Eh, I had to get to the jobs I didn’t really enjoy eventually. I wound up at Oracle because I badly wanted to leave Amazon. Never the best reason for taking a role, but we’ve all been there. Also, true story, Oracle rejected me back in 2002 because I didn’t have a college degree, so I felt a little bit like I was getting some of my own back. Not really rational but we’re all human. ...

The first time I saw Sugar live was at the University of Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City, on April 27th, 1993. That’s still one of the two most intense concerts I’ve ever seen, although I’m not a frequent concert-goer. I remember the music much more than I remember the band: huge sheets of guitar snarling out of the speakers and permeating my body. I’d never heard anything so loud. ...

S. and I took a little excursion to Lake Como this morning for Ingress purposes and wound up doing the mile and a half loop around the lake, just because it was pretty. Along the way we realized that this was a chunk of the St. Paul Grand Round (not to be confused with Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway, although they run parallel for a while). So because I am an OCD completist, I took this as an opportunity to start marking our progress along the full route. See the little tiny bit we’ve done around Lake Como? ...

I am pretty sure this is the specific story that’s gotten me hired more than once. It’s a good story about a project I’m really proud of and I’ve gotten pretty skilled at telling it. It’s also a great example of how rapidly careers could move in those days. I’m good at what I do but I also got lucky here and there and this story is about me being both competent and lucky. ...

I saw Buddy and Coyote vs. Acme within a couple of days of each other and I was struck by how much they occupy the same territory while still being wildly different movies. One is horror, and one’s a heartwarming comedy. Both are about the border between reality and children’s television; both are surrealist exercises. Will Forte and Cristin Milioti are the pivot points, the humans with a foot in both worlds. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of this, but I suppose the circumstances of Coyote vs. Acme’s release were the elephant in the discourse room. ...

I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on. My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense. ...

As is strictly obligatory in Minnesota, we visited the State Fair this week. Good way to burn a day while waiting for our things to arrive, although the minimalist lifestyle wasn’t so bad. We missed the TV, though, since it’s our only way to watch movies together. Anyhow, the bus ride to the Fair was super-easy and we went on a traditionally low-attendance day, which means it was only slightly jam-packed. ...

So that’s the first week in the Twin Cities. We’re loving it so far although we’re about ready to get our stuff back; fortunately it shows up Tuesday. I dropped an AirTag in one of the moving boxes to figure out if it’d be an effective tracker and it sure was; I can see our things in a warehouse to the northwest after a somewhat alarming trip down to Chicago. ...

My Vision Pro has been getting a real workout this week while our TV is in transit; it continues to be a great media consumption device and it’s also standing in very well as a monitor for my desktop Mac. Today I spent half an hour watching the start of the Red Sox/Yankees game, presented as an immersive experience, which means it was a 180 full range of vision view. ...

On Sunday, August 16th, we checked into a lovely AirBnB near our house in Seattle with the cats. On Monday, we went back to our house and supervised while the movers loaded all our crap into two U-Haul pods. On Tuesday, we packed up everything we needed to bring with us for a week and a half before the pods made it to St. Paul, stuffed it in the car, and started driving along I-90 starting at the western end. ...