The blog home of Jeff Putz

Last night I was watching a bunch of high school kids sing on the stage of The Lion King on Broadway, as part of the Jimmy Awards. Basically it's the Tony's for teens. One of the three boys was an Orlando local. I jokingly said they should just hand all of these kids Equity cards on the way out of the building, because they were all so talented. But what was so excellent about it all was the joy, the shared sense of love and purpose. That's a cruel business to be in, but for those that make it, eight times a week, they offer a cathartic experience that's unlike anything else we experience as humans. Most importantly, they are giving something to others.

I suppose that most well-adjusted adults do this. Giving, helping and boosting others brings most people joy, a sense of purpose, contentedness. If I'm taking inventory, it's certainly the thing that I've felt best about. Coaching remains one of my most satisfying endeavors, and I can promise that's way more giving than taking. Volunteering in ways that leverage my skills is always awesome. And certainly, writing a check to support things that you believe in offers little in the way of dopamine hits, but it can be really impactful.

Being a caring and empathetic person seems basic to human nature. So much of art is rooted in those qualities. I can't think of anything that I do for myself that feels as good as doing stuff for others. I mean, even holding a door for someone feels good. But there is a line where that gets harder. It is very hard to be caring and empathetic toward people who are selfish, cruel and apathetic toward others, especially those that are different from them. This is why I always flag suggestions of moral equivalence. If there are "sides," and one aligns with the selfish and cruel, that isn't the same as the people who are caring and empathetic. Sure, there is nuance in political policy, but there is no nuance to hate.

So what is it about the selfish and narcissistic folks? They seem to be having an outsized effect on our society right now. They co-opted the term "woke" to mean something bad, when I've always understood it to mean having awareness and empathy of others' circumstances. In other words, caring for others.

I'm not going to armchair psychoanalyze narcissists, but as best I can tell, they are miserable people. I conclude this because it's behavior that is the opposite of giving. And if giving makes people happy, being selfish and cruel to others can only make you miserable. As an empathetic person, I should feel bad for them, but how do you feel bad for people who are selfish and cruel?

I'm not sure if people with advantages are obligated to be givers, but I am totally certain that they would be less miserable if they looked outward and helped others.

Expanding on my observations about purpose and seeing it break through the noise, my therapist mentioned that there are some real certainties that we may be unwilling to accept about life. She said that life really is about coping and managing things to survive. Even animals have to do this. In a functional society, our survival isn't nearly as fraught, but whether it's parenting or working or providing, we are always challenged. And if you really want to go there, it never stops, until we die. So in some ways, we're also trying to avoid the existential crisis about why we even exist. We are ephemeral, and the vast majority of us will have limited impact on what happens after we're gone. It's kind of dark.

In some ways, critters have it easier. A cockroach only really knows one purpose, which is to procreate. Maybe that's why they've been around for millions of years. Being human is tricky, because as I said, intellectually, one could arrive in a place where our lives are pointless. Sure, we want to procreate as well, but that doesn't require any particular skill. We have to derive purpose in other ways.

Unfortunately, our cultural expectations and norms make this difficult. We have a lot of baggage that does not serve us well. For example, we associate need with weakness, but we all have needs, and they can't necessarily be acquired without others. We have this idealist view that will is all it takes to reach some arbitrary condition of success, despite the fact that the circumstance of the birth lottery has far more to do with our outcomes. It's a standard belief that enjoying work is ideal, and not enjoying it is a character flaw. Tell that to the people that you depend on to do really crappy things that no one else will do. And as I've said before, we measure our own value in ways that are kind of ridiculous. It's bad enough that we may depend on others to feel valued, but even if we don't, we may measure our value based on the scope of our impact on the world. We make it really hard for purpose to surface.

A currently trendy business metaphor is the flywheel. The idea is that a flywheel takes a lot of energy to get turning, but once it does get turning, momentum and less (or different) effort keeps it going. So let's say that you sell something amazing, and people love it, so they keep buying it, and keep telling others, so they buy it, and you get this sustaining flywheel of continued business.

Life, it seems, tends to have negative flywheels. For me and my brain, all of the things that are exhausting keep that negative wheel turning, and it's hard to get back to purpose. Purpose is the positive flywheel. When it stalls, for me, it's really hard to get it turning again. I think that's where my head has been for at least six to nine months.

If you throw away the above cultural expectations, I think you can get that flywheel turning in a sustainable way. Accept that you have needs. Accept that you're not shitty because you can't do certain things, even if you wish that you could. Know that work can just be something that you do, and isn't necessarily your identity (though don't stay in work situations that outright devalue you). Find value in what you do regardless of scope. Purpose will bubble up and drive you to keep doing all the things. That's where life's joy will come from. That's the point, even if we are mortal.

The cliche about enjoying the journey has a lot of truth behind it. Because let's be real, the destination is the same for all of us.

In the last week, I've done some recreational coding. I'm sure that sounds unremarkable if you know about my projects and web sites and all of that. But the truth is that I haven't done it much in the last year. If you look at my Github profile, you can see the green dots showing when I committed code. Starting around March of last year, the frequency of that dropped off. This is part of a wider phenomenon around the things that I used to do more of, like video stuff (and the rum doc editing), photography, writing beyond the blog, trying to play the drums, messing with electronic things, etc. I can't really describe what changed.

Aging, instinctively I want to say sucks, but if I'm being intellectual about it, I don't think that at all. I've lived a bit, and I fucking know some things. I've earned that. But I still view the universe with curiosity more than ever, humbled by all of the things I don't know. It's the physical part that I'm not crazy about. I can see it around my eyes, and as my hair continues to get thinner on top, it may be migrating to my ears. Sometimes I feel the change in weather in my joints. My minimum focus distance is now around 24 inches when I'm tired. None of these things will ever reverse. These are all reminders that I only have so many keystrokes left, and I can't know for sure how many there really are.

I think the noise around this may be part of the problem. It's already exhausting living in my brain, but now throw in the bits about mortality. Sure, I have literally decades left (hopefully), as I assume that I'm half-way through adulthood, but you don't think about that when you're 20-something. I'm the parent of a teenager who will be an adult in a few years whether he is or I am ready or not. That's a milestone I never even thought about. Now add in all of the usual stuff about work and financial health and the apparent dissolution of classic American ideals around freedom and equality. It's a lot.

But if one is heading toward "retirement" in a tangible way at this age, the clarity around what that actually means has been valuable. I read something about an observational study that concluded that people who live with intent and purpose in retirement live a lot longer. That makes total sense to me. I've always said that my goal is not to sit around and consume things in my old age. I just want the financial stability to be able to choose what to do without consequence. People make the joke about being a Walmart greeter (or in Central Florida parlance, selling churros at Magic Kingdom), but in all seriousness, that's the spirit of what I'm after.

In that regard, I've found it difficult in the last year for purpose to break through all of the noise. But there are signs that it's starting to bubble up. The coding was an example of that. I'm also signing up for something I haven't done in a long time that I'm excited about (but have to wait for it to solidify before I dare talk about it). I'm thinking about the rum doc at least. I hate to say that I need to focus on things to distract from the noise, but clearly that would help.

Sometimes it's troubling to see how much time Simon spends at the computer, but while I did the same thing as a kid, to an extent, I didn't have the social opportunity that it includes today. To that end, I don't want him to feel bad about this time, but I also would like him to move around a bit. Diana suggested that he go with her to the HOA gym at the start of summer. While he seemed a little apprehensive, he did it, and he didn't hate it.

What happened next is that he kept going. Every single day. My boy needs constant reminders for, well, everything it seems, but he's going on his own accord daily. I'm sure that part of this is the fact that he gets bored, and that's fine. I'm just surprised that he's sticking to it without any real encouragement. He says he mostly does the treadmill and elliptical, and he's spending close to an hour most of the time.

Meanwhile, I'm not doing that. I'm in a rut where my brain is so overwhelmed with noise that it's hard for me to even get on the treadmill that I own in my office. And I'm feeling that sometimes when I am on my feet. That's not good. I've always hated exercise. I am starting to endeavor in something that will help, but I'm not sure to what extent it'll get me moving. I just know that I have to get moving for the purpose of my own longevity.

I have to hand it to Simon though, his follow-through has been solid. I'm really happy for him.

I've been reading a lot of stuff lately on what various people think that it means to be a parent, and the psychological consequences for parent and child. Like everyone, I have an opinion on that.

The top line thing for me about being a parent is that it was my (our) choice. My kid had no part in deciding that. That informs a lot of the way that I look at my daily role in raising Simon. He is not obligated to like me, or even care about my role in his life. As a teenager, he'll probably mostly not like me or my decisions, which is normal. That doesn't mean that I don't want him to exercise empathy, for me or anyone, but I do think that there's a long-tail game of me having to earn that. Despite the friction, I do think that, as an adult, he'll get that.

That means being involved. I want to teach him to drive. I want to talk to him about relationships and sex, however awkward it might be. I want to talk about being different, about autism, about feeling lonely. I want to give him the reprieve of travel and vacations. I want to encourage healthy behavior.

It's my duty to care about what he cares about. I admit, this is hard. But for example, I know that gaming is important to him. Computer use is important to him. I don't always have the mental bandwidth to engage in what he's doing, but I am reluctant to find it burdensome or annoying, because adults expressed those feelings toward me growing up, when all I wanted was to desperately sit in front of a machine and make it do stuff as a kid. I can offer ideas about things to look into, but it's ultimately up to him, in terms of what he's into.

I don't feel like I have to protect him from all the things. I've never held back swearing in front of him, because I think that vilifying words only makes them more tempting to use. He's going to use those words anyway, at some point. I just don't want him using them at school or in polite company. To this point, I think I'm getting this right. He knows right and wrong, and appreciates the context.

If I were to summarize, I think that being a parent places more responsibility on the parent than the child. That's the contract. He doesn't really owe me anything, because his very existence was my choice. I'm not saying that he doesn't have any responsibilities, since teaching him self-care and independence is part of the journey.

One of the myths of building a new house is that the maintenance is low because it's new. Sure, I suppose it's technically better than owning a 100-year-old house, but it's far from maintenance-free. Our house is now almost 8, and there are definitely things to take care of. The HVAC has been a constant thing, partly because of the dogshit Lennox stuff that was installed by Pulte, and after annual service calls, we replace at least the upstairs system (the downstairs runs a lot less, and wasn't hit by lightning). I've had to replace two GFCI/AFCI breakers. Keeping the tiled shower free of mold has been a constant battle. And the carpet (also dogshit) desperately needs to be replaced, but I tolerate it for some reason.

But when something is relatively easy to fix, it's very satisfying. Replacing the fried thermostat was easy, and when it lights up and the AC comes on, that's a good feeling. When I unclogged the AC condensation line, that was good. Replacing a toilet valve, awesome. Mounting shelves to a masonry wall and drilling a hole through quartz for my glass washer, that was my high point.

I watch a lot of HGTV/Magnolia improvement shows, and I don't think that I could work at that level. The people in the trades have to lean on a ton of experience, none of which I have. Seeing those guys work for both of our houses was super interesting (and probably annoying for them). I admire people who can make things with their hands. That's why I'm obsessed with people like Xyla, Simone and Laura, because they start with an idea, sometimes not even a well-baked idea, and will stuff into existence. That's awesome.

I can't believe I'm writing this, but lightning hit us again, in about the same place. I was sitting in my office yesterday afternoon, just out of a meeting, when there was a flash and an instant, insanely loud crash. Scared the shit out of me. I went to the bathroom (not for that reason though), and noticed that the GFI tripped. After that, I noticed the kitchen did as well. I reset them, turned some lights on, and it seemed everything was fine.

But it wasn't. Around bed time, it felt warm downstairs, so I fired up the Google Home app, and noticed that it said the downstairs thermostat was offline. Having just replaced the entire upstairs system, I did the usual troubleshooting, starting with making sure the condensation drain didn't back up. Then I busted out the multi-meter to see if the thermostat was getting power, and sure enough, a solid 28V was there. The thermostat got fried. Again. I opened up the base and found the same charred spot that I saw six years ago.

I'm no stranger to this. Both thermostats got fried in 2019 (same model), but Google was nice enough to replace them because I complained on Twitter. That hit also blew some holes into the upstairs heat pump, and fried the fiber/coax converter for the Internet connection. Then in 2022, in a freak March thunderstorm, lightning fused the power gateway off the grid (it isolates solar/battery in the case of an outage), and killed my router, an ethernet switch, and the fiber/coax converter again, while also melting a light switch.

I can't say precisely where the lightning "landed," but what the hell, three times in around the same spot? At least it didn't break the power plant or the HVAC this time (well, thermostat aside). Do I need a lightning rod on the house to divert it away from stuff? A whole-house surge protector wouldn't matter, because it seems to come in via the HVAC, not the grid.

There has been a movement at work to adopt a particular language, which is not uncommon in software engineering organizations. I'm always skeptical of these conversations, because acting on them is not without cost in the form of learning. Also, some folks treat programming languages as religion. But as a leader, I've also accepted that the cost isn't what I used to think it was, because I've hired more than a few engineers that were proficient in another language or platform, and had no problem ramping up in a reasonable time.

I didn't always feel that way. I quite literally grew up with Microsoft's .Net platform, working with those betas and even Visual Basic.Net at first. I settled into C# quickly, and a fantastic open source world opened up around it, until the thing itself became open source. My pivot started when I worked for a consulting firm, switching projects every three to six months.

The short version of the story is that I had to learn about Java, Typescript, several front-end libraries (spoiler alert: React won), and even a little Python here and there. I wouldn't say that I'm proficient in them as the years have passed, but if I had to get back into any of them, or start on something new, I could get there if I had to. I expect that of any non-new engineer.

In subsequent roles where I hired people, I was always careful to make sure that my job descriptions invited people familiar with many platforms and disciplines, while explaining what we used. If I didn't do that, I might have overlooked really great people. The biggest cost isn't even getting to know the new-to-them language or tooling, it's getting to know what their wider open source landscape looks like. That doesn't take long either.

Don't limit yourself. Unfortunately, with a lot of recruiters and hiring managers relying on AI to do little more than keyword matching, many are missing out on the best people. Even if you do limited code testing, use something like HackerRank to make the task language agnostic. Looking for [your stack] on resumes isn't the thing that you should be looking for. Look for the makers who can demonstrate delivery, customer empathy and consistent soft skills. The language will come easy.

You say that you're "pro life," but...

• You don't care if mothers die from risky pregnancy.
• You don't believe that health care is a right.
• You put gun rights above all else, even when guns are the number one cause of death for children in the US.

You care about "family values," but...

• You're fine with working immigrant families being separated and deported.
• You voted for a guy who has been divorced several times and paid off a porn star that he had an affair with.
• You don't think that two dads are a family.

You believe in "the rule of law," but...

• You think peaceful protestors should be arrested, while convicted insurrectionists should be pardoned.
• You believe a president, well, the one you voted for at least, should be able to do whatever he wants.
• You think the separation of powers should be tossed out, despite being the very foundation of the Constitution.

You believe in "fiscal responsibility" for the government, but...

• You support a budget that adds trillions to the national debt.
• You don't question defense spending, despite it being the biggest ticket item.
• You don't point out the subsidies of pet industries.

You believe "America first," but...

• You oppose funding research for science, technology and healthcare, meaning other countries will lead.
• You rally against sustainable energy, ceding any leadership to other countries.
• You want the US to stop providing aid around the world, but fail to realize that it diminishes US influence.

You demand respect for the US military, but...

• You voted for a draft dodger that routinely insults gold star families, war heroes and career military leaders.
• You're OK with casting out those who serve because they're part of the LGBTQ community.
• You champion cuts to the VA, which provides care for our veterans.

I haven't written about politics lately, because honestly I don't have a lot to add that isn't already out there. But these are weird fucking times, where senators are getting manhandled for asking questions of cabinet members, and the backbone of the farming and hospitality industries are being dragged away by ICE agents who are not wearing uniforms but are wearing masks. And yeah, the president is doing a hundred things that violate the Constitution and obvious laws. This weekend, there are protests being planned all over the US, while the president attends a parade that is not about the necessary humility of having a powerful military for the protection of our citizens, but rather a boastful demonstration of power.

The strangest cultural phenomenon that we're enduring right now is that the segment of the population that, during the Obama and Biden years, constantly harped on the ideas that the Constitution was being violated, talking about freedom and rights (which were not at all endangered), is now silent about the clear violations of civil liberties. You'd think that the people who were so certain that they might be limited by an "oppressive" executive branch are now witnessing the very thing that they were worried about, but are now silent.

The reason is not a mystery. A notable difference between the right and left, is that factions of the more recent right are not concerned with their ethos if it doesn't benefit them. It didn't used to be this way. I used to find that right-wing folks were dogmatic in their beliefs, but it was at least consistent. But now, the belief system only applies when it aligns with their broader world views. In other words, all bets are off if it involves brown people, non-heteros, etc.

Remarkably, despite the appointment of judges by Trump, the judicial branch has mostly aligned itself with the broader intent of the Constitution. That's not to say that there haven't been losses in terms of women's healthcare rights, but that's more because we haven't seen the right laws passed. (For real, how has the ERA still not been passed, and why haven't more people advocated for it?)

The last week has been interesting, in part because the administration keeps losing in court when it tries to enforce an authoritarian motif of absolute power. The sketchy part is whether or not military leaders will push back and say, "Hey, I can't do that, it's not legal." Kind of makes you appreciate the way the founding fathers set up the separation of powers.

As much as I find everything going on right now distressing, there's small comfort in seeing the response, and the direction that the larger populace seems inclined to drive toward. The next few months should be interesting.

Those memories of serious air conditioning shortly after we moved to the Orlando area brought back a lot of feelings. What's interesting is that so many of those feelings were positive. I genuinely felt content and on an excellent trajectory. In recent years, mostly since the pandemic, I feel like contentment is intermittent at best, and anxiety is pretty much always high. For that reason, I feel like it might be useful to look back at that time and identify the things that made it better. Granted, people tend to look back fondly at certain times in a way that is more positive than it usually was. That said, I'm not big on nostalgia, and I don't view many periods of my life as exceedingly positive, so I think my memory is legit.

The first thing is obviously the excitement of all of the newness. I felt this a little in moving to Seattle, but it was muted I think because of the sheer volume of change. In that case I was moving away from Ohio after 36 years, navigating a new place, just got married, starting a new job, baby on the way, houses that couldn't sell, and it was a lot. Coming to Orlando from Ohio, I felt kind of done with the Cleveland area, wanting something new. Professionally, I had been wandering around much of the first half of the year, with a contract job, a false start, and relief that I got out of health insurance. All at once, and in just a few weeks, I landed a contract job at SeaWorld corporate, sold the house almost immediately, and secured a new place to live while building yet another. It was high stress for a couple of those weeks, but then everything was on autopilot and routine. It was radical change that came and settled quickly.

I was optimistic about the contract at SeaWorld, but also not married to it. Nothing was given about it, but after the prior few months of being unsure about what was next, it didn't even matter. I was very Zen about career, and the opportunities were so numerous that I could pick and choose. Even with Simon being 3 by that time, I felt like my most important outcome was to make sure that he and Diana were comfortable and getting everything they needed, and that box felt very checked and prioritized over work.

Parenting was just not very complicated. While we would get Simon's ASD diagnosis in that first year, there was no panic or serious worry. The biggest problem that I had with him was his unique ability to headbutt or otherwise hit me in the nuts (something that continued for the next three years). It's not that he never misbehaved, but he was happy to see me when I got home from work, and we were making all of these amazing memories, for me and Diana at least, at Walt Disney World.

Despite not being used to the heat of summer, I forced myself to go walking, a lot, with the acquisition of my first FitBit. I listened to tunes and just walked whenever I could. I got down to a weight almost matching my 2005 coaching days, and I felt great. I suspect that this had a lot to do with my contentment.

And yeah, there was a particularly great stretch of music around then. Our 2013 and 2014 playlists were pretty great. Alt rock and pop was having a moment, and it was pretty great. To this day, we listen to those playlists quite a bit, and they're the longest we've ever had.

Oh, and the world did not feel like it was on fire. An actual adult ran the country, racism and the various phobias were being relegated to the fringe of society and we were coming hot and fast out of the recession. There was a lot of reason for optimism.

So what do I do with all of that? If it's the circumstances that made it awesome, most of those are things that I can't reproduce. Simon will not be younger, we don't want to move, I'm in the longest job I've ever had and don't want to change. Obviously I can up my physical activity, but it's so hard for me because I kind of hate doing it. (And fuck you to the fitness people who think that's a personality flaw... You don't get extra points because you do something that you like to do.) All of our circumstances are different, and we're in a different stage of life. The question really is, how do I optimize this stage for contentment? To answer that, partly I need to define what I want it to look like. I can't stop being a parent though, and I have to responsibly game out the rest of life, which means wealth building so we don't have to work a "career job" indefinitely. This is especially true if these idiots in Washington tank Social Security. Those two areas already require more discipline than I think I have.

I can't recreate that year, obviously, but I'm trying to lean into the things that feel good now. It doesn't seem like that should be so hard, but it is.

When our DC friends were in town a few weekends ago, we went to Epcot and did the Finding Nemo ride. I haven't been on it in years, because Simon has aged out and, frankly, I was never aged in. But when we first moved here, and he was 3, we couldn't visit the park without doing that ride. When we walked in this time, I felt a mediocre blast of air conditioning, but that's probably because it was full of people, which was unusual back in the day. But in my mind, it felt like a huge blast because I remember it that way. Other attractions that day did have the blast.

In general, having moved here in July of that year, entering every building anywhere around town felt like that. July is certifiably what I call "swamp ass" season, because it's the part of the year that's 90 everyday and fairly humid (with an afternoon thunderstorm). It goes from June to September, and it's a small price to pay for 8 other amazing months. But many places seem to over-compensate for the heat, and chill interiors to a ridiculous level. Now, when I first feel that early in the season, it takes me back to those first weeks that we lived here. The memory extends to the rental house we had, which was a nice place.

You would think that the feeling would have worn off by now, but 12 years later, it has not. I've been experimenting with pushing our new upstairs air conditioning unit, in part because we had guests, and it's funny that I can get that same "arctic blast" feeling at home. It's comforting for some reason. That's a topic to cover in the next post.

Someone on PointBuzz referred to the old discount department store called Uncle Bill's, which I now understand to be local to the Cleveland area in the 70's. I haven't thought about that in many decades. But the funny thing is, it triggers a bunch of other defunct store memories.

There was Zayre, which people called "Zayre's." Just the name of it wakes up memories of the tile floors, the shopping carts, and the logo with an asterisk before it. Then there was Gold Circle, which I think had a location near my childhood home. Do you remember Best? They had the, uh, best Christmas catalogs, and their stores were weird because most of them were built as a showroom, and you had to buy stuff and they would bring out the product. Radio Shack lasted much longer, and in high school I remember buying some minor electronic parts to hack speaker jacks into my boombox or a switch for my model rocket launcher. Of course, everyone knows K-Mart and Sears, which combined to suck even more before disappearing. I worked at an Ames in high school, which I recall actually bought the Zayre locations in the Cleveland area. I closed that one when it went out of business, and bought a lot of crap cheap. That one was down the street from us in Brunswick, and it was later turned into a movie theater, which was extra weird having spent so much time in that building.

As a kid, it was fun to visit the toy sections of those stores while my mom shopped for whatever. It was kind of torture, because while I would inevitably get some of the things I desperately wanted for Christmas, most I obviously did not. It was especially rough when I got a little older and wanted an Atari 2600 or one of their early 8-bit computers.

These days we're down to Target and Walmart, and I rarely enter either one. I miss the dopamine hit of shopping for stuff I didn't really need. I suppose for a lot of people that has been replaced with social media likes, but I don't have a replacement.

Simon apparently came in to our room the other night (I didn't wake up) and told Diana that he couldn't sleep because his brain was constantly racing. It kind of makes you wonder if it's hereditary, or the result of something hereditary like autism.

I've articulated before about what this is like. I have to emphasize that it's like this most of the time for me. If he has to endure that as well, that's heartbreaking to me. Sometimes it makes living in the moment and relaxing very difficult. But it's absolutely the worst when you're trying to sleep. As I get more tired, the context shifting is reduced, but then I get into tighter loops thinking about the same things, which might actually be worse.

I don't have a ton of solutions, because honestly I just learned a few years ago that most people don't have this problem. It can in rare instances be useful, because it's definitely why I'm able to say witty things now and then. But mostly I find it exhausting. I'm not entirely sure how to coach Simon around it either.

I can say that a few milligrams of THC does wonders before bed, but the developmental risks are way too high, even with limited research, to give that to non-adults. It definitely helps me though. In waking hours, there are certain activities, mainly video games, that help me turn it off. And this will sound weird, but if I can focus on sexual thoughts, the lizard part of my brain seems to take over and shut down the spiral. Maybe I'm tapping into biology for that one. Oh, writing helps a ton. If I write multiple blog posts in one day, that's me coping with it.

It's a rough way to exist. I'm trying to find something positive that I've passed to my kid.

I've been a fan of free television for a long time, ditching cable for most of the last 15 years. Going cable-free has certainly become easier with the advent of streaming. If you go back more than 20 years, I built a PC in this sweet "stereo" case intended for your living room, and in that computer I had two over-the-air tuners. TV was still standard definition, so even then, you could load up a hard drive with so much stuff. The basic cable channels were not scrambled or encrypted in any way either, so if you did have cable, you had your own DVR, without the cost of subscribing to TiVo at the time. I used software called BeyondTV for that, and it was awesome.

Broadcast TV still has had some stuff that we watch, mostly awards shows and some sporting events. Oh, and we used to DVR the nightly news and SNL. Six years ago I bought a FireTV Recast from Amazon, which was a pretty great little box that you attached to an antenna and your network, and it recorded stuff off-air. Unfortunately, Amazon discontinued support for Recast, and it crashes a lot. It's a bummer, because it worked pretty seamlessly with the FireTV sticks on our TV's. Fortunately, there's a little box called a Tablo that does essentially the same thing, so I bought one of those, hoping to get a few years out of it before everything is streaming. And unlike the Recast, it seems to be getting our CBS affiliate, so we can actually watch the Tony's this weekend.

Beyond that, the landscape is so much better. Peacock seems prepared to perpetually charge $20 per year, so that covers NBC, which will also have the NBA back starting next season. ABC and FOX stuff is mostly carried on Hulu. We do the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle ad-free for $30, totally worth it. CBS is Paramount+, the old people channel, and there's nothing I want to watch there other than the Tony's (60 Minutes segments are all on YouTube). We're not big sports people, though we do enjoy watching as much of the US Open as possible. We usually get a Sling trial for that, which includes ESPN, and it's cheap the first month. I don't know how regular Sling or YouTubeTV makes it, because it's cable-expensive.

The eventual retirement of broadcast TV makes me kind of sad, because it's the thing that I aspired to work in. That, and terrestrial radio, which has been completely useless for a very long time. I haven't listened to it since maybe the mid-aughts, when 107.9 The End met its, uh, end, in Cleveland. But maybe when that all shrivels up, more marketing dollars will move online, helping those of us who have a side-hustle on the Internets not tied to a social platform.

I spend a little more for proper redundancy on my sites, because I believe that's important for the folks that choose to use their distraction time with me. Also, obviously, that's my kind of nerd stuff. Sure, the ad revenue doesn't cover it, but I can't not provide a high level of service. (Also, it's worth mentioning that back in the day I could pay my mortgage on 30k daily ad impressions.) I pride myself on how fast it all is, and the up-time, especially compared to the days when it all ran on a single rented server. The forum app powering the PointBuzz forums normally runs on two instances using only 1.75 GB, and a working set of 500 MB.

That all works fine, because typical traffic to that app is around 2,000 requests per hour, which is nothing. However, I've been dealing with a lot of bots originating from Alibaba servers in Hong Kong, Singapore and sometimes China or India. Sometimes it's from a single machine in Google or Amazon's cloud in the US (not the search engine). They go nuts and generate 100,000 requests per hour. This is also not what I would consider "high," about 28 requests per second, but it does push the limits of what that tiny amount of memory can handle because it's so bursty. By that, I mean the requests are not uniformly distributed over time. It can slow things down, and sometimes generate errors for people.

I can scale it up to 3.5 GB of memory, and everything is again fine. In fact, there's enough overhead at that point probably to do hundreds of requests per second. I don't actually know what the upper limit is there. But it's also the difference between spending $25 a month and $50 a month. I'm already spending $72 on the two "premium" instances running all of CoasterBuzz and the non-forum part of PointBuzz (as well as this blog an a number of other things), $110 for all of the databases and small amounts for Redis, ElasticSearch, Functions, etc. The database has yet to be overwhelmed, fortunately, so I haven't had to scale that up.

The bots are annoying, but if they get really ugly, it's easy enough to see where they're coming from, and block them. Alibaba is especially easy, because they come from predictable ranges of IP's, and always in East Asia. The one-offs are the more annoying ones, because any idiot can spin up a bunch of ephemeral machines and run a script to scrape the sites. Between the two sites, there are hundreds of thousands of pages, so there's a lot to hit. It's great for long-tail Google juice, but not great for rogue crawlers.

We spent last weekend on a cruise, which is hardly unusual for our vacationing endeavors. It's so completely different from everyday life, in no small part because there are people taking care of you in every way. They're making your bed, cleaning up after you and bringing you food. Oh, and taking care of your kid. While all this is going on, you meet people from all over the world in bars, during activities or just sitting around. Coming back to land, it's clear that humanity at its best is people serving people, sharing their experiences and connecting. Sure, in that environment, that's literally the crew's job, but it doesn't mean that it isn't genuine. It takes a certain commitment to work like that, and for guests it takes empathy and kindness to show your appreciation for the crew.

This happens in everyday life, too. Civil servants at all levels of government do their jobs not for the money, but because they believe in the mission of government. Volunteers in every capacity further their causes. People give money, often to the same causes. Again, this is humanity doing its best.

Would you not prefer that the people you elect also work like this? Elected officials are by definition supposed to be serving their constituencies. They must exercise wisdom to decide how best to make government work for all of the people it serves. It doesn't mean that they don't have to make difficult decisions, and it doesn't mean that they have to satisfy everyone. But they must approach the job with the seriousness and care that matches the impact they will have on people's lives.

Instead, we have a bizarre cult of personality that people treat like a sports team loyalty. Outside of working for a political party, I can't see any world where anyone would ordinarily be anything other than cautiously skeptical of anyone in office. It's not that you should expect the worst, but people who seek power are generally the ones who are least qualified to wield it. The power is used to hurt people and marginalize others. The cult turns a blind eye to the blatant self-interest that is antithetical to public service. And for what? To stick it to all of the communities that you fear because they're not like you? No wonder we are where we are.

I got my professional start working for a municipality. I did it full-time for three years, and part-time for the six years prior. It sure as hell wasn't for the money, but I stuck with it as long as I did because I found it deeply fulfilling to be doing things that benefited the community. What I did mattered to people. At no time would I have ever considered using my position to tear anyone down or cause harm to people.

I don't expect Trump and his sycophants to change. What is most disappointing is the regular people who are fine with the destructive outcomes. One can be for, against, or indifferent, but make no mistake, that indifference has the same outcomes as being for it. Is that the legacy that you want to leave?

Over the years, I've talked a little bit here and there about getting divorced. Most people didn't know what was going on, almost until it was over. But it was about 20 years ago that we initially split. That started off a chain reaction of events that eventually led me to remarry, have a child, and move across the country to work for a company that I never thought I'd work for. Stephanie and I are still friends, and I'm grateful for that. The reasons it didn't work out aren't that important to anyone other than us. I will tell you my story, the short version at least, of how things went after that.

I was a total mess for awhile, though I didn't really let on about it. There's just one blog post that implies something bad happened. I was very immature for my age, and I also had several bona fide autism meltdowns, though I didn't know what that looked like at the time. I had just started a contract job that was very flexible, my book just came out, I was coaching volleyball and the sites actually made enough money that I could kind of wing it. Heck, most of the previous year I didn't even work outside of writing the book. Volleyball was the thing that provided the most purpose.

We were doing counseling, but as was the case in my high school and college days, I didn't really know anything about getting into or maintaining a relationship. I was still of the mind that you met someone, made out with them a bit, and she was your girlfriend in a super committed relationship. That's why I was single so much. Later in the year, I got into a separate relationship that was complicated, but it did show me that an attractive woman could be interested in me. That fall I coached high school volleyball, lost a lot of weight and had moments of positivity and independence that I never had before. I don't think I had a choice.

The next year I met Catherine, and I learned from her about how you ease into a relationship. I wasn't proactive, but fortunately she was. We were a strange pairing at first, different in a lot of ways. She was so much more social than I was, whereas I found being that social level to be exhausting. (Again, wish I understood all of this sooner!) I was ready to really dive in, so I asked her to go to Vegas with me right after the divorce was final. Going on a trip with someone reveals a ton about how compatible you are. It was an epic vacation, I'm sure in part because of the newness of it. But we were all-in, with gratuitous PDA and such. I figured out what dating was supposed to be like.

We spent almost a year together, and when we did split, it was not overly dramatic. I think the bottom line is that dating someone in vet/med school is destined to fail, something they even warned her about in orientation. Fortunately, we stayed friends, and now our families vacation together. She helped me reset, and I learned a ton about relationships just by dating her.

After we split (well, mostly, aside from still more mini-trips), I got into a rhythm of dating. A lot. The Internet made it easy to meet people, and I went through a period of time where I think I was going on one date per week. I understood what wasn't working for me, and for the first time in my life declined further dates. It was during this time that I had my one and only one-night stand, which was one of the most bizarre things I've ever experienced. That's probably not a story suitable for a blog post!

Then, a little more than two years after the big split, I met Diana. We were married in under two years, pregnant right after that, and moved to Seattle six months into marriage, all during a serious recession. That period of change was intense, but frankly I needed it. It wasn't that Cleveland sucked, but I definitely needed to get beyond it. Everything has felt mostly fluid since then, in mostly good ways. But after a decade of kind of wandering around without a lot of deliberate direction, the split necessarily triggered a maturing process that I didn't know I needed.

This is where people say things like, "I wouldn't change a thing," and I kind of think that's nonsense. Yes, I am happy about the outcomes, but if I could have the same outcomes without a lot of the pain, hell yes I would accept that situation. The split was only one source of pain. I realized a lot of things about people I thought would be looking out for me that did not even acknowledge what I was going through. I struggled in a lot of ways that had less to do with the failed marriage and more to do with how inexperienced I was in important life stuff. And my therapist at the time was pretty shitty, now that I look back at it.

I can't believe how much time has passed. I could not have imagined any of the current aspects of my life. If this is how it goes for everyone, I have to imagine a lot of Type-A people being borderline suicidal. How do you arrive at a life you couldn't imagine but are so happy to have? I'm not going to pretend to know what things will look like 20 years from now. It'll be wrong.

The algorithm pointed me to an interview of Jordan Klepper, of The Daily Show fame, by Jen Psaki of MSNBC. While he has been going to MAGA rallies mostly to get laughs, he's also been thoughtful about what he's seen, and he was there on January 6. The thing that stood out in the interview was the bit about young white males being attracted to Trump, because they find some identity in associating with him. That struck me as weird, so I got to thinking about what has changed over the years. A decade and a half ago, I don't think his ascension would be possible. (And I'm disappointed it could happen at all.)

That decade and change ago, there was a developing sense that real equality was not only possible, but that we were headed in that direction. Perhaps naively, a lot of people, including myself, felt like having a Black president was a precursor to a more equitable society. Same-sex marriage eventually became legal, and a lot of folks realized that it wasn't enough to not be racist, we had to be anti-racist if things were ever going to change. Marginalized groups were getting louder, and quite happy to lean into their identity. It was exciting, and kind of a relief to see it happening.

At the same time, social media, which was mostly Facebook in those days, began its transformation into something that was less about networking and more about performance. I mean, that's why we have TikTok. Everyone is putting on a show. That was probably true before, at least to the extent that people presented themselves online in a way that was more polished or filtered than their real lives. With ad markets disrupted and monopolized, the concept of "influencer" was born, which mostly involves ephemeral performance in a long-tail of people who do whatever it is they do online. This is narcissistic behavior to various extents, which is kind of weird if you lived before it was typical. The point is that all of this lo-fi, ephemeral stuff appeals to an idea that you're awesome and should get your thing. After all, 16-year-old girls are getting their thing by doing synchronized dance moves online.

As a white hetero male, I've always been able to see first hand that advantage that I had over women and people of color. I knew this because many of my peers, especially those who were older, said and did a lot of sexist and racist things. As a Gen-X'er, I also had the, uh, "advantage" of largely being disregarded. I suppose I took up some identity in that, but I think it left me with a choice to find identity in helping others, or in finding some kind of fame and recognition. I've mostly leaned into the former, as my short tenure in radio, mostly pre-Internet-ish, made me realize that being even local famous isn't really that great. But again, not even autism, which I now understand has held me back in some ways, has not been a big enough impediment in my success. I think a lot of Millennials, who were more in that Internet transitional time, kind of caught up with us. This part is largely anecdotal, but stick with me for a moment.

Young white males today only know that performative online world. And that world includes people who are proud of their ethnic or racial heritage, proud of being queer, proud of being strong women, etc. The marginalized groups have had enough. Now, I'm in the aforementioned cohort that got to decide where we could find identity, and I believe many of us found it in helping others, raising people up. I have nothing to lose, and the proud identities of marginalized people does not come at my expense. But what about the people who only know a world where teens bank on making memes, and making everything about you is normal? If you're not a part of any of that, what is your identity?

To that end, I can see why young, white, hetero males feel threatened and without an identity that they can, uh, identify with. I am absolutely empathetic to this. You can't tell them about "white privilege" because they can't see it. They don't have the life experience to see it, and our education system fails to teach them about how human history is a tragedy of marginalized and persecuted people.

Unfortunately, because that privilege is real, and they're willing to associate their identity with a blatant racist and misogynist, they are moving us backward. The question then becomes, how do you reach them? They've grown up in a situation where it apparently is OK to be selfish, even at the expense of others (not to mention be a criminal without consequence). What's even more bizarre is the portion that show strong affiliation with Christianity, even though Christ stood for basically the antithesis of what MAGA folk believe. So now they also feel righteous through a warped view of religion.

I don't know what you do about this, but I can say that I at least understand how we got here. You can't explain ongoing cognitive dissonance to a person with autism though, or at least, not this person. I can't understand people who are so hateful because it's not rational. I also can't understand people who claim not to be hateful that associate with the hateful. And it's not for a lack of trying. I've tried to engage with random people like this, and they always get back to some talking point not grounded in reality, or one contrary to the values they claim to uphold.

It's not my problem to fix, but I want to see it get better. All I've got is allyship, volunteering and donating to civil rights organizations. It doesn't feel like enough.

I thought that the term "enshittification" was just a thing we said in software circles, but it turns out that it's being used for... everything. But let me back up a little.

In software and technology, the term started to show up when talking about the big social platforms. Remember when they were useful and allowed you to keep in touch and the goings on of your friends? Yeah, those days are long gone. They're gone because those platforms only exist to sell ads and increase engagement. You're forced to endure all of the noise to get anything out of it at all, and since the network is not interoperable or portable, you can't just lift and shift your network.

All of it is getting worse, and AI is one of the biggest problems. So much of the "content" on the Internet is written by machines. All of it uses link bait titles like, "This actor makes bold statement about co-star." If this were written in a more classic journalistic style, it would say the names of the actors and something about the statement. It's infuriating that even the entertainment things are going this way. For more important things like Google, they're giving you AI summaries of things instead of showing you the things, which of course is bad because the AI doesn't think critically (although, neither do most people it seems). It doesn't know what's real. This will get worse because all of the things that publish stuff and rely on ad revenue (also from Google) will stop publishing because they don't get any traffic. It's not sustainable. It was bad enough that everyone wanted to be a "content creator" (a totally meaningless designation), but now the Internet is flooded with people and things that aren't even real.

I'm reading on LinkedIn now that basically all of job recruiting is broken. People use AI to spam thousands of job postings, and recruiters use AI tools to find the "right" candidates. Obviously that doesn't work. That so many jobs are remote makes it even worse because there's no geographical limit to applicants. I always preferred to hire from my network, and that would still be the case if I was in a position to hire people. It feels like those days are gone.

Oh, and dishonorable mention to all of the online tooling that the schools use. Most of it is just terrible, and I'm sure the teachers don't care for it either.

The term is spreading to new contexts and variations on meaning. But the intent is the same: Things are getting crappier. Think about how electronic food ordering has changed the relationship with restaurants. The desire for the cheapest goods has led to lower standards for everything (this is also called the "Walmarting" of things). Entertainment is leaning into time-wasting, ephemeral crap online. And obviously, you've seen what's happened to our government and politics.

I'm generally optimistic about things, but I feel like so many things that used to inspire wonder and curiosity are getting crappy, or the crappy things are obscuring the good stuff. I hope that this is a temporary situation.