I saw a beautiful Cybertruck this morning. It belongs to a neighbor a couple blocks over. It is one of a few licensed liveries the neighbor drives. I had seen him washing it earlier and when I came back around it was glistening in the sunlight. It has a wrap that looks dark green at first but it also glistens in the sunlight, and shifts color as you pass by. This morning, there was a vivid pop of color because a few autumn leaves had come to rest on the shining clean windshield. I stopped and snapped a few pictures.
I don’t like the Cybertruck. They’re dumb. But they’re so over-the-top dumb that they’re kinda charming. Like a pug. Those poor dogs who got bred by dumb humans to look so dumb they can’t breathe. But there’s an accidental beauty in the stainless steel. The stainless steel is among the dumbest aspects of the Cybertruck because it stains at the tip of a child’s finger. Anyone who buys a Cybertruck needs to get a wrap from the aftermarket. That means that every Cybertruck has to be done up in its own personality. These rusting toasters of Brutalist uniformity by their very nature are forced to become objects of individual expression.
CyberTrucks are dumb, and as a result, they are sometimes beautiful.
2025-11-05 Wednesday
I have been in the process of disentangling from Big Tech. I’ve been wary for some time. It was Elon’s “Roman Salute” that left me done with buying stuff on Amazon. Shopping around is a little more effort but that and not just buying random stuff when it pops into my head are both gratifying. Less crap.
A few days ago I took the step of deleting social apps from my phone. Discord, Blewski, Mastodon, Reddit, all back up on the shelf of sitting down at a terminal. More time in my own head to work ideas through. Less clutter.
The monkeys are being peeled off my back. I feel a bit more like myself again. I start to feel like thing are more possible again. Let’s keep the feeling going. More life.
As I walked this morning I recalled an informal life goal had been days where I could spend a little time at the coffee shop, then hop on the train to work. I have this now. I am typing these words at my favorite cafe as my coffee cools. Some days I meet a friend for coffee and those are the best. It took time to get here. A tech job where their greater concern is that the work get done, not that I’m present at an office at a particular time. A home not too far from the train station: a bit under 20 minutes to walk. The final piece came, ironically, with the Pandemic, when management saw fit to downsize from a large suburban office site with ample parking to a hole-in-the-wall near the Caltrain. As a Pandemic Parent, though, I Work From Home three days a week, though I have been spending more of those mornings at The Office as well, to help our growing team find its speed.
Some days I make a new friend or two. Thanks to Rutvij and Amin, the above paragraph took somewhat longer to write, but I still made it to the office at a good hour.
The blustery wet weather and a degree of giddiness from last night’s election have made the morning feel like anything is possible.
Train Dreams
I saw the movie “Train Dreams” this weekend. I dragged the family to a small, nearly-empty theater. It felt like something that deserved a theater screen. It is the story of a guy with no family, who grows up in Idaho near the turn of the last century. He finds purpose when a woman introduces herself to him. They build a cabin by the river and have a daughter. There’s no work to be had in town so he’s a migrant lumberjack. Heading out each season to bring down old growth trees. It is hard being away from the people he loves.
One job with the railroad really turns him off future railroad jobs. When he was young, the Chinese had been forcibly removed from his town. Yet when he was out working, “he enjoyed the easy kinship” among men, whether they came from Shanghai or Cleveland. One day he’s sawing a tie with a Chinese guy and some motherfuckers come around, grab the man, and throw him off the bridge. The man’s face lingers in dreams for the rest of the protagonist’s life.
My grandfather grew up in a sod cabin in Montana, his father a Swedish homesteader. Grandpa wasn’t thrilled with the life out there so he rode boxcars to Chicago, and made a new life with his mother’s English name. There was a story I learned from that side of the family, in Upper Michigan, where logging is a major industry, of a relative, a young man, who got crushed to death by logs that had fallen off a truck.
The movie was filmed last year but to see Americans as migrant workers, amid racial violence … the history of a hundred years ago feels fresh. There’s a very soft-spoken scene near the end of the movie, when he visits a “big city” and sees men in a space capsule on a color TV in a store window. He’s never used a telephone. “What’s this?” he asks the woman next to him. “They’re in outer space.” He then notices their reflection in the window, and she confirms they are seeing themselves. It had been a decade since he’d bothered to look at himself in a mirror. The woman is Asian.
The story is of a guy who lives an unremarkable life that is in keeping with his time. I enjoy the human time machine. “Barry Lyndon” and “Lawrence of Arabia” are movies of men living noteworthy lives. “To Live” and “A Man Called Ove” are similar portraits of unremarkable men. Also in the theme is “Ikiru.” Both “A Man Called Ove” and “Ikiru” have been remade in English. “Ikiru” means “To Live” and the Western version is “Living” which is all to say I am not the only person who enjoys this genre. Even if the small theater is empty when I go.
Bicycle Dreams
2025-11-15 Saturday
I feel that a lot of folks are upset that a few Democrats ended the Shutdown. I share some disappointment. I think the aviation delays coming into the holidays would have created a lot of pressure on the Republicans to make a compromise. Instead the Democrats who signed a deal put their party on a tactical retreat: President Trump was eager to hold back food from poor people for political leverage. (Just in case you haven’t already seen that he is evil.) So, the compromise is we’ll pull back on Healthcare for the moment, and in exchange, SNAP is funded through September, and the government through January. Come January, if the healthcare subsidies haven’t been fixed, there will be a crisis underway for 22 million Americans, and nobody need go hungry when the Democrats stand firm.
Republicans, for their part are like “gee we want people to have heath care but we have to do something about the growing expense! Obamacare is fundamentally flawed! We have to reform it somehow, which we have been promising for the past decade. We have sketches of an idea of how we might could do that.” And I’m like “yeah … Obamacare is what you get when you insist on having for-profit companies stay in the middle of the healthcare system so they can figure out how to save money. You could of course have a ‘public option’ but the private companies (supposedly infinitely superior to the government) said there was absolutely no way they could compete with the Federal government …” Which is to say, the rest of the world seems to have found ways to moderate healthcare costs and the answer is Socialism.
I know a guy whose health insurance premium for next year is set to go up $30,000. My hope is that by March some deal has been worked to end the First Government Shutdown of 2026 that fixes his out-of-pocket costs. But, whomever is paying for it, a family’s health insurance should not be that expensive! Reform is needed, but the current political class isn’t going to deliver it. The best we can continue to hope for is that the government throw money at the problem until we eventually elect decent leaders.
Here’s the deal. I have fancy private enterprise health insurance. One of the local clinics has a soaring central atrium crowned by a Chihuli sculpture. I think there is a decent case to be made that art and positive aesthetics are healing, and maybe Chihuli cuts a deal for a medical facility, but the extravagance, while nice, seems wasteful. I also visit my wife where she works, providing government healthcare to low-income people. There’s no Chihuly. Just the grim cost efficiency familiar to anyone who has spent some time in government services.
There shouldn’t be two systems: one for the wealthy and one for the poor. Whether you write code or hang drywall, you ought to be able to go to a reasonably nice facility and receive the same quality of care. Why is this not the case? For much of our history, Americans have been taught that while “all men are created equal” also “not really” because someone has to pick the cotton and someone else needs to be removed to create new farmland for the settlers. This is why, so far, we can’t have “socialism” — because some people are less.
What the immigration raids are showing, though, is many, and maybe most Americans no longer hold that broken truth to be self-evident. The awareness is growing that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights: among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We need our political leaders to catch up with this.
But equality isn’t a concept the elites like. Opportunity for All may be great for economic prosperity but it is no way to sustain the political power of an Oligarchy that writes the checks that fund the elections.
America, we totally can have nice things open to all!
I am a successful IT professional. I got my start in the 90s, answering phones at an independent ISP and getting folks online with their new modems. This was a great age when folks had a choice of any number of Internet SERVICE Providers who could help them get up and running on AT&T’s local telephone infrastructure.
To this very day, I use the DSL option available from the local Internet Service Provider (Sonic) over AT&T’s wires. I use this despite the fiber optic cable AT&T has hung on the pole in front of my house. Fiber would be so, so much faster, but I’m not going to pay for it until I have a CHOICE of providers, like Sonic, who has always been great about answering the phone and taking care of my Internet SERVICE needs.
Competitive services were the foundation of my career in IT. I believe they were a strong foundation to get Americans online in the first place. Competitive services are, in my opinion, REQUIRED, if you want to get Americans on to modern network technology today.
Yesterday, on Martin Luther King Junior Day, a national holiday, Black Lives Matter protesters briefly shut down the San Francisco Bay Bridge in one direction. I smiled at that. A traffic snarl on a holiday commemorating a great activist caused by today’s ambitious activists: what is not to love?
But today on the drive in they were discussing it on Forum and people kept calling in to complain about how yeah sure they support black people and they think it is okay to protest but not, heck forbid, if it is disruptive. “Who do these people think they are? They’re not going to win me over with tactics like that!”
“Hooray for Our Side”
Dan Brekke, also of KQED, posted a piece with some historical perspective, and recounted how his Uncle Bill Hogan, once a Catholic Priest, had participated in a very similar protest in Chicago, blocking a highway into the city, on a Tuesday, May 9, 1972. He remarked that the Vietnam War ultimately ended, but that the protest in question was only one of very very many.
I got to thinking of the first time I ever engaged in a protest. Just a few days over twenty five years ago, on January 16, 1991. To quote an article by Charles Leroux in The Chicago Tribune:
“Cara Brigandi, 16, a junior at Lincoln Park High School, said she led a movement of Lincoln Park students to walk out of school and protest. Organizers gave students their marching orders when they came to school Tuesday morning. Fliers were passed out urging students to leave classes about 10 a.m. That effort mushroomed into a march down North Avenue to Lake Shore Drive and then to the Loop. Along the way, Lincoln Park students say they picked up students from the Latin School of Chicago, and William Jones Metropolitan High School. By about 12:30, approximately 200 students were in front of City Hall.”
I remember getting the flyer at the school door. I remember that moment when the time came and every student had to ask themselves whether they were going to stick with class or step outside. I remember looking out the window to see a growing crowd inviting us to join them and then the moment I decided to join other teenage kids running down the stairs to break a first taboo. After some cheering and whatnot, the crowd headed down the street. The cops managed to break the crowd in two, with the folks in the back returning to school. Those of us toward the front were soon walking through a Chicago winter day down a highway on-ramp and on to Lake Shore Drive: two lanes of students, one more lane of police cars, buffering us, and another lane of mid-morning traffic squeezing by, many cheering us on.
“Hell no, we won’t go,” the protesters chanted. And: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your (bleeping) war. Five, six, seven, eight, we will not cooperate.” Among the crowd were many non-students who had protested the Vietnam War. With that war, “it took years before there was this kind of protest,” said Lester McNeely, 37, of Oak Park, a member of the West Side Peace Coalition.
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
I’ve come a long way from being a chanting high school kid walking down LSD … I own a house in the suburbs!? I guess I’m in a place where I can suggest to others of my social class that there is a time for order, but there is also a time for action, however messy, disorganized, inchoate, and perhaps even self-defeating.
If it is Martin Luther King Day, and your trip across the Bay Bridge from the Chocolate City of Oakland into the Liberal Mecca of San Francisco gets delayed by people who are angry about cops murdering black kids, well, I would suggest that whether you agree with the protest or not, this is a perfect time to roll down the window, raise your fist in the air, and express your opinion.
Today marks the completion of the 40th trip of this body around the local star. A momentous milestone for the resident being. I spent the weekend with my wife and son, riding the train down to Santa Barbara and back, a pretty little beach town where we visited the zoo and ate ice cream together.
Most likely, I’ll be around another 40 years, or more, but really: who knows? Every day I wake up with my health and my loved ones is a blessing.
The trip has been good. Tommy did pretty well, and the scenery along the way has had a lot of that intense emerald green the dry parts of California get after some good winter rains. The view along the coast near Santa Barbara is worth the long train ride.
I am grateful to be alive. I am grateful for my family. I am grateful for my friends. I am grateful for my job and ability to earn a living. I am grateful to be living at what honestly seems to be a very promising time in the history of our species. Life will not always be so great for this being, and in time, my life will end. I am grateful for the time I have had, and the time I have yet, and that I get to experience a little part of our collective adventure.
We had company over Wednesday evening. Friends of the family who have cat-sat for us. They brought dim sum. After dinner we sat around chatting. I got a call on my mobile from a 408 number. I took it.
“Are you the owner of Maxwell?”
“I am. Is he causing trouble?”
It was the opposite. I grabbed a cardboard box and hustled down to the corner, where a small crowd had gathered. The woman who had called me said he had been standing in the street, looking the other way, when the car hit him. He died instantly. She removed him from the street and found my number on the tag. We hugged. She was obviously a cat person, who was glad that he had a collar, a bell, and an identification tag.
I brought him home. He rested briefly where his feline companion Maggie took a last opportunity to groom him. The young woman who drove the car and her father came by to express their remorse and see if they could make amends, but there was nothing to be done. The young woman was in tears. She wants to be a veterinarian. The Father remembers dogs who had been lost to cars. We agreed that the Humane Society might receive a donation. We shook hands several times. What a way to meet the neighbors.
Maxwell napping in the front yard in June.
In the back yard, a shallow grave was dug. Maxwell was wrapped in a familiar fabric, and lain to rest. Words were said.
It will take some time to feel his absence and truly mourn his departure. He might have lived a much longer life as a house cat, but he loved the outdoors and was well known in the neighborhood. He lived as he chose and while his end was violent, it was swift and he did not suffer.
Earlier this week, Yahoo! unveiled a new and improved Flickr! !! A radical new redesign, which, while kind of slick to look at, totally steamrolls all the narrative features that many Flickr users like me love. Time will tell if Yahoo will backpedal enough to let us old-timers see our photos in the ways we like. Given that the new business model appears to be ditching the user subscription model for ads ads ads I am not optimistic.
Tommy smiles at his father photographer.
Enter Iperntity, a 7-person outfit in Cannes, FR which appears to have cloned the Flickr interface back in 2007 and have since moved in the direction of building it into a site where you not only manage and share your photos, but you can also write stories, and keep track of the friends you have on the site. Basically, a little outfit building something like Flickr into what Flickr might have become had Yahoo! not spent the past decade neglecting it. In a way, it is even giving us the core sharing features that people like about Facebook, without all the skeeviness. (Or … critical mass.)
I miss the nice drag-and-drop web uploader that flickr recently launched
The site feels a bit short of snappy … not dog slow, just not snappy … to be sure, they’re seeing a spike in load
The first thing that really makes me smile is that by default the photo lists the date taken, rather than date uploaded … that always frustrated me about Flickr
I of course opted for their 3-month paid service. Once the Collections feature comes online then I reckon there is a very good chance I’ll migrate my data from Flickr and sign up for their two year plan.
It is just nice to discover that there is new technology waiting in the wings when the big megacorp decides to shoot its product in the foot.
I have been excited to see what might come of Yahoo! with Marissa Meyers at the helm. I am really glad to see that, after years of stagnation, Flickr has been improving. Free food and smartphones for employees? Sounds swell. But the buzz now is that there shall be no more remote work. The only way to be productive is to come to the office and feel the buzz and bounce ideas off coworkers.
I am happy to point out that, while we don’t get free smartphones or free food, my employer does issue remote employees with a hardware VPN device that provides corporate wifi, and a videophone. And we are hiring.
In my experience as a non-management technical professional, there is some virtue both to working from home, and to working at the office. The office presents great opportunities for collaboration: working through ideas and solving problems. Working from home, for some people, provides an excellent space to focus on getting some work done without interruption. You can get more hours of productive work when your commute is shortened to a walk across the dining room, and when there’s no pressure to quit at a certain time to appease the demands of the train schedule or traffic.
For some people, there’s no place like the office . . . some people can do better work from home, some people do not. Managers and executives, the bulk of whose work is meeting with others to make collaborative decisions . . . it seems that they may take several meetings from home and when they get to the office they feel uncomfortable that the busy hum of productive creative energy isn’t located there. I believe that managers who can structure the working and communication practices of their teams to effectively collaborate and track work progress without requiring a physical presence have an advantage over those who can not.
I live near the office and frequently collaborate with my manager, so most days I make the trip in. Sometimes when I need to focus on a project, or work with a remote time zone, I’ll commute to the home office. I have been with Cisco for over five years, now. I spent one of those years in New York, and my tenure here would have been much shorter without the flexibility to telecommute.
Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the Internet’s birth. First word was LO:
And then, he shows us the world’s first router, which they were going to throw out:
My first experience of the Internet was a 1200 baud dialup connection to a USENET host that connected upstream twice a day at 2400 baud. That would have been around 1992 or 1993. (I was a broke highschool kid who couldn’t afford the $30/mo+ for a proper Internet connection.) My first email address was dannyman@netwrk21.chi.il.us, and I lost that address when my network uplink failed to pay his phone bill. Oh well!
When I started college in January, 1995, and had access to labs and labs and labs of computers directly connected via Ethernet, with Mosaic and Netscape installed, it was like I had found my Nerd Nirvana! It only got better when I took a C programming course on the Sun workstations in the basement of the DCL . . .
Danny walks with the Chaplain into the wedding ceremony.
There are of course way better photos of our wedding day, but this one was taken with my camera, by my Uncle John, who even as a groomsman can not resist the urge to snap some photos.
Also, I don’t have to persuade the wife to post any photos of her that are less than perfect to her eye.
Dad gives a thumbs up from the driver's seat of a VW bus I rented on Oahu.
Some of my fondest memories of my Dad involve long expeditions in a VW bus. I rented a VW camper bus for a few days on Oahu, and had him pose. Given Dad’s health challenges these past years, to see him make it to Hawaii for the wedding and to enjoy the scenery in an old Volkswagen . . . that’s a good time.
Some folks are irritated with American reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden. Julie indicated that she had mixed feelings upon seeing our “own countrymen basically holding a frat party outside of the White House, hanging off of trees and singing ‘Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye!'” I have heard others moan that this doesn’t change anything, why are we celebrating?
So, I expressed my own feelings in a comment on Julie’s blog:
I was happy about the news yesterday, and I still am. We killed a bad guy who has devoted his life to killing us. That is a victory, and I am proud and glad.
When the crowd outside the White House gathered and sang the Star Spangled Banner, it brought a tear to my eye. Then, America the Beautiful. People gathered at Ground Zero for a candle light vigil. In both places, the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” They spoke for me.
I think it is debatable who kills the most Muslims. Our military adheres to Rules of Engagement that put them at greater risk in order to protect Muslim civilians. On the other hand, extremists recruit the young and naive to walk into crowds of Muslims wearing explosive vests.
We are not perfect and we shouldn’t pretend to be. We make mistakes, we kill innocents, and we have failed to hold ourselves to our own standards of humane treatment of prisoners and jurisprudence.
We are drawing down forces in Iraq, which has changed from a brutal dictatorship built on terror to a messy, unstable, imperfect democracy vulnerable to sectarian violence. We now have one less reason to linger in Afghanistan, which may help motivate the government there to get its act together.
Last night was progress. America done good and a bit of pride is perfectly reasonable.
-danny
I mean, its no Moon Landing. No sincere attempt to curb global warming or end world poverty, hunger, disease . . . but it is progress and I’ll celebrate it just the same.
You never forget your first computer.
For Christmas of 1984, Grandpa gave us a
Commodore 64. A couple years later we
got a disk drive, and eventually we even
had a printer. Before the disk drive we
had to buy programs on cartridge, or
type them in to the basic interpreter
line by line. Mostly I just played
cartridge games.
Eventually we got a modem, and I could
talk to BBSes at 300 baud in 40 glorious
columns. (Most BBSes assumed
80-columns.) I was happier when I got a
1200 baud modem for my Amiga, which
could display 80 columns of text.
In my second year of college I
discovered the joy of C programming on
Unix workstations, which led to my
present career as a Unix SysAdmin. I
spend my days juggling multiple windows
of text, generally at least 80x24. /djh
Fans in Mountain View Celebrate India's World Cup Victory
As I was walking home from the cafe I encountered a growing crowd of shouting, chanting, singing folks waving Indian flags. I googled “Indian Holidays” on my smart phone, then thought to google “India cricket” and it turns out India has just beaten Sri Lanka to win the World Cup.
In my Sophomore year of college I was paired with a roommate from India. Tarun was a very serious EE major who left the room for only three things: 1) classes, 2) meals and 3) the India-Pakistan cricket match. He was a nice guy but since he was always studying in the room he wasn’t an ideal roommate.
Indian ex-pats I meet tend to be really serious, smart, hard-working people, so it is nice to see a crowd of folks reveling in a collective emotional experience. This is a great moment for anyone who has moved so far from home to make their life.
I’m trying to get a better handle on my “spending cash” which is managed through my personal account and credit cards. Most “needs” type expenses are covered through our joint finances, so the personal account is mostly discretionary. The problem is I want to reduce my personal credit card debt, and these days the personal account doesn’t get much money to play with, which means I need to be smart and aware with my discretionary income.
About a decade ago I tried managing my spending by writing the date on a series of $20 bills. If I was breaking a bill with today’s date on it, things were going alright. If I was breaking yesterday’s date, I was doing well, and if I was spending a bill with a future date on it . . . well, time to cut back, eh?
This time around I’m thinking to allow myself $10/day. ATMs don’t give out tens, and these days I make some small purchases with the credit card, so I’ll try a different solution: a Google Spreadsheet!
I thought it might be neat to share the progress here, in case other folks are curious to see how this experiment works. You should be able to see the results tally up over the course of the month on the right.
This is by no means a comprehensive thing: I’m not tracking automatic withdrawals (charity, web hosting) or interest on the cards: I’m merely trying to keep my personal spending (the “burn rate”) in check by maintaining an awareness of what’s up. This is pretty much lunch money, small gifts, and entertaining the sweetheart. My rule is going to be that any personal spending I have to initiate I will track. So, I’ll count the $50 mobile phone bill, for the sake of a healthy challenge.
Technical note: I don’t know for spreadsheets, but the formula for setting up the balance column was to start at cell D3 with this formula:
=IF(A3="",,SUM(D2+C3))
This basically means that if the date (A3) on this row is filled in, add the amount (C3) to the previous total (D2). I was then able to “copy” that cell, multi-select all the cells below, and “paste” and the formula got updated each row, as my Excel Guru colleague expected.
My first experience of “Idaho” was hitching a ride to the Rainbow Family campground in Wyoming in a car with Idaho plates driven by a lady who took sips from the bottle of beer she kept pressed between her legs. At which point I concluded that Idaho must be Awesome.
Mind you I haven’t been fooled in to actually going to Idaho.
Some fantasies are best left untainted by reality.
