The blog home of Jeff Putz

A month ago, I wrote about how school is both better and harder this year. Yesterday perfectly illustrated that phenomenon.

Grades came home, and they're the best that they've been since elementary school. Most astonishing was an A in biology. The rest were a couple of B's, and one C. That's a far cry from worrying about whether or not he would pass the grade last year. I'm surprised because the year started with us having to supervise and nag constantly. Now, Simon is autonomous with geometry, mostly. Actually, we're working with him less than the start of the year, which at the time felt like it would be constant. I've been jumping in for the game development virtual course, and Diana assists mostly with geometry and reading.

On the other hand, yesterday also came with a parent-teacher conference that was mostly about behavior. That isn't surprising, because we're having the same battles at home. He has somehow become this angry kid, always deferring his problems to someone or something else, and never owning them. He insists that we don't listen, when listening isn't the point. When adults ask him to do something, he's supposed to do it, no explanation needed. I know it isn't that simple, I suppose because I've always questioned authority, maybe not always at appropriate times. And something about autism seems to come with a desire for social justice, so when something seems "unfair," it triggers us. The difference is that I understand when I just don't like the response, he does not. He doesn't understand that adults are not his peers.

Certainly, the academics matter the most, and this is a huge relief. Granted, he isn't having to do as much work as he would in the big high school, but from the testimony of his teachers, he does get and understand what he's learning. I'm very distressed about the behavior, but he's in therapy for that. We're also trying to get another doctor, because I get the feeling that amphetamines and stimulants are not right for him. We took him off a booster dose of Adderall, because it seemed to cause rage and all of the negative side effects.

So the highs are higher and the lows are lower. We're doing all the things though, and this school represents a huge opportunity. I can't predict where he'll land in two and a half years, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be on solid footing, whatever it is he chooses to do.

Back in 2009, as we were packing up to move from Cleveland to Seattle, I regrettably sold my Jurassic Park pinball machine from 1993. When I bought it used in 2000, for a comparatively reasonable $2,000 I think, the inside smelled like a bar (read: cigarette smoke) but it operated fairly well. It required a little maintenance from time to time, but I really got to know it well. It was a huge hit at parties. I always said I would get another one someday, but I didn't realize that it would be 16 years.

I've favored experiences over stuff for years now. I think this approach to life has generally served me pretty well. I've made some big purchases for hobbies, usually in the service of making stuff. But this is something that is purely for entertainment. While there are a ton of used machines, and I still love the old JP machine, I wanted something totally new, from the box. There are just two manufacturers now, and Stern has the legacy and history of the old Sega and Data East machines. They launched a new platform, which they call Spike3, with a new Star Wars game, Fall of the Empire. Incredibly, the designer was one of three guys that designed the '93 JP machine! Stern also has the press used to mark the playfield boards for every one of those old machines. So this new thing has ties to the old thing. I decided that it was long overdue. I've been looking at the new machines every year at IAAPA, but never pulled the trigger.

I bought the premium version, which is a step up from the pro, but not as expensive as the limited edition. The pro lacks certain mechanical ramps, movement and the "Force" magnet. The LE has blue paint and more lights, but I like this one better. It has a very classic Vader and Luke with lightsabers illustration on the side. What they all have now is online accounts that save your stats and achievements, and you can scan your QR code on machines anywhere. For the home machine, you can add your accounts directly to the machine so you don't need to scan them. It's very cool. I'll write up a review of the machine eventually, but so far I really like it. It can get very fast, especially with various multi-ball situations.

I waited to write about it for about two weeks, because I had an issue with it. A short somewhere in the lighting was causing the controller for the lower part of the machine to keep resetting. I was able to narrow it down to one of the "general illumination" strings (i.e., playfield lights), and specifically a socket that got hot and seemed to be shorting out. I could still play it by unplugging these, but it meant the bottom half was dark. The distributor came back out today and replaced it, and everything was good.

It's not the only quality problem. Someone failed to put a wrench on the bolts around the coin door, and one had come completely off in shipping. I found the nut inside. There's also a bracket around the Death Star opening that is too narrow, so the ball doesn't make it in as much as it should. It sounds like this is a known problem, and some enterprising folks have used a Dremel to widen it. But they may end up shipping out replacements.

All things considered, the architecture of the modern machine is pretty clever. Some things are radically different, while others are the same as they were 30 years ago. And while I'm sure that some of the parts are made off-shore, the machine is mostly made in Chicago. American companies are still pretty good at making certain niche things, and this is definitely one of them. I don't give Stern a pass for the QC issues, especially given the cost of these very expensive toys, but they are remarkably mechanical and physical machines. It's not like a game console, which likely works or it doesn't.

And therein lies the biggest challenge for Stern. The machines tend to find their way into homes more than commercial settings. It's not that there aren't any arcades, but no one wants to maintain these things. And your average D&B is mostly redemption crap now. So the growth is among collectors in the home. Selling a commercial product to consumers is tricky. The expectations are different. Things like copy machines and coffee makers are expected to require maintenance, as are pinball machines. But consumers want stuff to just work.

The other interesting thing is that the software isn't actually complete. They aren't to v1.0 yet, and apparently that's normal these days. The rulebook has blank sections! I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Still, there is I think a certain level of satisfaction that people get maintaining these, and I remember that was true for the old JP machine. In particular, I remember having a problem with the switches in the ball chute. One of them didn't line up right, so the machine thought a ball was missing. It took a day of messing around with it to fix it, but it was satisfying. Now they use optical sensors, which are way more reliable.

The best part is that Simon is totally into it. Diana is too, though she's the undisputed Galaga queen. I can't wait to have people over, as I'm sure they'll congregate around it while I pour them cocktails. As I said, I'll review the game after I've had more time with it. For now, let me say that I'm thrilled to begin my second pinball era!

Two months ago, I rambled about the strange ways that your brain did or didn't work on Spelling Bee, the game from the NYT. I have more thoughts.

First off, it seems like it does get easier, almost as if you just need to exercise your brain to make it work better. Some of this is just because certain combinations of letters yield the same results. You see I, N, G, plus a B and a T, and you get fun words you don't ordinarily use like "beignet." But then there are certain combinations that just don't make sense to you. And that's interesting because Diana obviously gets the same letters that I do, but the puzzles that are hard for me are easy for her, and vice versa. Talk about the different wiring!

But I'm generally to the place where I can get "genius" four times a week, and the rest are (usually) "amazing." Again, some of it is just repetition and training your brain to see things in those seven hexagons. The annoying thing is needing that center letter, because my brain gets stuck on the words found around the outside.

It's a fun distraction, and beats dicking around with anti-social apps.

Simon and I have been talking about emotions, and how we regulate them. It also seems that we have some things in common as far as being stuck in our head, thought spirals whirling about and going in some suboptimal directions. Our dumb lizard brains tend to go toward the fear and anxiety stuff, I suppose as a means of staying alive, despite there being far fewer threats to our persistence compared to hundreds of years ago. Why can't our minds go to puppies and rainbows?

I worry about that for him, because he hasn't had the experience of developing decades of coping strategies or self-regulation. I also know how not self-aware I was for a long time. And if there's one "advantage" that I had it was not knowing about my autism diagnosis. A lot has been written about that lately, because it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, you go through a significant portion of life thinking that you just suck at some things, with all of the self-loathing that comes with that, but on the other hand, you have the diagnosis and just kind of feel broken, with all of the self-loathing that comes with that. There's no winning either way.

The other thing that we may have in common is that we often feel like the world is against us. For me, I complained about it a lot when I was younger, but was mostly able to channel that into determination that led me to success in my field (before I decided it was shitty and changed careers). Simon is not there at all. He immediately deflects every challenge to others, rarely acknowledging that some of it might be him. I think I might be reaching him on that, but it's tough to walk the line of not invalidating his feelings and still holding him accountable.

I hate that I kind of frame everything about Simon's way of thinking to my own, but it's the only reference that I've got. The more time I spend talking to him, the more I get these little glimmers of hope that I can help him. It's hard at that age though to be most concerned with the present, because the past and future seem so important. Heck, it's not easy at my age! But living in your head all of the time is exhausting.

Last night I was YouTube surfing, when I saw that Bill Murray was on Kimmel. I was struck by how old he appeared, having just celebrated his 75th birthday. There was a part of me that was thinking, gosh, he might not have a lot of time left. Or he could live for another 20 years. I felt unusually sad about the passage of time.

On one hand, I feel pretty good about having purpose in life, knowing it is limited. As I've said before, be kind to others, make art, help out, leave things better than you found them. But sometimes it does feel as if I have to write like I'm running out of time, as per Hamilton. And then there's the perception of time passage, how that changes as you get older. You have all of these markers in your life, like relationships, jobs, moving, kids and such.

I've lived in Orange County for 12 years now, eight of those in this house. For someone who used to be adverse to change in my younger days, this feels strange. These 12 years have felt "faster" than others, despite having a pandemic in the middle. Consider the decade prior, which included three serious relationships, six jobs, 6,000 miles of moving and one child. The decade before that was one relationship, but included the end of college, a career pivot and 9/11, plus I was younger so most experiences were new. I haven't been static in "the Florida era," but it seems to have happened so fast.

Now I'm doing all kinds of rationalization about time. For example, half of my life gets me back to 1999, which seems impossibly distant, so that time hasn't felt fast in that context. And if I were to go 26 years forward, I would be older than Bill Murray, so that kind of feels like I have lots of time. But you never know, because you're one Florida driver away from your demise, or one cell that goes rogue and causes cancer. On the other hand, life expectancy keeps getting longer, so maybe Bill Murray isn't old at all. When I'm looking at quarter-centuries, it's possible that I'm entering Act III, but in a four-act play.

Aging is so weird. But given the relative brevity of life, it sure is hard to understand how so many people can be so hateful. Who has time for that?

Diana and I had the opportunity to see Joss Stone on Sunday night (with Rocky Horror happening in the other big theater), and she was "lovely," as she would say. This is actually the second time I've seen her, and it made me realize that she's still relatively young.

"Right To Be Wrong" is a pretty great song, one that she often ends with. It's wisdom is surprising, since she was probably 16 when she wrote it. Then it occurs to me, she was still a teenager when she started. That's why it feels like I've known her forever but I've got a decade and change on her. You wouldn't know it by listening to her music, or in conversation. She can sure work a crowd, especially when she goes out into it.

This tour she decided to strip it down a bit, and had three backup singers, a guitarist and bassist. There were just a few tracked bits, some basic percussion, or maybe it was played back by the guitarist (he had a rig on the floor of stuff). The result was a performance that was more natural and laid-back. As she put it, "Welcome to our living room." She played quite a few songs that were from her first two albums, which now are 20-ish-years-old. She's so good live. Her guitarist was very good as well.

And of course, we got to see her in Steinmetz Hall, which is always a delight. Usually we see orchestras and such in there, but this time they had the proscenium flown in. I hope she had a good time in our venue.

The NFL recently announced that Bad Bunny would be doing the Super Bowl halftime show this season. It hasn't even happened yet, and it's landing with certain white people about as well as last season's show with Kendrick Lamar. The response to that was gross because there was a theme that implied people of color should just play their sportsball and sing their songs and entertain us. Gross.

Some faction that is essentially composed of white nationalists declared that they should have their own substitute halftime show, with someone who is "truly Christian, American." I couldn't tell you how football became political, or a magnet for racism, especially given the fact that three-fourths of the players are not white. It builds on last year's ick factor. This year, I'm not sure what they're even talking about, since Bad Bunny is apparently Catholic, and certainly American, being born in Puerto Rico. He just happens to rap in Spanish. He's not my thing, but I don't expect every bit of art to be for me.

A central tenet of fascism is to declare that minorities or other people not conforming to whatever doesn't scare them are less authentic to whatever nation they're talking about. Considering this country was founded and built by immigrants, many of whom were slaves, it seems like an historically poor choice to be ranking who is more "American." Even if you could make a case for religion as core to the nation's identity, which you can't because it's right there in the Constitution, it's also laughable that you could make any claim in the name of Christ, who was a leftist brown person in an occupied territory whose teachings were the opposite of everything these racist folks seem to stand for. (If you doubt that, or want to call out people don't get it, I encourage you to read Separation of Church and Hate.)

The hate and bigotry is bad enough, but this phenomenon is also another indication that American citizens suck at civics. They don't understand their own country or what it's supposed to stand for. It's not just that it elected a felon and conman, it's that they don't understand the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, how laws are made, how the courts work, etc. When I was on my HOA board, I couldn't believe that people didn't even know what municipal jurisdiction they lived in. Most recently one didn't even know if they had gas or electric (do you pay a gas company?). Being patriotic apparently involves being willfully ignorant, which is another tenet of fascism, along with going after free speech, attempting to regulate higher education and attempting to prosecute your political enemies.

There are good reasons to feel dread about all of this, for sure. But history shows that things inevitably turn around when bigotry and wealth inequality start to reach a limit. And when minorities collectively become the majority, some time in the next 15-ish years, do you want to have left a trail on social media that you were on team bigot? All of the silly "woke" accusations in the world aren't going to excuse you from that. The Internet tends to not forget. I mean, look at all of the social media posts by current officials saying things that completely contradict what they're doing now.

Enjoy your sportsball.

A few days ago I registered my annoyance with Tesla Energy and their shitty support, over what I perceived to be a problem. As it turns out, it's working as designed, but I learned this entirely from unofficial sources.

My solar wasn't generating when I was off-grid, which seemed like a problem to me. Then I learned that this was by design in the event that the Powerwall state-of-charge is higher than 90-something-percent. This makes sense, because if the battery is full, there's nowhere for the solar energy to go. Because the solar inverters are not an integrated part of the system (they're made by another company and do not communicate with the Powerwall's energy gateway), the system has to trick them into not generating. Inverters have to synchronize their frequency with the grid, running at 60Hz, so that your sources of power all run at the same frequency. When it disconnects from the grid, and your battery is full, it fakes out the inverters by boosting the frequency over 62Hz, and I guess there are regulations that require inverters in the US to not generate if the frequency is that high. So when my battery was full, it was running at around 62.5Hz, effectively shutting out the inverters.

I confirmed this by running down the battery and manually going off-grid. Sure enough, the solar was generating power and feeding the house and battery.

Here's the thing though, this is not explained in the consumer manual or the installation manual for the gear. I pieced this together by reading Reddit posts. And the fuckwit support people either don't know this, or they did and instead of sharing it just disappeared my support case. This is on brand for Tesla's energy division. It's terrible. The techs in the field are good people, but getting one to your house is nearly impossible. There was the original solar and battery install problems, the time I got stuck off-grid a few years ago, and then this year's failures. And one of the inverters stopped talking to their old school communication bridge, so depending on which thing is the source of truth, the bridge or the gateway's metering, they don't have an accurate picture of my generation. That matters because there is a guarantee that they have to meet for ten years.

So again, I do not recommend Tesla for solar or backup power. They're just not very good.

I'm trying to engage in a project that I started five years ago. Yes, it's a private social "network," which is to say, it's not really a network if it's just for me. And probably my friends. As Meta gets further and further into the territory of "no consequences," and fails to be social in any way, I want to move on. I'm already just posting and rarely reading, so why bother? It's little more than a contextual journal at this point.

All of those years ago, I sketched out some data structures that would make it pretty easy to adapt to various post types (text, photos, links, etc.), but at some point it became pretty convoluted. Reasonably, it gets out of the over-normalized relational stuff and adopts more serialized bits as they relate to sub-types of content. But also, it makes some decisions about when to serialize or deserialize and send it over the wire. Whatever my thinking was when I started that, I do not recall. So as I come back to it, none of it works. This week I've sat down to look at it three times and lost interest very fast.

It's so clear to me why I didn't have the output of my peers when I was writing code as my primary job. Now I know it's the ADHD, but at the time I just thought that I was lazy. That's definitely not the case. What's interesting though is that when I have a clean start, I go for super simple everything. As it turns out, the non-neurotypical nature of my brain prefers simplicity, limited scope and much more readable code. When I encounter something in code that I wrote more than a decade ago, it feels over-engineered and gross. I wonder now if the simplicity would make up for the output if I were doing this as my primary job function.

In any case, I've resolved that I just need to start over with the end-to-end transmission of data between the client and the database, with all of the stuff in between. The database is fine, it's everything in between. If you write code, then you've heard of "data transfer objects," or DTO's, which I've always found to be cumbersome and often not necessary. My forum app doesn't have them. And part of the way that you get away with that is server-side rendering of user interfaces, which in this case isn't what I'm doing. So you add this go between over the wire, and then you're in the business of optimally shaping payloads. What I'm starting to get is that payloads are just wrappers around those entities that you already have. Duh. So if you have a text post, for example, and it has links, you're just optimizing that graph and sending that. I'm sure day-to-day code monkeys laugh at me for this realization.

Sometimes I'm amazed at how much I know, and how many dumb things I do anyway, when it comes to this craft. And boy does AI give you a lot of dumb options, but I'm trying to get more out of it.

Sometimes the weirdest things bum me out. Right now, I'm quietly raging about house problems.

First off, in my ongoing issues with Tesla's shitty energy products, last week we lost power for an hour, and the battery kicked in. That's the first time since the switching bits (to isolate you from the grid) broke in July. Now the problem is that when the system goes off-grid, the solar fails to synchronize with the battery. (The TL;DR is that alternating current in US houses runs at about 60 Hz, so the solar inverters have to match that so the power can seamlessly flow between solar, battery and house.) When this happened, I was in a long chat session with various support people and they opened a support case. A few days later, the support case disappeared as if it never happened. Remember, it took them six weeks to fix the last problem, and prior issues in prior years took as long, if not longer. They're just the fucking worst. I detailed the problem in email, so we'll see if anything comes from that route. I doubt it. I'm sure I'll have to call, and they'll do everything they can to avoid the problem.

Also last week, the TVX valve on our downstairs AC broke, so it failed to cool the place down. This is very consequential for my office, which is the furthest from the blower and with the door closed, gets no residual cooling from the upstairs units. At the time, and what made me realize something was wrong, is that the blower ran the entire night and the system used about $15 worth of electricity blowing hot air around. The tech believed that the motor had to be replaced, which on this old crappy Lennox stuff has an integrated controller, thus the whole thing has to be replaced. But as they quoted a repair, it didn't exhibit the behavior, so I passed on it. Two days later, today, it did the same thing, running all night. When it's cooling, it does cool, but it gets stuck blowing even when the compressor outside is idle.

So all in, these HVAC repairs are going to cost nearly $2k. It's an awkward spot because replacing the whole thing would cost just under $8k, so it feels like throwing bad after good. We did replace the upstairs last year, with a correctly sized (larger) system that is far more energy efficient, using more than a third less energy. It works so well. That cost $6,500 after a $2k tax credit, which of course the fuckwads in Washington have repealed, so there's no getting that again. We just need the downstairs system to work for another five years or so, when we might bail from here.

Look, I'm acutely aware that I have the good fortune of being able to save for crap like this, but it's that category of stuff that just feels like evaporating money. It's not like new carpet or cabinets or something that you can use and enjoy. As a colleague once put it, these are "in the wall" improvements that you don't see, and those hurt. Then pile on the incompetence of Tesla Energy, and I hate that I can't just rip everything they put in out and get my money back. The solar plant, at least, hits its ROI point next year, meaning all energy after that is "free" relative to the cost of the system. I guess that's something.

It may be obvious that I've not written about parenting or the school situation this year. That's partly because the situation is evolving, and it's partly because it's mentally and emotionally draining to even think about much of the time. The weird thing is that I can legitimately say that things are better... and worse.

Our boy was accepted into a very exclusive program that works with kids who have ASD and associated things like ADHD and anxiety, provided that they don't exhibit violence or self-harm. There are about as many staffers as there are kids, all of which are in high school. What this means is that the ratio favors more individualized attention and actual execution of an IEP. We're hearing from teachers almost daily, not always for positive reasons, but the level of communication is extraordinary. If I had to guess about what makes high school difficult for him, some of it was the social aspect, which is greatly reduced given the small class sizes. Because he processes certain things slowly (but not everything, we're learning), he can get behind, but not nearly to the extent that he did last year. His grades are significantly improved, not because it's easier, but because already the teachers see different ways and strategies to help. It's awesome.

That said, there are factors that make everything simultaneously harder while things are better. Start with the fact that teenagers are a hot mess of hormones and defiance, and from an emotional maturity standpoint, he's still a year or so behind. But the bigger problems fall into two areas that are hard to correct. The first is that he has leaned into a demand for accommodation at every turn, shunning accountability in the process. It started in the school he did for grade six, a private school that in retrospect was more of a sitter service than education. Middle school was much better academically, and in no small part because of his principal, who was transferred there from his earlier elementary. It wasn't easy, but he had people looking out for him. Last year, with 3,000 other kids, the school basically gave up trying to help and gave him exits from responsibility instead of helping him learn. Admittedly, we've probably contributed to this as well, more for our comfort than anything.

The other area is about gaming, which isn't strictly about playing games, as it's also a social outlet for him. One of the friends he made a few years ago at that terrible private school is an enduring connection. When it's not online play with that circle of friends, he's very into simulations of every kind. Roller coasters are a big part of it, but then he also gets into unlikely things like Farm Simulator. I have the baggage that my deep interest with computers as a kid was treated as a nuisance more than something to foster. While this is different, because computers are now ubiquitous and he's using it for entertainment and social interaction, I don't want to take this away from him. The problem is that he responds as an addict when he has to prioritize school work, or anything else. It consumes him. We need him to literally detox.

Even though there's less work, the homework is still contentious and stressful. Diana helps him quite a bit with math and is generally pretty good at it, provided he's compliant and engaging. She's fantastic. I've been helping him with a video game design class that he's taking virtually, and that goes pretty well. The other subjects it kinds of depends for me. Today we got through some reading stuff pretty easily, but when we went to the next bit of work on it, he flipped out in part because he didn't expect it. I was so angry that I went out to my car and sat in it for a bit. About those expectations though...

I have a growing opinion that the biggest challenge in teaching kids who are not neurotypical is that the entire focus is on accommodation without accountability. As a part of that, experts and countless amateur bloggers and advocates emphasize smoothing the path for these kids (transitions, structure, etc.) instead of figuring out how you teach adaptability and coping mechanisms. Maybe you do both, but the latter doesn't seem to happen. I'm not an expert either, so I'm drawing on my own experiences. The neurotypical world is never going to change, so it seems to me that the answer is teaching adaptation and coping. Adaptation for me in the moment is still difficult, and also exhausting, but what choice do I have but to roll with it? Applying this to my child means that I have to allow him to be deeply uncomfortable, maybe even unhappy, in the moment to help him in the long run. It sucks. I feel as if too much of his accommodation has been to help him avoid discomfort.

I'm getting better at compartmentalizing a lot of things, but parenting isn't one of them. I react emotionally, a lot, and often in anger and fear. Diana worries that my relationship with him will be poor, but he always comes around after the worst of it, usually apologetic (whether or not I deserve it given my part in the conflict). In the moment he "hates" me and believes that I don't understand him, but we always talk about it later. I've heard him say things to his friends online that imply that he looks up to me, so I take that seriously, but I can't protect him from discomfort. I just don't believe that protection would serve him.

His teachers are fantastic, but I worry about him being disruptive and disrespectful, because he has done that already. If he ever did anything to get booted out of there, the fallout would be devastating. This really is his best shot, and he's getting a legit education. It really is better, and worse, but hopefully he's 31 months away from graduating. There are positive signs too, because he takes driving very seriously. He talks a lot about working in hospitality, specifically theme parks, so my hope is that he can embrace being kind and helpful in a world that may not reciprocate that to him.

I watched the movie Swiped yesterday, which is a dramatic interpretation of the life of one of Tinder's cofounders. It's a solid movie, if a little jarring to hear Lily James speak with an American accent. Without giving a lot away, it's a familiar story as old as the commercial Internet. She gets sucked into tech startup culture, complete with the usual slides and ping pong tables in the office, a gigantic heap of alpha bros, betrayal, bad press and such. Since the real person settled with an NDA, of course they don't have the full story, but did their best to tell it from the public record. That she encountered all of the stereotypes is not hard to believe. I've seen it all as well.

Concurrently, there have been some brutal layoffs in a number of US companies, many at those that most people would not recognize. Meanwhile, Nvidia just invested $100 billion, with a "b," in OpenAI, something that defies any rational explanation, as these companies look for the problems that they're sure they have the solution for. It feels like 2000, and I wonder how it's going to shake out.

It all got me to thinking, I sure have seen my share of shit, and all of these stereotypes are true. I've been at "legacy" big tech, a dotcom flame-out, an IPO, and even a relatively stable, long-term business. I've worked for founders that were in over their head and incompetent, seasoned business leaders who righted the ship, and everything in between. I've seen examples of racism and misogyny (the worst in a non-tech company, actually). And I've met countless people, in and outside of jobs, where people are chasing unicorns. No wonder they make movies about this sort of thing.

The protagonist in the movie reaches an inflection point where, despite being driven, still wants to create a place to work that is safe and enriching. The goal isn't the exit, it's to make something durable, to leave some section of the world better off than it was. I'm sure that would be perceived as naive by most, but whatever, I like that. Being valued, respected and appreciated is what makes work worth it beyond the financial arrangement, in any job.

I wish we could focus more on that. We can't take it with us, as they say.

Meta has turned into the algorithmic rage machine. Sure, I understand that people want to double down on whatever their non-evidence based belief is. Certainly that's fucked up. Facebook was bad enough. I literally see one in 20 friend posts now. Instagram is suddenly going that direction as well, and that I expected to be more about the photographic moments that friends (and celebrities) have. No longer.

More than a year ago, I prototyped an app to simulate a "social network," as we understood it to be like 15 years ago. It's rough, it's not polished, and it definitely has not dependent on app stores, but it kinda works. I never really followed through on it.

But just as I decided I didn't want to blog on platform a bazillion years ago, why should I "social" post to the rage machine? I'm already in mostly a read-only, post for history mode. Why don't I just do that instead? If my friends are using Facebook, I never see what they post.

The hangup has always been, "But FB or Insta is where the people are." But what if they're there but I don't see their stuff? At that point, it ceases to be useful.

If my ADHD hyperfocus works out, I can build this new thing. If it really works out, I can build out the FB import, which is useful to me because I like the historical "memories" functionality. The only issue is that the people aren't there. So I'm willing to give it away to those people for life. If it gets traction, I can open it up an ask for money, but it will never, ever, be about "engagement" or whatever bullshit that means. No algorithms, no public posts, just friends, in chronological order. If it has value, cool, if not, it's not different from this blog.

Now I just need the energy and focus to do it. That's really hard, when I'm raging over the assault on the First Amendment and the general fascism exhibited by the current administration. I'm already subsidizing my sites in light of the Google monopoly. I suppose we'll see what happens.

I've had a few days this week where I found it difficult to stay plugged in and do specific tasks. It made me recall that there was a time that I viewed this as a personality flaw, but now understand it to be ADHD. The weird thing is that once I have this realization, I'm more determined to stay focused, and sometimes it works. I haven't not completed what I had to do, but it can be exhausting to get to the finish line.

That got me to thinking about hyperfocus, the potentially more positive part of ADHD. It occurs to me that I just haven't had much of it in the last year. That sucks. I realized it when it made an appearance late yesterday, as I enthusiastically threw together a technical diagram for some colleagues. I weirdly enjoy that sort of thing, and before I knew it, 40 minutes had passed.

You can't bottle or choose hyperfocus, despite what people who write self-help books tell you. But it is jarring to think that I haven't had much of it this year, other than when playing Against the Storm (yeah, still playing it!). A lot of the things that I want to complete or enjoy or whatever would benefit from the focus, but it just hasn't come to me. I wonder why.

I was never a car guy, but EV's of course really captured my imagination and interest. When we leased that Nissan Leaf in 2014, then bought a Model S the next year (fiscally irresponsible as it was), it was pretty clear we would never go back. But in many ways, I kind of loathe needing to have cars at all, but it's what we get for living in the suburbs. Having two cars totaled by shitty drivers (2020, 2024) doesn't ease my disdain for having to have cars.

But we're on the edge of a confluence of factors that I need to think about them again. First off, Simon will be legal next year. I'm not going to let him not have a car for the purpose of exploring work and social situations. High school sucks enough without having that constraint. I'm also still deeply uncomfortable with the interest rate on our newer car, at 6.5%. It's not a huge loan, but it's still awfully high. I'd like to pay it off.

The big thing that has changed, and I imagine will change even more in the next year, is that there are so many more options than before. Even last year, when we bought the second Model Y, there were no viable economic choices. We ended up getting that one for a little under $40k, which is pretty great for a range that large. Fortunately, the build quality was much better than the earlier car, too. But now, there are so many great options from most of the manufacturers.

Next year could go a few different ways. We could get Simon a cheap, used first-generation Leaf. I've seen them for like $3k, but the batteries aren't in great shape because it's very old battery tech (not lithium-ion). He couldn't go very far, but it would work. Newer, second-generation cars are around for about $10k with range over 100, and that would last him longer, though it wouldn't be ideal for the long term, whatever that might involve. I could also gift him my car, which at five years still has less than 30k miles on it, and the range is around 300 miles still.

In that last scenario, I'd have to buy a new car, with an eye on keeping it for six years or more, per our broader financial goals. Tariffs are going to make cars more expensive, domestic or not. I really like the VW ID.Buzz, but despite it not selling that well in the US, it isn't being discounted. $60k is a lot even for a novelty car. I really like the idea of having a normal sedan again. The Hyundai group cars aren't bad, but not significantly cheaper than their counterparts from others. The BMW i4, for example, is only a little more but the materials and quality from BMW are likely better. Audi is in that category too, but those are the crossover/SUV profile. Nissan is returning with the third-generation Leaf starting at $40k, but if you get the better trims, you're back in BMW territory. Model 3 would be the best deal if the idiots in Congress weren't hell bent on killing the tax credit, but politics aside, I'm still turned off by the quality problems I had.

I keep coming back to whatever the cheapest possible solution is and actually trying to keep cars for as long as possible. EV's just don't require replacement or maintenance like gas cars. If that Model 3 hadn't been crashed, it could have gone on for years. There was no meaningful battery degradation and the brakes were basically new. And yes, after having three cars totaled in my life, all because of others at fault, it doesn't feel logical to spend money on cars if you don't have to.

I've got a year to think about it.

Last night, we saw Kristin Key do a set here in Orlando (Instagram, YouTube). If you are unfamiliar with her comedy, a lot of it revolves around lesbian culture, stereotypes and such, and it is absolutely hilarious (this is a great story). Late in her act, she starts to take questions, and comes up with some of the most hilarious stuff, spontaneously, and she posts these clips online. So good.

As you can imagine, coming to Florida in the midst of the bizarre war on... sidewalk rainbows, there is some comedy there. But toward the end, she got a little serious, and expressed the sentiment that one of the most effective things that you can do is exercise what she called "joyful defiance." I like that.

Algorithms and cable news reinforce rage and anger, because it keeps you plugged into them. The "side" that seems to be against anyone who does not fit in their box of faux-normalcy wants to marginalize and shut down. But what if, despite the buckets of haterade, those being targeted are in fact exercising joy? Sure, it has the side effect of pissing them off, but it also means that at some level, the outcomes they're after are not achieved.

I know that a lot of my friends are struggling right now. It's not a great feeling to be treated as though you don't belong, don't deserve equal treatment and seemingly aren't valued as a human being. I'm not going to say that I don't know how we got here, because I do, but the disappointment in that part of the population that allows or advocates for this marginalization is heavy. But the old adage that you can't take certain things away from people may be applicable here when it comes to joy.

Last night was joyful. I've definitely never been in a room with that many lesbians, but like any group that leans queer (see also: countless coaster enthusiast events), there was joy, high-fives, hugs and a lot of shared experiences and empathy. Honestly, I never experienced that much love in church, where allegedly you're supposed to be about love. It felt about as opposite as possible to the world online, or a congressional hearing.

We can't lose our joy. I've never understood where the energy comes from to sustain hate, but joy is energetic. We need more of that, please.

I'm sure I'm repeating myself on this topic, but I really believe that one of the things that can burn you out, make you tired, make you want to disengage, is the scenario where you are giving way more than you take. I'm not saying that this isn't a noble goal, or even something that you can't derive joy from. But there are definitely times when the balance gets so out of whack that it grinds on you.

Parenting may inherently be one of these endeavors, but having children is a choice. I'm not saying that the give/take ratio can't be messed up, or that you can't feel the burn, but I do think it's something that you're more obligated to deal with. It does seem to come in waves, and they all grow up eventually, at which point you might miss the "excess give."

I know I was there with work earlier in the year. These days, I feel like the world itself is asking more of me, and I'm in no position to give what is required. And I am materially giving more than I take for the purpose of securing a better late-life, since younger me felt like I would live forever.

I just know that I shouldn't feel this tired.

Next month I have to choose a renewal term for the reserved resource instances that CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz run on. For that part of the expense, I can save about 55% per month if I commit to three years. A year ago, I committed to one year for 35% off, but that was after updating from the basic tier to the premium tier, which was necessary because of the increased load. In any case, the three-year scenario reduces cost by about $62 per month, or $744 a year. It also gets me back in line with what I was paying for the basic tier, which has less memory. And all of it is cheaper than when it was on Windows instead of Linux, which I switched a few years ago.

Both sites saw an increase in traffic overall last year, and I was starting to have intermittent memory issues, which is why I scaled up to the bigger instance and one-year commitment. My total costs are about $300 per month, and if I do the three-year, it'll be closer to $260. People say, "But you can get a site for [this much] with [some service]." They're not wrong, but given my line of work, and the fact that there are I think 16 different sites/apps running, making all of that robust isn't free. Everything is redundant and resilient, there's caching, there are off-app background jobs, an Elastic index for search, etc. Being cloud-based, I can scale all the parts up as needed without redeploying anything, too. And I'm pretty proud of the fact that average response times are under 20ms.

Believe it or not, there was a time when ad revenue (and club memberships) grossed as much as $2,000 per month, and with way less traffic (that's about $3,300 in today's dollars). Those were the days! That's why I didn't bother working consistently in 2004 and 2005, and wrote a programming book and did some volleyball coaching in that time. Because of the Google ad monopoly, there is no real competition, and there are more sites than ads that can be shown. The economics completely suck now for independent publishers. Video is probably worse, because it's also Google (YouTube), a single platform that won't even write you a check without a certain threshold of subscribers and watch time, meaning that there's an enormous long-tail of people posting their stuff while Google keeps the money.

Prior to the pandemic, for a decade, ad revenue varied seasonally, but generally fell between $500 and $900 each month, which was more than enough to cover the costs. Then 2020 hit, and it took a momentary dump, before recovering later in the year. 2022 came down though, in half, with a range of $250 to $450, then 2023 went down to $180 to $380. 2024 recovered a little, but then this year hasn't even hit $300. And keep in mind, my PointBuzz partner Walt gets half of the PB share. And this is while CB page views are up an insane 77% this year, though I don't know how much of that is robots, because the analytics also say that users are up 400%. PB page views are down about a third, but I don't really trust Google with any of these numbers. So it's a pretty sad state of affairs these days.

So with the upcoming renewal, and just being in midlife, the question popped into my head... how much longer do I do this? I started PB (then Guide to The Point) in 1998, and CB in 2000, so I've been doing this for a very, very long time. A number of regulars to the sites have died over the years. I went to a wedding some years ago where we realized that many of us met because of the sites. We did a few hundred podcast episodes before it was cool. I interviewed CEO's and industry legends. I went to a ton of media events. I've made so many friends, scattered about the country. We had a ton of events back in the day. I hosted other coaster sites for free for awhile. By most measures, the best days are behind us.

Then fold in the fact that I'm just not into any of it the way that I used to be. I don't want to use working at SeaWorld as an inflection point, because it's too close in time to the life reboot with a new-ish child and marriage. Priorities changed quite a bit. I live next door to arguably the best theme parks in the world, and mostly go to them to eat and drink. Industry consolidation hasn't been great for quality (see: Six Flags/Cedar Fair). Honestly there aren't many rides that are truly unique, and those that are (Guardians, Velocicoaster, Hagrid's) are here. The idea of traveling for the purpose of riding does not appeal to me, not when I can go places and see historic things. When I engage on the sites, it's mostly about the business of the industry, and sometimes about technology. A lot of the site regulars are in the same boat.

With all of that said, it's not that all of this doesn't serve me. Maintaining the forum app is something that I enjoy, even though there are fewer and fewer things I feel like I need to do with it. Without a "real world" application for it, I probably wouldn't maintain it. All of that infrastructure, which has a ton of available overhead, can also host whatever stuff I want to mess around with, at no additional cost. My personal music cloud runs on it. This blog runs on it, too. In a way, I'm subsidizing an Internet technology playground for myself. That is valuable to me. I don't mind sticking with it for a few more years. I'm also too stubborn to cede yet another community (or two) to the platforms. The audience that sticks around finds value in it, and prefers it to the platforms. I'm not exactly sticking it to Zuck, but it's something.

In my talk about lighting programming at the software level last year, I mentioned how my earliest interest as a teenager came from a specific light fixture model, the Vari-Lite VL2, that I saw in all of the music videos at the time. There was something really iconic about that blocky moving light. I went to some shows in the years following that used them, as moving lights became more and more ubiquitous at rock shows. It's funny that, for me, this thing that was intended to make light, but the object itself had a textural visual appeal to me. Other kids were aroused by cars, but lighting instruments did it for me.

This sentiment is still prevalent in the way that I'm wired. For example, I'm enamored by the patterns and designs found all over the newer part of the Coronado Springs resort, where we stayed in July. The textures are everywhere in the tower building. Look at this wall of lamps in the lobby, not just in the way that they're arranged, but in the texture on the lamps themselves.

I can't explain why it appeals to me so much, I just know that I dig it. Middle Eastern tile work also elicits a similar response from me. It's a subtle but peculiar feeling in my head that is some form of joy, but it's hard to explain. There are other ways that we respond to visual stimuli, like the way an attractive person may cause arousal, but that's easier to explain because it's rooted in our instinctive drive for procreation. I don't know what purpose this serves for us.

Here's an even weirder one. There's something satisfying about road cases. You know, the things that they pack equipment in so it doesn't get damaged when it moves from one venue to the next. I own a case like this.

The elegant simplicity of road cases appeals to me. The spring-loaded handles stay flush and don't stick out until you need them. The twist locks... those sure are a brilliant mechanism. Opening and closing them is satisfying. You don't even take the equipment out of the bottom of the case, it just sits on it so that you never actually pick up and move the equipment directly. And how cool are rivets?

And it's not just simplicity or patterns that appeal to me. A properly rigged camera location looks like chaos, but the thing that ends up on the screen looks precise and controlled.

Lights are all over the place (you can't see the one lighting the barrels), wires and cables go everywhere, fabric and reflectors are hanging around to shape the light, and the camera itself usually has a bunch of stuff that looks sloppily connected to it. I can't explain why that's amazing. I was recently in a theatrical venue with all of the work lights on, and I was borderline over-stimulated by all of the things that I could see.

I don't know if "visual texture" is a thing, but I know that I like to see it.

I think that I'm starting to see that too much of my contentment is wrapped up in excitement for the promise of things in the future. I'm not saying that you shouldn't look forward to things, but it's possible for that focus to swing too far in that direction. It pushes out the ability to appreciate the moment. And what's happening now is a gift, that's why they call it the present.

It's a hard adjustment to make. I know that I'm capable of being present, and sometimes it comes to me in the simplest ways. Sitting next to Diana watching TV, or interacting with one of the cats. My various bits of equipment may not always lead to finished product, but sometimes just touching it, and marveling at what it does, is enjoyable. Sometimes, even sitting outside with my lunch, alone, taking in the blue sky, can make me smile. I don't need to be on vacation to be content (though it sure helps).

Exploring this idea, about feeling content in the moment, also reinforces my theory that "will power" is generally bullshit. People like what they like to do. No amount of mind games with yourself will change that. It's not natural to force yourself to do things that you don't want to do, and it doesn't make you a better person for trying. Stop holding yourself to that standard, because it's not your standard. When it comes to contentment, sure, grownups have to do things they don't want to do, but get that done and get back to the things that make you content right now. You don't get a cookie for acting like you enjoyed doing something that sucks.