Had friends over last night to celebrate the end of the work week. One of our guests was also our chef for the evening, commandeering our kitchen to make boiled dinner. I’ve never been enthusiastic about boiled dinner, but this time around it was a …
Yesterday and today, back at my own drafting table. I am familiarizing myself with a previous tinkerer’s unfinished prototype, with the goal of making a working model. What is missing are the scribbled notes and earlier drawings that would tell me …
Multi-modal journey into the head office this morning. Along the way, I listened to a discussion about how things went sideways in the early 2010’s with algorithm-driven social media feeds. I agreed fully with this notion, and regret what it …
Testing out a micro.blog plugin. I’ve had this banger stuck in my head for days, now.
{{< apple-music url=“https://music.apple.com/us/album/system-shock/1795539082?i=1795539085" >}}
Yesterday’s various news items fostered in me a sense of existential dread. To combat the sensations of helplessness, I accomplished much before breakfast this morning. Language studies and a plan for the day, all before that sacred first cup …
We finished filling the first 20-yard dumpster yesterday. 10 years of living in a place means not having to think about what is truly important to preserve. We have only a matter of months to prepare for our next adventure, forcing us to appraise all …
Yesterday we took apart the collapsing remains of the garden walls. A tangle of rotting boards and wire fencing. The neighboring townsfolk are not upset to see them go.
Concert last night; a famous chanteuse from the old city. Nostalgia for a time half-remembered. Afterwards, we sat around the kitchen, drinks in hand - thinking about the future.
This showed up on Hacker News today; pretty amazing read on the technical construction of social engineering attacks: www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blo…
This morning I wondered about living in a reality distortion field that was so strong, I could not see any possibility beyond what my curated army of yes-men reflected back to me. And lashing out like a scared animal when the walls of that distortion …
There was a certain gloominess in the workshop today. The afternoon ice cream helped lighten the mood, and I left determined to make a brighter evening for my ensemble.
Putting on my top hat and monocle to head into the office today. It’s a space that is new-ish to my compatriot tinkerers and yet it is also quite old. A tiny, modern workshop built within the colossal ribcage of a fallen giant.
Evening situation: improving.
(rye manhattan on the rocks, like god intended)
I’ve been re-reading an email I sent yesterday. It’s one of those situations where I know I responded in the right way, but I still feel uneasy about it. In a relationship that has subsisted on me nodding along to their bullshit, I just drew the line …
Needed a place to clear my head that was relatively anonymous. Too much shit going on in the world.
Regarding Social Media - Don't Split the Difference
I’ve been trying to figure out recently how to make social media work better for me. I am stuck between two “worlds”. On the one hand, I’ve got my IRL friends and family who are on the major platforms and don’t want to …
Tech Transfers
One of the hardest things that any engineering team can do is to inherit a software project from another team. And yet, my team at Red Hat has to hand off software all of the time. Because of that, we’ve had to get really good at setting up …
Refocusing Creative Energy
Last Thursday, my regular D&D group of 25 years gathered on Zoom and I ran the last session of a long-running campaign. It was a relatively rare situation of us wrapping up a full start-to-finish campaign, and it was particularly notable for two …
After Decades, a Waking Dream
When I was a kid, I had some dreams that were so vivid that the sensory experience of them was almost indistinguishable from being awake. On Monday night of this week, I woke up at 3:30 a.m. with a picture-perfect recollection of the dream sequence I …
December 2022
I don’t even know where to begin with this month. I have strong emotional reactions to just thinking about it, but why bother trying to capture all of that negativity. I won’t appreciate reading it later - if I ever bring myself to …
Goodbye, Dad
My father passed away yesterday. I’m still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn’t want this moment to go by without some writing. Going through old articles from a previous version of this blog, I found something …
Supporting Grief
A few weeks back, one of my coworkers (we’ll call him Adam) had a major health scare and was hospitalized for a while. Another of my coworkers (we’ll call her Betty) pulled together notes of well-wishing from our team and prepared them in …
N7 Day
I’m a big fan of the Mass Effect video game franchise. I’ve played the main trilogy through so many times that I could talk you through the whole plot and the big decision points without loading up the games.
If you aren’t familiar …
Meta Problems
I’ve always used Instagram to promote my DJ hobby stuff. I know it is owned by (and integrated with) Facebook, which I actively dislike, but I always viewed IG as “Evil Adjacent” rather than “Pure Evil”. But at some …
Projects
Coding Projects
I’m nhr on GitHub. Here are some of my more interesting projects:
Shiftzilla
While I was part of the OpenShift team, I was responsible for managing several consecutive product releases. Understanding our progress against bug …