Fri Mar 671 23:14:06 PST 2020

It's almost a year since Tim died. The funeral wasn't until the end of July, with everybody staying home until the vaccines rolled out; the first stretch of grieving done, like most of the past two years, at home. Christmas was pretty rough, and I'm expecting to not be terribly useful next week, either.

Yeah. I just can't even.

that seems fine, then.

My previous employer started trading on the NASDAQ last week. I quietly converted most of my shares to cash earlier this year, which let me stop thinking about it and create a cushion for the household; I squinted and kept an amount that felt like it was still a stake in the outcome. More than anything, it's like being in a casino and deciding how much to take risks with. Mostly I want my friends there to be rewarded for their hard work. And there are a bunch of people who got royally fucked over, and will not be rewarded for their hard work. Shocker: they're not white or Asian males.

This fucking industry. Reflecting the inequities (and iniquities) of our society, garlanding itself with words like "meritocracy" and insisting that technology is neutral and apolitical, when it is neither.

This was really my first successful company: all the others have flailed into one ignominious merger or another, because VCs are really, really good at getting paid. But this is the first unqualified, high-value success. As a joint family project, we now have lots of options about what to do with ourselves; the funny thing is that, if you have to pick just one option, but you don't know what to do, then if you're suddenly able to pick three options...you still don't know what to do. Between the pandemic and the imminent end of high school, we're in a bit of a holding pattern.

(Just to keep me on my toes, though, the guys who bought my shares recently discovered that, being unaware of a stock split in 2020, they over-valued the company and paid me double what they intended to—both times. I've spotted them two phone calls where they desperately try to get me to give some of the money back, or hand them the rest of my shares, or anything. The overall valuation isn't in the contract, much to their horror; just the share price. This crosses the dichotomy of how different professions see companies: investors deal with big numbers like valuation, and employee-stockholders like me care only about the share price, because the valuation as such doesn't affect us at all.

The contract is uncomplicated, and filled with all kinds of juicy sections saying "We all totally understand what we're doing, we can afford to lose the investment, we understand the other party might have material information we don't, and we waive pretty much any right to sue each other," so I'm not worried, from that perspective. It's adrenalizing, and I feel bad for them, but Wealthy Guys Who Fuck Up Large Stock Deals is just not on my charity list this year.)

So the house is paid off, which turns to have been a considerable chunk of our monthly expenses; now we have more money to subsidize the booming business of running Dungeons & Dragons online for schoolkids, especially kids who are maybe wired a little differently. I'm trying to build up a little machine shop for...machining...things. Our musical instrument collection grows, in a measured, stately sort of way.

Just...trying to make it through, I think.

you should have been more specific.

If the three humans of the household had grown up now, we would all be labeled what is now called "twice exceptional" ("EE" or "2E" for short). I know that I've always been super smart, and also I get over-stimulated or overwhelmed and I shut down and retreat inward. And I have ADHD, and it turns out the old joke isn't actually a joke.

"Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"ADHD kid."

"ADHD kid wh—"

"LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!!!"

Anyway. I have to keep learning things, not from any kind of principle, but because it's who and what I am, and I could no more stop learning than you could stop breathing. I once sought out boring podcasts I could fall asleep to: histories of Byzantium and philosophy, two topics I find hyper-detailed and dull. They stopped putting me to sleep after one or two dozen episodes, because my brain adapted and started the process of enthusiastic learning. It's who I am. I have to roll with it, or suffer needlessly.

Luckily, the world has more stuff than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes! I've long thought it would be fun to know (at least a little bit) how to fly a plane, but I do not want to actually fly a plane. It's grotesquely expensive, the radio protocols are not friendly to my brain which often blips on audio, and the noise, vibration, and sickening motion of small planes hit me pretty hard. The most intensive flight simulation rigs can have VR, an eye tracker, and several monitors, enough to qualify for real-world training, and still be a fraction of an actual plane. So I bought the best-cheapest flying hardware (a Logitech joystick) and X-Plane, the biggest simulator for Macs, famous both for being cross-platform, and for having a physics engine enabling users to create the Space Shuttle, or the enormous wings of an airplane on Mars. Maybe someday I'll upgrade to more complex hardware, but for now I'm enjoying a light involvement, at the Indiana Jones level.

the haps.

I keep starting blog posts, thinking about Tim, and I'm not finding much to say that isn't private for one reason or another; it never stops being weird to miss someone even if you never saw or talked to them.

It's a big month: our anniversary, Tim's birthday, my friend J.D.'s yahrzeit, a niece's birthday, Dad's birthday.

I hit my 4-year anniversary of picking up the violin. If I were out in playing in the world, I would be enjoying the looks I get when I tell people I started when I was 40. It is an idiotically awkward instrument, and I think folks have trouble imagining that anyone could learn it without the plasticity and parent-enforcement of childhood. But no, I just wanted to play cool Scandinavian tunes.

We have momentarily discouraged the Oriental cockroaches—who much prefer to stay outside–by the simple expedient of having a bunch of guys demolish the concrete behind the house. Looking at the underside of the concrete, which of course is as uneven as the ground it was poured over (and obviously not flattened beforehand) I think they actually don't live as far underground as I'd thought, and as the ground settled over the years, they had the underside of the concrete to live and travel in. Maybe shared with the ants, when those are around.

The boy is doing well, if "boy" can describe someone several inches taller than me, and with considerably more facial hair. He's back in person at school, vaccinated. Learning stuff, occasionally talking to other teenagers, and generally being a delight to have around.

My previous company filed for an IPO this week! So that's a new experience. The date and price are kept under SEC-enforced lock and key, and then there's usually a 6-month lockout period for current and former employees (or something). 

My current company remains a big ship to steer, self-encumbered in new and exciting ways, but it's moving along. The tech job market is nuts, though. My former minions departing my former company are scoring absurd levels of compensation at new jobs. It's unreal.

And, finally, I've been reading a lot about machining, out of curiosity. I've been watching machining videos for a long time, mostly Clickspring and This Old Tony, and wanted to know how it worked. How do you take the messy, uneven, nonlinear materials of the world, and make flat surfaces? How do you create something accurate to within 0.0001 inches? (About the thickness the ink a Sharpie dispenses.) The answer, it turns out, is "kind of a pain in the ass, actually," but mostly it starts with somebody rubbing 3 plates of material (granite or cast iron, usually) against each other, and scraping down the high spots. When each is perfectly flat against the other two, they're all flat, because the surface common to them all is a flat plane. Few people do that themselves, and instead you usually acquire a "surface plate" for your shop, and use it to calibrate the more complicated gear that absorbs daily wear and tear.

Dunno. Could be worse.

house and home.

It can be harder to practice Bach when the wildfire smoke hits, because the fireplace room is less airtight, and if we have to pick between 2 of 3 air conditioners, we'll sacrifice that one if I don't need it for work. There's electrical work coming, because it'd be good to have a better A/C solution, and also our gas furnace and ducts are installed stupid. The new shiny thing is "ductless mini-splits," which are indeed shiny, and I wonder if a technology evolved to make them be more practical and popular, or if I'm just accustomed to dilapidated heating systems and no air conditioning. If I understand it correctly, some genius figured out how to use the same liquid for both heating and cooling, so you can stick the big compressor thing outside the house, and the inside-outside connection is limited to electricity and a fluid hose, both more energy-efficient than air and its ductwork.

Splits take 240V circuits, though, and our house also has an adorable 100A service that will need a lot of help, and there are other uses waiting for 240V circuits, etc. etc. and it will just be a whole thing, although hopefully less of a thing than the foundation work. That went really well, I think, and it is bizarre and pleasing that the floorboards in our 1938 house didn't creak at all for a couple months. It's not natural. There are wall and ceiling cracks all over the place, but the important part is that the house is no longer collapsing inward.

Our electric bills this summer were, for lack of a better word, absolutely adorable. I think we're paying about $20 for a month with a lot of A/C use. As far as the Sun is concerned, we live in a desert, so usually the solar panels spend the day generating enough power to run the house, and enough to charge the PowerWall house battery, and to sell surplus power to the grid precisely during the hours it's most expensive. Sunrun, who owns and maintains the equipment, handles all the accounting and makes the money. The safest bet in the country, that PG&E will only get more expensive and less reliable, is paying off, rates already having gone up over the year of the solar installation process.

Anna made a scale diagram of the property on graph paper, so we can take the various possibilities and see how to arrange them. The next step is a good shed, to put tools and stuff in, and get rid of the U-Haul container currently holding an improbable quantity of stuff in the yard. Then a shade structure, which then gives us a year-round workshop space, which we'll then use to somehow roll bench tools in and out of the shed. (The only things less fun to move around than the bench grinder are the drill press, and then the winner for Most Awkward is the chopsaw, an absolute monster of a thing that I got for five or ten bucks when I passed a contractor's retirement yard sale, and has lots of cast iron in it.)

Then there's an inflatable hot tub waiting for installation, and the dusty backyard crying out to be covered with something that's not dust.

To some extent all this home improvement stuff feels weird, when we'd like to move somewhere with more water; but we don't really know if we'll move, or when, or even if we'll sell the house if we do. We own the place outright, now, so just walking away into foreclosure isn't an option. It's more like car repairs: if your car breaks down, and you need the car, and you're not willing or able to replace the car, then your remaining option is to fix the car. High school graduation is on the horizon, but we don't know what the kid will need after that. At this point, I can't really imagine a post-pandemic era, but we can't shelter in place for decades. Whether or not we go out to concerts again, there will be colleges or job opportunities, or a simple desire for change, and we'll want to migrate.

To somewhere with clouds, and rain.

boats.

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

(If you haven't read The Wind In The Willows...why not?)

If you have Amazon Prime, you have access to the profoundly uneven and weird selection of Prime streaming video. One of its more rewarding options is Cruising The Cut, a homebrewed docuseries by a guy who appears to be some sort of video-making professional, who decides to buy a narrowboat and go spend long stretches traveling England's canal system. It's incredibly soothing (and also seems to be available on YouTube).

I'm not unfamiliar with England, and I grew up around boats, but this whole thing is absolutely wild. I barely know where to start.

• Britain's canal system had 4,000 miles of canal at its peak. There's 2,000 miles of it still.
• His boat is steel, 56 feet  (~17 meters) long. That is a damn big boat. It steers like my high school friend's 1977 Cadillac, which one would ordinarily say "steers like a boat," but.
• Like all narrowboats, it's 6-7 feet wide, and the narrow canals and locks can almost all handle 2 boats at once.
• My sailing adventure was in a boat 42' long, 14' at its widest.
• They run on adorable diesel engines with a usual max speed of 4-6 mph, but the correct speed is 3 mph or less. In the boats I know, this is essentially idling forward.

Navigating open water is a question of compasses, charts, lighthouses, foghorns, island contours, water towers (and GPS, if you're into that sort of thing). There's...not really navigation. It's a canal. It's a highway for boats. There are simple maps, but also posted signs with arrows.

The idea that there's 2,000 miles of waterway that you don't have to navigate and is generally 6' deep or less is just...some idea from another planet.

Much like with a train (at least in the U.S.), the canals are often in a secret world inaccessible or invisible by road. There are quite a lot of sheep, farms, and houses, and in one stretch, downtown London.

An aqueduct that carries a canal over a roadway is not at all a new idea, but it never stops looking weird to me. And then this thing, which is just amazing.

blargh.

The wildfire smoke finally turned around and hit us for a few days. I bought a couple PurpleAir sensors, which was useful, but awkward: they have built-in webservers, but the outdoor sensor actually has two sensors for some reason. And it was a pain to look at the two side-by-side, when that's actually an important comparison.

One of the many nice things about being a computer programmer is that I know how to find the data made available for computer programs to read and process. And one thing that makes me an expert is knowing that while I could go through the work of creating an authorization key to fetch the data from PurpleAir's service, that's silly, because the sensors are right here on the house network.

   "Adc" : 0,

   "DateTime" : "2021/09/01T06:26:33z",

   "Geo" : "PurpleAir-c882",

   "Mem" : 14200,

   "SensorId" : "10:52:1c:44:c0:87",

   "current_dewpoint_f" : 53,

   "current_humidity" : 35,

   "current_temp_f" : 84,

This is quite civilized: the sensor provides this in plain text, and the fields aren't rocket science to figure out. I don't know what Adc is, but I also don't care, because I want temperature, humidity, and the Air Quality Index, which the sensors label pm2.5_aqi. (PM 2.5 overwhelmingly dominates the AQI calculation for our purposes.)

We have data! But data is not information; information comes when you take your data and apply your questions. You can see that just in the screenshots up there: because I'm not an expert, 759 particles/deciliter is not a number that tells me if I should go outside or turn on another air filter. I need the user-friendly AQI for that. Next technical challenge, is that I would like to know...

• when the AQI goes above one or more threshold values,
• when it goes back down,
• the relationship between inside and outside AQI,
• and temperature/humidity/atmospheric pressure, just for fun.

If you've ever done any data processing or visualization—for which you probably used Excel and/or Google Sheets—you have a hint of the challenges, if you want to collect 10 data points, every 2 minutes, store them somewhere, do calculations on them, make them available via a web server, graph them, show the graphs next to each other...it's a pain in the ass. For businesses, it can be thousands or millions of data points, every few seconds. It's so hard that there are many companies you can pay to do it for you. DataDog is one of those. I wrote a 37-line script to send the sensor data out to DataDog, which also lets me set up alerts on it.

If you look at the live version of the charts, you can change the time window, and moving the mouse pointer along any of the charts shows a cursor at the same moment on each other chart, so you can correlate events.

So that's been useful. The wind has turned back for the moment, sending the smoke back to the rest of North America. But it will be back.

loss.

Content Warnings: death, suicide.

the zoo.

I just got another entry in my endless quest for a travel violin. I wouldn't take it gigging, but I'm always on the lookout for something lightweight and durable, easier to, yannow. Travel with. On airplanes particularly. One challenge is getting annoyed with an instrument that has less expressive range than I do; the ultimate answer to that is just to put up with the inconvenience and bring the real violin. It's not like it's a cello or a bass: it fits fine in the overhead compartment. Still, I dream.

The Cricket shows promise, though. Pretty much any violin made specifically for traveling–and there are not many–is based on the pochette, which dance teachers would carry around for accompanying their students. As that article shows, they sounded awful, as a rule, so people have put a little bit of modern knowledge and technology into making them nicer to play and to listen to. You can see this guy's travel and pochette fiddles, and the traveler models have eye-watering prices for something I'd expect to be tramping around with, or even just tossing into cars. (I think he just does them for fun, and for his day job he's a hydrologist or something.)

Magic Fluke is primarily a ukulele company, and this bears some signs of being built for fun by people who don't set up violins for a living, in particular a sharp corner at the top of the fingerboard, right where the hand will hit it every time. I also thought it was sounding quiet, so I repositioned the bridge closer to where it's supposed to be, which was a 10-15x volume increase; but I will bring it to an actual violin guy, who will make it sound its thin, reedy best, and can sand down that corner in a way that will not make it worse (he can even do it symmetrically on each side). I have an extra set of somewhat nicer violin strings, too, which will probably help.

(Solid-body electric violins sound more or less the same no matter the size, free of the heartless physics of sound waves in air; for the same reason, they're better able to sound good across a wider range of frequencies, so 5 or 6 strings require no fancy engineering adaptations. But, like electric guitars, their musical power without their extremely heavy support systems is pretty much zero.)

Here's my current list of instruments:

• Dahlia 5-string violin.
• Cricket Violin by Magic Fluke.
• Cecilio Sparkly Blue Electric Violin. (Marked for deaccession.)
• Fiddlerman Artist Viola.
• Unsatisfactory travel violin, built by a random guy on the Internet.  (Marked for deaccession.)

• 1970s patent-infringing Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-18 guitar.
• Blueridge tenor guitar (4 strings).
• Line 6 Variax Standard. (Electric guitar that emulates the sound of many other guitars.)

• Eastman MD505 mandolin.
• J. Bovier solid-body electric mandolin.
• Large octave mandolin/small Irish bouzouki, by Bigleaf Mandolins. (Marked for replacement.)

I ordered a weird Swedish thing from Sweden, but the guy won't start building it until November, so I really don't think it should count...

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

I have tinnitus. I've pretty much always had tinnitus, apparently: there's always been these tones ringing when there's no external sound. I assumed everyone heard them, since people talk about what they hear in an anechoic chamber, and there's always been this folk idea of sound just naturally generated by your neurons working or whatever.

My father has tinnitus, a relic of his military service, so to me it was always something that kept you from hearing the beeping of a watch alarm. Nothing dramatic has ever happened to my hearing: no habits of over-loud concerts or headphones, no heedless use of firearms. When I was in grade school, on July 4th down at the beach, I was standing maybe 20 or 30 feet from a detonating M-80 firecracker; while it's given me a lifelong healthy respect for the power of explosions, I don't recall my hearing changing. I had constant awful earaches as a kid, so maybe that's related to the tones? There's also a bunch of somatic stuff that comes with my package of brain wiring, and I'm just learning it still, so this could be in there.

Then, a couple years back, a new, lower tone appeared. Well, says me, that's never happened before. I should go get my hearing checked! The doctor said my ears looked fine, and passed me on to the audio technician for a detailed test.

Now, tinnitus is kind of a shitty phenomenon, because unless you've got one of a sparse handful of uncommon medical conditions, the treatment is basically to deploy coping strategies so it doesn't bother you so much. It would sometimes be maddening as a kid, because I couldn't get away from it. Telling this story to my therapist the other day, I realized that's probably where I developed the habit of falling asleep to music or a tape of old radio shows (Abbott & Costello and Burns & Allen were favorites). It gives my attention something to focus on outside my head, which is pretty much the standard of treatment anyway. Meditation let me further adjust my cognitive response, so when a new tone pops up–there's a type that comes and then fades eventually–I can sort of...embrace and absorb it, I guess. Really, I have no idea what's going on.

Except for the mental experience of it, I don't think the tones have affected my daily life. They don't obviously mask sounds in the environment, or hinder my musicianship, even on instruments like voice and violin, where you can only tune by ear. It mostly comes up when I'm trying to pinpoint a faint sound, and I have to decide if I'm actually hearing the faint sound, or if it's just the tones, or some other auditory hallucination.

You know what plays a bunch of faint sounds for you and tells you to signal if you hear one? Yep. A hearing test.

I was driving the poor woman nuts, I think. I'd be trying to distinguish if there was a sound in the headphones, and she'd say things like "Just press the button if you hear a tone," and my explanation didn't make any sense to her. When it was finally done, she showed me the graph showing the ordinary hearing loss for someone my age. Somewhere in there, she said I had tinnitus.

I looked at her blankly, and said, "Really? I thought I just had those tones."

She stared at me like I was an idiot (which happens less often than one might reasonably expect), and said, slowly, "If you hear a sound. Which is not coming from the environment. That. Is tinnitus."

And people wonder why I never go to the doctor.

Ironically, I can talk a lot about listening.

I don't really enjoy poetry any more than the average modern American (which is very little indeed), but the Zen teacher Ryushin Paul Haller read this one by Mary Oliver at a retreat long ago, and it stuck:

Praying

It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

To listen is to change. We take in words or actions, we try to understand them, we evaluate them. Another person's expression becomes part of our world, our memory. Ourselves. Many times, when we have a hard time listening, we are having a hard time changing. We may not even recognize that there's something in ourselves that we want to stay frozen in place.

Maybe another's words light a fire inside us, sparking zealotry or passion or determination. Or they rub us the wrong way, and our mind rises up in opposition. Maybe our opinion or viewpoint changes as we make space for the ideas and feelings of others.

The most sparse and bare outcome of listening is just to update our understanding of the speaker. Part of being human is that we have a shorthand model of everything and everyone we encounter. It helps us navigate the world. We can get stuck if we forget that the people in our head is not real. Anna and J and I know each other exceptionally well, but we are full of surprises.

Speak, and you change in the telling. Listen, and you change in the hearing.

The changing is the important part.

sometimes archaic technology is fine.

By default, the bowed strings use the same string attachment/adjustment design that every stringed instrument in human history used, until the Industrial Revolution: simple friction pegs, stuck in holes and turned as needed. I imagine this must have been quite an art before precision tools; now you can easily buy a reamer (for the holes) and a...peg...shaving...thing. It's like a pencil sharpener, but shapes the peg's barrel to match the shape the reamer makes in the hole.

Instruments like the guitar and bass quickly converged on geared tuners, because of their greater string tension, but the violin, viola, and cello have kept their friction pegs, on the grounds of being simple, functional, predictable, and lightweight, and being a safe baseline condition for these amazing instruments which can easily last hundreds of years with some care. Attempts at improvement have mostly failed for being too heavy––for the violin and viola, that weight falls at the end of your outstretched arm, like a see-saw, and the extra mass can sometimes inhibit vibration in undesirable ways––or requiring some kind of permanent alteration, like bigger holes, or gluing some kind of bushing into the hole. In the 1800s, you could do that (and more!) to your 300-year old Italian violin and probably no one would care; over time, violins, including almost every Stradivarius, had their neck extended to accommodate changing musical needs. 

(There is exactly one Strad in original condition, called the Messiah, and it lives a sheltered life in the Ashmolean Museum. It gets brought out every so often for virtuosi to play, because sufficiently powerful instruments, for lack of a better term, get crabby and temperamental when they're not played. I've played violins in their crabby state. My acoustic guitar probably qualifies, also.)

Of course, with modern technology, people set to work and designed things that look like regular friction pegs, but actually have complex gearing inside. They're non-invasive to install, and seem to just work. They're in use on at least one Stradivarius. I don't have them, because I'm not proud and I just have fine-tuners on the strings, because the orthodox use of tuning pegs hurts my hand, and heterodox use is just annoying.

ANYWAY.

I was thinking maybe it's time to change the strings, because I've been playing on them non-stop for about 9 months. I've never changed a violin string on a nice instrument before. Easy enough, I look for instructions.

The Internet reminded me that friction pegs do not do their work efficiently without a coating, because they have to do two opposite things:

1. Turn smoothly, with minimal friction, when pulled away from the pegbox.
2. Refuse to turn at all, using the friction between the peg and its holes, when pushed into the pegbox.

The homemade way to do this is with a coating of classroom chalk and a coating of soap (or maybe the other way around), but the most venerable option is W.E. Hill Peg Compound, which has this mind-bending list of ingredients:

• Graphite powder (lubricant)
• Petroleum Jelly (lubricant)
• China clay (sticky)
• Talc (lubricant and sometimes sticky)
• Red Iron Oxide (fancy name for rust: rough and granular)

That's...interesting. The instrument does need it, or at least mine does. I replaced the middle string first, then had to re-do it later, not just because it's the middle string and blocks access to other strings, but I only put the peg dope on one of the two contact surfaces (each peg has one for each wall of the pegbox) and it wouldn't stay remotely in tune.

The effort was worth it, since the violin is now singing and ringing the way it first was, which, I'd mostly forgotten, might be a bit much.

There are, of course, more difficult things to tune:

home, improved.

We reduced our mortgage payment considerably, just in time for the house to need some more professional attention. Long-awaited foundation work has come due, exacerbated by the weight of the solar panels and the new attic storage space. Naturally, the floor joist running the length of the house–most definitely load-bearing–has no piers under it. Construction in 1938 had a certain YOLO vibe to it, although in fact that arrangement has been Mostly Kind Of Okay™ all this time.

All that unused space under the load-bearing center floor joist was practically an invitation to install the furnace and ductwork there. In defense of contractors past, they knew enough not to cut into the joist, instead installing the shower drain backwards to compensate. (Our first plumber gave us a steep discount, saying "Don't worry about it. I'll be back.") The furnace is about due for a replacement, and the ducting is old and probably contributing to my allergies, sooooo maybe it makes sense to tear it all out. California passed some mighty restrictions on gas appliances; can we even replace the furnace with another gas furnace? What then, electric? What poor sod gets to make that work with the fresh electrical stuff from the solar panel install?

This is what the computing world calls a "yak shave."

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(I'm not really sure who took the Yak Shaving idea from Ren & Stimpy and applied to computer programming, but now even American Express people use it.)

This is in addition to replacing the rotting fencing, adding gates to/from the neighbors' yards (they're lovely people, we like them), and finally creating a huge private space with GIANT GATES (and a human-size gate) across the driveway. It turns out that 20% of the property has been wasted all this time, and we barely know what do with it all. (Except to not build a small studio apartment: the permits were finally approved after 5 years, but jeez.)

The Fig Tree is untouched; we'd be happy to say goodbye to the Weird Apple Tree and the World's Worst Ornamental Pomegranate, but they're probably impossible to kill. For all I know, they share the same unholy root system as the Zombie Rose.

(Before our first summer here, we asked our professional plant guy friend to identify the trees. He said it was an Ornamental Pomegranate, that wouldn't produce much fruit. While he is great at his job, this is not remotely true of that tree, for which generations of opossums are grateful.)

Anna had the contractors move and level her tiny house trailer in the side yard, whereupon it emerged that the Thorny Lemon Tree over there had decided it wasn't done living, and had a respectable 2-foot-high revenant flourishing underneath the trailer, in the 18 inches of vertical space, closely surrounded on three sides by fences and structures from 7 to 15 feet tall. The fourth side gets maybe 30 minutes of dappled sunlight in the morning, peeking through the picket fence. The actually quite poor growing soil on our property appears to be like Pet Sematary for plants, because the Thorny Lemon, like its cousin the Zombie Rose, was actually dug up. Out of the ground. In 2013. Which is enough to kill most plants. But not ours.

And PG&E finally inspected the leased solar installation, so the house is 80-100% solar-powered on most days so far, because we live in a desert and also got the house-battery option. The phone app shows soothing animations of the power flowing one way and another, and tracks how much we use from each source. The lease arrangement provides a predictable price for electricity for the term...twenty years, maybe? With an option to renew. It may already be cheaper than PG&E, and it's sure to be so very soon. And more reliable, as PG&E escalates its "If you're just going to be angry when our lack of maintenance causes historic lethal wildfires, then we'll just turn off power to more and more people" strategy. (Last year their response to people who medically rely on electricity to live was, paraphrased, "Go fuck yourselves," and they're expected to steadily extend this policy into major metro areas.) 

It's Anna who really makes this sort of thing possible; I pay for stuff, occasionally lift heavy objects, and make sure the wifi works, and the rest is her doing. I mean, I'm exceptionally good at paying for stuff and making sure the wifi works, don't get me wrong. But her determination and project-management skills for this stuff are both waaaaaay better than mine. Not even in the same ballpark. Or playing the same sport.

stupid instrument.

I enjoy complaining about the violin, partly because it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but the truth is I'm pretty good at it, which is not so incredible, once you start grading on a curve. It's the same way a native English speaker like me with 3 years of studying French under their belt will be much more capable than the same person would be after 3 years of studying any form of Chinese.

(Unless you're Anna, whose natural aptitude with languages exceeds my natural and rarely-mentioned aptitude with weapons.)

Any teacher loves a student who wants to learn and will put the effort into it, and my teacher is no exception. It turned out we have a lot of tastes in common, particularly fiddle traditions, up to and including Scandinavian music, which is not for everyone––even I much prefer playing it to listening to most of it.

(Recall that the difference between a violin and a fiddle is that no one minds if you spill beer on a fiddle.)

And Baroque music, so I can play through a small Vivaldi concerto, and I was a bit off in the weeds being determined to play this Bach keyboard invention, so now I can play through it, too:

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He does love a ton of standard violin repertoire that I don't, and I'll end up learning some of it anyway because that's what one does. I expect it will, again, be much more fun to play than to listen to.

Even though my 5-string covers the viola range, I've been eyeing violas for some time. Physics means my violin's 14" air chamber cannot produce the same sort of tone or volume as that of a viola. Apparently violas aren't acoustically perfect either, because if they were, they'd be too long to play.

(I've seen websites where builders complain about this, citing their own frustrations in arguing that 5-strings are pointless, which seems pretty obviously untrue. In particular, they vent about how the low G on a violin barely sounds okay, and the low C on a viola of any size is even less okay. It's worth noting that building a violin is not exactly easier than playing one, though I'm sure it's a quick transition once you've been building cabinets for a decade.)

Maybe we can blame Anders Hall, of Nordic Fiddlers Bloc and SVER, who makes folk viola look awesome. Anyway, I bought a starter viola––probably smaller than his, but who knows. (Violin sizes are standardized, if nonsensically named according to fractions having no relationship to any of the instrument's dimensions. Violas are categorized by body length, in half-inch increments.)

It arrives tomorrow! So we'll see.

stretched thin.

Back when my people were younger, we would often(-ish) go out to all-night electronic music parties of various stripes. I mostly stuck to and helped put on Chill Parties, but went to no few Dance Parties, and even more Campout Parties, and especially Campout Chill Parties. They customarily ended around dawn, so we'd help with cleanup, go home, and shower before going out to breakfast, followed by a day of watching TV.

(Nickelodeon launched a new satellite channel at the time, and its initial programming was literally nothing but Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact, a glorious undemanding parade of amusing nostalgia, perfect for being full of pancakes after being awake for 24 hours.)

The human body, even in our 20s, is not actually meant to be out partying until dawn, sober or not, so spending the day staring at Sesame Street is what we call "cracked out." I don't know where the term came from, but that's where I've been at this week.

I don't think I've ever been on a job search with this many conversations before, but the context-switching between companies, remembering who I've spoken to, when, and what I told them, is wearing me down. It doesn't help that all but one of these companies has around 10-25 engineers, all reporting directly to one of those two founders who are white or Asian guys with PhDs. Generally folks are pretty forgiving, but even so, you don't want to get the names wrong. The whole process has out-run my historical way of managing the notes and meetings of a job search.

I've been mostly angling to lead and build a whole Engineering department, to get some of the responsibility I want, without grinding my way through a larger company. PhDs have generally never hired people-leaders, so it's an exercise in mutual education: this past week, two companies who I'm pretty sure had taken that role off the table decided to put it back on. (I mean, sure, I'll be the only manager, call me a Director and we'll pretend I'm not running the thing.) For one of them, this manifested by passing me over to an executive search recruiter they'd retained after first talking to me. I had a great laugh with them about the context-switch thing, since of course they're dealing with even more companies at once than I am.

It's a good problem to have, but my stamina is running down, and I think I need to accept an offer before the end of the month, and in the meantime I'm just going to not respond to email for a few days.

eventful weeks.

I meant to take a photo of all the empty space on our lot: the garage looked nicer as a debris pile than it had as a garage, and yet it's even better now that it's all gone, and better still since our neighbors (who we're friends with) took down the shared fence. Even once we give them back the 8"-12" the old fence stole from their property, there's so much space to work with: not just the 19'x19' building, but the 6' wide Shed of Doom on the far side, and the metal-roofed, low-ceilinged, termite-ridden shade structure over the patio. There's so much space for things that are...not ugly! Someone on Nextdoor even wants the old well pump from 1955 or whenever.

In an improbable coincidence, the garage was demolished and then suddenly our permit to demolish+rebuild–which permit has been stalled for, no joke, 2 years–was approved. Not that any of us have the bandwidth for that, whether it's the project management, or the construction noise that we can't get away from because...there's nowhere to go. Instead, we'll put up a nicer shade structure, and a couple of sheds for secure bike and tool storage, and big gates across the driveway to screen everything from the street. It's gonna be awesome.

One thing startups don't like to tell young engineers is that any given startup, no matter how carefully they think they've chosen, is almost certainly not going to be the kind of success that will let them retire in luxury at 27. Silicon Valley relies on that heady brew of intelligence, optimism, ignorance, and heedless energy. Many of us keep working at startups even when we no longer have all of those things, because the money's good enough (depending on your lifestyle) and we don't like working at big companies. And there's a place for us, too. Or we hope so, as we get older.

This is not to say that companies don't find a way to "exit," as we say. The venture capitalists funding your startups are VCs because they're good at making money, for themselves and others. They know all the other VCs, who are also good at making money, and so it's not remarkably difficult for VCs to make money for each other–at the very least, to get their investment back–by buying each other's companies. If you own millions of shares, this can be a hefty down payment on your new Learjet; if you're an engineer who was employee #40, it will likely come out somewhere between "a weekend at the Four Seasons" and "buy a new Volvo." I've worked at a lot of startups–I think a dozen?–and all but the single most idiotic managed to fumble their way into a half-assed demise of being bought by Microsoft or Facebook or something. As a rule, VCs are good at getting paid.

I did manage to extract some real, non-hypothetical money from this last one, which means reserving money for taxes, paying off a lot of debt, and buying more musical instruments I've been eyeing for months or years. And probably adding to the list, since that is the way of things.

I've been mostly enjoying this round of job searching, which is new. I was a people-manager for 4 years at a name-brand company that everyone in tech recognizes, so I just have to talk fluently and convincingly about people and teams and organizations and relationships, which I can do easily, unlike programming interviews, which I can't. I'd already been unemployed for 3 months when the comically awful January struck, I'm pretty ready to stop looking and start working. I've been talking to so many companies, this week especially, that it's been hard to keep them straight, as I give similar answers to the same questions from different small companies on the same day. I'm happy to find places that value emotional intelligence (or would like to), and I'm expecting two or three offers to land next week, though, and then I can get busy hiring my Army of Dread Software Minions.

For my birthday I bought my first truly nice violin bow. It's carbon fiber, so far the only material to really compete with the incredibly problematic high-quality pernambuco wood that is still the musical standard. (Pernambuco is as messed up as any other tropical hardwood, and also it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something.) This one has a funky kind of design and balance, which they suggest is for "high-octane" performances, perhaps well-suited to unusual instruments like my 5-string violin.

I love it. But I don't really understand why. I've measured and weighed and checked the balance points among the 3 very different bows I have: the carbon fiber, a yellow sandalwood, and a "hybrid" which is wood over a carbon fiber core. The differences don't look so big on paper, but our human power of honing our perceptions make these things matter. There's a story of an Olympic-level fencing match, where one fencer stops and accuses his opponent of cheating via a longer weapon. Sure enough, Mr. Cheaterpants's weapon was...1/16" too long. I don't think this is exaggerated: in aikido, I adjust my timing by fractions of a blink, maybe 50-150 milliseconds objectively. Get the timing wrong and your technique won't work.

So the new bow bounces "right," and seems to draw the right sound out of the instrument, including the low C string. I dunno. I just like it.

an architectural icon dissolves abruptly

One project that has been entirely too long-term has been to get rid of our garage, somehow, it being an unsafe structure and full of rats and termites.

Terrible Garage™

1938 - 2021

R.I.P.

The demolition took a day, and the cleanup will be longer: apparently, once you've created your pile of large smithereens, they lock together like felted fibers, and you have to further demolish the debris pile. As it is, they worked for 3-4 hours and filled a dumpster the size of our bedroom, and they'll fill at least one more.

Then some gates and fencing, some stuff for storage and some stuff for workshop space. It was really a huge chunk of the lot gone to waste, not only the 19' x 19'ish building, but 6 feet on one side, and maybe 3 feet on the other. (There's a tree back there!) We'd wanted to build a studio apartment for the kid, but it's been two years since we applied for the permit, and it's about time to give up and move on with other plans.

Thanks as always to Anna, who makes these things happen. ❤️

March 350th, 2020.

 One of the many,

many,

many

irritating things about the violin is that your ear is a few inches away from the soundhole, unlike the more civilized 1-4 feet given by...every other instrument. Playing generates a lot of little sounds and obnoxious harmonics that just aren't perceptible unless you have your head practically inside the instrument. Imagine the worst violin noise you've ever heard, and have some empathy for the poor player, who has it much worse.

(Low frequencies travel farther, and the gnarliest bits of violin sound are high frequency and low amplitude.)

Singers have the same problem, for the same reasons. If you try to sing so it sounds unambiguously good to you, you're almost certainly just bottling your voice up inside your throat and head, which are all full of resonating cavities and highly conductive bones bringing the sound to your ears.

(There are actually bone-conduction headphones, the wired version of which I tried out many years ago, and they didn't solve my problems, but they're cool and the sound is decent.)

You have to let your voice come out with some balance of nose and mouth. You can make some recordings to learn how you sound, take some lessons from a good voice teacher, and eventually you redefine what "good" means, so you can make it sound good for the audience, and you just spend less time sounding pretty for yourself.

All this to say that as I've been exploring my 5-string violin's viola capabilities, I've been wondering how it actually sounds. Putting a low C string on a violin––or a high E on a viola, for that matter––involves some funky and obscure design tradeoffs, between playability and the physics of tone. Some excellent makers have jumped right into the problem, with pricing around $6,000 at the low end, and $15,000-ish at the top (Jonathan Cooper, for example). That's a good deal for a pro-quality instrument, even if it illustrates the old adage that violin prices are like guitar prices, with an extra zero at the end. Mine was mostly made in (probably) China, and shipped to Gary in Minneapolis in some form. He took it apart if it wasn't already, added the electronics he invented, put it back together, and did the final setup of all the hardware bits: tailpiece, bridge, nut, strings.

(Having spoken with him at length, I would not be at all surprised if he checked all the front and back plate thicknesses, and did some re-graduating on them, as long as he had the thing in pieces already.)

Violas have a certain kind of growly tone, and I talked to Gary about what I was looking for: the punch of the lower register, with a pure but not strident upper register, since violin high notes kinda bug me. It doesn't have to look like an ordinary violin: I don't need to impress anybody, I'm not joining competitions or orchestras. I'm pretty sure my violin owes its rounded lower corners to a viola design I haven't had any luck finding, even though it's clearly a thing:

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Although I guess I don't have any proof that Eric Benning didn't invent them.

Luckily, over the past year I've been accumulating the bits and pieces of a home recording setup: a couple of inexpensive microphones, a Scarlett 2i2 (a USB interface that connects microphones to a computer), and a pre-amp for the violin.

(I asked Gary the Violin Guy if I couldn't just plug the violin directly into the Scarlett like a microphone, and he said "Well, you can try it, but it's probably expecting an impedance like a microphone's, around 3,000 ohms, and the piezoelectric pickup's impedance is a few million ohms." So, right. Pre-amp it is.)

Maybe on a little bit of a lark, I bought another bow, nicer than my current ones. Bows and bow-making are far more arcane even than making instruments. For centuries the prized wood has been pernambuco, and I don't entirely understand why. Pernambuco is not doing better than every other tropical hardwood, and incredibly, it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something. The primary replacement material is carbon fiber, which can certainly be achingly expensive, but for us mere mortals, you generally get a higher quality bow for the same money. I've been trying to not buy tropical hardwood stuff if I can avoid it, anyway. I got my other two bows re-haired so I could compare to the new one, and it's lovely, and I think quite suits my playing.

Attention Deficit HEY LOOK A SQUIRREL

Amidst the many-faced train wreck of the past few weeks, it emerged that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This came up because I had an adrenaline-filled day at the end of December, and once I started digging into the problem, I found the adrenaline was granting me a state of hyper-focus that I haven't experienced in a long while. If your thinking is scattered, and a stimulant un-scatters you, well. We don't quite know why that works, but there it is.

This explains many long-running mysteries of my life: Why were my grades erratic when they could have been perfect? Why do I fidget? Why do tasks like taxes or bills go un-done, even when I know exactly what to do?

How and why do I read books the way I do? In the days of paper books, I would be in the middle of six or more books at a time, switching between them in a single sitting. E-books have taught me how many books I can actually be in the middle of and still remember the context when I pick one up: 20-30. I read some pages, flip to a different book, read some pages, change book, etc.

Why did I take a semester of Mandarin Chinese in college? I needed the stimulation of learning something difficult. Why didn't I continue with it? Because memorizing is hard for me––because it's boring––and learning Chinese is an endless vast quantity of memorizing arbitrary pieces of information. (I cannot recommend highly enough the self-descriptive essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.)

ADHD shows up a little differently in super-smart people, in ways that are still being refined for the next DSM. One challenge is that the diagnostic criteria up to this point have included "If it makes living a fairly standard life impossible," so they're adding refinements to include "Can hold down a job, but causes a lot of suffering." And it's masked by being super-smart, which has let me lurch through a college education (albeit finishing with a 3.2? 3.4? GPA) and out into a successful career. If I weren't super-smart, I would probably be living in a van down by the river. Most likely an unregistered van, having failed to file the paperwork.

The difficulty of task initiation explains another life oddity: I'm terrible at mathematical proofs. Learning how the math works, using it to solve problems, I'm fine with; but if I sit down to try even the most basic proof (proving that √2 is irrational is the usual introductory example), I just can't get started. It's not math anxiety, as usually thought of; I just have trouble getting started. But I can, even now, explain the basics of differential and integral calculus, and I promise I've had only basic use for differential, and zero use for integral, since I graduated. Would I have learned them on my own? No. Is it fun to know them? Well, yes. I like learning and knowing stuff, and I'm really good at it. I have a long list of hobbies and random stuff I've learned, to prove it.

(While I was in Chile, Anna was driving J someplace, and he asked a question about the moon. She said, "I don't know, but I bet Chris would." To which J replied, "Yeah! Chris is like a Google, but one you can Skype!", which I think says a lot of true and wonderful things about our relationship.)

Anyway, yeah. ADHD. Possibly the easiest thing I've dealt with this month.  I do love a good theory that fits the facts.

March 307th.

While 2020 can indeed fuck right off, I'll call it done when I feel safe hanging out inside a coffee shop for an hour, or if I ever see my violin teacher in person again (he's doing Zoom lessons from Puerto Vallarta).

We had a mellow Christmas here, as always. On Christmas Eve I was wondering why it didn't feel particularly Christmasy, and I realized that the distinguishing feature of my Christmasy feeling is of gathering around and spending quiet time...at home. Not exactly an unusual feeling for 2020. Next year, perhaps we'll spend Christmas someplace else.

I finished a paltry 52 books in 2020, even if 10 of them were the 3.2 million words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Compare to 59 in 2019, and 97 in 2018. 2020 was a year for watching TV, of course, and I spent a lot of time playing my flotilla of musical instruments. I bought myself a lovely 5-string violin, which is sort of oriented towards folk music, but it humors me as I learned a piece by Couperin to start learning ornamentation, and a concerto by Vivaldi to start playing in the higher hand positions instead of just up by the head of the violin. I had never heard of Couperin, but I wanted to play this first Québecois tune with all the ornaments to make it sound right, and since Couperin wrote Baroque music you could describe frankly as "frilly" or "froofy," it's got ornaments every few notes (of which the grace-note is only the easiest and most familiar) and good for learning.

(Voices of Music is local here to the Bay Area, actually, and has dozens and dozens of these amazing videos, though I've yet to make it to a concert. They're doing "historically-informed performance," which is why the cello has 5 strings and no endpin, the violins have decorations on the fingerboards, and the whole ensemble is tuned a half-step down from the American standard A=440 Hz, which would be [looks it up] A=413.5 Hz.)

The dog groomer noticed a funky growth bleeding in between a couple of her two front toes, so somedog got to go to the vet. There turned out to be two of them, and the first had a bigger base than expected, so instead of just "skin glue" (medical-grade Superglue) she got a few sutures, and 10 days in a cone. It's her first cone since she was spayed maybe 5 years ago, and the pathos levels have been high.

She's not in pain, but in this time of trial, she gains even more succor from her true god, the heater vent. With a truly doggy grasp of cause and effect, she will sit in that spot multiple times per day until May or so, trying to get the heat to come on.

One thing that's been really striking is that without her customary cat-like grooming, she really does have a lot of crusty oozing around the eyes, that she takes care of herself; and without licking herself with her unstoppably disgusting breath, she smells better.

Except for one week over the summer when businesses boarded up their windows–the gun shop up the road decided to just leave theirs boarded–we've been free of the civil unrest of the larger cities nearby. You never know, though, and as I'm big on self-defense, I did some digging into projectile weapons.

(I have knives, and I know how to use them, but knife fighting is dangerous, and your only reasonable goal is to kill the other guy, and win or lose, you should expect to get cut up a bit. I definitely don't want to get cut up, and I definitely don't want to kill anybody, so I looked for other options.)

I don't really want a firearm in the house, even though less-lethal shotgun rounds are myriad: among other things, you need to practice with whatever device you get, which is a pain in the ass in normal times, and more so now.

From watching this veterinarian firearms aficionado testing less-lethal options with/on a friend, I learned about PepperBall, which is a paintball "marker" (the paintball industry wisely and studiously avoids saying "gun") where the balls are filled with OC (oleocapsaicin–pepper spray) instead of paint. In one of those unreasonable intersections of regulation that liberal states like California stumble through in the process of trying to do the right thing, chemical irritant projectiles are illegal outside of law enforcement. So guns are legal, but OC projectiles, which you might use to avoid killing people, are not.

(As an aside, California did a clever thing and instituted background checks for ammunition, mostly identical to the background checks required for guns. This means mail-order ammunition has to be sent to a licensed dealer, just like guns, instead of to your house. And many mail-order businesses around the country have just decided it's not worth the hassle, and don't ship to California any more. They also made it a felony to circumvent the system by shopping in our libertarian neighbor Nevada and bringing it back here. I assume catching people doing this is like shooting fish in a barrel for cops, just looking for California plates at gun shops and following them over the border. 

It's incredibly obnoxious if you're just a normal human who wants to buy ammunition, since this exacerbates the long-running ammunition shortage; but I appreciate the creativity, because the Second Amendment says nothing about a right to buy and own bullets...among other things, when the Second Amendment was written, people were still making their own musket balls at home.)

Given all those constraints, I finally found these guys, who take a paintball marker which is the platform for the Pepperball™ "launcher" (Pepperball™ also avoids "gun"), and work them up into something that is no doubt considerably more painful: the video shows a different model shooting through a cookie sheet. They're in Maine, with delightful accents to match. And I can practice in the Terrible Garage, for as long as it stands.

That's not even everything that happened this year. I don't know when March 2020 ends, but we all hope it's soon.