Coyote Cartography
Archive About Also on Micro.blog
  • While I think I’d prefer a desktop application for fiction brainstorming/plotting as a user, I only know how to develop web apps. The silver lining is it would be cross-platform… (I could learn Electron, although I’d also have to learn how to make Electron apps not suck.)

    → 12:51 PM, Dec 31
  • Wondering if I could build a story development app somewhere between Dramatica’s over-the-top “Theory of Everything” and Contour’s uber-formulaic “Save the Cat!” approach, with a UI that feels like it was designed this decade. Hmm.

    → 11:02 PM, Dec 30
  • Poking at Ulysses' new “Projects” feature. This is a pretty direct shot across the bow at Scrivener.

    → 10:56 PM, Dec 28
  • Perhaps a touch apprehensive that my first flight back to California after making the move to Florida is going to be on Southwest. (And, y’know, during an ongoing pandemic, but I’m kind of resigned to that for the foreseeable future.)

    → 3:22 PM, Dec 27
  • Central Florida is not well-equipped for three nights of hard freeze in a row.

    → 11:45 AM, Dec 24
  • For years, I’ve had a set of “Corporate Promos” filters in Gmail. I’ve deleted a bunch now so things end up right in the inbox and make me decide “label or just unsubscribe,” because “just unsubscribe” is probably the right choice in most cases.

    → 11:55 AM, Dec 23
  • Despite being all in on Ulysses for writing, I brought iA Writer’s custom fonts with me. Writing prose in anything but iA Writer Duo or Triplicate Poly, depending on mood, seems weird and fundamentally incorrect now.

    → 1:17 AM, Dec 23
  • Okay, so an hour after getting the smart lights, they’re fun! But I don’t know how useful they will be, especially with the only control being the phone. (I am not willing to commit to a system with wall switches yet; I have spent all of $20 as a cheap experiment.)

    → 6:53 PM, Dec 21
  • (watches several Mastodon servers grind to a halt and fall over) You know, I really do like Ruby on Rails, but perhaps we could all agree to stop writing real-time communication servers with it?

    → 4:37 PM, Dec 18
  • I’m thinking about getting a few HomeKit-enabled smart lights, but not sure which. Hue is good but expensive and will probably require a proprietary hub; Nanoleaf is much cheaper, uses Thread/Matter, and still good, but I’ll need to get a HomePod mini or upgrade my AppleTV.

    → 12:32 PM, Dec 18
  • Remembering that time on Twitter someone mansplained the Bechdel Test to me. Good times.

    → 5:23 PM, Dec 16
  • My new glasses came in. This prescription is very different and, apparently, right—less spherical correction and more astigmatism correction. So odd to see clearly again…

    → 2:07 PM, Dec 16
  • So apparently it’s good that I got to post “where to follow me” links on Twitter before they were banned in the name of free speech, huh.

    → 10:57 AM, Dec 16
  • So when I made the analogy of Twitter to a favorite bar that’d been taken over by a new, bad owner, I didn’t expect to end with “…and then he set the bar on fire while screaming that The Woke Left made him do it”

    → 12:26 AM, Dec 16
  • Okay, so. Do I finally upgrade my Macs to Ventura now that 13.1 is out?

    → 3:50 PM, Dec 14
  • My Mastodon address is now @chipotle@mstdn.social, and I’m re-following Mastodon accounts from there. If you follow my Micro.blog account via ActivityPub (@chipotle@micro.coyotetracks.org) you might want to follow me on Mastodon directly instead! Sorry for the inconvenience.

    → 2:47 PM, Dec 14
  • Probably going to set up a “pure” Mastodon account, rather than following Mastodon folks from Micro.blog, because I think it will make certain things easier. (Although the transition will be faintly annoying.)

    → 12:55 AM, Dec 14
  • Replacing one smart thermostat (Lennox iComfort M30) with another (Ecobee Smart Enhanced), because the iComfort is—how would you put it—bad.

    → 12:18 PM, Dec 13
  • From Ezra Klein: “Twitter’s value is how easy it makes it to talk. Its cost is how hard it makes it to listen.”

    → 11:36 AM, Dec 12
  • What Advent of Code has taught me so far is: I have gotten pretty rusty at solving programming problems.

    → 11:33 AM, Dec 9
  • Starting to follow more and more Mastodon users from my Micro.blog account and wondering if this will collapse the space-time continuum.

    → 5:17 PM, Dec 6
  • Having your 78-year-old mother go in for a cervical laminectomy/fusion is speedrunning “how to be a parental caregiver”. Really hoping I’m up to this.

    → 9:55 AM, Nov 30
  • I am not quite at the point where I am going to have to switch from “show all posts and replies” to “show posts and replies only to people I’m following” on Micro.blog, but I’m inching closer.

    → 11:47 PM, Nov 23
  • Twitter, failure modes, and your favorite bar

    So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in terms of both engineering and policy.

    Make no mistake, many of these are solid arguments. Twitter has, as much as we like to pretend otherwise, gotten many things right. They’ve got fast onboarding. They provide a good experience on both mobile and desktop. (Please don’t @ me with your objections to ads and algorithms and whatever; I’m not saying the UX design on Twitter is perfect or free of dark patterns, I’m saying that it’s been developed by UX professionals over a 15-year period and it shows.) They understand the importance of making a service like theirs accessible. They understand the importance of well-designed terms of service that limit their legal liability without taking draconian stances toward users and their content. These are all failure modes that other, newer, smaller services have done little or nothing to address.

    But for many people, the real issue isn’t what’s wrong with the other places. It’s that they love this place. Twitter, for all its faults, for all the love/hate relationship you have with it—it’s your favorite bar. This is what most indie creators are feeling, I think. None of the other services have the audience reach; it’s unrealistic to expect us to be on a half-dozen new sites when we could just stay put; and, hey, the likelihood of Twitter really exploding is pretty low. All of those are true, too.

    The problem, though, is that just because Twitter’s failure mode isn’t likely to be “closing up shop” doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other failure modes. You might have noticed I didn’t mention harassment and toxic behavior as a failure mode—the things a Trust and Safety Team handles—but it is. As Nilay Patel observed, the product of a social network is content moderation.

    To be clear, this is something all the Not-Twitters are going to have to come to grips with in ways they haven’t yet. Cohost, Hive, and OoobyBloobly (which I just made up, or did I, you’re not sure, are you) look good by comparison because they are a fraction of a fraction of Twitter’s scale. Your favorite Mastodon instance this week is even smaller. With Twitter’s two hundred million users, trying to regulate bad behavior is a 24/7 rearguard action.

    Well, guess what? Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team is now gone. By deliberate design. It’s not coming back, at least not in any recognizable form, not any time soon.

    You think I’m going to mention Musk restoring Trump’s Twitter account. I am. But the canary in the coal mine isn’t the who as much as it’s the how. Musk claimed in October that he’d set up a new “council” for moderation, and that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before the council convenes.” That was a blatant lie. He polled his followers—hardly a statistically unbiased group—about restoring Trump’s account, and has restored others just on his own. Tech journalist Casey Newton:

    At the risk of stating the obvious, this sort of ad hoc approach to content moderation and community standards is completely unsustainable. It does not scale beyond a handful of the most prominent accounts on the service. And, most worryingly, it is not based on any clear principles: Musk is leading trust and safety at Twitter the same way he is leading product and hiring—by whim.

    And this is Twitter’s failure mode. All those tweets you’ve seen bitching about how a big problem with Mastodon is that you might choose an “instance” that ends up being run by an anti-woke edgelord tinpot dictator? That’s Twitter now.

    Oh, you say the need for advertisers will help rein in Musk’s worst impulses, because no sensible advertiser wants to have their “promoted tweets” running in line with alt-right propaganda? Good luck with that: a Twitter that’s only ten or fifteen percent of its original size requires a lot less money to run, and Musk’s been clear he aims to reduce the company’s dependency on advertising income.

    And those remaining thousand employees or so aren’t going to push back the way we saw happen in some tech companies a year or two ago. The shakeout isn’t just in progress, it’s almost over. The ones left either can’t afford to leave or subscribe to Musk’s worldview. Anyone who joins Twitter under his leadership will have done so knowing what that worldview is.

    The “liberal bias of big tech” has always been a phantasm. Silicon Valley has always had a strong libertarian bent to it, from the right-of-center Hoover think tank at Stanford University to the military/aerospace roots that long predate the 1990s dotcom boom. While many SV libertarians are socially liberal, not all are, and a few of the most prominent conservatives came out of the “PayPal Mafia”: Musk, the openly anti-democratic Peter Thiel, and VC David Sacks, who co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth with Thiel a couple of decades ago. Along with professional idiot Jason Calacanis, Sacks now advises Musk on how to run Twitter, and the circumstantial evidence suggests they’ve encouraged the performative cruelty Musk’s exhibited in how he’s run things so far.

    So here’s the thing. What conservative culture warriors always say they want is the absence of political bias, but time and time again what they mean is bias that explicitly favors them. Everything else, you see, has an innate liberal bias—it’s them against the world, fighting the good fight. They want fairness and balance the way Fox News does. They don’t want an unbiased social media site; what they want is a site with Gab and Parler’s slant, but Twitter’s reach. Now they have it. The product of a social network is content moderation, and Twitter’s new content moderators will be hand-picked by Musk. It’s going to be full of people who won’t object to racism, homophobia, and transphobia as much as object to fighting it, because “free speech”.

    If you do believe in the Fox News kind of balance, that I’m wrong about Silicon Valley’s political biases and especially wrong about Twitter’s, this isn’t a failure mode. It’s what you want, or at least what you think you want. It’s clearly what Elon Musk thinks he wants. But for Twitter as we knew it, this is a catastrophic failure. It’s a terminal condition, an unrecoverable crash.

    New Twitter will be hostile to anyone queer, or non-white, or slightly to the left of Ronald Reagan. You may be a creator who wants to stay on Twitter to reach your audience, but the audience there will inevitably tilt toward the anti-woke, All Lives Matter, gender critical, Just Asking Questions crowd. If they’re your audience, congratulations, I guess. If they’re not, you have a problem.

    I get that, right now, it’s still easy to rationalize staying on Twitter. The alternatives are too confusing, or have questionable terms of service, or don’t have a registered DMCA agent, or have a crappy official app, or have a crappy web interface, or just seem like they’re run out of a college dorm room. We can go down the list and acknowledge most or all of those are great points.

    But your favorite bar is under new management, and whether you want to admit it or not, you know damn well what kind of bar they’re making it into. You need to think long and hard about whether you’re okay with that.

    → 5:16 PM, Nov 22
  • Some of my workplace meetings are now being conducted in Slack “huddles” rather than on MS Teams, and it’s not as much an improvement as it is trading one set of annoyances for another.

    → 2:44 PM, Nov 14
  • Do Mastodon instances have to specifically enable some kind of support for Micro.blog to “see” them? I occasionally encounter people I can’t follow on Micro.blog because searching for their Mastodon username gives me no results.

    → 10:24 AM, Nov 5
  • I tried the Arc Browser a little and didn’t quite feel like it took. A couple days ago decided to put web sites I visit frequently in a bookmarks sidebar in Safari. I just now realized I was kind of recreating Arc, but slightly worse. 🙃

    → 4:47 PM, Oct 31
  • I’m going to try to renew my efforts to be “Micro.blog first,” and maybe bestir myself into actual blogging more than once or twice a year (gasp).

    → 1:49 PM, Oct 31
  • As I poke at re-learning Ruby on Rails yet again, I’m discovering to my chagrin that the Emacs Rails package is, like, really good. Better than Nova’s, better than VS Code’s. I wonder if I can figure out how to add some of this functionality to Nova…

    → 10:22 PM, Oct 26
  • It feels like it’s an open secret that Panic Nova 10 is going to be a big release and I am sort of irrationally vibrating waiting for it to come out.

    → 6:32 PM, Oct 25
  • I’m taking a Ruby on Rails refresher course, but I’m pretty sure it’s subconsciously just to figure out what editor I want to be using for web programming. (Probably between BBEdit and Nova, but Doom Emacs made a stronger showing than expected.)

    → 9:12 PM, Oct 18
  • After a few months back with Safari, I’m trying the Orion web browser again. I suspect I’ll go back to Safari for syncing/convenience reasons, which is what’s happened whenever I’ve tried to switch to Firefox. (Also, Firefox is…not that fast by comparison.)

    → 9:07 PM, Oct 14
  • My favorite crazy story brainstorming app, Dramatica Pro, still runs only on 32-bit Macs even though the company is theoretically still in business. At this point we’re past “dropped the ball” and on to “rolled the ball under the couch and set the living room on fire.”

    → 12:28 AM, Oct 12
  • Working on a Spacemacs-inspired theme set for Panic Nova. Despite my inability to get into Spacemacs itself, it’s a great color scheme.

    → 10:25 AM, Oct 11
  • While I’m still using BBEdit for almost everything, I’m excited again about Panic Nova since version 9, and especially to see where it goes after its next major release—which seems like it’s making some big internal changes.

    → 6:15 PM, Oct 10
  • While I haven’t been using Elixir recently, I just updated the Elixir BBEdit Package. This makes me think I should really get going on some kind of Elixir project…

    → 3:55 PM, Oct 10
  • Hurricane Ian’s predicted path two days ago took it within 14 miles of my house. Its actual path was much farther south, so we “only” got tropical storm effects. There’s a lot of damage ~100 miles south, though.

    → 9:45 AM, Sep 29
  • Okay, this is SERIOUS now.

    www.usatoday.com/story/mon…

    → 5:48 PM, Sep 28
  • Catching up on “Andor” before the storm hits.

    → 6:33 PM, Sep 25
  • Finding great seafood in Florida is surprisingly difficult, but I had a truly great clam chowder, a three-time award winner at a New England chowder competition, on Cedar Key. Fairly far from where I live, though (and from anywhere else, really).

    → 5:34 PM, Sep 17
  • I keep trying my iPhone 12 Pro without a case, because I always used to hate cases and it always looks prettier and feels better without one. But invariably I get nervous and put the case back on.

    → 6:46 PM, Sep 14
  • Exploring Clermont, Florida, today—when it’s not raining, it’s (slightly) cooler out. It’s a fairly walkable lakefront town with a surprising amount of neat shops and cafés. And hills. Really. Small hills, but, you know, still.

    → 4:16 PM, Sep 9
  • Impression after a few minutes with the Keychron Q3 keyboard: this is very heavy, and I’m not convinced it’s a better feel than either the Vortex Race or Matias Mini (my other two mechanicals). But it’s…interesting? Hmm.

    → 4:23 PM, Aug 30
  • I can’t say I’m fully adjusting to Florida, but I’m finding/rediscovering interesting places once more. The town I grew up in (about 30 minutes from where I live now) is so different, and all for the better.

    → 6:32 PM, Aug 25
  • I keep telling myself I will re-adjust to Florida summer, but the truth is, I don’t feel like a dew point of 79°F/26°C is something you should adjust to even if you could.

    → 10:36 AM, Aug 10
  • After Palm Springs, Tucson, and Austin, I will be the only person walking in New Orleans tonight thinking “this is refreshingly cool.”

    → 6:18 PM, Jul 21
  • Ah, nothing like waking up to morning rain to make you think, “I left the car sun roof cracked open, didn’t I?” (Everything looks fine.)

    → 9:02 AM, Jul 20
  • My Nancy Boy shaving cream de-emulsified in the heat! It whipped back up to a usable consistency with a lot of frantic stirring using a hotel room coffee stirrer, but its original fluffy goodness is likely lost forever.

    → 9:13 PM, Jul 18
  • The whole Palm Springs area is like Florida’s weird desert cousin.

    → 12:26 PM, Jul 18
  • If I’d known my cross-country trip would be happening during a heatwave, perhaps I wouldn’t have chosen to go across the California and Arizona deserts to start with. It’s ten minutes before 9pm and it’s still 101 °F (38 °C) outside. The morning low will be 89.

    → 11:50 PM, Jul 17
  • Last dinner in the SF Bay Area on the deck at Quinn’s Lighthouse in Oakland.

    → 10:06 PM, Jul 16
  • Thoughts on Leaving California

    I.

    I wasn’t born in California. I wasn’t born in Florida, either, even though it was, until 2002, the only place I ever remembered living, the place I would say I was from. I was born in Dallas, but only lived there maybe six months. I think the next place we moved was Albany, New York; I know that’s where we were living a few years later when my parents divorced. When I was around kindergarten age, we moved to the east coast of Florida, and in little more than a year moved to the west coast, to Tampa Bay.

    I moved out to San Jose, to Silicon Valley, looking for computer work, just after the original dotcom crash. This might have been quixotic, but my technical background was all Unix, and Tampa’s businesses—enterprise back offices, military subcontractors hanging off MacDill AFB—were almost all Windows. I landed in wobbly fashion, doing (of all things) Excel work and then technical writing. Then finally, someone I was applying with for a different position actually read my résumé and realized I was a web developer.

    To call my career path spotty would be charitable at best. Some years I made less in Silicon Valley than I had in Tampa, although occasionally I’ve made considerably more. When I recently passed my four-year anniversary with my current company, it made this the position I’ve held the longest since the mid-1990s.

    II.

    Moving to the West Coast had been on my mind for years. I always had some reason not to, though. A job, whether or not I liked it. Not enough money in the bank to take that kind of risk. An impoverished roommate I would feel guilty about abandoning, even though I was hardly much less impoverished than he was. A mother who, after her mother passed away, had no local family in Florida besides me.

    But by the time I moved out here, I had been laid off, so had no job to leave. I had some savings after that long-lasting, high-paying job. (At least, it seemed high-paying to me at the time, which it was by some measures, and the savings seemed like a lot, which I now know it was by very few measures.) I lived alone. And my mother was in a new relationship. A friendly acquaintance had a spare room in his house in San Jose and offered to withhold rent until I could find a job, so I took the leap.

    When I announced I was moving to California, more than one person reacted like it was some kind of phase, something I needed to do for a few years to get out of my system. Then my wanderlust would be fulfilled, I would move back, and get on with whatever serious business I presumably couldn’t do in Cali.

    But I didn’t, back then, have any intention of moving back. On one of my first interviews out here, my prospective manager asked me the ultimate interview cliché: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Somewhat foolishly, I said, “With any luck, living in a cabin closer to Big Sur, writing.”

    I got the job anyway. I never got the cabin.

    III.

    Every so often, I hear that California doesn’t have seasons, just climate. To someone who grew up in a place with hot summers and snowy winters, maybe. To someone who grew up in a subtropical climate—hot summers and warm winters, differentiated mostly by storm frequency—not at all. The Bay Area moves from dry, bright summers whose highs reach into the nineties and beyond to wet, grey winters whose highs rarely reach the sixties. And it gets snow almost every year, a light dusting on the Santa Cruz and Diablo Range mountains, if only for a few days.

    And yet, the climate changes across the Bay Area in a way it doesn’t in Florida. From Silicon Valley, it’s less than an hour inland to the Tri-Valley, where the Mediterranean climate takes on a touch of desert aridity and the highs are higher and lows are lower. And, it’s less than an hour to the coast, to Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, where moderate is the best description: the change between daily high and low is consistently about twenty degrees, and the change between summer and winter highs (and lows) is maybe about fifteen degrees.

    These climates are not what I grew up with, but I adjusted to them quickly. Every year I have flown back to Florida for Christmas, and despite it being December it always feels like a sauna when I first step outside. I don’t remember that feeling growing up. Perhaps I’ll readjust to Florida as quickly as I adjusted to California, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that adaptation isn’t reversible.

    IV.

    I don’t have a great affection for wine, but I love wine country. Some of my favorite parts of the Bay Area—the Santa Cruz mountains, Livermore, and of course Sonoma County—are all known for wine, and they’re all beautiful, each in different ways.

    I’ve picked up some things about wine since being out here, though. It’s hard not to. I’ve also learned about—and learned to love—cocktails, beer, and coffee since I’ve been out here. (I’ve been drinking coffee since I was a child, prescribed it for ADHD back when we called it “hyperactivity.” It took moving out to the Bay Area to appreciate coffee, though.) I was a nascent foodie my last few years in Florida, and that’s only grown in California.

    It’s hard to pick a single cuisine that somehow defines the Bay Area. There’s good Japanese food, and Thai, and Korean, and Filipino, and lots of good Mexican. People from the northeast seem to think there’s no good Italian, but the reason wine country is wine country is Italian settlers. There’s not just good Italian, there’s great Italian.

    Whenever someone asserts the Bay Area is rare in this “café culture” of terrific cocktails, beer, wine, food, coffee—cites it as a reason that they don’t want to leave, or a reason that people want to move here—it gets met with pushback, skepticism, or defensiveness. Other places have great versions of all those things, you know, they’ll say. And of course, we know. We know you’re going to be able to find a great coffee shop and a great craft brewery and a great cocktail bar and and and in nearly any metro area, often even in the smallest towns.

    We also know, though, that there just aren’t that many places in the world where you can find this many in this concentration. And we also know that “how many good coffee shops do you need” is a pretty lame comeback.

    V.

    As my mother got older, being closer—being able to take care of her when needed—felt more important. Her relationship, the one that gave me confidence I wouldn’t be leaving her alone if I lived on the other side of the country, had ended disastrously. In 2016, she had surgery on her carotid artery, and I didn’t go back to care for her, trusting her local friends to do so. That failure ate at me. When I look back at my journal, this is the year I find entries about me looking for my own places in Florida.

    What I pictured then was a situation like I’d been in before, and like she had been with her mother: living nearby but not together. My grandmother only moved in with my mother during the last year of her life. Before that, they visited every other week, then every other week. If I lived in Tampa and my mother lived in east Hernando County, about fifty miles north, we’d live even closer to one another than she had with her mother.

    Yet back then, this was abstract. I’d already attached to places here, the land, the cafés, the Pacific Ocean rather than the Gulf of Mexico—and I’d attached to people, too. Friends. A writing group. Even some coworkers; I had one of the best jobs that I’d ever had, not knowing the company wouldn’t survive the year. And an old friend I’d feinted at dating once, failed at, and stayed friends with anyway was becoming—I could say an aromantic partner, and maybe I could just say BFF. Either way, someone I’d rather be able to keep seeing regularly.

    At the time, I thought it might happen in 2018, after I passed four years with my company and my 401(k) became fully vested. Instead, by 2016 the company had collapsed, and the next job I had in 2017 was short-lived and not particularly enjoyable. I might well have moved back to Florida in 2018, if I hadn’t gotten another job, this time one I did enjoy—and that paid extremely well.

    So I stayed. And these last four years might well have been the best of my years here.

    VI.

    In 2020, my mother started pushing hard for us to move in together. I had been thinking about my schedule, not hers, and she was in her mid-70s marching toward the late 70s. Instead of pushing for me to move there, she wanted to move out here.

    This wasn’t the first time the possibility had come up. In 2016, my mother had found a potential home in Gilroy, a town about thirty-five miles south of San Jose. I didn’t like the house, and liked the location even less. In retrospect, Gilroy would have been a nicer place to live than where my mother lives now, a tiny town fifty miles north of Tampa, but I didn’t recognize that back then.

    By 2020, though, housing prices here had made homes even south of San Jose virtually unattainable. We looked at the outskirts of the Bay Area, in Vallejo and Concord, and in Sacramento, a city I’ve come to love over the last decade. Sacramento was more expensive than Tampa, but not by much.

    But, of course, the pandemic began in 2020, and traveling back and forth house-hunting in the midst of it became unsustainable. So this, too, was put on hold. And in the two years since, housing prices in Sacramento skyrocketed.

    VII.

    It’s tempting to try to find one specific problem to blame for California’s housing costs: it’s restrictive zoning, it’s foreign investors, it’s NIMBYs, it’s absurd tech salaries, it’s Proposition 13. It’s not any one of those things, though. It’s all of those things.

    And it’s also one other thing. People want to live here, despite the soaring costs, legendarily bad commutes (at least pre-pandemic, although traffic snarls are returning), rampant homelessness, a myriad of other strikes. It’s not just a matter of putting up with the area in exchange for great pay, if they’re getting one of those absurd tech salaries.

    I’m not going to miss paying over a dollar more per gallon for gas. I won’t miss paying as much in rent share as I would pay for an entire two-bedroom apartment in Tampa. But even twenty years on, there are moments nearly every day when I’m sitting in an outside patio, or walking in a park, or even driving down an interstate through the hills on either side of the Bay and think, I am so lucky to live here.

    There are other places I could have that feeling about. Other parts of California. Probably most of the Pacific Northwest. I like being near the ocean, even if I don’t visit it as much as I should. I like the moderate climate. I like hills and evergreen trees, sunny summers and grey foggy winters. I like coffee culture. I like the whole region’s mostly progressive politics.

    And I can’t pretend the politics, both legislative and cultural, don’t matter. My BFF-slash-aro-partner is trans. Most of my friends are LGBTQ. So am I. Words I could use to describe myself—grey-asexual, aromantic, masculine nonbinary—feel very, very Californian. I don’t think of myself as “closeted,” just quiet. But I’m going to stay a lot quieter after the move.

    A late friend of mine used to say Florida was paradise, and that he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live anywhere else. He and his partner—one of my oldest friends—weren’t particularly quiet or closeted. It was half-joking, suggesting I should move back, but for both of them, Florida really was, and is, paradise.

    But it’s not my paradise.

    And I wonder whether, as Florida’s politics shift from purple to red to proto-fascist, it’s safe for that friend there. Or my BFF, who has family in Florida.

    Or me.

    VIII.

    There’s a voice in my head trying to play therapist.

    Is your dismay at moving back partially because you feel like you’re returning to watch your mother die? Probably some.

    But you do want to be with her in her last years. Of course.

    Yet, you feel like you’re returning under duress. Why? Because it’s happened like the old line about how someone went bankrupt: first gradually, then suddenly.

    Back in 2020, my flatmate for the last fifteen years started considering where he would go when I moved out, seriously looking at Portland and Seattle; for a variety of reasons, he likes the Pacific Northwest, too. My former housemates, the ones I first lived with when I moved to San Jose, now live on the outskirts of Portland.

    When I went back to Florida for Christmas in 2021, somehow my moving back in July of this year, now, was treated as a fait accompli by my mother. I don’t remember committing to that during the year, nor do I see any journal entries about having done so—when they touch on moving back, they’re mostly concerns about personal space—yet I don’t remember not committing. Does that make sense? I left that Christmas trip with the feeling of, “So, I guess it’s happening now, then,” not the feeling of, “I am deciding that it is happening now.” At the same time, my flatmate found what seems to be his dream loft in Olympia, and put a deposit down on it before I’d gotten back to California.

    So then it definitely was happening. I mean, if I’d said “No, I’m not ready, and I’m not moving,” he could have gotten his deposit back, but it felt like the quantum states were collapsing.

    Your mother asked you to make sure that you had no reservations about moving in with her, but you clearly have them. What was I going to say? When I re-read what she wrote in March 2020, it isn’t the ultimatum it became in my head, but the subtext of “if you say no, I have to make plans to move into a group home” still comes through.

    And besides, at the end of the day, it’s not moving in with her that’s the issue. It’s leaving California.

    So why not stick with her moving out here? I don’t know. Scared of the economics. Scared of the recent wildfires and their air quality issues, which mom was extremely put off by—for an asthmatic not too far from turning 80, not without reason. Feeling like somehow this was the path of least resistance.

    Maybe you need a real therapist. Maybe.

    IX.

    Four days ago, junk haulers came to my apartment and took away furniture I’m not moving with; two days ago, movers came and took away nearly everything else, and I moved into a hotel in San Jose to live out the rest of the week, wrap things up, say goodbyes. My flat now has nothing in it but abandoned cleaning and packing supplies, and some flotsam and jetsam I haven’t disposed of yet. A dish rack. Three pillows.

    Two days from now, a Sunday, I’ll set off on a cross-country road trip. Sunday night will be spent just outside Palm Springs, on a day when the predicted high hits a balmy 115 °F (46 °C). On Monday, I leave California behind to drive to Tucson, Arizona. I’ll be following I-10, more or less; after Tucson I stop in Van Horn, Texas, then Austin, then New Orleans. From there, I could make the trip all the way to my mother’s house—my house—in a day, but I might stop somewhere around Tallahassee. I’m not sure yet.

    I’ve joked about retiring and opening a tiki bar somewhere around Tampa Bay, which has a surprising dearth of real ones, serving the complex rum cocktails invented by Trader Vic’s, Don the Beachcomber’s, and other mid-century bartenders. Even though I don’t think I’m serious, I’ve thought enough about it to think what I would (and wouldn’t) do: focus on drink quality, lean on beach culture and the Caribbean for theming rather than Polynesia, try to sidestep the “white dudes do the exotic Orient” issues endemic to tiki.

    Yet, at least now, as I sit outside a brewery in Santa Cruz, it’s hard not to daydream of moving back even though I haven’t left yet. I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford moving back to the Bay Area on my own after I leave, unless I get another flatmate. But I don’t have to, necessarily. There’s Sacramento. Or Santa Rosa, the most affordable North Bay City. I could even go up the California coast toward Eureka, which is beautiful but maybe too secluded for me. And there’s always Portland or Seattle or Eugene, the whole Pacific Northwest.

    I have faith I’ll find things I like in Florida: friends, old and new; rediscovering old places that survived all this time; finding interesting new places. If I’m honest, I’ve been scouting over the last few years on my return holiday trips, finding breweries and coffee shops and restaurants and, yes, even a tiki bar, although it’s seventy miles away in St. Petersburg. (St. Pete is perhaps the most interesting city in Tampa Bay these days, manifestly not the case when I lived in that Tampa suburb a quarter-century ago.)

    But one day, I’ll return. For all the quirks, all the expenses, all the travails I’ve been through these past twenty years, this is my paradise.

    → 5:21 PM, Jul 15
  • As I visit places around the SF Bay in my last few days here I keep thinking I’m visiting (Place) for the last time, which I doubt is actually true.

    → 3:24 PM, Jul 15
  • Hm. It occurs to me that I probably can’t change the billing address on my credit cards until after the week-long road trip back to Florida, because I am booking hotel rooms using my current address and don’t want things to fail!

    → 12:06 AM, Jul 8
  • Likely my last time doing some remote work at the irrationally pretty business park in San Ramon.

    → 4:12 PM, Jul 1
  • Pretty sure I want to get back to Il Fornaio at least once before I leave California. I’m not sure people outside the area know how great some Italian restaurants here actually are.

    → 9:50 PM, Jun 17
  • I drifted away from the iPad completely after getting my M1 Air, but lately I’ve been carrying the iPad Air again, with the thin “Folio” keyboard and an external mouse. There is something neat about going this light, I’ll grant.

    → 8:20 PM, Jun 17
  • Apparently the cloud version of Microsoft PowerPoint handles conflict resolution with “keep your slide or the other person’s and delete the other one forever,” no “keep both and resolve the difference manually” option. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

    → 8:11 PM, Jun 10
  • One thing I do like about the iPad, which you can only do with a true external keyboard: portrait mode is great for writing.

    → 7:31 PM, Jun 9
  • For no particular reason, I’ve headed out for an afternoon remote-working with the iPad Air rather than the MacBook Air. Let’s see how this goes.

    → 7:08 PM, Jun 9
  • Pretty sure I’ve seen dance clubs with a less elaborate stage lighting system than this secondary theater at Apple Park.

    → 6:21 PM, Jun 7
  • In line for the Talk Show Live at Apple Park’s new developer center. Feeling lucky I get to say goodbye to living this close to Apple Nerd Central this way.

    → 6:03 PM, Jun 7
  • I am finding the state of modern PHP frameworks more exhausting than ever; I may have been on the right track starting to build NINAF (“NINAF is not a framework”) last year.

    → 1:48 PM, May 21
  • I bought a Magic Keyboard that supports Touch ID today, and now wonder just what I was thinking. They’re great keyboards for what they are, but I’m pretty sure I’ll just keep switching between the two mechanicals I’ve been using.

    → 11:00 PM, May 19
  • The Laravel tutorial that I’m working through to refresh my PHP credentials uses the Tailwind CSS framework, which everyone says you will love once you get used to it. I’m still waiting.

    → 3:17 PM, May 17
  • I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’ve been to a wild coyote—probably about 50 feet. I wish I’d had my real camera for this!

    → 9:46 PM, May 14
  • Remember when 5by5 was the up-and-coming tech podcast network?

    → 12:28 PM, May 11
  • Because it seemed like there should be one, I have made a version of the Nord color scheme for BBEdit. github.com/chipotle/…

    → 12:11 PM, May 6
  • Tempted to walk around the mostly empty office building and chirp “are we feeling collaborative yet?” at random coworkers.

    → 4:32 PM, May 5
  • After watching “Severance,” I would like to expand my catalog of defiant jazz.

    → 9:10 PM, May 4
  • This week is my first with mandatory in-office days since March 2022. On the one hand, it’ll be nice to see coworkers in person; on the other, they closed our great downtown San Jose office and I’ll be going to a boring business park.

    → 12:36 PM, May 2
  • (Re-)learning Laravel, the PHP framework, in my spare time, and I’m very impressed with what the PHPStorm IDE is doing in Laracasts' instructional videos. I’m obstinately returning to Panic Nova as a test, though; the flakiness of earlier versions seems largely gone. We’ll see!

    → 6:41 PM, Apr 28
  • Discovered Apple Music—and other streaming services—now have the cast albums for two musicals based on Alan Parsons Project albums, both of which were staged (to some acclaim, I gather) in Germany in the 1990s. They’re…odd?

    → 12:02 AM, Apr 22
  • I have ordered an Ember “Smart” Coffee Mug and feel bad about myself for having done it. ☕️

    → 4:57 PM, Apr 21
  • Plugged my MacBook Air into my Studio Display for the first time this morning, and immediately questioned whether I should actually have bought the Mac Studio. Oh well.

    → 11:45 AM, Apr 19
  • As much as I love the modern era of thin and light laptops, I miss being able to lock my laptop to a table at a coffee shop with a Kensington-style cable.

    → 9:06 PM, Apr 15
  • There may be no more more convincing proof of Satan’s existence than the Hacker News thread on “Elon Musk makes unsolicited bid to take Twitter private”.

    → 5:57 PM, Apr 14
  • Realizing I have an old Logitech K380 keyboard that’s no longer “attached” to anything has gotten me to set it up with my iPad mini—and set the iPad up with more “real” productivity/creative apps finally.

    → 5:07 PM, Apr 14
  • Part of me wants to hang on to this, but I don’t even know if it’s still readable—and I doubt any modern PCs could even run it.

    → 2:18 PM, Apr 12
  • So apparently Star Trek: Picard season 3 will basically reunite ST:TNG. I think I’m on board with this?

    → 10:16 PM, Apr 5
  • I seem to have a strange talent for running into edge case bugs in Acorn, my favorite image editor. Only two, but that’s two more than almost all of you have! (It’s a great editor, and I mean, these were pretty edgy edge cases.)

    → 8:44 PM, Apr 5
  • One interesting silver lining to the Studio Display: for the first time since March 2020, I have an external monitor for my work laptop—and for the first time ever, it’s a 27″ 5K (5120×2880) display, rather than 24″ FHD (1920×1080).

    → 12:20 PM, Apr 4
  • This is an interesting opportunity to re-evaluate some of my day-to-day workflow. I’ve been using Drafts as a “temporary text place”, for instance, but it’s way overpowered for 99% of my usage—so now I’m trying Tot, which seems absolutely designed for this.

    → 9:42 PM, Apr 3
  • Well, hopefully things will remain copacetic. I’m watching you, theoretically confirmed-to-be-working computer. 🧐

    → 8:59 PM, Apr 3
  • If you want to hear what the Mac Studio’s fans sound like when they’re REALLY running full bore, run Diagnostics. Holy jet engines, Batman. (Mine comes up with “no issues,” for what it’s worth.)

    → 8:36 PM, Apr 3
  • The new Mac is…working? Twice—in 24 hours—it’s stopped responding to the keyboard plugged into the Studio Display, and I can only fix that by unplugging the Display itself and reconnecting it. And this morning it’s been super slow and juddery when waking up the display.

    → 2:50 PM, Apr 3
  • Seeing “Tweetie2” still referenced by the current Twitter app is a trip, if you’re a certain kind of Mac user. (If you’re not, Tweetie 2 was the third-party client Twitter bought to make their app. Tweetie was arguably better in many ways.)

    → 1:48 PM, Apr 2
  • Nope, that doesn’t solve it, as Safari instantly locked when I started it. Chrome does the same thing. This computer may be going back to Apple; it’s literally unusable for me like this. :/

    → 12:15 PM, Apr 1
  • Hmm. After more head-bashing, I am suspecting my problem is actually Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource—or more accurately, that Migration Assistant left it in a state where it seemed like it was installed correctly but had not gone through the proper Apple Silicon Security Rituals.

    → 12:10 PM, Apr 1
  • While I’ve gotten everything transferred over to the new Mac without incident, Safari has been locking—spinning beachball of doom, force quit required—literally every few minutes. I’m now deleting everything that remotely looks like a preference file or cache…

    → 11:44 AM, Apr 1
  • I’m somewhat dismayed that the Mac Studio power light appears to stay on all the time, even when in sleep, given that the computer is in my bedroom. I’ll see if it annoys me in practice or not tonight. (When I move later this year, it will get its own office, at least.)

    → 11:18 PM, Mar 31
  • I don’t suppose I know anyone who knows someone at Twitter who can look into a support case for an incorrectly suspended account, do I?

    → 5:01 PM, Mar 28
  • Racing to get a revision outline done in a story brainstorming program, Dramatica, before I can’t anymore: it’s still 32-bit and already needs an Intel-only virtual machine, and by early April I will have no Intel Macs left. (A 64-bit version is coming, eventually…)

    → 12:35 PM, Mar 26
  • I haven’t had really great taco truck tacos for a long, long time. Until tonight.

    → 9:02 PM, Mar 25
  • I am eating peanuts at this microbrewery near my laptop, and peanuts make little bits of peanut dust, and it is making me think “if this laptop still had a butterfly keyboard half the keys would stop working in five minutes and it might literally explode.”

    → 8:57 PM, Mar 11
  • Unnecessary update: swapped back down to 32GB of RAM. I’ve been getting by for years with “only” 24GB in an iMac, so I’m pretty sure I can limp along with only 8GB more for quite a while.

    → 12:43 AM, Mar 9
  • I may have ordered a Mac Studio and—may have overbought. Still waffling on whether to change the order to ease it down from 64GB RAM to 32GB RAM.

    If I buy this much computer, it may encourage me to start the micro-press I keep threatening to do, though, I guess…

    → 11:56 PM, Mar 8
  • Trade-in credit for your 2015 Apple iMac: $50 gift certificate to The Cheesecake Factory

    → 7:06 PM, Mar 8
  • The silver lining of (over)buying a Mac Studio, if I convince myself to pull the trigger, is that I won’t need to buy another computer for a decade. So I tell myself. Ha ha. Although I could make an argument for just keeping the 27″ iMac I have another couple years…

    → 5:47 PM, Mar 8
  • Hmm. The “Mac Studio” plus the new display may be the official replacement for the iMac Pro/27″ display model. I’ll price out a Studio, but might just get the new overpriced display and connect it to the M1 MacBook Air I already have.

    → 2:59 PM, Mar 8
  • Well, I suppose getting a breakthrough Covid infection is sort of like an extra booster, right? (I’ve been fever-free for a week, am past a reasonable isolation period, and have no symptoms other than congestion that may just be my typical seasonal allergies now.)

    → 8:38 PM, Feb 18
  • I have my new iPad mini, finally! I need to think about actually organizing the home screen, which I never truly did on its predecessor.

    → 11:28 PM, Feb 17
  • For some reason when I made a post a few minutes ago, Gluon (a Micro.blog client I’m going to stop using now) just randomly attached a photo to it. I would blame operator error, but I genuinely cannot see, given its UX, how I could have done that without noticing. Yikes.

    → 4:16 PM, Feb 17
  • If I were on Tesla’s Board of Directors, I would be telling Elon Musk it’s time to put out an announcement about stepping down to spend more time with his shitposting.

    → 4:14 PM, Feb 17
  • With the most recent episode, I think “Star Trek: Prodigy” has now leapt into first place for me among New Trek shows, which is—rather unexpected. But it just keeps firing on all proton cylinders. 📺🖖

    → 10:06 PM, Feb 3
  • Well, I could make my inaugural cooking-for-one dish (rosemary skillet chicken, which will almost certainly make enough for two, actually), but I just realized I have a $100 DoorDash gift certificate I’ve never used. So. Maybe cooking tomorrow.

    → 9:11 PM, Feb 2
  • For the first time in nearly 20 years, I’m living alone—only until mid-July, but it’s still going to be a shift.

    → 1:55 PM, Feb 2
  • It seems silly that, knowing I am moving in six months, I am buying new sheets, and a new electric kettle, and a sauce pan. But all but maybe the electric kettle are necessary. At least, I’m telling myself that.

    → 12:38 PM, Feb 1
  • For some reason, my MacBook Air has decided that Apple Pay should always be confirmed on my watch, not on the Touch ID sensor literally built into the Air’s keyboard. This is such a first world problem to be annoyed about, but man, it’s annoying.

    → 11:13 PM, Jan 31
  • I have email from a recruiter that begins “(Company Name) is looking to hire a Technical Writter.” I am resisting the temptation to respond, “Clearly.”

    → 9:29 PM, Jan 21
  • After being on the Fantastical for Mac and Timepage for iPad/iPhone trains for a few years, I’m settling back into Apple’s Calendar programs—work no longer uses Google Mail/Calendar but instead very locked down Exchange servers, and it’s not worth the hassle.

    → 1:54 PM, Jan 12
  • I have finally broken down and, despite my desire to mostly get rid of things before an almost certain cross-country move in July, ordered a new iPad mini. (It is replacing an existing thing, so that’s okay, right?)

    → 7:40 PM, Jan 7
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