almost awake

I promised I was going to write more, and I haven't. That's the story of this year, really. There are numerous things more important than writing that I haven't been doing, either.

The sleep clinic seemed pretty confident they can fix me, mostly using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which is fancy-speak for "tweaking your sleep schedule with science." Their first tip, to go to bed when I'm drowsy and fix my waking time, may or may not be helping: this past week I was approaching "rested," until yesterday. I've been through this before, so it's just as well I'm taking a week off from work.

The clinic has a 6-8 week lead time on appointments, so the followup won't be for a while. I liked the feeling of going there, though. Most doctors I've met, they don't seem particularly smart. Obviously they have the mental abilities to get through medical school, but those are not overwhelmingly abilities of curiosity, intellectual engagement, learning, and problem-solving. The internist I talked to has already trained as a neurologist, then went to Stanford to learn more about treating sleep. And I met the insomnia group's director. They are smart, not just doctor-smart.

Here's hoping.

Vegas, baby.

I've been sleeping! The makers of NyQuil, the mightily soporific cold remedy, saw another niche and decided to make ZzzQuil, which skips the "cold remedy" pretense.

It uses a different antihistamine to knock you out--diphenyhydramine instead of doxylamine--so the quality of sleep is better and the hangover is, for me, not so bad. In fact, it's not so much a "hangover" as it is "I could just lie here and sleep another 3 hours," followed by a day of being able to lie down and sleep at almost any time. I skipped it one night, though, and decided this is preferable to the usual routine of broken sleep.

I have an appointment at the Stanford sleep center on Monday. I don't think I've ever looked forward to seeing a doctor before, though I'm trying to keep my hopes down.

I went to Las Vegas last week, to do a panel with my boss at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference. (The short description of AWS is that it's an infinite number of virtual computers and services that I can use without having to worry about the physical hardware for.) The panel went really well, and in general I hated Vegas less than I expected, though that's probably just because I'm more grounded than in my younger years.

I may have been a little crabby about it because the night before I slept about 2.5 hours, then spent a day talking and learning stuff, went to bed responsibly about 10:15, and woke up two hours later. This is the shopping center at the Venetian at 2 A.M.:





It's quite pretty, actually.

I went for a long walk down the Strip. There are some profoundly sketchy people walking around Las Vegas at that hour. The distinction between "working prostitute" and "partying woman" is not always clear to me. And the drunks! Las Vegas is like the never-ending party of Bourbon Street in New Orleans! Except with the added reek of human desperation. It's amazing that humans build places like that, but imagine if we could put all those resources into something useful! Instead of building a populous monument to degradation in the middle of the desert.

work work worky work

Work had a disconnect for a few months, where my team has been doing incredible work, and I was really unhappy with my job. I have the biggest team in Engineering, with arguably the most complex technology, and so more and more over the past 6 months, I've been sucked into being purely a manager, without the time needed to focus on making technical contributions. (Doing ordinary coding work alongside the team has always been out of the question, but for a while I was able to do useful prototyping and experimentation.)

This reached a terrible crescendo a couple of weeks ago, and I sent a big "help me" email to my bosses. The initial response was to promote my senior minion Jess to co-tech lead, a creative solution that addresses several needs at once. That's taken a bunch of pressure off, and I've been able to unwind and do some more technical things. I'm still not doing mainline coding on the team, but that may or may not ever be possible. I also have to be careful not to just drop my workload on Jess, however happy she is to help: otherwise, she'll just end up with the problem I had.

The team is close--SO CLOSE--to the first milestones of this massive re-architecture we've been banging away at for the past year. We had a great meeting with the executive team today, which went something like this:

"Our customers are screaming with frustration and anger. What are we doing to fix it?"
"We've been working on it all year. We're expecting to have something in production by the end of Q1."
"Phew. What can you do to help in the meantime?"
"Nothing, really. We've done it all already."
"That makes me a sad panda."
"I know! Us too."

We established a common understanding of the situation, and everyone feels heard and nobody has any idea what else we can do that's faster than the re-architecture. It was a good bonding experience.


Also we told the CEO we'd have it in production by the end of March. So, hey. We should get on that.

an alt-medicine fiesta

I accumulated enough stuff to do today that I just bailed on work entirely. In between fetching my motorcycle from the shop in the morning, and getting the oil changed and tires rotated on the car in the afternoon, I did a Great Circle of the Bay Area, visiting a Chinese medicine guy in San Francisco and a wacky hippie doctor who defies description in Oakland. These were probably the last step in my Quest For Sleep before going to talk to an actual medical doctor (which would be sad, since I find them mostly useless).

(The Oakland guy is a certified and practiced chiropractor and obviously very smart, but he uses these magnetic-field generators and he sets off my low-level Bullshit Detector. Except that magnetic fields are used for various therapies, as they induce currents in the body, and our nerves do run on electricity. The world is a big place and there's a lot we don't understand.)

The Chinese medicine guy listened to my issue--essentially, waking up many hours too early--and said it was a pretty standard case, which was a relief, since he'd thought my case would be "out on the fringe somewhere." Then he actually took my pulses, whereupon he decided his theory was wrong, and we talked about how to address the massive chi and yin deficiency he found. I don't think he has a theory about the insomnia, actually: I asked him about it twice, and both times he sort of circled around it and talked about the underlying issue. Whatever: he could tell I'm deeply fatigued, and he suggested a couple over-the-counter supplements that won't hurt me in any case, and unlike obscure Chinese concoctions, I don't think there's any worry about the supplements interfering with the obscure Ayurveda concoctions I normally take. (Traditional medicine systems are great, but you shouldn't mix and match.) In particular he said I have a massive B-vitamin deficiency.

He also got my pulses more or less back in sync somehow--my wrist pulse was delayed from my neck pulse, and if you're healthy all your pulses should happen at the same time.

After a stop at Rainbow Grocery to buy supplements and lunch, I headed over to Oakland to see Dr. Hippie.

Holy crap.


I didn't try retaining the vocabulary for what this guy was doing, but basically he put a thing around my head with electromagnets controlled by a computer (but not touching my skin). The first phase was diagnosis, where, I gather, the computer manipulates the electromagnets so they use electromagnetic pulses like sonar, bouncing them off different...things, to get information about different parts of the body. I didn't get a picture of the machine, but it looks like it's from 1980 and it was made by "Maitreya, Ltd.", which...wow.

Bullshit Detector notwithstanding, Dr. Hippie came up with a very similar profile to Dr. Chinese, even though he was reading straight from the computer--the only thing he knew about beforehand was the insomnia. Common things:

• Systemwide fatigue, where parts of my body are not getting enough energy.
• Broad B-vitamin deficiency.
• My liver is a little crabby. (Dr. Ayurveda has done a lot of work for that this year, so I'm not surprised.)

Dr. Hippie's machinery pulled out some other useful and pretty accurate results, and then he proceeded to have it adjust...things. It does double duty as both diagnosis and treatment, depending on what you have the computer do with the electromagnets. I did start to get drowsy while the treatment part was running: qualitatively different than any usual afternoon drowsiness, but it was an unusual day.

"When do you want to go to sleep and wake up?"
"Uh...exact times?"
"Yes."
"10 P.M. to 6 A.M.?"
"Okay, that'll take a few minutes."

Apparently this is a thing he can do. I'm very interested to see what happens tonight.

housing doom

With Anna's business, our finances are now complicated enough that she had to go talk to an accountant. I didn't meet him, but he sounds really nice,. In examining our situation, he did the math that's always been too hard for me, and demonstrated with numbers that we should buy a house.

We're already up to our ears in difficult projects, but there was this beautiful little house for sale. The price would be ambitious for us, but whatever, it couldn't hurt to try.

Let's set some expectations, for those of you not accustomed to Bay Area house prices. In Redwood City, where I live, the absolute lowest you'll find a 2-bedroom house within a couple miles of downtown will be $450,000--that's likely to be a fixer-upper--and it goes up from there. If you have normal American expectations about what kind of house and neighborhood you'd want to live in, you're looking in the $500k-$900k range for an 1,100-square foot house on a 5,000-square foot lot.

I went to talk to our realtor about this house, to find out whether it was worth buying, but also whether it was possible or worthwhile to put an offer in. It turns out the answer was "no":

• Banks are tight on financing right now, so you need 20% down. On a $500k house, that's $100,000 in cash. On a $700k house, it's $240,000.
• Houses in this range are getting multiple offers, at least one of which is typically all cash with no contingencies. Cash offers usually win.
• For an offer to be considered, it usually needs to be at least 40% cash.

That's $200,000 in cash for a $500k house, or $280,000 for a $700k house.

Life's been really good to me, but not quite that good, yet.

With much less excitement, we're keeping an eye out for a condo we could live in for a couple years before renting it out and buying a house, but the outlook is pretty grim.


Sometimes I really want to move somewhere with weather and a sane housing market.

music: what makes a song?

I've never really written a song, passed from half-assed efforts I wouldn't show in public. For a lot of artists, songs develop a life of their own, as they're bound up in the writer's experience and carry a lot of emotions. I'm fascinated by what makes the essence of a song, and so I love hearing different versions of the same song. This got really started with Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes". Unless you're my wife, that's a really pretty song, and I was always caught by the rich instrumental layers.


But think for a minute: Peter Gabriel didn't write the first version of that song using a dozen different synthesizer tracks. The overwhelming majority of lyrical songs are worked out on solo piano or guitar. So we get Jeffrey Gaines's solo-guitar version.


One of my favorite songs of the past few years has been "Fireflies" by Owl City. It has a really, really recognizable opening riff.


This is a ton of electronic stuff, right? It's very much descended from The Postal Service and some other lyric-electronic bands of the mid-oughts. Guys like this often perform what you could call a "laptop show", where they're onstage with a bunch of boxes, twiddling knobs. And this song pretty much telegraphs its presence immediately. So, how cool is this?


SO MANY INSTRUMENTS! It's so tempting to think the orchestration defines the song, because that's the idea of the song that I've built up in my head. But the songwriter knows the song in a way that I can't.


Music is awesome.

nasal toast intrusion

Anna left for a business trip on Tuesday morning, as a punishment for doing the amazing work she does, so I did all the kid routines on Wednesday and Thursday. (He didn't starve to death or anything. We're all very proud of me.)
I haven't slept well this week, so Tuesday morning I was a bit of a zombie, and breakfast ended up being gluten-free toast with Trader Joe's goat brie, instead of something good for me. I was idly chewing my toast and drinking coffee, doing something on the computer, when suddenly I snarfed, and the airflow and timing in my throat and esophagus just kind of...broke, somehow. My soft palate failed to do its job, and I felt a significant amount of chewed toast go up into my sinuses.

At this point, I'm thinking two things:

1. I've only been married for a year and I've already turned into one of those guys who can't manage life alone. My wife has been gone for 90 minutes and now I have toast up my nose.
2. My sinuses are full of toast, and I'm supposed to care for a child?!

It didn't hurt, though it did feel quite awkward. We're really not meant to have chunks of food up our nose. Naturally I knew kids in school who could, at will, put milk or spaghetti into their mouths and have it come out their nose; like many things other kids did, I decided that fell outside my comfort zone.

Since the toast wasn't coming out by blowing my nose, I brought out the neti pot. That loosened the toast bits up enough to get blown out. The biggest chunk was about 4mm.

Luckily for me and you both, subsequent mornings have been less eventful.