So this is going to be odd coming from a guy working at a place with a Leadership Principle saying “Speed matters in business”

If I’m doing my job right, I consider myself to be a “slow” developer.

I’ve watched the recent explosion across my social feeds about AI SUPERCHARGED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS! like Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, and Warp Terminal. They all seem neat, and this seems like a Nova (if not a Supernova) of dev tooling we haven’t seen since Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ battled it out 15 years ago to see who could make IT departments upgrade from 512 MB developer machiens fastest.

All the Leaves are Brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a Winter’s Day

My college roommate Chris died last week. He was 46 years old, the same age as me. I have no idea what he died of. I was a groomsman in his first wedding in Orlando, Florida, though I don’t remember what year that was–early 2000’s likely 2001-2002. Chris was a guest at my own wedding in 2005, and likely would’ve been a groomsman if it was a larger affair. Chris & Jessica stayed in contact with Whitney and myself until they divorced, though again I don’t remember when that was…the latter part of the 2000’s.

So Los Angeles is burning. Hurricane force winds up to 100mph fanned firestorms West, Northwest, and Norht of Los Angeles proper, with significant portions of Santa Monica under evacuation.

As of this writing, 10 people confirmed dead.

It seems undeniable, the planet is angry with us.

“The day….the Music Threads…Died”

Zuck gave us a present this morning.

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
2. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
3. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
4. Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
5. Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
6. Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.

It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I’m looking forward to this next chapter!

Since moving 45 minutes north of Austin in 2020, I drive at least 90 minutes every work-day. Some days (especially if it’s raining), that can total 2 hours. This year mark’s Amazon’s return to 5 Days per week in-office so that will be 10 hours a week on the road, 50 or so weeks a year.

To maintain sanity, I did two things:

1. I traded-in my 2018 Honda Civic 6MT for a fancy toyota (A used Lexus ES300h). Let’s be honest: It’s a couch on wheels and a quiet place to be for those 90 minutes. Look for details on that coming later.
2. I’ve gotten very acquainted with podcasts and audiobooks.

I’ve loved podcasts for a long time. Here’s my list from 2012 They’re the soundtrack to me doing things: Yardwork, ranchwork, driving, travel. In general they ease the loneliness that is modern life–Someone’s voice in your ear, helping you learn or laugh.

So, it was quite a year, of some advances and pain. I’m still here, so let’s get into it.

Professional Life

A Door Closes

Last January was probably the lowest I’d been in many years. I was looking for a new job. I managed 6 people in Seattle from an office in Austin, I’d been converted in January 2023 officially from Software Development Engineer (SDE) to Software Development Manager (SDM), though I’d been doing the job from April 2022. (This will become important later).

My my how things have changed since I first moved this blog to AWS hosting. For one thing, my previous Hugo Theme is no longer compatible, and hugo itself moved from YAML to TOML for configuration language. So that’s been a fun afternoon.

I’ve been following these excellent instructions that should automate the full deploy from checkin to push. Syncrhonizing the Github action will be interesting, but that’s just it–it’s INTERESTING.

Once I get this sorted, look for updates on the regular.

Am I still alive?

Yes.

Are things rather different now?

Also yes.

I live on a 10-acre ranch. As I type this, my neighbors are doing their regular Saturday target practice (pistol-calibre from the sound of it). I have a nearly 2.5 Year old Toyota Tundra, a tractor, a chainsaw, and two rabbits.

I bought, raised, and sold (for a terrific tax-writeoff loss) 4 Aberdeen steers.

I’m somehow still married with diagnosed mental-health issues that are okay with medication (more on that later). We’ve been through 3 Texas ICE/Snow events and managed to survive.

If I add up all the maladies/mishaps/accidents I’ve had in my life, I should be:

• Functionally blind
• Half-deaf
• Missing half my teeth
• Dying of Colon Cancer in 2019
• Dying of Skin Cancer in 2012
• Lying dead under a crashed car somewhere in Eastern Kentucky in 1996 or so.
• Decapitated by a drainpipe in a creekbed in 1984

That’s just off the top of my head. Modern med’cine has been good to me. The rest is, variously: Probability, Luck, Fate, or Divine Providence. Take your pick.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KVJ)

I’ve had a subscription to some sort of car magazine, blog, etc. since I was ten years old. I used to covet and read car magazines like more well-adjusted boys used to secret Playboy magazines. (November 1994 was a classic of that particular tome, but I digress.)

Poor sleep last night.

So the Daylight Savings Time switch was this weekend, so everyone felt fully capable of staying up until midnight watching movies. This weekend we watched Raya and the Last Dragon on Friday, the final episode of Agent Carter and the first in the Hobbit trilogy on Sunday.

I’m uneasy. I have my second (well, final) cataract surgery on Wednesday–as luck would have it St. Patrick’s Day. I went to bed before Whitney and Maria and when they went to bed I woke up with my mind swimming from flashbacks from the last cataract surgery: The immense anxiety. The claustrophobia of being draped with just your eye poking out. The general fear of the smells of a surgical center.

Today (well, tomorrow) makes it a year. On 3/13 last year I left my office, picked up my kids from Grace Academy for Spring Break…and the great upside down world of CoViD 2020 happened. Example: WFH Day 2

I was a reliable journalist for awhile, then in June I just…stopped. Overwhelmed didn’t really cut it; I was paralyzed by how much the world was changing.

The 2015-era computer I wrote those blogs on is gone, replaced by another coporate laptop from my employer after the battery decided to die. The house I wrote those in is gone, replaced by a 10.11 acre rance property with cows, rabbits, a tractor, and a new (LEASED!) Toyota tundra.

This seems to be the question occupying those in power right now:

“Is all this crap for real?”

What follows is my attempt to frame the current socio-political situation in the United States, circa June 2020. Namely, weeks of daily protests and nightly riots about systemic racism.

Whether those in power are stoking the fire or co-opting the mob for political agenda–I’ll not name names there–all those in established positions of authority seem to be asking that self-same question:

It was going to be something.

Something was going to wake a nation of people who’ve been quarantined for 80+ days. People are bored, anxious, afraid, and simply tired.

Turns out, that something was the death of George Floyd on 25 May, a week ago today. Today, an independent autopsy indicates he died of asphyxiation

One week. In that time, protests have broken-out in 140 cities, in particular in Louisville, Kentucky, my wife’s hometown. Each day, there are protests, and as night falls, they turn violent. Last night, police in Lousiville felt they were fired upon, and returned fire with live rounds, killing restaurant-owner David McAtee.

The world went to hell on 13 March 2020.

We’d been watching a slow-motion tidal wave from China come our way since January. We’d hoped it’d stop like SARS in mainland China, and we’d get to say “Whew! Close one.” Nope.

We saw it bloom in Europe, but hey–we’re still an ocean away from this thing, right? No.

On March 13, I got the email saying “Work from Home until further notice.” Then a few weeks later, it became “We’ll evaluate but stay home until May 1st at least.”

A Tale of Two Housing Transactions

In 2012, I sold my house at Georgetown, Kentucky. If you look far back enough in this blog, you’ll find posts and pictures from that little builder-grade “story and a half” house on a corner lot sitting within dynamite’s distance from an active limestone quarry, two houses away from a meth house.

Quite the neighborhood, that.

In any case, I sold that house via a realtor, and I never saw the people buying the house until we were at the closing table. Eight years on, I have no recollection of what the buyer looked like, his name, or his family situation. I know he bought the place on a 100%, no-down-payment VA loan. I also know that when I mistakenly had a package delivered to “my” old address, he refused to remit the package into my possession and strongly implied he had a firearm the other side of “his” door if I had a problem with that.

If the “Great Lockdown” or whatever history calls this thing had sight, smell, sound, taste, and feel, what would they be?

Feel is easy: Tired. The feel of a not-so-early morning after a long night of binge-watching whatever (Mandalorian, Picard, Friends). Being tired for no particular reason, like the tired of a long road trip or transcontinental flight: You haven’t exerted yourself, but you’re exhausted, disoriented, and cranky.

CoVid19 tastes like bad breath, that cottonmouth you get from dehydration after too late a night or far too early a morning. It also tastes like the Diet Coke® I secret away in my gun safe so my kids won’t drink any.

So, phase one (shock/denial) appears to be over.

Over 20 million people are out of work, roughly a 20% unemployment rate.

There are almost 700k total cases, and 32k deaths. This is just from people we know had the disease.

Whatever “rainy day funds” most people had are exhausting. Quickly.

It seems clear, this is going to be somewhere between the “Great Recession” and the “Great Depression.” And honestly: There’s no end in sight.

So, it’s official as of today

(Source. As an aside, this ‘worldometers.info’ site is a clinic on how to present and visualize data at scale.)

Eight-three thousand cases, and no sign of let-up after 2 solid weeks of “shelter-in-place” or “stay-home-pretty-please”

New York is simply exploding, especially The City.

I’ve taken to following a former member of disaster preparedness for Obama, @JeremyKonyndyk. Here’s his take as of today:

We’re not “flattening the curve.” We’re accelerating. We’re fighting our health care system.

Well, at least yesterday was good, right?

The stock market went up by 2,000 points. The Congress seemed to agree on–depending how you count it–a SIX TRILLION DOLLAR (!) bailout package, that represents a quarter of the US annual GDP. This comprises:

• 2 Trillion in relief for businesses and regular Folksy
• 4 Trillion in authority for the Fed to buy….stuff. REITs, ETF, Bonds, etc.

Today has been less rosy.

Last night, I was up with grace in immense pain until 11 or so, then I just collapsed in my bed. I finally got to work by 9am…only to find that I had a mandatory 45-minute Mac OS Catalina upgrade (10.15.4, if you’r scoring at home) to do.