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Staying Busy

Tonight was the toughest I've had this week. I finished work, feeling drained. Steph and I walked around the neighborhood with the dog, I made dinner, we ate dinner. I had the whole evening. I sat down to write another blog post like yesterday's, since it seemed to resonate and was really thrilling to write. It didn't work. I can't summon that on demand. I had good raw materials yesterday and bupkis today. I puttered around for a while. I tried to read. I went upstairs to for something. I saw … (Continued)

The Present Alone

This moment right now is not so bad. If you're sitting somewhere, reading this, wherever you are, whenever you are, it's not so bad around you.   Sure, somewhere in the world there are people facing very tough challenges. But they are less worried about their predicament than you are right now. When you are in the midst of the battle, you don't have time to worry. You just do what you have with the resources on hand. Right now, on the other hand, you are probably idle. You have time to sit, a … (Continued)

To be rather than to seem

The virtues of copper: “Sleek and shining stainless steel doorknobs and push plates look reassuringly clean on a hospital door. By contrast, doorknobs and push plates of tarnished brass look dirty and contaminating,” she wrote at the time. “But even when tarnished, brass—an alloy typically of 67% copper and 33% zinc—[kills bacteria], while stainless steel—about 88% iron and 12% chromium—does little to impede bacterial growth.” Ultimately, she wrapped her paper up with a simple enough conc … (Continued)

Yuval Levin on EconTalk

I'm not familiar with Yuval Levin (I don't even remember his previous appearance on EconTalk, which I must have heard), but he was on EconTalk recently talking about his new book. The book sounds interesting enough, and if I had room on my to-read shelf for it, I'd probably add it, but I don't so I won't. But the bits of conversation that emerged centered around three things that really stuck with me. First was the idea of formative institutions. One view of people is that children know what' … (Continued)

Birthday 2020

Had a pretty good birthday today. Took the day off work at Stephanie's suggestion which was a superb idea. Got in a workout at the gym. Put together all my shooting stuff and went to practice for the first time since Nationals in November. It got above 60 today, just warm enough to be comfortable in pants and short sleeves. Now that I have bookshelf space to spare in the new office, I had decided to buy a complete Calvin and Hobbes collection to replace the patchwork of collections I'd accum … (Continued)

The Paradox of Pain

I'm currently about six months into Invisalign. It took about a week to rewire my brain from feeling that it was weird to be wearing the aligners, to it being weird not to wear them. Now, I actually start to feel a little on-edge when I can't get somewhere to brush and put the trays back in. And things definitely seem to be moving in the right direction. So far so good. One thing I was told early on by one of the non-certified assistants at the orthodontist's office is that a common pattern … (Continued)

Why do hackathons work?

Reading about Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both histories emphasize that part of the successful R&D formula is hiring the best minds you can, giving them resources, and then leaving them alone to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. (Expect that they produce something, but not what or when.) The closing chapters of "Range" by David Epstein echo this as well. Hyper-specialization is a trap. Great results in the lab can be achieved by recognizing promising people, bringing them into your lab, an … (Continued)

The world that C, Unix, and C++ Built

It is difficult to comprehend what modern computers would look like without Bell Labs. In some abstract way I was aware of this, but reading Kernighan's new Unix history/memoir really hit that home when he talked about Bjarne Stroustrup developing C++ while he too worked at Bell Labs. Stroupstrup's name and the fact that he invented C++ was lodged deep in my brain from my high school AP Computer Science class where it was just one of those factoids in the textbook that was bolded to indicate th … (Continued)

Gains in Computer Hardware

From Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: "By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world." It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11's with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That's about one thousandth of a typical lapt … (Continued)

Attention Spans and Perfection

Excerpts from an interview with Tom West and Tracy Kidder, three years after the publication of The Soul of a New Machine: West: If somebody walks into your office after five minutes of staring at a sheet of paper and asks: "Should we make this register sixteen bits wide or thirty-two bits wide?" you know the answer to this question if you have been through it over and over and over again. So you can tell him the answer, and he goes back and puts it in. The he sits around for another five m … (Continued)

Christmas 2019

We spent the day painting a closet and building the laundry room cabinet. Cooking our modest feast took a few hours. It's our first big meal in the new house. This may look ordinary, but it's a milestone for us. The roast beef in particular was my first experiment cooking something low and slow in the new oven. It turned out well. The last month and a half has been a blur of packing, unpacking, painting, building, organizing. Cooking and enjoying this was a nice break from that. The first of ma … (Continued)

Trust and Risk

"Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business." Tom West quoted in The Soul of a New Machine (p.131), by Tracy Kidder. The business always wants to avoid risk. The hidden downside to this is that low-risk businesses also tend to be very un-trusting. This is dissatisfying to people who value autonomy. If you insist on low-risk, eventually they remove themselves from your labor pool.

Recent Adventures in Plumbing

Don't ever neglect an opportunity to learn something, even if it doesn't seem all that relevant right now. Two or three months ago, the metal rod that lifted the stopper in our master bedroom sink rusted away so the drain was permanently closed. So we fished out the stopper and set it aside, but that left a big hole in the sink, perfect for dropping things into. So, figuring it couldn't be that hard, I watched some YouTube videos, got the parts from Lowe's, and set to replacing the drain and st … (Continued)

SteerMouse and the Logitech G604

Steph and I are in the middle of the process of moving (big moving day is the day after tomorrow) and so it's been a long week of work, eat takeout, pack until bedtime. People talk about how you have more stuff than you think in your house when you go to pack, and for better or worse I will say that we have about as much stuff as I thought we would have, it just takes a long time to pack  it all. But one bright spot this week has been SteerMouse adding support for the Logitech … (Continued)

USPSA and Friendship Distance

At dinner last night, the topic came up again about how I've gotten a great deal of satisfaction out of shooting USPSA, but that I've never really made friends (in the "hang out and drink beer together"/"help you move"/"bail you out of jail" way) through USPSA. I've met lots of interesting USPSA people and had good internet conversations, but that only goes so far. All of the shooting friends that I've made were made shooting either IDPA or Parrish's Action Pistol matches. … (Continued)