I’m carrying a pot full of homemade macaroni and cheese to work today. I’ve successfully navigated the first 2 of 3 legs of public transit. A worker came by and asked what I had in this giant pot. I showed him the cheesy goodness and he asked if he could join us for lunch. I said I’d save him a seat and he laughed.

Commute step 1: Leapt onto Muni as the doors closed.

Step 2: Waited 2 minutes for BART.

Step 3: Waited 30 seconds for a bus.

This was the most efficient trip I’ve had in months.

Ugh, “walkable” cities. 🙄

To get dinner, we had to:

• Walk a couple of blocks
• Pause for my wife to pet a dog
• Watch sunset at a table behind a taqueria
• …where my wife had to pet another dog
• Stroll past the monthly outdoor fest with live bands and a bunch of vendor booths
• Wait for my wife to pet a dog again
• Walk back past the European market, where we walked in to get dessert snacks
• …and for my wife to pet the owner’s dogs

Simply intolerable.

I’m heading in to staff the booth at a convention. That’s far outside my comfort zone, so when my boss asked me, I immediately said yes to commit myself to doing something new.

This has traditionally worked out well for me. I highly recommend everyone do this to extent they can.

You know how sometimes you come to decide that an entire niche market is so filled with awful and overpriced alternatives that you’d rather just write your own and give it away for free?

My toes are on the precipice.

I knew the conversation wouldn’t be easy when the veterinarian asked if this was a good time to talk.

I still think of her as a puppy, even though she hasn’t been one for many years. People are surprised to find that this tiny little dog is a full-grown adult. Although she’s shaped like a miniature version of the real thing, it’s hard to wrap your brain around something that small being anything other than a baby.

The years don’t care about her appearance, or that she sometimes sleeps on my pillow next to my head, or that I remember how frisky she use to be. Even little bits wear out and start to fail. As her vet translated the numbers from the lab results into things I could understand, I began to realize what they meant: my wife and I will have to make difficult decisions soon.

It’s hard to know what’s best for her, and harder yet to separate that from what’s easiest for us. Those aren’t at all the same things. If I could throw the finite resources available to us at the problem and put it off forever, I would. But that’s not how time works. We can delay things, but only for so long. And the delay has its costs. The analytical part of my brain imagines that she has a fixed amount of happiness left. Do we let her spend it all and then lay down for a last nap, or do we spread it over years (or maybe just months, who can tell) of uncomfortable treatments and procedures? I don’t know. And not deciding is the same as deciding: time won’t give us the luxury of pausing until we can choose what’s right.

My heart knows that this is tougher because of how much we love her. If these sorts of decisions were easy, that would be sad in a different way. Many years ago, we came to care so much about our little puppy that it made the inevitable so painful, but I wouldn’t change that even if I could. And until then, I’m going to make her remaining time as happy as I can.

When I was an enlisted sailor in the US Navy, I spent an awful lot of time on a deployment hacking away on our ancient laptops to write QBasic programs to automate some of our completely-not-computer-related work. For instance, I wrote a little program to format short text messages in a particular way and write them to a floppy. Then I could hand that floppy to the ship’s radioman, and he’d run a program to load the messages and broadcast them over a packet radio to the MARS radio network. A ham operator in the States would call the recipient, read the message to them, transcribe the reply, then radio it back to our ship. I’d pick up a floppy with those replies, bring them back to the medical department where I worked, and print them out.

At that time, the quickest way to contact home was to buy a calling card for the ship’s on-board satellite phone, which cost something like $5 per minute to use. The alternative was to write a physical letter. If you were lucky and the person wrote back immediately, that would take about one month to get a response. The MARS radio system was free to use and shortened the round trip to about a day. My little program helped people use it, and I can’t exaggerate how happy this made my coworkers and bosses.

One day, a particularly enlightened boss sat me down for a talk. “Why do you lie to yourself that you want to be in medicine?” “Uh, because I want to be a doctor?” “Stop kidding yourself. You want to work with computers. We both know it.” Whoa. It was like a lightning strike. Well, of course I could go to school for that thing which had been my obsessive hobby since I was tiny! Why hadn’t I thought of that?! And so I got out of the Navy, enrolled in a computer science program, and here I am today rattling on about it.

Thank you, QBasic. You weren’t running on my beloved Amiga, but you were in the right place and time to kick off a career that I’ve loved every step of the way.

“Dynamic range” describes the difference between the softest and loudest bits of a musical recording. If the sound was recorded poorly so that the soft and loud parts are similar, it stops being interesting. Imagine the 1812 Overture where the cannon fire was at the same volume as the brass, or Skrillex without the drop. Without softness to compare it to, you can’t have loudness.

I was thinking about a loved one who passed away, and about the ebb and flow of happy memories mixed with tragic moments. The difficult parts were devastating, but I don’t think I’d forget them if I could. Without the sadness to compare with, could the happiness be as wonderful? I wouldn’t risk foregoing the lows if it meant the highs were less joyous.

I started this blog twelve years ago. I always meant to update it regularly, but… life intervenes. After recently coming back to it, I decided it was due for a good cleaning. There were lots of old articles about things I no longer care about but that people on the Internet keep visiting and linking to. I kept them. But there were also a lot of opinion pieces that I no longer agree with. Their disposition was a harder decision. The possibility of deleting them felt dishonest, like I was denying ever holding those beliefs. Conversely, this blog isn’t a diary (I have a separate one of those) or a public record (I just write stuff every now and then).

I won’t ever apologize for opinions I’ve had but discarded. If we’re a product of our environments, then our ideas must surely be the result of the people around us and the things we were taught. We don’t often get much say in these until later in life. However, many of my opinions have changed greatly through time, usually after meeting new friends or reading new viewpoints and considering my own beliefs in the light of new information.

Additionally, while reading through those old posts, I realized that a lot of them were phrased a lot more strongly, perhaps harshly, than I’d ever actually felt about the subjects involved. In person, I can cheerfully discuss great differences with just about anyone. I’m excited and energized by tracing back to the roots of our dissents and looking for common ground in even wildly different worldviews. And yet, reduced to written word, a lot of the things I would have said with a smile over a shared meal came across as, well, angry and mean.

Given that I now disagree with many of the ideas I’d described, and that other posts inaccurately conveyed a stridency I never felt during their writing, I’ve deleted large swaths of old content. If I won’t apologize for my opinions, I will for how I might have expressed them in ways that hurt, angered, or belittled.

And with that, let’s begin this experiment anew.

I probably sound like I gripe all the time, but that’s really not what I’m like. I’m an optimist and happy by nature. It’s just that I have high expectations for how things could be and I’m disappointed when I see people fall short of their potential. I don’t complain about companies that are trying their best but fall short. I call out the ones that could be so much better but don’t seem to have the desire to see it through.