 about the differences in the one day in January of 2020, 2021, and 2022 I sat in a VW dealership. I made a guess about 2023:

What’s my best guess for January, 2023? No masks. Finally hit 10,000 miles but still well under 20,000 and impossibly far from 30,000. I’ll still go to Trader Joe’s after. I’ll be smart enough to do this on a weekday so I don’t get stuck in the weekend crowd. Things change, but things stay the same.

Was I right? I pulled in the service bay with 9992 miles. No one is wearing a mask. It’s a Friday. 50/50 I go to Trader Joe’s after — we’re good on groceries but I do have a mild trail mix addiction. Is everything normal now? Normal as any normal is, I guess.

Annual Maintenance Again

Aptitude is the ability to perform a type of work. Tenure is the length of time in job. Their correlation degrades rapidly.

Ilya includes a nice graphic here of the idea of aptitude versus tenure. In a past career life I worked with a manager who would frequently toss out the phrase “I have over twenty years experience!” when justifying decisions. We’d joke he’d been showing up for twenty years, whether he’d actually learned anything was up for debate.

Most organizations have a “career resting level” for each job: a level everyone is expected to reach eventually that, once reached, carries no further level growth expectations except for sustained execution and honing of their craft. Unfortunately, it's rare to find well-developed tools and language that gives enough credit, praise, and recognition to this happy steady state. Resting levels are not "easy" levels, they are the personal goldilocks zone: challenging but not impossible, rewarding but not at the cost of all else.

The idea of a resting level is a nice thought experiment now that I’m some-many years into my career as a software developer and I am not yet (and do not appear to be on track to reach) Google Fellow level.

Aptitude vs. Tenure

Jeff Beck passed away yesterday. I don’t recall how I first found out about him, it was either some 

 magazine list of “greatest guitar albums” or my dad recounting the history of rock n’ roll to me while driving me to school. He wasn’t popular or well known when I was a teenager, but I got a copy of 

 and listened to it a trillion times in a row. The solo in “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” remains one of my favorite guitar solos.

Weirdly of all the songs of his that pops into my head on a regular basis it’s this song “Blackbird” from his 2001 album 

, where he does call and response with a bird and, in Jeff Beck fashion, lets the bird get the last word.

RIP to the only person who has managed to figure out how to use a Fender trem and keep the guitar in tune.

Jeff Beck

At some point when building out this blog I made the clever (but not smart) decision to match Next‘s page folder structure with my content. So when generating all the routes for this site, I’d get all the content from the blog folder, the parse out the year and month from the path of the item, and that’s the url of the post.

content/blog-posts/2023/01/mistakes-of-the-past

. Which is ok, but over time I found these issues with it:

Am I starting to wish I kept some of this in a database? No… nope. Not yet. Nope.

How not to organize content for a Next JS based blog.

Mistakes of the Past

. It’s 2023 and it still hasn’t happened, but I want to more consistently use one tool for notes and writing this year, so I’m deciding to stick with 

 and not think about it for the next year. The main reasons for this:

The one mark against Obsidian compared to Bear is the mobile app support. Obsidian has a mobile app and sync service that is paid, but I rarely edit on mobile, so I’m going to use my 

Keeping all my notes in Obsidian in 2023.

Obsidian for 2023

, a black Squire Stratocaster. It is (I think) from 1995. My other guitar is a nicer Stratocaster from 1999. When I got that guitar I was torn between it and something more “shreddy”. If I remember correctly I was comparing it to an Ibanez JS1000, but in the end I wanted the bridge and middle single coils, so I went with the Strat.

Well, 20-odd years later, I finally have a “shreddy” guitar, a the amazingly named 

 in Weymouth, worth a trip if you’re in the Boston area looking for guitars. The color is Chameleon and I wanted to get it from a physical store, not online, because the color… photographs as a lot of different colors!

It’s fun and I’ve aggressively abused the whammy bar many times already. Now for next year finally following up on something I meant to 

20-odd years later, I finally have a shreddy guitar.

A New Guitar for a New Year

[^1] today. I started it many months ago, it was a book I read in fits and starts. I thought it approached the subject of “what is technology doing to how we think” well enough, with lots of references to historical precedence (people thinking writing would ruin the mind hundreds of years ago) and non-technical studies of similar topics like shared knowledge and the overhead of organizing large and wide knowledge networks.

One of the more interesting parts, at least to me, was about solving puzzles collectively. He talks at length about video games, and wiki pages for games contributed to by large sets of people, which means every facet of a game can be documented   in depth and at speed. He references 

 recently. The game does not present a deep story unless you know what to look for, and many of the puzzles are fair if you know what you’re looking for, but… you might honestly have no idea what you’re looking for. You can search online for the smallest part of the game and find everything you could ever want to know about it. There’s deep backstory on Reddit that you’d think was fan-fiction except it comes with references!

And it’s true of almost everything. I’ve been playing guitar more this Winter, and I like to search for “how did player X get their tone”. The information is out there, and you begin to realize that a lot of good electric guitar players from the 60s and 70s were ok guitar players who had access to the equipment and information that allowed them to get great tone. Today you can Google it and get the same tone in a digital modeler (more technology!) in five minutes. The ease is obvious when you start to search for instrumental electric guitarists in your favorite streaming music platform: there’s 

 of them, and the music skews heavily towards the last ten years or so, when not only did digital recording get easier, sharing information on how to play and inspiration for playing did too. Heck, some of the best known guitarists now don’t even record often, they post on Instagram and play live. Hard to say that’s a bad thing for humanity.

There was one salient bit later in the book about Twitter:

One study homed in on Twitter users who displayed “clear political preference,” as with right-wing Twitter users following Fox News, or left-wing Twitter users following 

. It turns out these users inadvertently got a more diverse set of news delivered via other people they followed, because their friends would tweet tidbits from the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, 17.8 percent of the left-wing Twitter users were seeing right-wing media via retweets from people they followed, and the right-wing Twitter users saw even more—57.2 percent of them were seeing left-wing media.

So someone right leaning goes and buys Twitter and now how do you think that skews? And what impact does that skewing (and the algorithm behind the skewing) have on us as a society? That’s a question the book can’t answer, we’re learning that one in real time.

[^1]: His blog is sadly and oddly dead. Oddly because it’s mentioned in the book more than once.

Smarter Than You Think

A list of ten Christmas songs with particular vibes I enjoy.

1. Christmas At Ground Zero - “Weird Al” Yankovic

The best of the “joke” Christmas songs you would hear on classic rock stations, well above “Grandma Got Run Over by A Reindeer” or Porky Pig singing “Blue Christmas”, but it stopped getting radio airplay because after 9/11 the phrase “ground zero” went from the generalized dystopian idea of where a nuclear bomb lands to specifically the World Trade Center (that’s very America of us). It’s on this list so you 

I like this song well enough, but there’s something else to it because it’s the only Christmas song that, when it comes on, anywhere and at any volume, Lorelei starts singing along like she’s an awakened sleeper agent.

4. Mary Did You Know - every Catholic musician in history

Many years of attending Catholic school as an atheist means I could do with out anything espousing the true meaning of Christmas, but I personally enjoy this one because it strongly implies that Jesus takes over the world with an army of zombies.

5. Christmas Time Is Here - Vince Guaraldi Trio

It’s Christmas Eve. You’re sweaty, wrapped up in fleece footy pajamas and under a blanket, laying on a high pile carpet floor, using a Christmas present as a pillow (is it a Nintendo?). You can hear adults around you talking but their words are muffled and the syllables distorted. The edges of your vision are blurred, strange Caldor-color rainbows, but in the center the warm yellow glow of a CRT TV. On it, a dog points his nose at the sky and wiggles his arms and feet erratically. You fall asleep, knowing someone will pick you up and put you in your bed, and in the morning it will be Christmas.

6. What’s This? - Danny Elfman from The Nightmare Before Christmas

Every time my brain has the thought “what’s this?” it’s immediately repeated (what’s this!) and then this song begins.

With a nod to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” as heard on “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24”. The Christmas songs you can headbang to.

8. Please Come Home For Christmas - Charles Brown

If you were drinking spiced egg nog while reading this, here is where you skip the egg nog part of the mix. Take a pretty standard blues arrangement, throw church bells in the background and a piano that sounds like sleigh bells, it’s a Christmas song! A really, really sad Christmas song about being alone at Christmas.

The sad, sad part is the Eagles version gets played the most. I fuckin’ hate the Eagles, man.

Oh you thought that last one was sad, did you? While “Please Come Home For Christmas” covers Christmas day through New Years, this one starts with “putting up Christmas”, so now we’ve got the day after Thanksgiving through to New Years covered with sadness.

I will acknowledge that “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” probably doesn’t hit as hard for people who grew up in warm climates, but on the other hand every musician who has seen ice once has covered this song so there’s something to those words.

There’s a lot of songs that fit a theme of “it’s the end of the year, and having some time to reflect on the state of things, I’ve decided the world could generally be a lot better than it is”, but this one is the best one. Also a good one to end this list on because as Stevie says, someday at Christmas everything will be right, but it’ll be long after you’re dead.

The Ten (Insert Superlative Here) Christmas Songs

Took Lorelei to the comic book store yesterday. She got some Pokemon cards, I got Saga, volume 10. I’ve been waiting for it for a while, volume 9 released in 2018! And ended on a total gut punch too. Fortunately this one has a happier ending.

Yeah, it’s another rough one. Still a great series. I want to believe there’s a happy (happy enough) ending for Hazel but that looks to be many volumes away still.

Saga, Volume 10

All the smart stuff in the house is back. I did two things:

So now my home automation can run, and at sunset today the Christmas tree will turn on and the nearby Homepod will start playing Christmas music. 🎄

Did you try turning it off and turning it on again?

built with coffee