but there’s a difference between not stepping on the new President’s toes and throwing yourself to the floor to Lick His Heel. What gives? Well, the Curly-Haired Harvard Kid gave us a clue by peeking down the cleavage of his buddy’s trophy wife. He reminded us that Tech CEOs are just Lonely Boys who found they had a special talent for the video game of Capitalism, which can be a rush, but typically leads to being surrounded by sycophants. It is Lonely Boys that swoon hardest for the Siren Song of Fascism. So when these Lonely Boys see that one of their own, a master of the video game of Capitalism, is now to lead the country, suddenly everything makes sense, they forget all that old WWII propaganda, and they show up front row at The Party.
Later in the month, a week after the Pinewood Derby, a fella who was too much in a hurry tried to pass me aggressively. I didn’t cooperate, and he managed to merge into our Nissan Leaf, damaging his Prius in the process. Insurance found he was entirely At Fault and gave us some money to fix the scratches in our car. It is nice to get a check in the mail, doubly so when you don’t mind a few scratches on the old car.
February
Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute. “But did he really?” Well, he was raised by White Nationalists in South Africa, and funds the White Nationalist party in Germany. His new hobby is worrying that low birth rate will “destroy civilization” … because the only group the world is presently producing in surplus are dark-skinned people in Africa. Low birth rate is a challenge for existing models of capitalism, but it is a challenge the developed world is already managing, in part by practicing more socialism. It wasn’t like I was going to buy a Tesla anyway, but March 7 saw my last purchase on Amazon. Since then, really, I have bought Less Stuff, because it takes a little more effort to find things, and those things are generally a little more expensive, generally somewhat less shady.
Nothing here about paying a monthly subscription fee for two-day shipping.
March
I upgraded our not-too-old gas water heater to a hybrid heat pump. A gas line got replaced by a dedicated electric circuit to heat the water with a lot of electricity when the low-energy heat pump fails to keep up with demand, which is rarely. The contractor helped sign up for all the rebates, because it was way more expensive to swap the gas for electric than makes any sense to me. Best I can figure is the incentives mean some crazy marked-up profit margins to encourage the contractors to become eager to help homeowners electrify. Now we’re down to a gas furnace in a mild climate, and the garage is cool in the summer and like a walk-in refrigerator in the winter.
Birthday parties for both boys: laser tag for one, and a bouncy castle and a piñata in the yard for the other. Saint Patrick’s Day at the pub. The older son is nearly Mom’s height.
April
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father in Maryland, had been snatched off the street and sent to a Sadistic Death Camp in El Salvador. Kilmar’s story has haunted me through the year, and if they can do this to him, they’ll do it to anyone. I wrote in April:
I debate whether CECOT is a concentration camp or a death camp. It is a one way trip off of this earth into a mass grave. They haven’t added the gas chambers and ovens yet. The conditions are more horrific than what I read from Alexander Solzhenitzyen and the fuck of it all is is that if you’re having to parse your national policies in comparison to the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, you’re already in deep shit.
. . . I wish I was being hyperbolic and overreacting but it feels like the United States is Wile E Coyote having run over the cliff, pausing in mid-air, then daring to look down. It isn’t a Done Deal that we have lost our Democracy and I have some Faith that we’re going to Keep It Together but I am totally freaked out.
The photo of Senator Van Hollen and Mr Abrego Garcia was a relief.
The candle we often burn at dinner, and some of the wax of past candles it wears.
The 12-volt battery in our 2023 Ioniq 6 died. Pretty straightforward, but the car asked to be diagnosed by the dealer, and the dealer took way too long to do anything because they couldn’t open the door because my wife hadn’t given them the metal key that is disconnected from the key fob and nobody at the dealer could conceive of calling the customer to help get the car open. Now I own a jumpstarter battery. Nice to have around.
I took my wife to a nice restaurant for her birthday.
Throughout the year, we have had some magnificent clouds in our Bay Area skies. Too often our skies are a plain blue for weeks on end, but this year we have often been graced with clouds worthy of the Great Plains.
The boys hunted Easter Eggs in the front yard.
May
The Leaf had been missing its rear hubcaps and I ordered replacements online. The car looks sharper now, even with its scratches. I washed the living room carpet in the driveway. The younger kid built his rocket for the Cub Scouts’ Water Rocket Derby. I took Bear Bear to work. I rode in a Waymo. I read about enshittification.
Behold our Cerulean Chariot: the replacement hubcaps help draw the eye from the rusted old scratches.
Family came to town. The elder son earned his second-degree black belt. We dealt with a flat tire on the Ioniq 6. And a flat tire on the Madsen cargo bike. We have been buying the Sunday paper at the coffee shop, because Home Delivery is inconsistent and the boys love a chocolate pastry with the Sunday comics.
I flew to Las Vegas for work.
At the Santa Clara Caltrain station I saw a line of old Caltrain gallery cars parked on a siding, acquiring layers of graffiti as they awaited shipment to Peru, where they may serve on a new commuter line running East from Lima, including a station named Santa Clara.
BART promised in our future, an old Caltrain gallery car from our past.
We went up to San Francisco to watch the movie “25 Cats From Qatar.” We played air hockey at the Pinball Museum.
June
I rode my bike down to the new Micro Center. Since Fry’s went bust, we have been lacking a superstore for geeks.
I hired a company to repaint the front bathroom, whose ceiling was overdue for some love, and also the hallway. I discovered a very cost-effective way to make the house feel more wonderful.
I am very pleased with the shade of green we selected for the bathroom, which works well with the shower curtain and rugs.
On a Saturday, I marched up El Camino Real to protest President Trump, and then Sunday rode the train to San Francisco with the boys to watch “The Neverending Story” at the Roxie and then visit with college friends.
Pink was a bold choice for the hallway but I think it works really well. I painted the interior of the closet door frame myself.
I visited the Golden State Model Railroad Museum in Richmond. Solo. I enjoyed the model trains, wandered through the park, then down along the abandoned tracks along the shore to where the trains once loaded onto the San Francisco ferry.
July
I purchased the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy for the older son to read at Scout Camp. He enjoyed it. I purchased Reamde for myself, which I finished later in Tennessee. For my money, Adams beats Stephenson.
I drove scouts up to Camp Wente and stayed with them for the week. I wanted to get away from the news and while there is a wifi at camp it is weak and slow. A temptation easily resisted. I hadn’t been to Scout Camp in this century or in this time zone, so I was eager to see what was different and familiar. Same canvas tents, but no cots. The baseboards were flat plywood and comfortable enough with an inflatable ground cloth. Private showers!
The food was better than I remember. Tasty and filling. Camp Wente was pretty similar to Camp Blackhawk at Owasippe. Similar dining hall overlooking the lake, Flag ceremonies, enthusiastic staff, and scouts walking across camp to various activity areas, including the same little swimming skills chit cards and rigid check-in/check-out at Aquatics.
My older son taking aim at the archery range.
I signed up for a class for the week, brushing up on outdoor skills, but mainly to socialize. Among other things, I learned the basics of Dutch Oven cooking and a simple recipe for peach cobbler. At one point I was chatting with the woman who ran the dining hall, and she started showing me her stickers and talking about her craft projects and that is when I realised that Scout Camp is almost entirely run by Young People. Young People doing a good job of Running Things. Hell yeah!
I had plenty of idle time and I spent much of it catching up on print magazines. At one point I heard a small animal crying out in alarm. I looked up to see a raptor carrying a ground squirrel in its talons, maybe twenty feet ahead of me over the coast of the lake. The ground squirrel was crying out, venting their objections to the Universe, as the raptor flew towards a suitable lunch perch. Another time I was walking down a dusty camp road when a doe stood before me, and one of her young started butting her abdomen with its mouth. I guessed correctly: nursing time! She stamped her foot and another kid came running out of the bush and the siblings nursed together as Mom looked around. A scout coming from the opposite direction also paused for a moment before the meal break concluded and the deer continued along towards the lake.
Better than a wide-screen TV.
The animals at Camp Wente seemed really calm around humans. I credited that to the Scouts being good guests.
Conservation arises from the perennial human desire to dwell in harmony with our neighbors–those that creep and fly, those that swim and soar, those that sway on roots, as well as those that walk about on two legs. We seek to make a good and lasting home. We strive for a way of life that our descendants will look back on with gratitude, a way of life that is worthy of our magnificent planet.
Scott Russell Sanders
Back in the Bay Area, Google decided they can’t support a thermostat for more than ten years, so I replaced the Nest with an Ecobee. Ask me about this in 2035.
August
We have had a low-key problem at work: we bang a gong to announce A Deal at our All Hands Meetings, but Zoom tends to squelch the gong with its white noise filter. The solution is to toggle “original sound for musicians: on” when they reach for the Gong, to disable filtering, then turn the filtering back on for the rest of the meeting, because our office is a noisy little warren.
Grandma inspects a historic church at Great Smoky Mountains NP.
We flew to Tennessee to meet up with family to celebrate my mother’s 75th birthday at a rental lake house. The time spent with family was wonderful. Tennessee is wonderful and problematic. Some impressions:
I rented an electric car at the Knoxville airport because it is 2025. The guy looked up my reservation and noted that I had requested a four-door pickup truck. Twenty minutes later he convinced the computer that the Ioniq 5 that the system had reserved for me was indeed reserved for me and I was relieved I wouldn’t get to drive a Tesla for the week.
We rented this gigantic house for the family. It was in an exclave of rental houses from different companies. We noted the “Minuteman” rentals each had a different logo of a different patriot with a different gun.
The house had beautiful balconies looking out over a cliff at the lake. I grabbed the balcony rail and gave it a good shake and found it was super wobbly and advised the kids to stay away from the balcony rail. All the houses in the area were built on sharp sandy slopes and I wonder how many years they will stand before The Storm comes through and wipes several into the lake.
We drove to North Carolina for a train ride. There was kudzu covering much of the forest along the excursion route. The conductor explained that they once brought the kudzu in from China, and like the Chinese, it was difficult to remove. I left a one-star review along with a note that while kudzu is Chinese, the US imported it from Japan.
After the train I drove the car to a fast charger that had a QR code to download The App from a European website, that said The App was not available in the United States. Twenty minutes on the telephone and the car was charging. We ate lunch at a place that was still opening, so the menu was limited to what they could prepare in the food truck. Tasty enough. Down the hall my younger son let loose an impressive scream from the bathroom, as the porcelain sink had fallen off the wall and shattered at his feet. He was uninjured but WTF?
There was an Exotic Petting Zoo which had a building full of parakeets who would climb all over you. That was great fun.
We drove down to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, just for a scenic loop through a historic community. Two churches, and a water-powered mill. There is a house that demonstrated the earlier “log cabin” construction along with an extension built from wooden planks once they got the sawmill going. We saw deer and bears, including a couple of cubs who got to playing with each other a few feet from the road.
We went to a fancy tea place, which was a nice time. My Uncle asked for a straw, and the lady informed him: “this is a straw-free establishment.”
The guy running the roadside BBQ stand was very nice, and he had the tiniest pupils I have ever seen in anyone’s eyes.
A few weeks later the rental car company sent me an email that I would be charged for damage to the car. I wrote back requesting an explanation and some evidence. There was an invoice from a towing company for $45 to repair a tire. Plausible enough and a lot less than I figured.
The greatest treasure was time spent with family.
Window seats are the coziest.
September
The family spent a few hours sitting along El Camino as part of a No Kings protest. We got Pizza My Heart afterwards.
A Conservative Intellectual famous for aggressively debating Liberals was explaining that Gun Violence should really be seen as a problem of Gang Violence. He was then shot to death in front of his audience.
We watched “Little Shop of Horrors” at the community theater.
I got new glasses at a new place. The optometrist talked me into trying progressive lenses. I tried for a week and it was awful. Basically, there’s two places you can look where your eyes might be able to focus nearer or farther and everything else is like trying to peek through a dirty fishbowl. I had them replace the lenses with a normal prescription and now whenever I need to look close I either slide my glasses down to the end of my nose or I just take them off and get a little closer.
Anyone looks good in front of the right tree.
I switched to using Kagi as my search engine. It is like using Google in the old days, before ads. Just results, lickety split. They figured out an alternate revenue model: you pay $5/mo. That might retard the usual corporate slide towards evil. It has all the bells and whistles, including the ability to run questions through an AI. I still use Google Maps for its purpose. Of course, I can not remove or configure the Google Search function on my Android phone, so there’s a Kagi Search just above. A/B testing: I have noticed that searches through Google are followed with targeted ads and content on various websites, while searches through Kagi … don’t. One’s online experience is a little closer to “the world” than a personalized bubble.
The Corporate Offsite was held in Santa Cruz around when Jimmy Kimmel got canceled. The family has stayed in Santa Cruz a few times, at a motel across the street from the beach, but the offsite was at the hotel on the beach. It was a good time and I especially enjoyed sitting at a little campfire on the beach as the sun set.
One day I was walking down the street between my house and downtown, when I saw a vehicle coming my way that looked like a cop car, but didn’t have the lights. I kept my gaze on it, trying to see if they had any lights in the grill. Could this be ICE? Doubtful … but something felt Off about the whole thing, and I watched it drive past me, then circle wide at the light in a manner that implied swollen testicles. The car came up alongside me on the other side of the street, and the lone guy gave me his best menacing look through the glass. Okay, douchebag. He then sped off back towards downtown. I watched as he went, wondering if he was going to take another street to circle around back up into our neighborhood, but no; Whatever had happened between us he had changed his mind, at least for a moment, about doing whatever it was he intended to do in our neighborhood.
For Transit Month, one Saturday I joined a “walk audit” which was a volunteer effort to get folks to walk different routes through the neighborhood and identify sidewalk problems. After that, I tried the cobbler recipe that I had previously tried at Camp Wente in my new Dutch Oven, and shared the results with friends and neighbors at the block party.
The next weekend we had a great time with the Cub Scouts at Mount Madonna, despite damp weather. I made the Dutch Oven cobbler again. We must have counted a dozen banana slugs on our hike.
October
We got new enclosed garbage bins on Murphy Street.
I saw a clip online from Chicago. A man rides his bicycle up to ICE agents in an alley and one agent pulls a gun on him. People in the apartment building yell at the agents to go away, and they stand down and leave. The alley looks familiar, but don’t Chicago’s alleys all look pretty similar? I pulled up an address in Google Maps and yes indeed this was the alley behind my Aunt’s condo. She said she had heard yelling but hadn’t gone to check. I am really proud that my home town does what it can to Resist.
The new protected bike lanes on El Camino in Mountain View and Palo Alto are amazing and wonderful!
I tried the new protected bike lanes on El Camino in Mountain View and Palo Alto. They are a very nice direct route up and down, except trucks, especially FedEx, will block them entirely because the green paint and bollards obviously mean “loading zone.” Also, they don’t exist in Sunnyvale. A modest consolation is that our stretch of Evelyn beats the stretch in Mountain View.
An inconsiderate FedEx driver easily blocks the wide protected bike lane. You can’t fit around the truck without riding either on the sidewalk or committing to a traffic lane on a state highway until the next curb break.
One Saturday, the younger son and I caught the tail end of a protest along El Camino. He ran into a classmate and they sat together on a lawn chair sharing an iPad as drivers passed, honking in solidarity. The next day the Cub Scouts enjoyed their first Raingutter Regatta.
We went to the Western Railway Museum Pumpkin Patch event. It was great fun. You ride an old Key System Bridge Unit to the Pumpkin Patch, where there’s a straw bale castle, pumpkin chucking, a wagon ride, and other festivities. In my book, everything is better with a train.
November
In California, we voted to Gerrymander our Congressional Districts for five years. That sucks but we fear not counter-Gerrymandering Congress would be even worse.
I learned that T-Mobile had contributed to the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, so I switched to AT&T wireless. I also switched our Fiber service from Sonic.net to AT&T. Nothing against Sonic … the service I had been paying a premium for was an AT&T overlay … a service Sonic has since stopped offering … which came with its own support issues. When Sonic rolls out local fiber, I assume I’ll switch back. For now, my bill is down and my bandwidth is up.
When I drink at home, it is usually non-alcoholic.
We wrote a vacation-sized check to the local food bank to offset the withheld SNAP benefits. We also Scouted for Food as we do each year.
On Murphy Street they installed ADA access ramps in the curbs and then began re-laying the cobblestone paths that connect the ramps in a different color of paver. The guy at the coffee shop wondered if they couldn’t just paint the street for a lot less money, then I figured the city probably got a funding grant that required and paid for the change.
We took a family bicycle ride on the bay near the SMART station. The youngest still balancing on his bike, not yet pedaling. After that outing, he became motivated to master pedaling, and he has since become a full bike rider.
The youngest kid begins pedaling. I managed to catch the moment on video.
We went down to Santa Cruz for Thanksgiving. Splurging on the beachfront hotel where we had the offsite, eating dinner at the regular place. We saw butterflies and explored the tide pools and somehow neglected the arcade.
December
I watched as the city re-paved Evelyn and continued with the pavers on Murphy Street. Zareen’s has not yet reopened in place of Murphy’s Law, but soon? I figured out that both the squirrels and crows that enjoy our yard like to collect tasty bits of trash, probably from the adjacent school, and then drop the remains on our lawn. The crows favor foil.
Puma guards the Christmas tree.
We put up a tree, and hosted a holiday party. I helped with the holiday lights bicycle ride which was up in our neighborhood this year. Grandma flew in to spend Christmas with us, and I took sufficient PTO around the holidays to finish writing this. What do you think: was the time well spent? Hit Like and Subscribe and thank you as ever for your support on Ko-fi and Patreon!
