Getting started
A year ago I was headed to California and had a spare morning that lined up with a running class that was being offered.
Maggie rolled her eyes and said, “just start running.”
Of course she’s right, but that’s not how I do things.
When I wanted to learn to draw I researched the paper and pencils I would need.
Pencils?
Sure - you need different kinds of pencils for soft and hard lines.
But you don’t.
Certainly not when you get started and mostly not even when you’re pretty good.
I’ve seen someone draw an amazing sketch on a napkin using a regular ink pen and I sat watching someone bring a beautiful scene to life in a spiral notebook using a yellow, number-two pencil.
They got started and then they kept going.
Blogs and Newsletters
At least monthly a friend or someone I vaguely know will post something about starting a blog.
If they’re a programmer, they will often spend a lot of time writing the software that drives the website. They’ll fuss with the font, work on the navigation, and struggle with the branding.
They won’t be writing and publishing posts.
I have that tendency as well.
And that’s why it was a shock when four years ago, a month into the COVID shutdown, that I would write a weekly newsletter.
My financial advisor had suggested I publish a monthly newsletter to let people know what I was working on and point them at books and courses they could buy from me.
He was right then. He’s still right now. It’s just not my way. I almost never market things in my newsletter - even though he’s right.
I’ve been giving talks at conferences for forty years and it’s only this year that I even mention a book they can buy from me on the topic I’m speaking on. I do it in a single slide, almost apologetically at the end.
So anyway, four years ago I decided to write a weekly newsletter that featured an essay about whatever was on my mind.
I’d try it for a year.
At the end of the year I paused to consider.
I didn’t pause too long or I would have likely stopped.
And so last week was the end of four years of weekly posts. I wrote and sent last week’s from Berlin. The week before I wrote and sent from Amsterdam.
Week after week.
Yesterday I asked Maggie for her link of the week. She’s provided me with one week after week for four years.
And with that simple request I realized that I’d signed up for another year of writing this newsletter.
I appreciate you reading it. I’m not sure I’d keep writing if you didn’t.
I appreciate when you reply and let me know that something resonated with you.
Every week I sit down to discover how I feel about something.
I learn something about myself week after week.
The Podcast
A year into the newsletter I had the idea that I would record the essay from the previous year’s newsletter and release it as a podcast.
I hosted one of the early podcasts. While working for O’Reilly (the tech publisher not the awful former Fox News host), I created a podcast called “Distributing the Future.” It was a great playground for me to learn about podcasting.
This time I had a different goal.
I thought I would experiment with reading essays for my podcast to see if I could create an audio edition of “Dear Elena”, the first 100 posts to a blog I created after my youngest daughter died.
I wasn’t ready for that project, but maybe the podcast would be a good experiment.
The anniversary of the newsletter passed and I didn’t start the podcast.
I could have started it any time, but I Arlo Guthrie’d.
I know that’s not a word, but there’s a part in Arlo Guthrie’s song Alice’s Restaurant where he invites the audience to sing along but has to wait until the chorus comes around again on the guitar.
So I did other projects and continued to write my newsletter week by week and then the second anniversary came around and I missed it again.
Then a year ago, on the third anniversary of the newsletter, I launched the podcast.
I could have waited until I worked out the format and the technology chain and where I was going to host it - but I just started.
I used music in the background of the first few episodes as I was sure that I should score the essays like they did on the really good NPR podcasts.
It took a lot of time and didn’t add much. In fact, it was a bit distracting.
The other thing I needed to figure out how to do was how to handle the asides I tend to include in my writing.
“What asides,” you ask.
Those asides.
And so I stole a device from Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz that I’d used before and used a second voice which I processed as if it was coming through a bad telephone line to represent my inner voice.
I mainly read the essays as they were, but sometimes had to add an update or provide some context because the essay was three years old.
I always edit my podcasts heavily. If I don’t like the way I’m reading a particular word or sentence, I pause and pick up the recording there and edit it together. The podcast pieces are short. The recordings are often twice as long.
I didn’t know if anyone would listen. I don’t check stats for any of my projects. That’s not what drives me.
Revisiting what had been on my mind three years early was fascinating for me. Usually, they are everyday topics from politics to productivity.
The past two episodes that ran while I was in Amsterdam and Berlin were quite tough for me to record.
Two weeks ago was a piece called And Ever about me proposing to Kim. Last week was 15, a post that was reprinted from “Dear Elena” on the 15th anniversary of Elena’s death.
That finished my first year of recording the podcast. I think I will continue for a second year. They release each Friday.
I still don’t know if I’ll record the audio version of “Dear Elena”.
For now I put it off week by week.
Video
I have a problem.
I mostly write and teach for a living.
That means if I want to teach twice as many people, I have to work twice as many hours.
More than a dozen years ago I thought about producing video courses. That way no matter how many people took the course, I would be spending a fixed amount of time.
I fell down a deep hole where I fussed about how I wanted the videos to look and how I would produce them. I’ve never liked the way I look on camera so the videos would be my voice and text and images on the screen.
I know the research says videos do better when people can see you - but I also do a huge amount of editing so it would be too jumpy if I was on camera.
I produced samples and ran it by friends and after years and years of talking about it had nothing to show.
Then during the pandemic shut down some of the conferences asked that we provide videos instead of presenting remotely live.
I was forced to produce and release something.
So a year ago, at the same time I decided to release a weekly podcast, I also decided to release a weekly video.
A video is a huge amount of work. The actual production isn’t so bad, but the preparation of code and material took a fair amount of time.
I released one each week for about ten months and then reduced the frequency to every other week.
I have to say, I’m on the fence with this one. It’s a lot of work. I’m not sure whether or not to continue and I’m not sure whether or not I should try to produce and sell a video course.
My first video was a short talk on why I present code the way I do.
The most recent one is a link to a talk I gave at AppDevCon six months after Kim died. It was a very raw talk - you may have seen the smoother one I gave after my dad died. It’s called It’s about time.
So that’s my scorecard. Four years of weekly newsletters, one year of weekly podcasts, and a year of videos that has slowed from weekly to bi-weekly.
What will I do next?
I’m not sure - but I think about it week by week.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 209. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>Shiny things
Sunday Maggie joined me in Amsterdam and we took a train to Haarlem to meet a friend and his family for lunch.
Not the “A Train” - that’s Harlem not Haarlem.
On our walk back towards the train station after lunch my friend and I discussed things we are thinking of working on next.
I told him I’m trying to finish my current book and other pending projects so my desk is clear in June for whatever Apple might announce at their conference.
He nodded and said that that’s kind of been my brand. To learn about the latest from Apple and find a way to write about it and explain it in accessible ways.
He writes wonderful books that are rooted in years of experience with a topic. Neither approach is better, each fits who we are.
I love learning new things and I love passing them on.
Enough
Earlier in the week I had taught two workshops on technology Apple released last year. One day was on Swift Macros and the other culminated in Observables and SwiftData.
The details don’t matter.
The point is that these were technologies that Apple previewed in June and released in September. Here we are in March and I’ve been teaching workshops on the topics for a while, released a book on one of them and am almost finished with a book on the other.
During the lunch break of one of the workshops I was chatting with two of the attendees.
I’m very age conscious at conferences. I am quite a bit older than most attendees. For many I am double their age and/or the same age as their parents.
One said that he would never guessed it - which was kind.
But he also said that he was very reassured by my workshop.
He has an older colleague who refuses to learn new things. The programming language and techniques he learned twenty years ago were good enough then and he considered them to be good enough now.
This worried my student. He worried about the day that he would decide he had learned enough and would refuse to learn more. His collegue was so forceful that he assumed he would become like that too.
It was a relief for him to see an old guy (me) who continues to learn new things.
Science
While in Haarlem, Maggie and I went to the Teylor museum. It was an eclectic mix of everything from fossils and geodes, to paintings, to optical illusions, to… it was eclectic.
One of my favorite part was the rooms that showed scientific instruments from the past.
In order to make progress in science, you have to be able to observe or measure various things particular to your field of interest.
When this older programmer decides that his tools never need updating, he’s decided not to see or struggle with new sorts of problems that his aging tools can’t address.
I’m torn when it comes to gadgets. I love a new kitchen gadget as much as the next person. But then I looked up to find my kitchen filled with single-use gadgets that really didn’t justify their place in a drawer or on the counter.
I have more mortar and pestles than I know what to do with and still I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about a garlic press or a nutmeg grinder.
For the most part I use a couple of really sharp, well-maintained knives and I use my hands.
When I watch a talented chef cut, cook, and arrange food I’m astounded by the efficient movements of their hands.
When I watch a baker handle dough, I’m likely to comment on the the soft but sure motion of their hand.
Your hands are the most important tool you use in the kitchen.
But if I didn’t buy a sous vide, pressure cooker, and countertop oven there would be food that I couldn’t make. And without my spiral mixer there would be a lot of food that I wouldn’t make.
So my kitchen is a combination of specialty tools and essential tools that I take time to sharpen now and then.
Sharpening the Saw
People often see a very sharp kitchen knife and voice a concern about how dangerous it is.
It is.
Working in a kitchen around heat and knives is a risky thing.
But working with a knife that isn’t sharp is much more dangerous.
We apply more force and have less control. Instead of the knife gliding through the item we’re cutting, it isn’t steady in our hand as we force the blade through.
A sharp knife can do more and it’s much safer to use.
The final habit in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is “Sharpening the Saw”.
It is more focused on the lack of productivity that results from tools that aren’t well-maintained.
When I say a sharp knife can “do more” I mean it in two ways. There are tasks that can’t be done with a dull knife and I can perform more of any task with a sharp knife than a dull one.
There are the physical tools I use in my work - my Mac and iPhone. I use recent hardware and I keep the operating system up to date.
But the most important tool in my work is my mind.
I can’t imagine not wanting to learn new things.
I can’t imagine saying that I know enough.
Our collective understanding of the world keeps changing. Perhaps I will get to a point where I want to freeze my perspective at a happier time.
Perhaps the old man shouting at kids to get off his lawn doesn’t have the latest tools to see that those aren’t kids and that’s not his lawn.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 208. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>Too late
I landed in Amsterdam and limped to Passport Control and Baggage Claim.
Man it hurt.
A year ago I finally asked my doctor about the pain in my foot. I’d thought it was plantar facietis but the pain would move to my ankle and sometimes as high as my knee.
He told me it was sciatica and recommended some stretching exercises.
For the last decade I’ve been pretty good about getting up frequently on a long plane ride to stretch and move a bit - but often it’s too late by then.
Ignoring the obvious
The week before I travel I usually have a ton of things to do.
This trip I’m presenting two workshops and a conference session. The workshops are based on books I’m writing.
All that is to say that for the last two weeks I’ve been sitting a lot with my computer in my lap.
If I had started stretching then, I would likely have had no pain at all.
Two nights ago I noticed that all of a sudden my foot hurt.
Too late.
Grrr.
You’d think I would learn.
I started to stretch but that only reduces the severity of the pain and sometimes shortens the course of it. With travel where I’d have to sit for long periods, I was only going to compound things and sure enough I landed in Amsterdam moving like a man many years older.
Don’t wait
Anyway, it was a reminder to me about not waiting until other things happen.
We have to get politically active now - before it hurts.
We have to give money to people who may not be the absolute best because it will avoid the pain that is absolutely promised by the people they run against.
There are things we can do once awful people are appointed but at best that reduces the severity of the pain they are determined to cause and possibly shorten the course of it.
In the Republican response to the State of the Union, we heard a story that was supposed to highlight the problem with Biden’s treatment of the border crisis.
The story sounded like a story of a woman who crossed the border into the US during the Biden administration.
It didn’t take long to find out that the horribly, unimaginable things that happened to the woman happened in Mexico during the Bush administration.
One side started stretching.
The other side didn’t. They doubled down. They want their people to feel the pain. They want their people hobbling around in November, and they want their people to believe their pain is Biden’s fault.
I don’t know what to do about that.
The most painful thing about my condition is getting up or down and taking the first few steps. After I’ve been walking a while I look ridiculous but I can get around.
In so many areas of my life, I don’t stretch until it hurts.
I really need to learn to change that.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 207. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>So close
I’ve learned to love watching rugby after Maggie started playing. Until she explained the game to me, I have to admit that it looked like a bunch of people running around fairly randomly stopping every once in a while for an all encompassing hug.
“Oh Daniel,” you say, “I hope this isn’t a post about rugby.”
It’s not - but it is where we begin.
I suppose many of our pass-times seem random to people who don’t know the rules and have nothing invested in learning them.
Last year I was in Paris during the rugby world cup. I watched the games there and in the following weeks on television and it was a fantastic tournament. This time of year I always enjoy the six nations tournament which features France, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Italy each playing each other.
Poor Italy never seems to win. Last year they lost all five games. Their closes came against France where they came back in the second half and had a real chance. At the very end of the game they were moving down the field so close to scoring and knocked the ball forward giving the ball and the game to France.
A couple of weeks ago Italy faced France again. It looked a lot like last year. France dominated in the first half and Italy came back in the second half. With ten minutes left in the game Italy scored to tie it. When the time ran out at 80 minutes France had the ball - but in rugby the game doesn’t end when the time runs out if you’re in the middle of something. Italy ends up being awarded a penalty and is close enough to kick the ball to score and win.
So Garbisi places the ball on the tee and he has a minute to kick the ball. Just before he kicks it, the ball falls off the tee. Garbisi has to reset the ball and rush his kick and it starts to drift right but it looks like it’s going to go through - NO, it bounces off the right goal post and the game ends in a tie.
The week before Scotland had scored with no time left but somehow the ball got caught on an opponents shoe. In rugby it’s not a score unless the ball touches the grass. The other team can get under the ball and hold it up and it’s not a score. Some how the other team’s show was ruled to have held the ball up so the game ended in a Scotland loss.
These “almosts” were thrilling to watch. It felt as if Italy should have won and felt even more that Scotland should have won.
Instead it was a tie and a loss.
Gambling
I always think of gamblers when I think of almost.
Years ago I went to a conference in Las Vegas and my mother-in-law told me to gamble while I was there.
I know there are people who win but most people don’t.
I mean, walk into a casino and look around you at the huge buildings with expensive decor. What do you think pays for all of that?
Sure, there are people who win, but most people don’t. And even those who win, talk about their winnings but don’t tend to talk about the many times they lost.
Most of the casual gamblers I know, the ones who say “Well, I’m in Las Vegas, I’ll gamble a bit.”
Most of them have an allowable limit. They put some amount of money, say $200 in their front pocket and that’s the money they’ve budgeted to lose. Playing with that money is the cost of the show they’re going to.
I’m more conservative about such things, so I got two dollars worth of nickels and played the nickel slots until I lost it all.
There’s something about slot machines though. Sometimes you know you’re going to lose when the second slot comes to a rest, but sometimes the possibility of a win is still there. It’s not until the third slot comes to a rest that you find out that you’ve bounced off of the far post.
In slots, however, it’s so easy to play again. Just play one more time. There’s a little excitement when the dials start spinning and perhaps a little more just before the last one comes to a rest.
So close. If only this one was different I could have won the big jackpot.
But you lost.
Yeah, but I was close.
Twenty minutes later I’d lost my two dollars. I’d also lost my interest in the game.
Technology
I used to play solitaire when I was a kid.
Now, these are the old days so we didn’t have computers and we certainly didn’t have smart phones.
We would take a deck of cards and shuffle them.
You young kids may need to search to see what a deck of cards is and what it means to shuffle them.
It wasn’t hard but it wasn’t trivial. You’d mix the cards then cut the cards a couple of times and then have to deal them out.
Like, you’d take the cards one by one and place them face up or face down to set up the game.
And then you’d play.
There were two things about physical cards that are different from playing on a device.
First, on a device the rules are enforced by the app. There are strict rules you have to play by.
With physical cards, I just didn’t feel like shuffling and dealing again so sometimes I would modify the rules a bit.
Second, on a device the shuffle and deal is so trivial that as soon as you finish a game you tap a button and play again. In fact, most games make such a fuss when you win that you couldn’t possibly not play again.
I don’t play solitaire anymore, but I’ve had to remove some games from my phone because I was spending too much time playing them for no apparent reason. They weren’t that fun, there seemed to be little point in the game, but - win or lose - as soon as I finished playing a game I’d tap a button to play again.
What did I win?
Nothing. In fact, often I wouldn’t win. It didn’t matter. There were absolutely no stakes. But I had to play again.
I’ve somehow convinced myself that Wordle, Sudoku, and the Daily Mini are good for me so I haven’t removed them.
But I’ve removed many of the other games that I mindlessly opened and played.
Dating apps
And then I considered the dating apps on my phone.
Are they really good for me?
They certainly took up a bunch of time. I would return to them to see who had appeared in my queue.
One of the sites would present me with someone each day that their algorithm had determined was a perfect match.
The person was invariably a conservative though my profile says “I’m liberal and it’s important to me.”
They would be looking for marriage - I’m not.
Suggested topics for discussion might include, “why vaccines are a hoax” and first date suggestions were that we ride our motorcycles to the lake.
Perfect match.
But every day, usually multiple times, I’d open the two dating apps on my phone to see what awaited me there.
One of the apps shows people nearby so when I traveled I would see the suggestions for Chicago, New York, London, Bologna, Barcelona, … It helped me see the place that I live in another light and not a flattering one.
Every once in a while I’d find a woman who seemed like she might be a decent fit and I’d swipe right.
It’s an app. If I was playing with a deck of cards I would change the rules so I’d have a “maybe” stack but in the app your choices are only “yes” or “no” before you see the next person.
Opening the app was like putting a nickel in the machine. There was a slight thrill.
Swiping right was like putting the wheels in motion and watching the first two slots stop.
Often I wouldn’t hear back.
Sometimes I would hear back and the conversation wouldn’t go anywhere.
Sometimes we’d meet for coffee and it would be quickly clear that this was not a good idea.
Whatever - I wasn’t actually dating any more while being on the dating apps than I had been when I wasn’t.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I had a coffee date set up and the woman messaged to cancel.
It broke the spell.
It made me stop and ask what I was doing.
I wasn’t paying for the dating apps but every day I was getting an offer to spend money to raise my chances of getting a match.
This was an online Casino designed to bring in a lot of money.
Sure there are people who won - but most of the people playing didn’t.
I don’t regret the nickels I put into that app but something changed.
I lost interest in the game.
I suspended my profiles, deleted the apps, and, I have to say, I’ve been happier since.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 206. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>Adjustments
Saturday the temperatures in Cleveland were between 19 and 26. That’s Fahrenheit. In Celsius that’s around -7 to -3.
And yesterday it was 60 (15.5).
I sat outside in a t-shirt enjoying a cup of coffee working on some code for my next book.
This is the sort of code where you can write something as simple as @MakeAdjustments(for: Daniel) and my car seat moves forward or back, up or down to the perfect height for me, the mirrors automatically adjust, and my favorite podcasts update and begin playing at the perfect volume.
It’s the magic we almost don’t notice any more until we get into a car without these features and complain about the end of civilization because we have to reach up and adjust the rear view mirror with our hand.
Tools
The @MakeAdjustments macro is a tool. It’s something that makes my life easier. It helps me accomplish an every day task of preparing to drive.
In a recent interview on the Hard Fork podcast, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis talked about the AI debate about whether we should be building tools or creatures.
(Hassabis says)[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/podcasts/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis.html?showTranscript=1], “I think initially, I’m seeing AI and the next versions as these incredible assistive tools. That’s how I think we should design and make them.”
I ask, “initially?”
“I’m in the camp, we should be making tools to assist human experts and so on, whether they’re scientists or medics or whatever it is, to free them up to do the higher-level conceptual work.”
It reminded me of a company I visited more than twenty years ago.
They had software that helped doctors track tumor growth. At the time this was very difficult. You had to compare images that were taken at different times perhaps with different equipment and maybe with patients positioned slightly different.
You then had to estimate whether or not the tumor had grown and this wasn’t always easy.
So this company had developed software that could say whether or not the tumor had grown and provide additional information.
The rule was that the doctor had to make their evaluation first before consulting the results of the software.
The software was a second look.
The doctor, assumed to be the expert, was in charge and the software would then provide additional information and the doctor might reconsider in the light of this.
Does having this tool change the doctor’s initial evaluation?
I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.
This all felt like a win to me. It was a tool not a creature.
Creatures
What if the doctor used the tool as a first look?
I’d like to think that the doctor would still do all of the work to independently evaluate the tumor - but…
“But,” you ask.
But, self-driving cars.
We continue to hear stories of people who get into accidents in self-driving cars because they aren’t paying attention. They don’t have their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel.
The self-driving ability was good enough that they came to trust it.
They’ve never have to take control of the wheel - until they do.
We behave differently when we depend and come to trust these tools.
We turn these tools into creatures.
Self-driving cars help alert us to things we might not have noticed. They can be a tremendous tool.
We just might not be equipped to use them appropriately.
We have spell-check enabled on our document so we don’t bother checking to see if we used a wrong word that is spelled correctly.
I recently listened to an audio book where the narrator misread one line and a minute later misread “said Agatha” as “said Alice” when there wasn’t an Alice in sight.
This is a mistake that a synthesized voice wouldn’t have made. It would have correctly read all of the words on the page, and yet I’d still rather be read to by a human.
A synthesized voice is a great tool. I don’t want to make it into a creature.
Frankenstein
Our notion of creatures often comes from sci-fi or horror movies.
I don’t remember much about the original Frankenstein movie. Most of my knowledge comes from “Young Frankenstein.”
A recent corpse is connected to a brain.
Who’s brain?
Abby.
Abby, who?
Abby Normal.
Anyway, a bolt of lightning and the monster comes to life.
But that was the movie based on another movie based on a book.
I read (the Wikipedia entry on Frankenstein)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein] and discovered why the 18 year old Mary Shelley subtitled the book “The Modern Prometheus”. The article says that the term “Modern Prometheus” derived from Kant writing about Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity.
Prometheus famously was punished for defying Zeus and giving man the gift of fire. His punishment was amazing and disgusting and depended on the ancient Greeks knowing that the liver could be regrown after being half-eaten by an eagle.
But I digress.
Fire is a tool.
Shelley objected to it because the gift of fire ended up “seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat.”
Seduced by fire.
Look at the way you treat your tools. For example, look at the way you treat your phone.
When it becomes a creature, you no longer control it.
It controls you.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 205. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>A Tradition
A few days before Valentine’s Day I noticed that Susan had hung hearts on the trees in the garden at the end of our street.
She and her son have done it every year for seventeen years.
For the first ten years some of the hearts had Elena’s name on them.
For the past seven, others have had Kim’s name on them.
I wrote an email to my neighbors about these hearts and this on going act of kindness just to make sure they’d noticed.
They had.
The Garden
Jan used to live across the street from the garden.
Our street and the one behind my house come together in sort of a tilted U where Coventry comes to a dead end.
Jan lived on one side of the U and we’d see her each day when I walked my kids home from elementary school.
As her cancer got worse and her chemo caused her to lose her hair, she still came outside and gardened. It was good for her and it was good for us to see her outside in her baseball cap doing what she loved.
Elena always stopped to chat. And when Jan died, a little more than eighteen years ago, Elena insisted on going to sit shiva and pay her respects. Elena was six.
Eighteen years ago this Thursday, Elena died suddenly.
The next summer our neighbors gathered to plant a garden for the two of them.
There’s a bench that has the names Jan and Elena engraved. There are trees that were planted along with flowers.
I have so many great memories of that day. My wonderful neighbors coming together to remember and memorialize two people who lived on their street. So many of them put in a lot of work.
But I also remember the person driving by who stopped, backed up, lowered their window, and told us that the garden would never last. It would be overgrown and forgotten in a year. He asked why we even bothered.
Sophie
I try to get out of the house at least once each day and do some work at a cafe.
Last summer I was at one of my regular places, lost in my work with my headphones playing music when I noticed a young woman standing next to my table looking at me.
I took my headphones out and looked back at her.
“Are you Daniel Steinberg?” she asked.
I told her I was.
“I’m Sophie,” she said.
Sophie had been Elena’s best friend. Their birthdays were two days apart. They had been planning for a joint celebration when, a little over a week before their seventh birthdays, Elena suddenly died.
I can’t imagine being twenty-four and having the self confidence to approach a stranger and introduce myself. I’m so glad she did.
We chatted a bit and I could see the six year old inside of this twenty-four year old. She provided a glimpse at what my six year old might have become.
I asked about her parents and her brothers and she brought me up to date.
I told her I’d tell Maggie I’d seen her and maybe they could get together the next time Maggie was in town - and they did.
She went back to her table. Back to studying for her med school classes.
I put my headphones back in - but couldn’t focus.
The harvest
Some of the hearts have Elena’s name on them and some of the hearts have Kim’s name on them.
Each year I walk down to the garden and take pictures. Often I try to find a shot that has hearts with both of their names visible.
But there are hearts that have no name on them.
These are hearts that anyone can see as hanging for someone they love or care about, living or dead.
I always remember that man who stopped to yell at us.
I don’t know why he thought the things he thought.
I don’t know why he felt compelled to share these thoughts with a group of neighbors working together to do something nice.
In the eighteen years since Jan and Elena died, in the seventeen years since the garden was created, the world around me has changed where it feels like there are more people like him who have these thoughts and feel entitled and encouraged to share them with the people struggling to just plant a damn garden.
And yet the garden stands.
Those trees have grown so much in seventeen years. I look at them and see the saplings my neighbors planted.
The city saw the work my neighbors had done and added trees of their own.
It reminds me that sometimes the kind things you do in passing last for years and years.
Sometimes people build on these little things.
We keep planting trees no matter how futile it seems these days.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 204. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>Sticking
The Apple Vision Pro is really expensive - but that’s not the reason I don’t see myself getting one.
Actually, is the Apple Vision Pro too expensive?
On the one hand, $3500, so yeah. On the other hand, Microsoft’s HoloLens2 starts at $3500 and the only version I could find in stock is the Industrial Edition for $4950.
But once an idea gets stuck in your head it’s so hard to get it out.
Why do people talk about the price of Apple’s $3500 headset but not Microsoft’s? I really don’t know.
We seem to only get ideas stuck in our head for some people and things but not others.
Hillary calling opponents “deplorables” stuck even though she was applying it to people who were racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobice, and/or Islamaphobic. Trump calling opponents “vermin” didn’t stick.
Biden’s gaffes and the recent report referring to him as old with limited memory is looking like it will stick. Trump confusing Biden and Obama, Pelosi and Haley, being convicted of sexual abuse, trying to steal an election, with memory lapses and difficulty telling the truth never seems to stick.
Wait. Where was I.
Oh yeah. I tried a demo of the Apple Vision Pro.
It was ok
Here’s the TL;DR; - I didn’t not like it.
The guy helping me was nice enough, but he kept trying to sell me the device. It was a classic-car-salesman-like experience.
Kept trying to help me see myself in the device using it throughout the day without understanding how I use technology or what my day looks like.
“So,” he asked at several points during the demo, “do you think you’ll be ordering one today.”
“No,” I said each time and politely said some version of, “I’m just here to try them out and see how they feel first hand.”
He didn’t ask what I knew about the product. He didn’t ask why I was interested in trying it out.
He didn’t ask me anything about my home or work settings. In a way, I’m a perfect target for this device. I live and work on my own and wouldn’t be shutting anyone out if I used it at home.
At one point I mentioned that I have a music app on the store and I wanted to see if it made sense to bring the app to Vision Pro.
He later tried to call back to that information in a way that showed he wasn’t really listening. “You said you like to listen to music,” he said, “many music apps run great on the Vision Pro.”
It wasn’t what I said and he didn’t show me any music apps - but I understand it was a scripted demo.
Not for me
It could be that I’m not a gaming guy. I haven’t tried any of the headsets that have come before this.
Well, I’ve tried them, but not more than a quick experience.
Years ago I visited a VR room at NASA and it was a lot of fun - though early days.
I saw an early demo of Croquet. It was a 3D Squeak like environment where I could build my world and you could build yours and we could visit each other’s worlds and walk around.
The demo was at an O’Reilly conference years ago. There was what looked to be a PowerPoint presentation on the screens on the left and right side of the room. And then we realized it was our vantage point - our camera angle as two independent actors were watching the same screen. They backed up, turned and faced each other and the audience got that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Virtual worlds - augmented worlds. If the time isn’t right for them, perhaps it’s closer.
A friend produced serious content for the HoloLens for a local medical school and Maggie and I got to try it out. I found the experience cumbersome and hard to navigate.
My brother and sister-in-law gifted me a fantastic meal in Bilbao last year. The dessert course was served with an Occulus headset. You put on the headset and waited for the environment to appear and then you were to eat the tiny dessert items in a proscribed order.
The food was amazing. The headset added nothing.
If anything, it took me out of the moment.
I could feel it on my head and the scene I was presented with had a poor image quality and didn’t seem to have anything to do with the dessert.
And so I followed the directions of the guy at the Apple store and lifted the device with my left hand and pulled the strap over my head with my right hand.
The Demo
The scan of my face and prescription glasses worked great and a moment later the device had booted up and I saw the menu floating in space between me and my guide.
Navigating wasn’t difficult but I found it required more gesturing than felt natural.
We started with the photos app. You look and you tap your fingers together and that worked fine. It was the scrolling that I didn’t care for. On a web page later in the demo my guide told me I could scroll down and keep reading but it took a lot of effort to scroll and scroll. As a friend observed, on my Mac I can tap the space button to scroll down a screen-full.
Oh and speaking of buttons, typing the URL in to navigate to a web page was painful. I ended up choosing one of the stock URLs. I found this particularly interesting if you remember what it was like to send a text message on a phone before the iPhone and how nice and natural it was once we got the full keyboard on an iPhone. This felt like hunt and peck in the worst way. It was kind of like entering a search on Apple TV with the remote control selecting a letter at a time.
Then again, I figure I could have been holding it wrong.
The photos demos were nice. The 3D were fine. The immersive were fun.
My guide had me resize the window and move it off to the side and select the TV. He had me watch trailers and then I watched an immersive demo with quick scenes from this or that.
My favorites were the sports demos. Getting to sit in great seats and look around at the action or check out the scoreboard was a killer app that I could see myself paying for at some point.
My brother sent me an article that said that movies on a flight were another killer app.
There was a control on the headset that allowed me to dial up or dial down my surroundings.
And this is where they lost me.
It reminded me that this is a device you put on to immerse yourself in a world currated the way you want it.
It’s an isolating experience.
Maybe that’s what I didn’t like about wearing a headset for the high-class dessert.
Meals - even if you’re eating alone at a restaurant - are a shared experience. The couple at the table next to me turned to chat now and then. I watched some people enjoy courses I’d had already and others sample courses that were to come.
I’ve watched us progress from people who engaged with others to people who sit next to each other staring at their phones. (Although, for some reason many of them have their speaker on so that I have to listen to their FaceTime conversation or their music.)
There will come a time when I want to put on a headset like this and immerse myself in its content.
At that point I’ll be able to come up with some justification for whatever the price is.
But now, it’s too important that we stay aware of what’s going on around us.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 203. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>The browser
There’s a scene in my new book where the detective decides that his sidekick needs to organize his work with a physical planner. Much of this book takes place in a department store and so it should be easy to find one.
The pair are loosely based on Poirot and Hastings. In mine, in a nod to Jonny Ive, the detective is Chamfered Edges and the sidekick is Captain Swiftly.
I know it’s silly. But it makes me smile and the book is really a technical book on dataflow in SwiftUI and serves as a counterpoint and metaphor to the lessons being taught.
Anyway, they’re in a department store. In my mind the story takes place in Paris though I never say so. I used to visit this time of year for the dot Swift conference. This department store is like a scaled down version of the Galeries Lafayette.
I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of the name of the department in the store where you’d find the planner. But I’d heard about perplexity.ai at last week’s meeting of NSDrinking and so I thought I’d check it out.
At the prompt I typed, “What section of a department store are planners kept in?”
After a long delay, I saw the response that began, “Planners are typically kept in the retail store’s back-of-the-house area, which is not accessible to customers. Store planning involves determining the ideal store size, layout, fixture placement,…”
Clearly they were talking about a different sort of planner and it was a little disturbing that they were kept somewhere.
At the end of the lengthy answer I was prompted to ask a follow-up.
I wrote, “I mean calendars.”
This time the answer began, “Calendars are typically found in the stationery or office supplies section of a department store.”
Real life
Forget that the initial answer was wrong and the machine misunderstood what I was asking - people do that too - the physics of the interaction felt wrong to me.
By now I probably have as many conversations over text as I do speaking. With some exceptions, most exchanges, whether typed or spoken, are short phrases or sentences with a fairly quick response or follow-up.
So the exchange with the machine, in real life might have been…
“What section of a department store are planners kept in?”
“Oh, they’re kept in the back.”
“Back?”
“Yeah, store planners work on…”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. I mean planners like calendars with extra pages for to do lists.”
“Oh, the stationery section. Third floor near the escalator.”
There’s a back and forth. By physics I mean for action (thing spoken) there’s an equal and opposite reaction (response by the other person).
Back and forth.
There’s interrupting.
Suppose I was going to ask, “what section are planners kept in? You know the calendar things?” But I was interrupted before I got to the clarifying question.
That’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to conversation. We can’t know both what we’re talking about and where the conversation is heading at the same time.
At the moment I was interrupted, an answer was provided based on what had been said and the listener’s idea of where we were going.
Momentum
I got to thinking about the physics of conversation last week when talking to a friend.
He made a comment and I thought he was referring to a conversation we had had a year before.
I said something back because I didn’t think we had finished that discussion and he said he didn’t want to revisit the conversation.
I said ok, made a further comment about it, and then stopped.
Why the further comment? It certainly made things worse. I’ve told people, “I don’t want to talk about that right now” and been annoyed when they continued.
The answer is physics. It’s conversational momentum.
It’s that moment when the waitress says, “enjoy your meal” and you can’t stop from saying, “you too.”
Some people can stop quickly and some are like a train where it takes a mile to come to a complete stop.
Sometimes it’s not the person it’s the topic like the difference between coming to a stop on concrete or loose gravel.
The trick is to not speak while you’re coming to a halt.
It’s one of my favorite Ron White quotes, “I had the right to remain silent. I just didn’t have the ability.”
You have to not speak in such a way that the other person doesn’t think you’re sulking or angry. You’re just staying in your silence until the thoughts in your head have come to a complete halt.
Heisenberg, Newton’s third, and momentum.
And later when you go to unpack the conversation, you need to be aware that items may have shifted during the flight of time in between.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 202. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>The jar
There’s a classic video of a fictional professor in a Philosophy 101 class who wants to give his students A Valuable Lesson for a Happier Life.
The video is a dramatization of a story by Steven Covey who wrote a lot about getting the most out of your life.
The professor places a plastic jar on the desk and fills it with golf balls.
He asks the class, “is it full” and they answer “yes”.
He reaches into his brief case and pulls out a bag of gravel. He pours that into the full jar and the gravel slips and slides around the golf balls and settles into the spaces in between.
He asks the class, “is it full” and they again answer “yes”.
He then pours some sand into the full jar and shakes the jar a bit until the sand fills up the spaces that even the gravel left.
He asks the class, “is it full”. You’d think by now they’d have gotten the point but they again answer “yes”.
He places two bottles of beer on the desk. This gets their attention. He pours some of the beer into the jar until it is indeed full.
There’s no beer in the original story. The original story is rocks, pebbles, and sand.
In the story is the rocks are the most important things in your life - the really big things like your family, friends, amd passions. The pebbles are important but not at that level. The pebbles are the important things in your day like your job, your home, and so on. The sand is the small stuff. It’s scrolling your phone, watching tv, and other things you don’t need to be doing.
The point of the story is that if you put the sand in first you won’t have room for the pebbles or the rocks.
You fill up your life with the small things and the big things never get done.
Because you’re occupied with the small things, you don’t notice day to day. It’s only when you look back.
The Third Word
This year my three words have had a theme. They often do.
I’ve been thinking about scheduling my time and making priorities the same way we scheduled ads when I was in radio.
The first word was designed to make sure I do notice day to day.
It was reconcile.
The idea was that at the end of each day or the beginning of the next day, I would look back and see what it was I accomplished and how that compared to what I had planned to do.
The second word was designed to make sure I’m not setting myself up for failure.
It was avails.
It’s a term of art in radio ad scheduling (which is called traffic).
Avails are the number of available slots in a day for specific tasks or specific times. If I don’t have any availability, I either need to make room by moving or canceling another task or I have to decline or defer this task. I don’t have any avails.
My third word is ROS.
It is again a term of art and is pronounced R.O.S. and stands for “Run of Schedule”. It’s the first time I’ve used an acronym for a word of the year and it feels like a bit of a cheat except in radio it is one word like scuba (self-contained underwater breathing aparatus).
Scuba feels like a word to most of us. ROS feels like one word to me. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
Rocks and Pebbles
There are things that are important or not but we’ve committed to being there at a specific time. In some ways those are the golf balls or rocks we need to work around.
In the planning or reconcile stage we should look at these scheduled commitments and decide whether or not they should be in our calendar. While preparing for the day ahead, these calendar items are mostly immovable and so we look at the space around them for the pebbles.
The pebbles aren’t less important as they are in Covey’s story but they are more flexible. We can look at our to-do list and see that on our way to meet someone for coffee we can stop at the library and pick up the books that are being held. We can stop on our way back at the grocery store for those items we need to make dinner.
So even though these items are on our to-do list and not scheduled at a certain time, while I’m preparing my day, I can enter them into my calendar at a set time and help make sure they get done.
Sand
The jar still isn’t full.
I don’t want to schedule these things in, but I want them to be captured somehow so that I do them when I have time.
These are the Run of Schedule items. These are the lower priority “if there’s time” items.
This is the moment when I check my email, pay my bills, catch up on that podcast I’ve been meaning to listen to.
This list is there so that if I have time to fill I have something to fill it with. Absent these I’ll doom scroll social media or watch a television show that I’ve already seen.
What happens if these R.O.S. items don’t get done today?
Some of them will become important.
When that bill comes closer to the day the payment is due, the grain of sand becomes a pebble and I schedule it and do it.
Some of them will become less important.
That podcast about a certain news event is now a week old and I don’t really care anymore.
Some of them reveal their importance by my doing or not doing them.
Some of them will just expire.
That sale on clementines ended yesterday. There’s no reason to stop by the store and buy them now.
I’ve been thinking about writing a to-do app that uses these concepts from radio traffic departments. An app that is built around reconcile, avails, and R.O.S..
It’s been in my ROS for a while now. Years. Perhaps someday it will grow into a pebble.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 201. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
]]>Too much
One of the things that makes me sad about the prospect of downsizing and moving to a smaller place, is I won’t have enough walls for my artwork.
I don’t have enough walls already. Several rooms have pieces that are framed and leaning against the wall. We’d planned to rotate what we’d displayed but I like most of what’s up there.
A student of mine had me over to their parents house for some gathering years ago. Every inch of the wall was covered in art and every piece displayed cost more than my entire collection.
It made me uncomfortable.
I know nothing about design, but there has to be room to breathe. There’s probably a whole science of how much space needs to be around paintings depending on their size and settings.
So maybe I could hang a lot more of my art if I got rid of all that space - but I just can’t.
And so I have too many pictures for my walls.
I’m full
It’s not just pictures. I have five sets of dishes.
I have my every day dishes and I have the pattern that Kim and I have from our wedding. We used to use it to entertain - but it’s been years since I had someone over.
I should probably get rid of my every day dishes and just use the nicer set.
Then there are the sets we got from family members as they downsized or died.
I could eat on a different plate or dish for seven months and not use all that I have.
It’s too much.
Someone offers you something and you don’t have a good reason to say “no” and you don’t want to hurt their feelings so you say “yes”.
What the heck am I going to do with a new
Where am I going to put it?
For a while I had a rule that for everything that came into my house at least two things had to leave.
I’ve only got so much space.
Scheduling
It also turns out that I’ve only got so much time.
That’s harder to see. It’s like the snack ad that tells you to eat all you want, they’ll make more.
There’s always more time coming.
One of my favorite Ron White jokes is about him spending the night out drinking and getting back to his hotel at 7:30 in the morning. He stops at the desk to leave a wakeup call for seven o’clock since he’s a comedian and works nights.
The person at the front desk let’s him know that it’s already after seven. He tells her, “no, the next one. You’ve got another one coming around. Put me on that one.”
There’s always a next one.
And yet we can’t go back and unwaste the time we spent earlier in the day. If I could go back and not watch some of the football I watched this past weekend, think of all I could have accomplished.
And yet, I needed to spend some of that time doing nothing. The time I was watching football was the space around my paintings.
Maybe you’re different, but I can’t pack my days too full.
Hang on a second there junior - it turns out that’s not true.
I do pack my days too full. It’s why my to do list has so many things on it that roll over from day to day.
I have items so stale that there’s no sense in doing them any more. I may as well cross those off.
And I have items that have rolled over so many times that I should just face the fact that I’m never going to do them. They just aren’t urgent or important enough that I ever dedicate the time for them.
Selling ads
I’ve mentioned a scheduling app I’d like to write. My first word for this year was “reconcile”. It involved looking back at your day and seeing which appointments and to-dos actually got done and what was occupied the rest of your time.
My second word is “avails”. When I worked in radio, the salespeople sold ads to run. There are ads that run at certain exact times. Say someone wants to sponsor the 755 newscast. Then their sponsorship runs during that newscast.
Other ads have to run at certain times of the day. Maybe they bought during morning drive time so the ad has to run between 7 and 9 am. Maybe they bought it for midday when people used to listen at the office. Maybe they bought for evening when people are at home. These times are called daypart.
Some ads need to be separated. Sometimes on television I see ads for one car run right after an ad for another car. In the old days we would separate your ad from an ad for your competitor.
There are only so many ad slots available in a day - we call those avails. But we could have plenty of openings for next Tuesday just none in the middle of the day - so we have no avails in midday so we can’t sell an ad then. We can suggest a different day or a different time.
And, of course, there are exceptions. If a big and loyal client who spends a lot of money needs some time, we might see if we can move one of the other ads. If a customer is offering a lot of money for this particular buy, we might see what we can do.
It’s like someone has given us a really nice painting and we look to see if we can either move something that’s up on the wall already to another wall or maybe take it down.
Scheduling time
So what if we schedule our days by paying attention to our avails?
Say next Tuesday I have to write this newsletter and I have a one hour phone meeting. I could decide that that leaves me with two hours of avails in the afternoon.
Maybe I can handle more.
In fact when I reconcile the day I can see how much I tried to pack in and how much I actually accomplished.
There will be many days where I accomplish more than I have scheduled but I need to leave space around my scheduled tasks and that means understanding and using my avails honestly.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 200. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe
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