Favorites this year: Arc, Obsidian, Linkding, Feedbin, Cursor, Ivory

📨 Mail Client: Gmail (web) and Gmail (iOS). My email needs are pretty basic but I really enjoy the snoozing feature, which Gmail’s own apps handle the best. Any time I get an appointment confirmation email or concert tickets or anything like that, I snooze the email until a day or two before the event so that I won’t forget and so that I can easily access the ticket or confirmation email etc. I rely completely on the vim-like keyboard shortcuts on the web app.

📮 Mail Server: Google

📝 Notes: Obsidian. I love Obsidian so much even though I’ve pretty consciously avoided diving into the deep end of the plugins etc. I use it for organizing my personal life reference material as well as for private 1:1 and reference notes for work (separate vaults, work vault is local only to my work machine).

✅ To-Do: OmniFocus. I really dislike the direction of OmniFocus 4 which was released about a year ago, and the app generally feels old, overwrought, and stale. But I’ve been OmniFocus to organize my life constantly since 2007 and it’s solid enough that I don’t feel the need to switch. In particular I hate how they made quick capture harder to do on iOS. If I were starting fresh now I’d probably use Things.

🐘 Social Media: Ivory. I’m pretty much only on Mastodon these days. I was a heavy user of Twitter until about 3 years ago when I was able to drop off. Mastodon is quiet but has a few people I care about on it, and I follow a lot of local Bay Area folks who are generally posting positive things about local events and pictures of when the sunset or clouds look cool. Almost no one on Mastodon appears to have a sense of humor or post things that are funny, which is a bummer but keeps me from being sucked in. It’s not a replacement for Twitter, but I don’t really think I want a replacement for Twitter right now. If I did I’d go to bluesky, I have no interest in supporting anything Meta does if I can avoid it. Also I’ve never installed TikTok because I know it wouldn’t be good for me, but I’m bummed that they’ve made their website so unusable that I sometimes can’t watch silly videos my wife sends me.

📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 14 Pro

🎨 Photo Editing: Photos app on my iPhone. With a young child I’m mostly trying to capture as many moments as possible more than taking the perfect shot and editing it. A live photo where she’s doing something cute is worth much more to me at this point than a perfectly composed shot.

📆 Calendar: Google Calendar with email reminders for events. My personal calendar is pretty sparse.

📁 Cloud File Storage: I don’t really think about this much these days. My photos sync with iCloud and I also sync them on Google Photos, I pay for both because they aren’t too pricey to just never have to think about it. I assume my computer uses iCloud to do something? I have Dropbox for a few legacy media workflows, and use BackBlaze for cloud backups.

📖 RSS: Feedbin, which I absolutely love. I especially like the custom email addresses to sign up to newsletters but get them in my RSS readers instead of cluttering up my inbox. I also set up some automatic filters so that I can tag some feeds as “Hiatus” and have them automatically get marked as read but still be around in case I want more of a firehose of sources I trust. I consume my RSS feeds using Reeder on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone. I also have a light Reeder clone that I built for fun up at drews.club. I haven’t touched the code in ages but it still works pretty reliably and I use it all the time. If you’ve got Feedbin feel free to give it a try, there’s very little control UI just keyboard shortcuts (j/k to scroll items, n/p to scroll feeds, m to mark as read/unread).

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: macOS Contacts

🌐 Browser: Desktop: Arc for browsing, Chrome for Development. My default browser is actually Velja, which lets you configure what browser to use based on the URL you’ve clicked (and auto-opens links like Zoom and Notion etc in the App directly, except for Slack because Slack’s URL structure is horrible). iOS: Safari

💬 Chat: In order of quantity: Slack, Messages, and occasionally Discord

🔖 Bookmarks: I switched from Pinboard this year due to some unreliability as well as hateful political statements from the founder. I had been a loyal Pinboard user since 2010, paying since around 2015. I’m now using linkding that I pay to host on PikaPods thanks to Brett Terpstra’s recommendations and have been quite happy with it so far.

📑 Read It Later: I subscribe to my own linkding bookmarks as an RSS feed which pipes it back into Feedbin.

📜 Word Processing: I tend to write in either Obsidian or VS Code. iA Writer is great, but I’ve found that I need vim mode to feel productive at all.

📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets but pretty rarely. I also love Soulver which replaces a lot of needs I have for a true spreadsheet.

📊 Presentations: Didn’t do many presentations this year, but I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with iA Presenter. It’s got a bit of a learning curve and you have to just accept that you can’t lay out slides in a pixel perfect way, but once you grok it you can whip together a decent looking presentation while typing in markdown in no time at all. Great for throwing together a quick presentation without needing to use my mouse much.

🛒 Shopping Lists: I’ve been using Clear for forever, and the new version that came out in the last year or two has been great. My wife doesn’t believe in shopping lists so for better or worse I haven’t had to deal with any sort of shopping list syncing behavior.

🍴 Meal Planning: N/A

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Honestly at this point I just try to make as much money as possible and not be completely unhinged with my spending, and hope for the best.

📰 News: RSS, New York Times & SF Chronicle although I have major frustrations with both, and Ars Technica which I love. I’ll also shout out Simon Willison’s AI Coverage, which is more focused on the tech than the business stuff and I find generally optimistic and engaging without selling any snake oil.

🎵 Music: Spotify. They’re evil in a bunch of ways and I refuse to use them for podcasts on principle, but it’s the best music app and integrates well with my Sonos and Alexa devices. A few friends have switched to Apple Music as a principled stance which I respect, but I’ve never heard anyone actually enjoy using Apple Music. I still miss Rdio and think of it often.

🎤 Podcasts: Overcast. Don’t love the new version released this year, it’s been pretty buggy and I find it pretty hard to manage a large backlog. But like OmniFocus I’ve been using it for forever and I’m used to it. I’d probably go with Pocket Casts if I was new to the scene.

🔐 Password Management: 1Password, it’s fine.

🧑‍💻 Code Editor: VS Code and Cursor. I haven’t really used the advanced AI Cursor features heavily but I really enjoy Cursor Tab. It takes some getting used to, I’ve described it as trying to type while an overly caffeinated intern screams suggestions at you that are right roughly 70% of the time. But once you get used to it it’s great for the tedious parts of coding.

🔍 Search Engine: I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but I still almost always prefix a search with !g to initiate a google search. I mostly just like the ! prefix functionality where I can search wikipedia with a !w or google images with a !gi, and I’m more aligned with what DuckDuckGo is trying to do as a company than Google.

🚀 App Launcher: I switched from LaunchBar to Raycast this year but haven’t noticed a huge difference. I mostly just use for app launching, although I did create a few snippets in Raycast as well as one integration to quickly append text to a list in a specific section of a document in Obsidian.

✈️ VPN: Tailscale at work, nothing in my personal life. I’ve heard really good things about using Tailscale for a personal setup and would definitely reach for it first if I found myself in a situation where I might need it.

One day Mo-Mo was in a mood for reminiscing, understandable at her age. I asked her to tell me a story I had only heard passing references to over the years.

“Mo-Mo, is it true that when my mom was a kid you all had a pet owl?”

Mo-Mo lit up with a big smile.

“Oh yes, Owliver!”

I’ll try to reproduce the story as Mo-Mo told it; I believe that this took place in the 1970s in Illinois.

One day, an owl showed up outside of Mo-Mo’s house. It was very small for an owl and clearly in bad health. It was resting in a covered spot, safe from rain or predators. Mo-Mo immediately took a liking to him and named him Owliver. She nursed him back to health by feeding him raw liver out of her bare hand. Owliver was very delicate and careful when eating, and never bit her hand.

As Owliver got a bit healthier, he stuck around the house and became very attached to Mo-Mo. She started taking him on car rides, with Owliver hanging out in the front passenger seat. She’d take him to the grocery store to get more raw liver and leave Owliver in the car while she shopped. People at the grocery store would frequently tell her she had some sort of hawk or crow trapped in her car and she would calmly correct them that he was an owl, his name was Owliver, and he was doing just fine, thank you.

After Owliver had been with the family for a while, Mo-Mo consulted “the bird lady in town” (???) and asked what she should do. The bird lady told Mo-Mo that if she kept feeding Owliver and providing him shelter he’d never be able to survive on his own in nature, so she advised her to let Owliver go. Mo-Mo drove Owliver far away to the woods, said goodbye, and set him free.

Owliver showed up back at the house a week later. As Mo-Mo tells it, she explained to Owliver that he had to live on his own, but he was still allowed to visit occasionally and she would feed him if she happened to be home when he showed up.

This continued for a time, with Owliver dropping by periodically to visit and have some liver, until Mo-Mo hadn’t seen Owliver for a while. She hoped that this meant that Owliver was finally able to live on his own and no longer needed her help. Mo-Mo paused at this point in the story, and began to cry softly.

She found out that a boy in the neighborhood had received a BB Gun for his birthday, and had almost immediately shot and killed Owliver. She doesn’t blame the child, who she says was given a BB Gun from his parents with no guidance and was “just doing what little boys with BB Guns do.”

Mo-Mo has had many bird friends over the years. Most recently was a years-long friendship with a cardinal named Einstein who winters at her condo, but that’s a story for another time.

The only thing worse than a rambly video announcement from someone who loves hearing themselves talk is a video announcement from someone who is clearly being forced to record one. This has become a scourge at my work, and I bet we’re not unique in this respect. An engineer’s manager will tell them that they should post a video about what they’re working on to get higher visibility across the company. The result will be a 3-4 minute video of an engineer, head barely in frame in a dimly lit room with a blank white wall behind them, in a full flop sweat dead-eyed reading off of a google doc into their MacBook webcam.

I think I understand why this is happening. I think a lot of this is to combat announcement fatigue at work. Every day we are inundated with new announcements that may or may not impact us: updates about insurance and benefits, IT telling us whether or not we can upgrade to the latest OS, company reorgs, process changes, invitations to all hands meetings, invitations to fill out surveys about the all hands meetings, actual technical information from engineers that may or may not impact us directly, etc. Following all of them can be a full time job, and as a result many people ignore most of these messages entirely. But in a long stream of text announcement messages in a channel a video announcement pops visually. For one, it simply takes up a lot of space on the screen. It also looks far more inviting than an intimidating wall of text, and it usually requires you to actively interact to get any information whatsoever (as opposed to being able to quickly skim text).

This last spring I found myself in a situation where I needed to make a series of announcements at work, and I wanted to do something different. I was encouraged to post videos to bring more attention to them, but as I’ve said before, if you have to make a status update video for work and can’t just do a text message instead, you should put in the effort to make the video relatively short and worth people’s time to watch.

tl;dr I made some silly videos using AI at work, scroll down and watch them!

Interview With The Vampire

First, a bit of context. I’ve been at my job for over 7 years, which in tech can feel like several mortal lifetimes. For better or worse my most enduring legacy at this company will be that of “The Redux Guy” (you do not need to know anything about Redux to follow this post). When I joined in 2016, I jumped right into leading the migration of our existing data layer to Redux to support a broader React migration, and I’ve spent the majority of my time since maintaining these systems, adding functionality, and working to improve the developer experience through both education and tooling. We were a much smaller company in 2016, and back then I devoted a lot of time both one on one and in small groups to teaching people Redux and the internal patterns and nuances of our data layer. I should note that there have been many developers other than me who have made significant contributions in this space, but ultimately it’s my small team that owns this part of our codebase and I’m the resident domain expert on the team.

My wife and I had our first child in May, and my work provides a very generous 6 month parental leave, which I used all at once after our child was born. In the months leading up to that, I thought a lot about what I should be doing to prepare for such a long absence. I cleaned up some creaky parts of the codebase that I owned and upgraded older packages so that everything would run smoothly in my time off, and I’m happy to discover now that I’ve returned that everything did run mostly smoothly!

I also continue to spend a lot of time helping others work with Redux and our associated infrastructure. At the start of our data migration, I wrote a lot of really good documentation, and I’m frequently helping people in code reviews or in our various help channels at work on anything Redux or Redux adjacent. But over the years our documentation had gotten a little stale and scattered across different internal document systems, and I wouldn’t be around for 6 months to help out with individual questions. Plus, we’d grown a ton as a company over the years, and more people were joining all the time who perhaps had little experience with Redux, and certainly no experience with our internal patterns. My approach to helping people individually or in smaller groups wasn’t scaling, and something needed to change. I decided that my impending parental leave was the perfect nudge for me to devote some time to providing comprehensive educational materials that could be a resource to all of our engineers both now and in the future.

I’ve found it really helps for a project to have a name, even if it’s made up of many tangential parts. I decided to call this effort the Redux Speaker Series: a series of video presentations covering the basics of Redux and how we use it internally, with deeper dives into specific topics. These video presentations would be live zoom meetings that anyone could attend and ask questions, and they would also be recorded for people to watch later and to use as an ongoing resource. Accompanying these videos would be updated documentation on the topics, all stored in a central location. While I planned to give a few of these presentations myself, I also wanted to solicit guest speakers from across the company to talk about topics that they had expertise in.

Risky Business

This was in March of last year, which was a pretty rough time at work. We were over a year into the very disruptive and at times rocky process of being acquired by a much larger company, many significant contributors to our culture and codebase had left, and we were fresh off a rough round of company wide layoffs in January. Morale was pretty dire, overall engagement was low, and those of us remaining were mostly sticking to our individual work to provide value to our team instead of helping out with more cross-team efforts and discussions. It was not a time where people were attending optional meetings or doing work that wasn’t strictly assigned to them.

This was not an ideal situation to kick off the Redux Speaker Series. For the effort and time put into this project to be worthwhile, I would need people to attend these presentations and take advantage of the documentation, as well as get other engineers to volunteer their time to present topics for the series.

I decided that I would give the first three presentations of the series, so that I could set the stage and expectations around the presentations and establish a baseline level of quality. I also decided to make these presentations weekly, as I have seen many a biweekly or monthly meeting quickly flounder and die (also my baby was due in 2 months, and I had at least 10 topics I wanted to have presentations on). In order to prevent a skipped week from a speaker needing to cancel at the last minute (very common for these volunteer efforts), I set aside a few “ringer” related topics from people who had already recently given presentations so they’d be able to jump in on short notice. Frontloading my presentations also meant that I’d be able to ramp down my time investment and focus more on coordination and outreach as our baby got closer to arriving and my life got more hectic.

I needed to announce the Redux Speaker Series in a way that broke through this tough environment, got people’s attention, and got them excited (which is challenging because honestly Redux as a topic can be very academic and dry). We had a biweekly Front-End Sync meeting where announcements like this were usually made, but that meeting had lately only had a dozen or so attendees out of the 200 or so Front-Ends at the company. I also had a conflict and wouldn’t be able to attend the next FE Sync, so I decided to make an announcement video and schedule a post in our FE channel to go out a few minutes before the meeting, when FEs would be most likely to see it.

American Made

I’d had some fun making videos for work a couple years ago, and I wanted to continue in that vein. I tried to think of who in the world is the best at promoting something in an exciting way that I could mimic. A person immediately came to mind, someone who believes that their sole purpose on this earth is to entertain and who is willing to go to great lengths to do so. I didn’t have the same talents or resources as this person, but AI was really blowing up at this time, and on my commute home the night before the FE sync inspiration struck. I spent the evening making a video and scheduled it to post the next morning.

(Videos have been lightly edited to redact internal information and some names of coworkers)

I put together this video using iMovie, Audacity to add radio effects to the audio, and one of the better AI voice cloning tools. I won’t say which one because I clearly violated the terms of service by checking a box saying that I owned the rights to the voice I’m cloning. I made the voice clone using only the audio from the original video, and I picked this video because I figured the bad audio quality (from Tom Cruise recording dialogue from the top of a plane!!!) would help mask any AI weirdness around the voice.

While I’m not able to see view metrics on the video, over 50 people reacted to the message with encouraging emoji, a greater turnout than the FE Sync itself. Even more encouraging, the following week 70 people joined my Redux Fundamentals talk on zoom, with more watching the recording afterwards. I cannot stress enough how weird it is to dial into an optional one hour zoom on a Monday morning to learn about Redux fundamentals. I’d clearly struck a nerve and people wanted to learn more about this topic, and the feedback I was receiving on the content of the talk was overwhelmingly positive. With this sort of reception, it was clear to me and my manager that it was worth me investing a significant amount of my time in this speaker series.

For my next presentation I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do an announcement video. If I did another one I was in danger of having to do a new video every week until I went on parental leave. But I think the video really helped boost attendance to the presentations, which were more work than the announcement video anyway. So I decided to scale back a little bit and make a more conventional announcement video where I just talk to my webcam in my home office.

Just kidding, I went all in! I decided to do a misdirect with a different celebrity guest, before of course falling back to Tom Cruise. The AI voice cloning was also a lot better than I’d expected, so I got more adventurous with using it.

In the leadup to this video I’d taken advantage of the positive attention for the Redux Speaker Series and reached out to other engineers to be guest speakers. I was worried no one would sign up, but it turns out if you invent a meeting that lots of people attend, and invite people to talk at that meeting, it’s really good for their career to say yes! A few people even proposed topics and got added to the list. I decided to use the second half of the video to promote the upcoming topics and speakers, to build excitement for what was to come.

Far and Away

I was having a lot of fun being creative and silly with these videos, and sticking to the limitation of trying to shoehorn these technical topics into videos featuring Tom Cruise. My next topic, Redux Persistence, was a particularly dry one and one that I had a lot of mixed feelings about, having worked in this particularly challenging space for years. I decided to branch out a little bit and try to elicit some different emotions, while at the same time grappling with my enduring role at the company. Fortunately, Tom Cruise has incredible range. I also had a different reason to be emotional: my good friend and teammate Anuj had decided to move from San Francisco back to London. He was still working on my team remotely, but I was really going to miss seeing him regularly in the office. If he ever actually leaves the company, I’ll be despondent and utterly inconsolable. I chose to make this video longer, and dedicate a “post-credits” type sequence to him. I was also comfortable making a longer video, as at this point anyone watching one of my announcement videos was mostly doing so for entertainment, since the videos contained no information that wasn’t already in the text of the message. I will note, however, that the videos still had roughly the same useful information density as most of the other announcement videos I come across.

Thanks to my teammates Ken and Sarah for letting me hijack a team happy hour to record footage. They happily agreed to let me film them having fun and laughing in a bar, unaware I was going to edit them into the death montage of Top Gun: Maverick. Also thanks to Anuj, obviously, for everything.

This was also the video where I realized that some actors have voices that lend themselves extremely well to AI cloning. Ed Harris’s AI voice was spot-on, using only audio from the original clip.

All The Right Moves

The Redux Speaker Series presentations continued to have very high attendance, engagement, and positive feedback from my intended audience of FEs. What I didn’t expect was that these announcement videos would break through to other parts of the company. My boss’s boss’s boss (gotta be a better way to say that) stopped me in the hallway to tell me how much he was enjoying them as well as how much he’d been hearing about the speaker series itself. My VP shouted me out during an all hands meeting. I also got in touch with our Engineering Learning Program Manager, who made the Redux Speaker Series videos part of official onboarding for new FE hires at the company. What had started out as something silly I was doing out of some mild corporate boredom and malaise was actually starting to have a noticeable and positive impact on my career. I was more energized and engaged than I’d felt in years! Feeling emboldened, I decided to push myself again and incorporate more original footage for the next video, while having even less relevance to the actual presentation topic. Thanks to my teammates Ken, Daniel, and Sarah for being game and letting me take an hour out of their busy work day to film, everyone on the 30th floor of the office for ignoring us and pretending like we were being normal, and Jeremy Renner for his work as my stunt double.

Top Gun: Maverick

I apologize for this brief aside, but if you’ve made it this far I’m hoping you can handle a quick tangent. I’m an excellent Staff Front-End Engineer. I care a lot about work culture, both in terms of having fun and in creating a welcoming and collaborative space where no one is afraid to ask a question and everyone is able to do their best work. I love thinking about and working on the developer experience, as well as helping others both in formal mentor relationships and in one-off interactions. I also think that I have a knack for FE infrastructure type work (here’s another post I made that better demonstrates some of my thinking in this area). If you work somewhere where you think this sort of nonsense would be appreciated and that I might be a good fit, or you know of such a place, please reach out to me (email, mastodon, linkedIn). My stock grants run out in April.

Mission: Impossible

It turns out that the Mission: Impossible movies are perfectly suited for my needs. They’re full of dramatic monologues, exciting reveals, lengthy exposition scenes, and great action setpieces. One video I made (that I can’t show because I’d have to redact too much of it) used a scene in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol in which Tom Cruise literally presents a slide deck describing the next impossible mission. I also got to use by far the best monologue from the franchise:

Born on the Fourth of July

At this point the Redux Speaker Series was running smoothly. The guest speaker presentations were all excellent, lots of people still tuned in to watch, and I had lined up someone else to facilitate the last few presentations while I was on my rapidly approaching parental leave. I had one last announcement video to make before our baby’s expected due date. In my most ambitious editing effort so far, I introduced the next presentation topic, the impending birth of my child, and promoted a movie release of a franchise that I hold near and dear to my heart. My baby was actually born a week early so I made some last minute edits before my coworker posted this, probably my magnum opus.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

I like to think that I’m extremely thoughtful with respect to my career development. I’m a planner by nature. But if I’m being honest, the best moves I’ve made professionally have always been a direct result of me steering by dead reckoning. I didn’t know where I was going with the Redux Speaker Series or these videos when I started, but I followed my heart and my gut, and it ended up being exactly the right thing for me to be doing. I hope that for the rest of my career I continue to pursue environments where I get to work on interesting problems with intelligent, kind, and fun people in a sustainable way.

I’ll leave you with one last video that ended up not being used, as the presentation never ended up happening. I think it features the best AI voice cloning yet, due to the extremely consistent cadences and diction of news anchors. As Tom would say, thank you for watching.

Well, wonder no more. The latest installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is now available to watch at home! The Tom Cruise film is currently available to purchase on demand for $19.99 on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube. It is not currently available to rent. The Blu-Ray release will be on October 31st, and at some later date Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One will be available to stream on Paramount+. It is also available for free on BitTorrent and Usenet newsgroups.

OK, now that I’ve got that SEO out of the way, I’d like to instead talk about how to prepare to watch Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, organized by how much time you’re willing to devote.

No Time

Just go watch the movie, you’ll be able to follow and enjoy it just fine. See it on the biggest screen with the best sound you can.

A Few Minutes

Here’s what you need to know, assuming no prior knowledge.

• These are spy movies about an American intelligence agency called the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), doing missions that are impossible.
• But these movies actually revolve around Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt.
• Tom Cruise does his own stunts, so every action scene you see him do is pretty much exactly what’s actually happening, and that’s the fun of it. When he’s riding a motorcycle with no helmet, it’s because the movie wants you to see that it’s Tom Cruise, and if he was wearing a helmet you’d just assume it was a stunt double.
• Spies in Mission: Impossible have the ability to wear masks that make them look like anyone else as well as mimic their voices. The best moment in any Mission: Impossible movie is when someone peels off the mask, it’s akin to using NOS in the Fast & Furious movies. A running gag in the later movies is that the mask printing machine frequently breaks and the team will have to scramble.
• Other top Mission: Impossible tropes: Tom Cruise’s character going rogue, being assigned a mission via some form of tape that self destructs after playing, Tom Cruise sprinting long distances.
• Over time, the series has evolved so that the most important thing in the main characters’ lives is their friends. It’s almost identical to the emphasis on family in the Fast & Furious movies.
• If I had to briefly describe Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, in my own words: There is no secret he cannot extract, no security he cannot breach, no person he cannot become. He has most likely anticipated this very conversation and is waiting to strike in whatever direction we move. Sir, Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny - and he has made you his mission.

Many Hours

Your best bet is to simply rewatch the other Mission: Impossible movies, all streaming on Paramount+ and BitTorrent. The movies are: 1, 2, 3, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout. Ideally, watch all of them in order. The only one that’s pretty objectively bad is 2 (although it’s a very fun silly watch), but 2 and 3 are the ones to skip. If you can only watch a few and just want to be able to understand what’s going on in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, I’d watch Fallout and 1. But the best action scene in any of the movies is in Ghost Protocol.

Too Much Time

I really like the Blank Check podcast, and they’ve covered all of the Mission: Impossible movies. Their Ghost Protocol episode is available for free, and they later did commentary episodes of every single movie on their Patreon feed. These episodes are really fun and provide a lot of great context and information about the making of these movies. For a quick taste you can also read host David Sims’ article What Mission: Impossible Understands About Tom Cruise.

As mentioned frequently on the Blank Check episodes, the director of the last several Mission: Impossible films, Chris McQuarrie, has some incredible in-depth interviews on the Empire Film Podcast covering Rogue Nation and Fallout. Those old episodes are now behind a paywall, but you can find links to them on Reddit. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed listening to Chris McQuarrie talk about his process on these movies. He doesn’t sound like any other director I’ve heard in interviews. His big break in the film industry was writing The Usual Suspects, which won him an Oscar. After that he spent years as a “script doctor”, doing uncredited rewrites for movies like Batman & Robin and X-Men. He started working with Tom Cruise after writing Valkyrie, and they’ve since become inseparable. He works really well with Tom Cruise and they both really get how to play to his strengths. Chris McQuarrie doesn’t believe in auteur theory, swears by test screenings as part of his process, and has a very healthy understanding for how little an audience is paying attention. He enjoys making intricate spy plots in Mission: Impossible movies, but also understands that most viewers won’t be paying enough attention so he makes sure that you can follow his movies without sweating the details. There’s a lot more that surprised me about the way he works, but it’s better to hear him talk about it on these episodes.

Way Too Much Time

If you’ve done all of the above and still would like more, you should check out the Light The Fuse podcast. Light The Fuse has been releasing weekly episodes since 2018, with a simple premise: interview anyone they can find who has worked on any Mission: Impossible movie. This includes actors, directors, editors, but also stunt doubles, makeup artists, visual effects artists, and even a marketing intern. The interviews are definitely not hard-hitting since many of the subjects are still active in their careers and the hosts of the show are super fans, but the secret sauce of each episode is that every single guest has at least one good Tom Cruise story from working on these movies. Still, I’d recommend listening to these at 2X speed or so since the guests aren’t usually used to being interviewed and things can move a little slowly.

This year, Light The Fuse was declared the official podcast of Mission: Impossible, and has gotten to go to red carpet premieres and given more direct access to the cast and crew for interviews. Unfortunately, that also means the 238 episodes recorded beforehand are no longer available on their main feed, and are instead only able to be streamed from their site. This is a bummer, but it does make sense that Paramount wouldn’t want to mark these older episodes as “official”, since they can occasionally say negative things about the movies. Fortunately for you, I’ve gone rogue and scraped their site to generate a Light the Fuse: Rogue Backlog Feed. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pick a few episodes that sound interesting to you and jump in! Here are a few that I enjoyed:

• Director Christopher McQuarrie on episodes 28 and 29.
• Brad Bird, director of Ghost Protocol, on episodes 39 40 and 41.
• Barney Burman, Makeup Artist, on episodes 47 and 48. Him talking about how they make the Mission: Impossible masks was fascinating.
• Keith Campbell, Tom Cruise’s stunt double, on episodes 70 71 and 72. A funny wrinkle to this is that Keith Campbell made a career out of being Tom Cruise’s stunt double, until Tom Cruise decided to always do his own stunts and never needed him again.
• Stu Maschwitz, Digital Effects Artist for Mission: Impossible, on episodes 64 65 and 66. I loved hearing Stu talk about the challenges of doing digital effects for a movie in 1996.
• Todd Vaziri, Digital Effects Artist for Mission: Impossible III and Ghost Protocol, on episodes 67 and 68.
• Craig O’Brien, Skydiving Camera Operator for Fallout, on episode 166.

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This message will self destruct in five seconds.

I haven’t made one of these posts since March. That’s mostly because we had our first child in May! So it’s been quite hectic. Everyone is healthy and happy and we are loving getting to know our little one. I’ve been collecting links to post since last time, so some of these are going to be a little stale, sorry!

Read

• How the New York Times Managed to Avoid Ruining Wordle. In a world where anything fun online is being actively ruined by business interests, I enjoyed this writeup of how Wordle wasn’t ruined by the NYT.
• John Wick 4’s director and crew walk us through its stunning one-shot fight. This was by far my favorite scene in John Wick 4, and I loved this breakdown discussing it.
• Candy Crush Mom Accidentally Entered $250k Tournament, Kills It
• Thirty-Five Years Later, There’s Nothing Like ‘My Neighbor Totoro’
• Oral History of Susan Harris, Creator of Golden Girls
• 64 software bugs, complex union rules and a $15.8 million mistake: Why S.F. can’t pay its teachers on time. an incredible technical breakdown of what went so horribly wrong with the San Francisco Unified Schools payroll system.
• ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Has the Most Words Per Minute of Any TV Show. They never say the words have to be smart.
• Ryan Gosling GQ Profile promoting Barbie. There’s an overwhelming amount of press around the upcoming Barbie movie, but I really enjoyed the photo shoot and the interview here. On people saying he was too old to play Ken:

But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time.’ No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.

• How some people get away with doing nothing at work. I really enjoyed some small details of this piece that I hadn’t seen elsewhere of people coping with having their job mostly disappear without anyone noticing, like consciously having to keep up your skillset on the side, and being afraid to make any moves or changes internally lest you get noticed and immediately laid off instead.

San Francisco/Bay Area

I’m making this its own subsection because there have been a lot of breathless fear-mongering discussions about the San Francisco death spiral, doom loop, etc. I love living in San Francisco, it has its fair share of problems, but the national media (and local newspaper the Chronicle) depictions of San Francisco don’t really represent the city I live in and love. So I’m going to regularly post links to positive things about this city.

• SF Chronicle Now Seems to Regret Amplifying the ‘Doom Loop’ Narrative It Heavily Amplified
• Great SF Tourist Advice for Elderly or People with Limited Mobility
• The San Francisco Nordstrom is closing. It was also a wild success
• The Character Assassination of San Francisco
• Laser light shows are coming to some of San Francisco’s biggest landmarks. These have been really fun, the header image of Sutro Tower is from this.

Social Media Discussions

It’s mostly been an exhausting and tedious navel-gazey discussion, but here are some pieces that I enjoyed:

• Erin Kissane’s thoughtful piece on Mastodon
• Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out
• Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon: where are we all supposed to go now?

Watched

• April 1st SNL Weekend Update. The reason it’s funny has nothing to do with the title of the video.

• Rushmore Academy and the Max Fischer Players at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards. How had I never seen this before?! The kids from Rushmore parodying other movies from 1999.

• The Giant’s Dream: The Making of the Iron Giant

• In TV,

  • We finished the most recent season of Survivor, which was excellent, and my partner won $200 in our fantasy Survivor league. Congrats to her!
  • I watched Jury Duty and thought it was just ok. The final episode after the reveal was very wholesome and fun, but I think the absurdity of Nathan For You and How To With John Wilson and similar shows made the hijinks in this one feel tamer by comparison.

• In Movies, you can see everything in my letterboxd but here are some standouts.

  • I rewatched all of the Mission Impossible movies leading up to watching Dead Reckoning in IMAX at a fan event on Monday with my friend Brook. We had a great time at the movies, just like Tom wanted!
  • Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show: A very fun watch, everyone involved has gone on to be so successful that they aren’t bitter about the show’s failure and can be very honest about the decisions that they made that doomed it.
  • Fast X was bad, but I expected it to be and still love the franchise, no hard feelings. Momoa was great in it though.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was an uplifting and fun delight.
  • BlackBerry and Air were solid movies about business.

Played

• I purchased a bunch of games from the Steam Summer Sale but haven’t really gotten to play any of them yet.
• I did install and start playing a fan made Sonic game on my Steam Deck, it seems really ambitious and in the brief amount of time I’ve played it I’ve really enjoyed it! Here are some instructions on getting it to work on the Steam Deck.

Computered

• I’m still really enjoying Arc Browser, and think this writeup is a great intro.
• Subscribe to your Mastodon bookmarks as an RSS Feed with this free tool. You gotta love the open web. I have a similar workflow in place that uses Pinboard instead and follows my Pinboard RSS feed, but if I didn’t have that set up already I’d definitely check this out.

ok, bye.

Nothing super interesting to report. I went in to the office 4 days this week, a rarity since the pandemic. It felt pretty tiring by the end, but I was reminded that I used to go in 5 days a week every week, so I think I’ll readjust pretty quickly. I continue to enjoy going into the office to have some separation between work and home, and it’s been really nice to see my coworkers that come into the office as well. I love a routine, and there’s been a lot of changes to my work environment recently so it’s been fun establishing new ones.

The California Poppies are in full bloom all over Twin Peaks, so I went up with a coffee on Saturday morning to enjoy the spring energy and clear weather while it still lasts. This morning I awoke to rain, and rushed out to meet it head on with a much chillier and wetter walk to twin peaks. Just as invigorating though! It’s nice to see the chronicle is on board with my assertion last week that the only cure for this weather is a nice little walk.

Read

• I’m currently reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. I picked it up years ago and got most of the way through it and really enjoyed it, but never ended up finishing it. It hits very differently in a Covid world and with a little bit of distance from the Trump presidency.

• I’ve been absolutely loving the brr blog, dispatches from a person from San Francisco who is spending about a year doing IT work in Antarctica. Each post is a little slice of life of what it’s like to live in Antarctica. My favorite posts so far are the ones about doors, showering and frost.

• Absolutely my shit: S.F.’s ‘Bay Lights’ refused to go dark. It took a ‘Mission Impossible’ to literally pull the plug.

• Here’s how The Washington Post verified its journalists on Mastodon. I clicked this article assuming it would be a quick explanation of how Mastodon verifies links, but this was a more involved process than I expected, and was a fun read.

• This guy has decided to visit every park in San Francisco, and I’m going to enjoy following along!

• My buddy Paul Russo at Akita Software built an Exceedingly Polite AI Dog That Answers Questions About Your APIs. Love this!

• Hell yeah, Monk’s coming back. I cannot wait to see how Monk handled the pandemic.

• Soleil Ho wrote about their experiment trying to live off food stamps for a week (big deal, I lived in Egypt for a month!). These sorts of articles are usually really cringey and out of touch (wow, poor people can’t buy organic avocados?!), but Soleil avoids all of that and leverages their chef expertise as well as previous experiences living off food stamps to write something really compelling.

Watched

• I’m a huge fan of Krazam videos. I think their most recent, presented live on stage at a tech conference, is their most ambitious one yet, and their most successful. In an industry with possibly the worst collective sense of humor imaginable, we are blessed with a Krazam that we do not deserve.

• My alma mater Purdue University entered the NCAA tournament this weekend as the number 1 seed in their bracket. This was preceded by many breathless articles about the uniqueness of their situation, having built their entire team around a 7-foot-4 305 pound center whose singular weakness, as far as I can tell, is that he simply is not good at basketball. Purdue has never failed to disappoint me over the years, so I was delighted to watch the team absolutely crumble in the very first game, becoming only the second #1 seed ever to lose to a #16 seed in the first round. Yesterday I got a little more of my schadenfreude fix with this detailed writeup of what it was like to work the broadcast for such a historic game. Also, be sure to check out photos of their demented mascot Purdue Pete throughout history.

• I saw the trailer for the Blackberry movie and refuse to believe that that’s the actual tone of the movie. With that cast and that premise, it has to be a parody. But we do live in an era of Ben Affleck directing a film about the white guys at Nike who dared to ask Michael Jordan to wear their shoe, so I don’t know what to think anymore. Instead of embedding either of those videos, please enjoy this incredible old sketch from the writer, director, and one of the stars of the Blackberry movie.

• Actors Roundtable with Justin Theroux, Rajat Suresh, Jeremy Levick & More. I haven’t made it all the way through this, but it’s really an incredible piece of media. Props to Justin Theroux for being so game in this, although it’s not as surprising if you know that he co-wrote Tropic Thunder.

• Back to the Blackberry movie, I think Glenn Howerton’s Always Sunny colleague Rob McElhenney said everything that needed to be said on the issue:

  pic.twitter.com/oCEFSiAHbr

  — Rob McElhenney (@RMcElhenney) February 22, 2023

• In Movies, I finally got around to watching Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and really enjoyed that. I watched the trailer for the one where Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers but think I got what I was looking for from the documentary.

• Also, The Riddick Trilogy is currently streaming on Netflix. I don’t know that I’d recommend them, but watching them sure is a trip.

• Like most of us, I’ve been watching a lot of clips of Lance Reddick after his untimely passing this week. My favorite so far was this anecdote and corresponding video about his appearance on the Eric Andre Show. I’d also really like to know more about his on-stage depiction of Roman performing a fake script called Fast Nein: The Fast and the Fuhrer.

  I read on a clickbait site that Lance Reddick didnt know the show,did reserch,was confused but dug it.
  
  But wrote he own ideas for his bit. So very little of this skit was eric andre's ideas lol
  
  (yes eric legit did get scared by the table thing) https://t.co/ua96bG3vGe pic.twitter.com/dkdpTbJaJr

  — Go to blue sky 🇿🇦 (@ProjectAuuman) March 18, 2023

Played

• I haven’t played anything new, but did pick up a couple of games from the Steam Spring Sale: Red Dead Redemption 2, Dead Cells, and No Man’s Sky. If my current Steam collection is any indication, I will never play any of these games. I’ve had Bioshock at the “top of my queue” since 2007 and still haven’t played it, despite purchasing it at least 4 times.

• I’ve been playing Fantasy Survivor this season, and have been in first place in my league for the last two weeks. I’m getting in my gloating now as I’m sure I will fall off my perch very soon. The web site for this is incredibly confusing to navigate, the rules are too complicated, and it’s easy to forget to vote every single week. I thrive in the chaos.

Computered

• Velja is a really great free utility that I’ve added to my setup recently. You set it to be your default browser, and then you can configure it to open different URL patterns in different applications. I don’t use it for much, but the built-in Zoom functionality means that Zoom links open directly in Zoom instead of littering my browser with useless zoom tabs that I need to clean up. There’s also a great option to strip tracking parameters out of links, but I have that disabled for web development reasons. Shoutout to the Velja developer for a dedicated part of the FAQ to explain why this can’t “just work” for Slack. A top-tier free “set it and forget it” application.

• One Sec App. I recently tried out One Sec for about a week, it’s sort of a souped up version of iOS’s existing Screen Time functionality. It’s got some great ideas, for example I really like the choices of different animations when you need to take a break before using an application. Taking a single slow deep breath is always helpful and restorative, yet I almost never think to do it. Ultimately I stopped using the app because the implementation method was sort of flakey and a pain to set up (everything is done using iOS shortcuts, which you must painfully set up manually for each app you want to limit your time on). This is Apple’s fault for limitations around its APIs, not the creators of One Sec. Personally I’m hoping that Apple Sherlocks them and builds most of this functionality directly into Screen Time itself.

ok, bye.

At my previous apartment in the Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, there was a utility pole right outside my apartment that was a real eyesore. My pole wasn’t particularly special, most utility poles in the neighborhood looked like this: wires snaking out in every direction, across the street, tangling through trees, etc. On windy days, two wires that appeared to have simply been cut instead of removed would loudly bang against my windows. On a day without fog (rare), the wires obstructed my very narrow view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I don’t know enough about how any of this works to know why this utility pole might have been in need of some maintenance, but it certainly didn’t give a ton of confidence even at a glance by a layman like myself. Regardless, the company in charge of this pole, PG&E, did invest in some maintenance last year, and I’d like to imagine what might have happened.

The Proposal

Let’s pretend you are the infrastructure engineer at PG&E who is in charge of this pole. You’ve been watching more and more wires get added to this pole over the years, each one increasing the complexity and overall risk of the system. Finally, some change or decay in the system crossed a risk threshold where you now felt the need to advocate for maintenance and improvements. You write a proposal and share it with leadership. The proposal has all the usual things:

• Describing the problem and its impact: You break down what’s wrong with the current implementation of this pole, and the risks to the business of not addressing them.
• Definition of Done: You outline what a successful migration is. In this case, a successful migration would be that the new pole is installed, the wires have been attached to it, and the system is still operating smoothly.
• The Proposal: You define the phases and milestones of the project. Obviously there’s more detail, but these would be the basic steps:
  • Install a new utility pole next to the existing one.
  • Migrate existing wires to the new pole.
  • Refactor the system (either during the migration or afterwards, whichever makes the most sense) to clean up the technical debt that’s accumulated over time.
  • Verify that the migration has been a success.
  • Remove the old utility pole.

These sorts of proposals get written at your company all the time, and most of them never get prioritized. For some reason, either due to the quality of your proposal, the potential risk of not fixing the pole, or just sheer luck and timing, your project gets funded! Your manager tells you this project is going to have really high visibility, and that if you do a good job this could lead to you getting a big promotion. You’re stoked! You’ve been passionate about utility poles since you were a child, and an opportunity like this to dive into a real gnarly utility pole problem and build something robust that you can be proud of will be the highlight of your career so far! You finalize staffing and scheduling of the project, and dive in headfirst.

The Project

While you want this project to go as smoothly as possible and will do your best to limit outages for customers, this process requires some downtime. So, you determine a good time for an outage based on customer patterns, and send letters to all customers who might be impacted well in advance. I received such a letter, and knew that on specific days last September I may be without power within given time windows.

The day of the project kickoff actually gets pushed back a week due to poor weather conditions, but you update the customers about that too, and the day finally comes!

The milestones are flying by perfectly and smoothly. You easily get the new pole installed next to the old one, and after allowing a few days for it to settle (is that how cement works? You tell me, you’re the engineer!) you begin migrating wires to the new pole in earnest. Oh man, this new pole is incredible! It’s taller than the old one, it’s better constructed, it hasn’t been beaten down by years of weather. You wish your job always involved working with poles this nice. You tell your boss you’re having the time of your life, and they’re singing your praises all the way up the org chart. Life is good.

You decide that the smoothest migration path in this case is to move the wires over to the new pole as is, instead of refactoring as you move. This is the least risky approach, and has the least downtime. Besides, once you’re over to the new pole and the old pole is gone, life is going to be so much easier: you’re going to have more room to operate, and you won’t have to deal with all the baggage of the old pole while you focus on finishing the utility pole of your dreams.

You also decide to move the highest risk wires first, because they’re the ones that you absolutely need to move to mitigate the business risk. Technically, about 2/3 of these wires would be fine if they stayed on the old pole, so you can wait to move them while you move the higher risk ones.

After a few days, you’ve gotten the high risk third of the wires moved over to the new pole. You verify that the entire system is operational, and it’s working perfectly! You let out a sigh of relief: you’ve completed the hardest parts of this migration. All that’s left now is moving the lower risk wires, removing the old pole, and finally getting into that awesome refactor of the new pole that you’ve been excited about this whole time.

You let your manager know what your team has accomplished already and how smoothly it’s gone. Your project is well ahead of schedule, but it’s the end of the quarter at PG&E and your manager is looking for some good news to share with their bosses. They proudly report at the big End of Quarter Leadership Roundtable that all of the high risk work on your project is complete, and that you’re about to kickoff the cleanup and refactoring phases of the project.

Deprioritized

The next day, your manager schedules a meeting with you. The mood is tense, and they inform you that unfortunately your project has been deprioritized, effective immediately. What, how? It’s not done! Your manager tells you that while they understand how great the cleanup and refactor was going to be, you’ve reached the point of the project that technically meets the Definition of Done in your initial proposal. The highest risk wires have been moved to the new utility pole and no longer pose significant risk. Also, the company unfortunately has had to reprioritize their focus on putting out literal fires and doesn’t have the budget right now for “unnecessary refactors.”

You’re really bummed out at this news. This project was just starting to get really interesting! Also, you take pride in the quality of your work, and to abandon this project as is, with TWO poles in the ground and wires on both, gives you a deep sense of shame.

Post Mortem

After a few days of sulking, you begin to reflect more on the situation. Leadership is right. The pole no longer poses a risk, and there are much higher priority issues that need to be addressed. The refactor you had been planning had the potential to be great, but not in a way that really helped the business. You swallow your pride and start to think about your next moves. You still did a good job on this project: you proposed a change to limit business risk, and implemented a solution ahead of schedule. The fact that it looks like it was built by a spider on benzedrine doesn’t actually matter or show up on any sorts of graphs or metrics that the organization sees. You switch your focus to helping your manager communicate how successful the project was, although they’ve informed you that since you didn’t get to that technically impressive refactor, your promotion is probably going to have to be pushed back a couple of quarters. At the end of it all, you don’t get a promotion but you get a solid performance review, and your manager thanks you privately for being a good team player.

What’s Next?

You try to think about what your next move should be. Leadership appears to be singularly focused on an exciting prototype that they’ve been testing out to trim trees, a “heli-saw” comprised of eight chainsaw blades suspended from a helicopter. They’ve got a working prototype, but are looking to hand off to an infrastructure engineer like you to conduct a safety audit and productionalize it. You know that jumping on this project could be good for your career, but your true passion and expertise is in utility poles, and something about dangling chainsaws from helicopters close to power lines just seems a little risky to you.

Can’t you just keep working on utility poles? There’s still a lot of good work there, but unfortunately your project was deemed so successful and repeatable that you’ve started to see double utility poles all over town. You drive over to check on your pole and reflect. The person who lives in the house next to your pole sees your PG&E uniform and comes out to talk to you. He tells you that you put the new pole so close to his driveway that he can barely get out of his garage anymore. You want to apologize to him and explain the situation, and tell him it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The refactor was going to include alterations to the sidewalk to give him a wider driveway on the other side of the pole. Plus, he was going to be living near the greatest god-damn utility pole in the history of humankind! That pole was going to be so good you might try to figure out if you could be buried under it when you die. But you realize that none of this story changes his situation, and that in this moment you are simply a representative of PG&E to him. You apologize for the inconvenience, tell him we’re all trying to find the guy who did this, and promise to report the issue to your manager and put fixing his driveway right at the top of the backlog. He thanks you and goes inside. You get back in your car, knowing his driveway is going to be like this forever.

Distraught, you consider leaving PG&E. They’re going through a lot of problems right now, and there are rumors of a takeover by a huge bureaucracy known for its inefficiencies and mismanagement. You’re worried that a takeover would cause for a really disruptive couple of years. Also, the leader doesn’t seem to know much about utility companies, and seems to spend most of his time with celebrities and powerful people outside of his industry when he should probably be focused on governing. Also, even though everything he says and does is ostensibly liberal, something about him really makes you feel like he’s a Republican.

Still, you mostly like your job and love your team. A bunch of new graduates just joined, and they’re really excited about utility pole work, just like you used to be! Their energy is contagious. You’ve been mentoring them as they do their own utility pole projects, and you end up finding it even more rewarding than working on utility poles directly. You encourage them to do refactoring and cleanup work continuously throughout the project, so that even if it’s cut short they’ll have improved the situation rather than making it worse. They argue that that’s a less efficient way to do the work, but you smile and tell them your story and assure them they’ll thank you later.

This is all speculation, of course! I don’t know anything about PG&E or utility poles or how infrastructure work like this actually happens. I write software.

Did

The weather in the Bay Area has been rough for the past few weeks, so I haven’t been out too much. Part of the joy of living in California is that you kind of give up on fighting the weather. If the weather sucks, just stay inside until it changes, it usually won’t be long. This is the maybe worst non-fire-related block of weather I’ve experienced since I’ve lived in San Francisco, and I finally hit my breaking point this weekend on the “wait it out” strategy. I got out the limited rain appropriate gear I have, and went for some hikes in the pouring rain. It was glorious, and I now know that I can walk to a peak of Twin Peaks in about 20 minutes from the apartment I recently moved to. I feel invigorated and refreshed, and no longer down in the dumps about the weather. I mean, it’s just wet, it’s not cold! Today I tried to time my walk with maximum rain, and although I didn’t time it perfectly it felt freeing to aim for it. Watching a rainstorm come in from the top of a hill is right up there with watching a brilliant sunset imo.

I’m also really going through a ramen phase, getting Marufuku Ramen every time the dreary weather gets to me. Marufuku delivers everything in separate containers, so it delivers very well and reheats wonderfully. I’ve started ordering two every time I order so I can have another one the next day.

Watched

• Thomas Flight on Uncut Gems. I have a love/hate relationship with film criticism youtube, but this video by Thomas Flight on the editing of Uncut Gems to create a sense of anxiety was right up my alley.

• 2008 Roofball World Championships. This video is a real nostalgic slice of suburban Americana. I didn’t play “regulation” roofball growing up, but “throw a ball on the roof and then try to catch it when it comes back down” is definitely something I spent hours doing with friends. Loved the deadpan commentary, the of-the-era “iPood” parody T-shirt, and the live “shame cam” in the house for your walk of shame when you throw the ball over the roof.

• Jerry Seinfeld in Pulp Fiction Deep Fake. the laugh track on this really did it for me.

• In TV, lately I’ve been watching and enjoying:

  • Party Down (old and new)
  • Drive To Survive (newest season)
  • Monk (holds up really well! They’re all on Peacock)
  • Poker Face
  • Survivor (newest season)

• In Movies, you can check my letterboxd but lately I really enjoyed:

  • The Worst Person in the World
  • Knock at the Cabin
  • The Menu
  • Magic Mike XXL (a rewatch. It’s tons better than the new one, and the gas station sequence is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in a theater. If you haven’t seen the scene, the only context you need is that Joe Manganiello has lost his mojo and has decided he needs to make this cashier smile or he’ll stop dancing forever. Also, they’re all on molly.)
  • M3gan
  • Triangle of Sadness
  • Nope

Read

• Brent Simmons On Not Taking Money for NetNewsWire. Major “that’s fine for Merlin” energy on this one, I don’t think these arguments apply for most folks trying to make software for people to use (he makes this explicit in the post). Still, it was an interesting perspective for why Brent specifically doesn’t take money for NetNewsWire.

• Robin Sloan’s newsletter post How the Ring Got Good shared his thoughts from reading The History of The Lord of the Rings and his surprise about how much Tolkien had to revise and modify his work before it became the classic we know today. The actual book sounds very interesting, but this article whet my appetite and had some great examples without the time investment of reading the whole thing. I never made it all the way through the Silmarillion, there’s no way I’m getting through this.

• Clive Thompson’s The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions.

• Steve Blank’s The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free. This post has a lot that rubs me the wrong way in terms of the deification of the “elder software engineer”, but nonetheless was a thought-provoking anecdote about how small cultural changes at a company can directly cause rapid and significant declines.

• Charlie Jane Anders’ J.K. Rowling and “Separating the Art from the Artist”.

• San Francisco Chronicle’s story on our doomed Ocean Beach Gondola in the 1950’s.

• Even though I dislike long distance running, Winnie Lim’s more of the same post about the flow state and mental health benefits of endurance exercise really resonated with me. This experience maps well to when I was cycling regularly. I’ve gotta get back into that.

• Sophie Koonin’s Painting the whole beetle: an adventure in learning to learn.

• How to help someone use a computer by Phil Agre.

• Taking notes makes gaming more fun by Clayton Ashley at Polygon. I’d recommend reading the post over watching the video, the video has a bit too much “Content” energy.

• Alex Kladov’s <3 Deno on what he likes about deno, an alternative runtime to node.

• Jon Udell’s Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse, in particular:

But gradually I came to see that there was a sweet spot, somewhere between (let’s say) 200 and 15,000 followers, where it was possible to enjoy the kinds of pleasant and stimulating interaction that I’d first experienced in web forums and the blogosophere.

Played

• I’ve really been enjoying playing Rollerdrome on my Steam Deck. It’s sort of a Tony Hawk Pro Skater shooter, with bullet time and a really cool art style. A great single player game! I’ve 100%-ed the main game, and am now working through the post game higher difficulty modes.

Listened

• John Gruber’s The Talk Show podcast episode with Jason Kottke on the 25th anniversary of Kottke.org. I’m no longer a regular reader or listener of Gruber or Kottke, but this nostalgia trip through the history of blogging and the rise of paywalls/death of APIs was a fun listen in the current collapse of Twitter climate. I’m not a 2Xer generally but this bad boy is over 3 hours and … works very well at 2X speed.
• I wrote most of this post listening to the new-ish albums from Miley Cyrus and Carly Rae Jepsen. They’re great.

Computered

• Arc Browser. I’m very hesitant to switch browsers, but last year I tried out Vivaldi after reading an article in Wired (use 12ft.io to sidestep the paywall). I didn’t end up sticking with Vivaldi, but I did like the idea of vertical tabs. Anyway, I finally gave Arc Browser a try and have really been enjoying it. There’s a lot of features I don’t currently have any interest in, but the command palette, vertical tabs, and the shockingly game changing “Peek” feature have caused me to stick with it for the last couple weeks. I still do development in Chrome, and I intellectually miss the incredible performance and battery life wins of Safari, but I’ve got a fast computer that’s always plugged in so I’m fine taking the hit right now.

• iA Presenter. I recently used iA Presenter, currently in beta, to make a presentation for work and I found it equal parts pleasant and maddening. I’ve loved and used their excellent iA Writer for years now, but I don’t think this new tool is going to be a good fit for my needs. In the invite email, they explicitly say “You probably won’t enjoy iA Presenter that much if you are looking for a Markdown PowerPoint-clone”, which turns out is exactly what I want. This tool seems great for anyone who doesn’t work in a corporate job that demands slides with bullets of text on them. I understand the designer community disdain for the “slide full of bullets”, but in my corporate job most people don’t come to the presentation and just wanna skim through the slides later anyway. Anyway, if you want a way to easily make aesthetically pleasing slides while mostly working in text, and you don’t need the ability to make pixel perfect layout decisions, maybe this is a good tool for you. Just be aware that if people would like a copy of the slides, your only export options are markdown, the ugliest PDF you’ve ever seen*, or a 10 megabyte folder containing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

*Update: there’s several options to make PDF export better, I like the “1 Slide, Borderless” option personally. Thanks for the tip @FIGBERT!

• FeedBin. I’ve finally switched to FeedBin in advance of the death of my long used and beloved Feed Wrangler. I stuck with Feed Wrangler for a long time mostly because I built my own web app to use as an RSS reader and it was built specifically to Feed Wrangler’s API. Now that I’ve been forced to switch, I updated my web app to support FeedBin and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. I really love FeedBin’s newsletter and twitter support. You can give a newsletter a custom feedbin email address and have all of your newsletters in the RSS reader interface, and you can also follow twitter accounts and have those piped in, which is great because twitter hasn’t had RSS support for years. I fully expect the twitter integration to break in the next few months because of twitter’s current situation, but for now it’s been nice.

• StreetPass, a browser extension that will collect mastodon profiles for web sites you visit throughout the day, and let you choose to follow them. What I love about this is that it’s powered by the links that Mastodon checks to verify bio links, so people don’t have to be aware of this browser extension to support it. Long live the Open Web and meta tags, baby!

• BikeHopper, an open source directions app for transit and bikes. Google Maps bike directions are pretty ok in San Francisco, but there’s definitely room for improvement. I usually start with Google Maps directions and then end up following cyclists on my route who look like they know what they’re doing. I frequently end up on a safer and smoother route than the initial one Google recommends. Hopefully this tool helps as well!

• The great Darius Kazemi’s got a tool for taking your exported twitter archive and making it accessible and searchable. I’ve been a big fan of Darius ever since his incredible deadpan XOXO talk skewering lucky successful tech people who like to advise others on how to mirror their success, as if it’s a repeatable process.

ok, bye.

net send lab2126-24 test

and get an alert that looked like:

The computer names were predictable, something like lab + room number + computer number, and the computer numbers were physically written on the machines themselves. It was pretty clunky, and there was no scrollback, but it was a fun way to goof off during class by sending each other short messages.

We quickly discovered a few interesting characteristics of net send that could be used for some silliness. For one, the alert dialog that opened up stole keyboard focus and was generally disruptive. You could spam as many net send commands as you wanted and the alerts would just pile up on a user’s screen, with no clear way to dismiss them all. We took advantage of this by mashing up and enter as well as writing batch scripts to render our friends’ computers useless. Eventually a tense truce was called, when we found out that receiving a net send message while playing the hidden copy of Unreal Tournament GOTY we had installed on the school network would temporarily take the player out of the game for just long enough to be killed in a critical moment.

The most creative exploit we came up with for net send was on students (and teachers) who weren’t yet aware of the feature. We had the ability to open an official windows alert on anyone’s machine, and at a glance it wasn’t obvious these messages were coming from another computer on the network. We started sending messages like “Critical Error: Please Restart Your Computer Immediately” and would watch with glee as our victim sighed deeply before restarting their computer.

The net send joyriding was shortlived, however. Curious about any other avenues of abuse, I looked up the documentation for net send at home one evening and saw that it had wildcard support! Reading the docs, it appeared that if you did net send * MESSAGE, the MESSAGE would be sent to every computer on the entire network. As I did not have a home network to test this on at the time, I anxiously waited until the next day at school to tell my friends.

The next day at lunch, I went to the computer lab and pulled up the documentation online for my friend Eric, and began explaining what I thought it did. As I was explaining that of course we shouldn’t try such a thing because we would get in huge trouble if it worked, he ignored me and quickly typed into his machine and submitted the command that would forever live in infamy among our friends:

After a very brief moment, Eric’s computer received the sup message. I glanced at mine and saw the very same sup message. A terrifying slow pan of our heads across the entire lab confirmed our fears: sup on every screen. We’d gone wall to wall sup!

If you look back at the screenshot of the alert above, there’s another detail you might have missed: the alert text contains the name of the computer that sent the message. We were sitting at computer XX in room YYYY while everyone else looked at a message from lab-YYYY-XX. We were seated directly in front of the smoking gun. Like any reasonable 8th graders, we responded by immediately unplugging the computer and sprinting out of the room and down the stairs.

When I got home from school, my younger sister who went to another school in the same district told me and my parents that every machine in her school had received a strange message that day that simply said “sup”. I held the best poker face my 14 year old self could, which I’m sure was not very convincing.

In retrospect, it’s fortunate that the net send alert didn’t include the username, only the originating machine. I’m not sure if there are potentially audit logs that could determine which user sent which message, and now that I’m a grownup I know that this was pretty harmless and we wouldn’t have gotten in very much trouble anyway.

By the time we got to school the next day, the IT person had disabled net send across the network. We’d flown too close to the sun, and I forever learned my lesson: never read the docs.

This is my first post on this website, and when trying to think of what to say first this story came back to me, because Eric said everything that needed to be said on that fateful day:

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sup