Visualizing Genius

19 Tuesday May 2026

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It’s not all wild hair and chalkboards

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I’m a Salieri. I’m smart enough to recognize genius in others, but definitely no genius my own self. This is not self-denigration; I am friends with a couple of people who truly are at the genius level, and the gap between them and myself is pretty vast.

(Some of my friends would argue with this—and my mom and dad definitely would—but IMO that’s mostly because I’m simply good with words. I’m highly verbal, I was very precocious, learning to read very early, and reading well above my grade level for all of K-12. People who are articulate get a lot of credit. I’m articulate. That’s all.)

So: Doug != Genius. Okay?

As such, it’s always fascinated how media, especially visual media, tries to depict the thought process of genius. When my friend looks at a three digit arithmetic problem and instantly knows the answer, what the heck is going through his head? Or when my other friend had an upper-division geometry mapping problem in college and simply wrote down the answer, how the heck did he do that?

This came to mind because I’ve been reading and rewatching The Queen’s Gambit, and I found the way the creators visualized Beth’s gift at chess just fascinating. If you haven’t seen it, she looks up and watches games play out on the ceiling. Hundreds of moves, and they just come to her. It’s amazing and slightly scary.

It put me in mind, in a very minor way, of how I write. I just raise my mental antenna up into the aether and then sit there and watch the words appear on the screen. Of course, I have to be in exactly the right frame of mind and it definitely helps to have a quiet environment. (As opposed to the loud Starbucks full of chattering 10 year old girls in which I am currently sitting. Thank god for noise-cancelling headphones.)

And then I started thinking of how other media “geniuses” have their thought processes shown on screen.

The first time I saw genius depicted on screen was the film Amadeus, in 1984. Mozart’s father comes to stay, and (to say the least) he doesn’t get along with Mozart’s wife Constanza. In one scene, the two are arguing and Mozart checks out, goes to another room, and starts hearing music in head that he just dictates down on paper. Literally listening to the music of the spheres, as it were.

But the most amazing scene to me was when Salieri was “helping” him finish his Requiem in D Minor. Even though Mozart is sick, Salieri can barely keep up with the instructions pouring out of him. But the thing that really drove it home was that, after Salieri had taken down multiple parts—horns, voices, brass, percussion—he thinks they’re done. “And that’s all,” he says. “No,” Mozart tells him; “Now for the real fire.”

Even when taking dictation, Mozart was so far out in front of Salieri that Salieri thought the piece was finished while for Mozart all the other parts had just been the basis for “the real fire.” Amazing!

Another lovely depiction is in the much-maligned Iron Man 2, where Tony Stark invents a new element on the fly based on obscure clues his father left him in fucking landscaping for the love of god.

Another great example is from the early seasons of the British TV show Sherlock, where Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes simply notices things others don’t because his brain is so hyperactive. (Indeed in the stories he self-medicates with cocaine, totally on brand for someone with severe untreated ADHD.)

I love these. I love to imagine how truly brilliant people think. (And I shudder when I think what it must be like to live inside their heads. When Robert Downey Jr. is himself playing Holmes and someone asks him what he sees, he responds “Everything”. Can’t be easy. (Something neurodivergent people everywhere can relate to, I think.)

So which ones did I miss? And what other types of visualizations have you seen?

“Should’a Hanged ’em”

02 Saturday May 2026

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Film “Lincoln” with Jared Harris as Grant and Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, talking about “Liberality all around”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we got into this current political and societal mess.

For a long time, I blamed Reagan and his policies. During that administration, the social safety net began to be shredded, the pillars were put in place for the right-wing media ecosystem, the move of the court to the right began, we basically decided giving tons of money to the military was good for all time, Republicans began their long and fruitful association with the Evangelical right (and on to Christian nationalists), and on and on.

One could make a good case that it really began in the 50s, with evil thugs like McCarthy and the Goldwater campaign and I wouldn’t argue. (I once read that the 60s reaped the foul harvest of the 50s, and I think that phrase is appropriate.) But the more I thought about it, the more I think it began far, far earlier. That indeed, one of our greatest presidents also made one of our biggest mistakes, right there on par with the horrific 3/5ths “compromise”.

Lincoln. I’m talking about Lincoln here.

I’ve been saying for months and months that the right doesn’t want to take us back to the 1950s, like many people often say; they want to take us back to the 1850s. (While I don’t think many on the right really want full-on chattel slavery, I’m absolutely positive many of them—especially the rich ones—would love to see some indentured servitude. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if we started hearing rumblings from them that it would be good for the country and economy for, say, people who file for bankruptcy (except themselves) are required to work off their debt in a job of the state’s choosing. And of course we already have it in some states in the form of convict labor.)

“The 1850s?” say you. “How can that be?” Well, let’s roll back through the Constitutional Amendments they either want to eliminate or essentially invalidate:

  • Increase voting age back to 21, or even higher (26th, 1971)
  • Presidential term limits (22nd, 1941)
  • Women’s suffrage (19th, 1920)
  • Direct election of Senators, ie letting it move back to the state legislatures, which can be manipulated much easier (17th, 1913)
  • Birthright citizenship, which they’re going after right this minute (14th, 1868)

Which takes us right back to the Civil War. And those are just the ones they’ve talked about. I’m sure they’d be happy to revoke the 27th, 24th, 23rd, and probably several more (look them up).

I’m not making this stuff up; these are all things various members of the right have advocated. And I’m not talking about people on the fringe (though for Republicans that hardly means anything nowadays); I’m talking about people in office, or in think tanks, or sitting on the bench. People with actual power.

And this is why I’m blaming Lincoln for some of this. Or at least letting the seed of it take root. At the end of the Civil War, the North was kind. Chivalrous. Lenient. And despite what some Southerners say, Reconstruction was not nearly as thorough a cleansing of discrimination in the South as it needed to be. And of course the Southern politicians began chipping away at Black rights immediately and setting the stage for Segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).

Not only has that contributed to the south staying racist and acquiring too much power, it also showed that the law doesn’t apply equally to all. These powerful people were to a large extent let off the hook. Some rejoined Congress, for fuck’s sake! One started the KKK. Others did exactly the kind of thing you’d expect racist traitors to do. But hey, they were powerful people, and let’s “heal”, so they were let off the hook. Like Nixon. Like Trump. Like basically every powerful person today.

Now I’m well aware Andrew Johnson blew it too, and there were other factors, but Lincoln was the commander in chief and President.

So in conclusion, yeah, they want to go back to the 1850s. The seeds for rolling back our civil society started almost immediately, and was carried on through “the Lost Cause”, Segregation, and other right-wing rationalizing BS. And if I sound angry, it’s because I am.

They shoulda hanged ’em.

NB: No, I did not have all these dates, court cases, and constitutional amendments in my head; I had to look them up. But I definitely do know what the right is talking about trying to overturn.

One Person’s View of Being Replaced by “AI”

19 Sunday Apr 2026

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(Image courtesy of Johns Hopkins University)

Let’s get this out of the way first: What everyone is currently calling “AI” is not artificial intelligence. It’s impressive software; it can do some amazing things; but it’s not artificial intelligence. It has no sentience. It can’t think. It doesn’t recognize selfhood. While it could regurgitate Decartes’ famous phrase, “I think therefore I am,” it has no concept of the philosophical underpinning behind that declaration.

“AI” is a marketing term. “Machine Learning” wasn’t sexy; “large language model” also wasn’t sexy. “AI” is very sexy. So corporate marketing people went with it. It is misleading, in much the same way “Cloud Computing” is sexier than “distributed computing”, and just as misleading. (Your content isn’t stored up in the stratosphere, at risk every time they launch a rocket; it’s on some hard disk or SSD somewhere, in a vast network server farm, being looked over by other software that balances the load across the servers by moving data around. No cloud. Nope.)

To say this annoys me is to understate it profoundly. But that’s where we are these days, and I have to use those terms to be understood. But I adamantly refuse, as a long-time science fiction consumer, to use the term “AI” without scare quotes. It is not artificial intelligence. Period.

Okay.

It’s probably also important to point out up front that I love tech. I have since I were a wee lad watching Star Trek: TOS, wishing I had a real Tricorder and Communicator. (Now of course I have the latter. If you want to get me the former as a gift my birthday is in June. It’s 400 bucks, though!) My disdain for “AI” has nothing to do with being a Luddite. Nope.

CEOs everywhere are doing three things right now: Putting massive investment into “AI”; trying to force “AI” tools into everything and onto everyone despite massive protests to the contrary; and laying off tens of thousands of workers they think they can replace with this software.

I’m a tech writer, and CEOs definitely want to replace us with “AI”. Here’s the thing (and all modesty aside): Can an “AI” tech writer, in addition to writing the content:

  • also restructure the information architecture of your Confluence system to make it easier to use
  • AND find corner cases in your product software that cause system errors that regular testing doesn’t turn up AND project manage a “tiger team” (a descriptor I hate, but there we are) to revise your corporate user community’s blogging approach
  • AND find inconsistencies in your GitHub folder and file naming conventions that will cause problems with the original programmer moves on
  • AND make sure the wording on those little “nudges” at the bottom of the page are both short enough to read quickly and make sense
  • AND take over for the manager when she goes on vacation because you happen to have 7-8 years of people management experience in your past
  • AND mentor new team members
  • AND write internal training materials for employees new to the software?

“AI” can do some of that stuff, and some it can’t. It can help with some of that stuff, but not all of it. The fact is that I can do all that and more for salary and health benefits with a much smaller impact on the environment than a giant data center. Cuz human brains be flexible. Hell’s bells, I’ve had to correct “predictive text” at least a dozen times while creating this post, and that’s been around for what, 15 years? If we haven’t gotten that right, why are we trusting “AI”, again?

My point here is not to brag—or not much—but to point out that actual human beings can do their own job AND bring extra stuff to the table that “AI” simply can’t. And at a lower cost to the company and the environment. Plus humans with money actually buy stuff; “AI”’s don’t. 

I don’t know what end state these CEOs imagine, with them taking more and more money from the economy and laying off more and more people. If we don’t have jobs, we don’t have money; if we don’t have money, we can’t buy their products. This seems pretty obvious to me. But not to the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sam Altmans and Jeff Bezoses of the world, apparently. (They really need to watch the Netflix series “Love, Death, and Robots” Volume 3, episode, “Three Robots: Exit Strategies”.)

(“AI” in the Netflix episode telling the rich billionaires just what they can do with themselves.)

So okay, I think that’s enough ranting for one day. I probably just made myself completely unemployable.

La La Land Lament

05 Sunday Apr 2026

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(Emma and Ryan, together again!)

I don’t watch the annual Academy Awards show.

I start with this in order to help explain why it took me ten years to watch La La Land. A film, in case you’ve forgotten, that was at the center of one of the most embarrassing, ridiculous Oscar ceremony mistakes ever, when it was announced as the Best Picture winner (and given the awards!) before the actual winner, Moonlight, got its due.

As much as I like musicals—love them, really—that kind of soured me out of the gate. Silly, maybe, but sometimes we do silly things.

The subsequent years being filled with things like divorce, cancer, two layoffs, moving twice, heart surgery, and other nightmares, it fell off my radar. And when I thought of it again and learned how it ended…well, I mentioned the divorce, right? I didn’t need any more angst.

A couple weeks ago, for some reason—I probably bumped into a mention of it on social media or something—I decided I had waited long enough and queued it up. It was adorable, wonderful, amazing, and (even after several rewatches) I think Emma Stone’s Oscar was eminently deserved. She does more acting in that film with her eyes alone than many flavor-of-the-month 20-something, block of wood actresses do in their entire careers with their whole beings.

And the ending wrecked me. Absolutely wrecked me.

Being a modern, self-reflective guy who has had a lot of therapy, I dug around in my brain for the reason, if only for my mental health. I was losing sleep, FFS. Obsessing. It wasn’t healthy. I mean, I’m paid hourly; I can’t sit around moping about a musical that came out 10 years ago. I have work to do.

Spoilers be coming, in case you are one of the five people who, like my friend Geoffrey, hasn’t watched this film.

I realized that while I was sad Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone didn’t end up together, that wasn’t the whole story.

One thing that made me vulnerable was a scene earlier in the film. Ryan Gosling, thrilled with the afternoon he just spent with Emma Stone, is so happy he breaks into a song and dance on the Hermosa Beach Pier. And it’s not just that it was a delightful number; it’s that it smacked me in the face with a memory so strong I actually had to pause the film.

See, when I was in college, there was this absolutely beautiful woman who started working in the college dish room during a couple of my shifts. She was pretty, she was wicked smart, she was funny, she had a ridiculously adorable laugh, and she fit right in with the dirty, disgusting team of stoner guys who also worked the shift. (I mean dirty as in “covered with meal debris due to the job” type, not sexually. They were real gentlemen to her, the only woman on the shift.) Of course all the other guys were interested in her, flirted with her, hoped she would go out with them. I totally wrote her off. I was a nerd, a nebbish, and skinny and slightly built to boot. Women like that not only had ignored me in high school, they had actively made fun of me. She was out of my league. Way way way out of my league. I mean, look at me; this was taken that very year:

Not repulsive or anything, but not a person who would expect lovely, smart, funny 19 year-olds to be interested in.

But here’s the thing: She didn’t give a rip about any of that. She thought I was funny and smart and interesting. So one night she asked me back to her room, where we drank Bacardi (with grape juice as a mixer; pro tip: don’t) and made out (until her roommate unexpectedly showed up). As I walked down the steps from her dorm to the bus stop, I felt just like Ryan Gosling. I wanted to dance. I wanted to sing. I had that new relationship energy (NRE) thing going on.

(I also wanted to not have bed spins because of the Bacardi. That wish alas didn’t come true.)

And it made me sad because, at my age, I’m unlikely to ever experience that kind of new relationship energy (NRE) ever again. Which sucks all on its own, and kind of primed the pump for what came later.

The end of the film is after Emma and Ryan have achieved their respective dreams, with Ryan owning a jazz club and Emma being a successful actress with a cute little girl and Tom Everett Scott (That Thing You Do!) as a husband. And he’s clearly a good guy! Emma and Tom, just by accident (it’s a musical; go with it) are walking the streets after dinner and happen upon Ryan’s jazz club. Which Emma didn’t know about. Ryan and Emma see each other and there’s a lovely extended dream sequence reminiscent of Singin’ in the Rain or An American in Paris, where they imagine their life together if things had gone a bit differently, if they had made slightly different choices.

That was a bit tough for me to watch, post-divorce and all, but the kicker was when it changed to them watching a film of themselves on shaky, hand-held, 16mm film, yellowed with age, looking at them moving in together, painting their apartment, Emma pregnant, them celebrating their son’s birthday. That was what killed me.

What I realized, what hit like a ton of bricks, was the realization that I had done the same thing with a woman in my own life (let’s call her Jane), and now the chance to be with her was gone. I could remember the different choices with crystal clarity. The moments I could have made different choices and didn’t. And now, even though she is also single, she isn’t interested. It’s too late. And being a lonely, older guy who’s had zero luck dating since my divorce, well, that realization was a killer.

I don’t know quite why I’m sharing this all except that for one, hardly anyone reads this blog so it doesn’t really expose me. For two, it has always helped me to get this stuff out.

I guess the moral of the story is, media can kick you in the ass even when you think you’re prepared. And further, carpe that ol’ diem, because you don’t know how long you have, and you never know when you’ll get another chance.

And yeah, I still love Jane. And it kinda sucks.

Weird Male Things

13 Saturday Jul 2024

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Why?

During the last year or so of his life, my dad—who was dealing with Stage IV colon cancer—lost his balance in the shower and had a heavy fall. When I heard of this I asked him why he didn’t have grab rails or a shower seat or some such. At 35, I felt incumbent on me as the Eldest Child to try to talk some sense into him. You’re dying of cancer, dad; you’re taking morphine, doing chemotherapy, you’re not the same as you were in the 70s. Be smart.

I was thinking about all this while in the shower the other day. I am now the age my dad was when diagnosed at Stage IV—61. I have had multiple health issues, and have had to run to the hospital a few times for various issues. (One time in an ambulance, which seemed overkill given I had driven myself to the urgent care clinic just fine.) I am definitely not the physical specimen I was at 25. Or even 45. And I had an epiphany as to why my dad refused to get a shower chair:

“Fuck that.”

Yes, just that; “Fuck that” I have plenty of maladies that should require me to be careful. And I am careful: I go to all my doctors’ appointments; I take so many medications my youngest is constantly amazed I can keep mine and hers straight; I avoid red meat, caffeine, processed sugar, and alcohol; I exercise regularly. Even so, there is plenty of reason for me to be cautious, to present a slightly more delicate facade to the world, so why don’t I?

Because fuck that, that’s why.

There are several parts to this, some of which heigh back to toxic masculinity. Some of which are because of the way folks my age were raised—”Go play outside, and don’t come back until dinner!”. Some are to avoid getting ostracized by society (and at work!) as “that old guy”. And some are just plain, in-bred stubbornness that I inherited from my dad; “The two most stubborn men I’ve ever met in my life,” my step-mother insisted. (I like to think of it as being resilient, but your mileage may vary.)

Anyone who has paid attention during the last 20 years knows that toxic masculinity has nearly as many negative impacts on men as it does women. Women are marginalized and suppressed; this is obvious. Men, on the other hand, tend to be repressed, especially emotionally. (There are other reasons for this, such as weaponization of men’s feelings against them, but that’s a tale for another time.) We are taught from a young age to not show pain or emotion, that we’re “wimps” or “pussies” or “faggots” (a huge insult when I was a kid) if we do. Not to share our thoughts. To just do what we’re told or required, and shut the fuck up about it if we don’t like it.

When I say, “taught”, I obviously don’t mean in the traditional sense, where a teacher got up and chalked “Don’t complain!” on a blackboard. No, I’m talking about hundreds of influences from media and the adults around us that added up to it. “Rub some dirt in it”; “don’t be a crybaby”; “no pain no gain”; “walk it off”; and on and on.

The latter, baffled me from the first time I heard it at age 8, when I was hit in the ‘nads with a practice ground ball that hopped up on one of the multitudinous rocks peppering our crappy little league infield. I buckled over in pain. The coach strolled over and said, “Just walk it off.” And even at 8 that made zero sense. “Walk it off?” I thought. “I got hit in the balls, not in the legs! What good is that going to do?” And of course, it didn’t do any. Other than to teach me to “not be a wimp.”


Just walk it off, dude!

This is how toxic masculinity creeps like poison gas into your brain while you’re not watching, taught to you by all the adults around you.

And of course my generation is now famous for playing outside and getting our water from garden hoses. And this isn’t an exaggeration; that’s what we actually did, especially during the summer. “Go outside and play,” was probably one of the most-common parental commands in my day. Right behind, “Stop crying or I’ll give you a reason to cry,” and “Don’t make me pull this car over”, and (one of my dad’s favorites) “I don’t care who started it, I’m stopping it!” (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

I’m not blaming my parents; they were really good parents, they didn’t spank, they weren’t neglectful, they clearly loved us, and they did their level best. Frankly, they were better than most. It was the social construct at the time.

So now my body is falling apart, and when something goes wrong, my instinct is not to ask for help, or complain about it, but to deal with it myself so I don’t “look like a wimp.” Which has caused me to do some fairly insane things such as driving myself to urgent care while literally screaming in pain from kidney stones; taking my youngest to his therapy session even though I could barely get out bed; drive into work when I had the stomach flu; and more. And I’m positive many men of my generation have done similar nutty things. (Heck, my boss the other day was just talking about walking around while in excruciating pain from a nasty foot injury.)

As a result, I finally understand my dad. He was on chemo; he was taking tons of meds; he had Stage IV cancer and was literally staring death in the face; and when it came to making things a little easier on himself in ways that made him look at all weak (and adding in the fact he was born in the middle of the Great Depression), I can easily imagine his mental state:

“Fuck that.”

If you’re wondering why your boyfriend, brother, dad, or whatever other male you know seems to be acting irrationally, just keep it in mind. That’s all I’m saying.

And I still miss him. To this day.

Marching Backwards on July 4th

04 Thursday Jul 2024

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One of the foundational myths of the United States is that a group of brilliant men gathered together in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and signed a Declaration of their Independence over the absentee landlords and ruling monarchy of George III of England. 

Like many myths, there’s a lot left out of this one. That the signers were all white men; that the nation they were “founding” had been occupied for thousands of years by the First Nations people; that many of these men declaring that “all men are created equal” owned other human beings; and on and on. And that’s all true. But we shouldn’t allow all that to ignore what a profoundly revolutionary act that Declaration was.

Up until then, countries, city-states, empires, and so on were almost exclusively ruled by one supreme monarch. A king, emperor, shōgun, khan, chieftain, potentate, kaiser, Caesar, pharaoh, tsar, or what have you. Almost always male, and usually with what today we would call “unchecked executive power”. The power to control all citizens, the armies, the navies, the land, the income, of whatever they ruled over. Sure, there were ways people could claw back some of that power, but in the main, for thousands of years, we had Kings. (They didn’t call Jesus “President of Presidents”, after all.)

Yes, yes, there were exceptions: The Roman Republic period, the Greek “democracies”, and so on. But they were exceptions. Humanity had Kings. 

To say having the idea to throw that all over and create a democratic republic and run a country “by consent of the governed” was a revolutionary concept is understating it. Yes, I am well aware that the founders drew on many historical precedents. But look at how countries were governed in (say) 1760, and how they’re governed now. Our experiment influenced the world. Heck, why do you think France sent us the Statue of Liberty?

I’m not going to go into all the ways we have failed of our promise over the last ~2.5 centuries, as most of us are all too grimly aware of slavery, segregation, the near-annihilation of the First Nations people, the antisemitism that closed our doors to Jews fleeing genocide in WWII, Japanese internment camps, imperial ambitions in places like The Philippines, and on and on. We are not even remotely close to perfect. But it’s important to remember, especially today, just how genuinely revolutionary our declaration was.

This is especially poignant now, with one of our major political parties clearly determined to turn back the clock on all the good things we’ve accomplished.

Starting in the Reagan era, I became convinced that the Republican Party was dead set on taking us back to the 1950s. When women didn’t work (or rarely), heterosexual marriage was the norm, non-straight people were forcibly closeted, Christian supremacy was unquestioned, Blacks were segregated, and the country had a huge majority of European descent. When straight white cis Christian men held sway.

Starting with the Bush II era, it seemed more like 1919, just before the 19th Amendment was passed, giving women the right to vote. They also weren’t much enamored of the 17th Amendment and direct election of Senators either, though, so maybe 1910 was a better target date.

Unfortunately, by stripping the most important provision of the voting rights act, overturning Roe v. Wade, making corporations equivalent to living human beings and money equal to speech, and almost too many other Supreme Court decisions to mention, it became clear in the last two decades that the GOP really wanted us to go back to the 1850s rather than the 1950s. Before Black people got “uppity”, when rich folks could do pretty much what they wanted, when women were oppressed, beaten, raped, and killed with impunity, and when the government was constrained from helping anyone but a straight white cis Christian man.

Boy, was I wrong.

With their ruling in Trump v. United States (and just take a moment to ponder the title of that ruling; Trump verses the entire United States!), the Supreme Court has embraced what Dick Cheney and his cronies from the Nixon Administration called “the Unitary Executive”, also sometimes known as the “Imperial Presidency”. They have given literally unchecked power to one person. (They would obviously prefer it was on straight white cis Christian man): The President. The President can do anything so long as “in their official capacity as President”. And given they very carefully didn’t say what that covers, they’ve basically turned the President into a monarch. And no, I am not exaggerating.

The Supreme Court, in their right-wing zeal to attain permanent and unlimited power for themselves, have take us back to 1750. I can barely contain my rage.

When I was 12, this country celebrated its Bicentennial; two hundred years of contiguous government. It was something to be proud of, and I was hoping at the time I would make it to the Tricentennial. 

Now, I don’t think the country will make it that far. I hope I’m wrong; I fear I’m not.

The Music of Your Life

11 Sunday Feb 2024

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Joni Mitchell, looking a bit frail but otherwise amazingly-robust considering her health issues of the past few years (and believe me, I sympathize with health issues) gave a lovely performance at the Grammys recently. And for me her voice is like a tramline to my past, and conjures up all sorts of emotions that watching and hearing her is like stepping into a Doc Brown-modified DeLorean and going back to 1974.

When I think of my past, it’s in eras. I suppose this is true for most people, and in my case even more so because I seemed to physically move someplace new after each on. My early childhood was in New England and on Long Island—I was born there and lived there until I started grammar school. Then at 12, just after I finished grammar school, we moved to the California East Bay, and I was here through middle and high school. I went to college in Santa Cruz and stayed for seven years after that, marking the “young adult” era. After which I got engaged and moved to San Jose for 8 years. And finally Austin Texas, where we lived for my own kids’ school years and their aftermath. These are my eras, and they are about places just as much as times and events.

One thing that I heavily associate with my grammar school years is the music my parents were playing on the stereo while I was growing up. Both of them liked to listen to music all the time, having it on in the background while they worked, or cooked, or cleaned, or we were all just sitting around in the living room. It was almost like my life had a soundtrack. And I was amazed years later to find how deeply into my brain this music had sunk, when I was able to sing along to music that I didn’t even remember hearing. (I don’t remember my parents ever playing Beatles records, but they must have, because I know all the lyrics to all the songs.)

And for me, this was an almost idyllic period. My parents were together, and young. We lived in a place where I had good friends. Like many of my generation, I grew up partly feral, being told to “go out and play” and not returning until dinnertime, even during the school year and especially in the summer. I was good at school and my teachers liked me. I played soccer, and Little League; was on the swim team and joined the Boy Scouts; rampaged around the neighborhood with my friends getting in trouble while trying to not get caught. Aside from the weather (abysmal in the summer) and the constant threat of friends moving away (it was just outside of Washington, DC, and many people in our suburban neighborhood were in the military and likely to get transferred any time), it was pretty wonderful.

On the radio and in our house there was Simon and Garfunkel, and Paul Simon on his own, and Carly Simon, and the soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar, (and comedy albums by Bill Cosby and George Carlin and Lenny Bruce at my friend David’s house), and in 1974 Joni Mitchell’s epic, incredible, Court and Spark.

To this day I can’t listen to Court and Spark and not think of the summer and fall of 1974 in Northern Virginia, where the summer air was so damn thick with humidity it felt as if you had to lean forward and actually push your way through it, and the fall was a riot of falling leaves piling up in people’s yards. I was starting my last year of grammar school, I was surrounded by friends and stuff I really enjoyed doing, I had two parents who clearly loved me, I had a little sister I totally adored and a younger brother who annoyed the living crap out of me to the degree where my dad actually sub-divided our family room so they could separate us. My favorite cousin—then a young, afro-ed, guitar-playing college hippy just turned 20—came down and actually roomed with me (in my tiny room) for part of the summer. It was joyous. Joyous, I tell you!

So when Joni sings—and most of all I queue up Court and Spark—I’m amazed all over again by the power and versatility of her amazing voice, the way it weaves itself in and out of the lyrics. I’m astounded by the power of those lyrics, the way you could picture in your mind the scenes she is describing, the people she’s talking about, and wonder if they map onto your own life. And most of all I’m a little boy again, cooling myself by one our four window air-conditioners (we blew out fuses so often I think my dad bought them in lots of 100) in a tiny suburban brick house in Northern Virginia, trying to con my mom into letting me stay inside a bit long, hearing Joni on the turntable again.


The house in question; my dad planted the pine tree on the right in the front yard

Joni is the creator of some of the music of my life, and it was tremendous seeing her there singing again. What is the music of yours?

Sometimes computer stuff just breaks

15 Monday Jan 2024

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The infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death

My first job out of college in the high tech industry was doing front-line phone support for a startup software company. The software ran on a Windows box, which back in those days were pretty rudimentary. I mean, a 100MB hard drive was considered “lots of space”. It was a long time ago.

I got in big trouble with my boss’ boss, the CEO of the company (and the guy whose arrogance, incidentally, drove the company into the ground rather than sell it to a big Japanese firm and make us all a bunch of money rather than the company folding), after one frustrating phone call with a customer. This was well before phone support people had “scripts”; we had a written list of common problems people faced, and after that we were required to solve their issues as best we could. And I was fresh out of school.

After spending a good half-hour trying to fix this guy’s problem, I finally had him reboot the system and the problem cleared up. When he demanded I tell him what might have gone wrong, I told him that sometimes, hardware just has the equivalent of brain farts, and you have to reboot to clear them. He wasn’t happy with this answer and called the CEO.

Here’s the thing, though: I’ve learned since then that computer software and hardware does sometimes just fail for no discernible reason. Sometimes it has a brain fart, and you have to reboot it.

It’s a fact of life. And why? Because the entire edifice of hardware and software is a precariously-balanced inverted pyramid that is only kept working by the tireless attention of millions of people. Let me explain:


There’s a reason folks didn’t build ’em this way

Down at the bottom, there? The point on which all computer systems rest is a little switch that either turns on or off. I know you’ve almost certainly heard it before, but it’s important to remember: No matter how sophisticated a computer system is, down at the bottom, it’s just a bunch of switches turning on and off. That’s all. When you turn on your tablet and the screen lights up, it’s just tens of millions of switches inside turning on and off telling the electronics what to do. All web sites are, at bottom, controlled by millions of switches flipping on and off. Yes, it sounds insane, but it works.

Back in the day, it was actual physical switches (eg vacuum tubes) that people literally switched on and off by hand in order to “program”. What’s happened over time is that the switches have gotten microscopic, and the systems that turn them on and off more sophisticated. But to repeat myself: The point of that inverted pyramid is just switches going on and off.

The next layer of the pyramid is “machine language”, which is a stream of ones (on) and zeros (off) sent directly to the switches. On top of that is a whole host of languages converting pseudo-english into those ones and zeros. On top of that is a host of languages that talk to those languages. And on top of that are the programs you run every day on your laptop, phone, car, or whatever. We are adding to those pyramid layers all the time, and at this point the pyramid is huge, and world-wide. And still balanced on a point.

Sometimes, a switch fails, or a program has an error and sends the wrong signal to a switch and it gets turned on when it should be off. Or a user (that’s you, kids!) sends a command into this giant edifice that the programmers haven’t anticipated, and it causes an unusual situation. When that happens, one of the blocks of the pyramid gets knocked out, and the thing goes off balance. And when the whole thing is balanced on a point, it can go off balance pretty badly, and your phone or laptop or whatever hangs.

Now, computer scientists have shored this delicate system up by surrounding the pyramid with lots of other pyramids so they can lean on each other and not be quite so precarious. And then pyramids get stacked on top of those pyramids, reinforcing the structure (and incidentally making a bad failure more catastrophic, but never mind that for now). We have devoted countless hours to creating backup systems that back up other backup systems that are behind even more backup systems. We don’t want your devices to fail. Especially if that “device” is, say, an airplane. And this all works pretty well in the main.

But every once in a while something unexpected happens in the system, and your device just hangs, or gives you the famed “blue screen of death”, or “bricks” (ie stops working entirely). The vast majority of these problems can be relieved by rebooting the device, although sometimes even that doesn’t work and you’re hosed.

Today my son brought me his iPhone because it had done hung. The weather in Austin is below freezing, we’re getting a lot of phone alerts, and somehow an alert had popped up on his phone at just the right microsecond—or maybe he happened to be holding down a button when it popped up—so that the message couldn’t be dismissed because the screen also wouldn’t accept input. Further, his phone couldn’t be rebooted in the ordinary way, with the ol’ hold-down-a-volume-button-and-the-power-button trick. So I had to go online and google for whatever backup plan C is to reboot iPhones. And it worked, because we have a bunch of backups now, despite this insane inverted pyramid structure.

(And if I may add another analogy: Computers are a lot like the sailing ships of yore in that they accumulate the data equivalent of barnacles on their hull. And just like a sailing ship had to be careened and scraped on a regular basis, this is why you need to reboot your phone or laptop every once in a while. To get those electronic barnacles off.)

So the bottom line is: Sometimes the system brain farts and needs to be reset. That might have PO’d that long-ago customer, but it’s simply the nature of the beast.

Words Words Words

24 Thursday Aug 2023

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My vocation is to help people understand things. This is different from “explaining things”; when you “explain”, the person to whom you are explaining is passive. Helping people understand things is collaborative; I want to engage with the audience, not just lecture them. I don’t want them to be a passive receiver of verbiage. I want to provide the steps on which they climb to a higher level of comprehension. In my particular case, this is through technical writing, but I do try hard to apply this in all aspects where it’s needed. Explaining things to my autistic child, for example.

So words are my stock in trade. I operate in words in a way similar to how a sculptor might work in marble, or a painter in, well, paint. I craft words into information, and try to make it engaging and helpful. It’s how I earn my daily bread.

As you might expect from someone who has been crafting information in this way for a few decades, I have some strong opinions on words and phrases in regular use. Some delight me; some drive me nuts. And I wanted to share that a bit.

Almost everyone has some word or turn of phrase that drives them nutty. Online in social media lately you can see people mixing up “your” and “you’re” all the time, and you can see it driving lots of other people absolutely nutty. (Hint: I am your friend because you’re a good person. Extrapolate.)

I first got a hint of this in my high school English class, where my favorite teacher Mr. Rodriquez—one of two English teachers who encouraged my writing ability, and to both of whom I owe a huge debt—was driven crazy when a student used the word, “nice”. “‘Nice’ how?!” he would bellow. “In what way is it ‘nice’? What makes it ‘nice’? Then use those words! ‘Nice’ is useless!” I don’t necessarily agree, but it definitely doesn’t speak well of a word when it’s lexicography is:

late 13c., “foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless,” from Old French nice (12c.) “careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish,” from Latin nescius “ignorant, unaware,” literally “not-knowing,” from ne- “not” (from PIE root *ne- “not”) + stem of scire “to know” (see science).

OED

Not very “nice” at all, is it? It drove poor Mr. Rod batty when we used it. (So of course some wags did it deliberately. Fortunately, he had a sense of humor.)

For my dad, it was “irregardless”. “It’s not a word!” he would say. “Why not just say ‘regardless’?” And I had to admit I had a point.

These and similar types of lessons encouraged me to not only be careful in which words I chose, but to make sure I didn’t choose one because it sounded “fancier” (“Irregardless!”) in the hopes it made me look clever. Don’t use “jejune” instead of “boring”, for example. Sure, sprinkle those kinds of word in your fiction to give it flavor, but just like you want a little cayenne in your gumbo, too much of that kind of thing makes it unpalatable.

As a bit of a contrast, author Dan Simmons is driven insane by the current use of “decimate” as equivalent to “utterly destroyed”. As Simmons points out, “decimate” comes from the Latin, meaning “to destroy one part in ten” (“deci” is from the Latin for “ten”). I understand his frustration. But despite many writers and grammarians desire to the contrary, English is a living language, words evolve, and sometimes they take on new meanings that don’t necessarily jibe well with their lexicographical origins. Almost everyone uses “decimate” as an equivalent for “utterly destroy” these days; Simmons’ efforts to the contrary, I think that ship has sailed. (Though personally, I use synonyms like “annihilate” or some such.)

What about me? Well, my “word irritation” comes from both a lack of precision in how these words are used, and the fact they in one case, it’s just wrong.

The first bone of contention is the sloppy way so many people use the words “couple” and “few”, often as if they’re synonyms. They’re not! “Couple” means “two”. That’s it; two. No more, no less. And yet some people mean it as if it’s equivalent to “a handful” or “a bunch” or “a few”. It makes me insane. No. It’s two. “A few” is “more than a couple.” Personally, I only use “a few” when it’s between three and ten, but I don’t expect everyone else to adhere to my OCD-enabled needs. (After “a few” comes “a bunch”, followed by “a lot”. But again, that’s me.)

A small digression: I apply similar precision to “probably” and “maybe”. “Maybe” means 50/50; “probably” for me is “a greater than 50% chance”. I know some people use them interchangeably; I don’t.

The other thing that’s been driving me batty on social media lately is when people want to make an exclamation of cuteness. That word, kids, is “Aw.” That’s what you saw when you see a cute cat video, or a baby smiles at you. NOT “awe”, which is “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.” They’re not the same, and you need to stop using them as if they were!

Words have meanings, kids. And while yes, those meanings do evolve (much though it may frustrate Dan Simmons), if you want to communicate, if you want to help people understand what you’re saying, it’s important to use the right words. So think before you speak.

So tell me: What words or phrases drive you crazy? (And tell me if you want a similar rant on grammar, which I will entitle “Why We Shouldn’t Give a Damn About Split Infinitives, and Other Grammar Rules Doug Ignores”.)

Connections

15 Saturday Apr 2023

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When we are growing up, we just don’t question the individual character traits of our parents. They are who they are, sort of like the sun and the moon. Their actions are all-but-incomprehensible, how they developed into the people you experience a mystery. They just…are.

One of the major changes a person goes through is when they realize their parents are actual people, with thoughts and feelings and histories and motivations. It can be painful, or lead to conflict, especially when our parents are very different from the person we are developing into. We saw this on a societal level during the 1960s, when many of the Boomers revolted against the strictures—social, sexual, behavioral—under which their parents and grandparents had operated for decades. (That the Boomers, in Stephen King’s words, “could have changed the world and instead settled for the Home Shopping Network” is a whole different topic.)

My Dad has been gone for nearly a quarter-century now, taken at age 63 by colon cancer that he, in classic Silent Generation fashion, dismissed the warning signs of. (“If you ever see blood in your urine or stool, Doug, be sure to tell the doctor,” was his conclusion. The entire extended Moran family went for colonoscopies after he died.) And yet his influence over me has remained and, if anything, deepened in the intervening years.

As I have aged towards grandparenthood my own self, I have had a lot of cause to reflect on these influences. And one of the biggest I’ve noticed recently, in the aftermath of being laid off, is how I connect with people.

When I was little, I never considered it at all remarkable that my dad could chat just as easily with janitors, sanitation workers, and gardeners as he could with Admirals, Congressmen, and his engineering colleagues. He was DAD, and he did what he did. It’s only in the last few years I’ve come to realize both how remarkable a skill that was, and how much of it he passed on to me.

Recently, I was laid off from my job. This always comes as a shock when you’re a high performer with heavy expectations for yourself. Though of course at my age in this particular industry—high tech—which is notoriously both sexist and ageist, it wasn’t totally surprising. High tech is going through a lemming-like period right now where everyone is laying people off because…everyone is laying people off. The executives say it’s to cut costs and prepare for a (presumed) upcoming economic downturn. I don’t believe that for a moment. To me it’s clear that companies are doing it because other companies are doing it, with a side hope that this will relieve some of the pressure put on employers to be more reasonable to workers recently. They want their power back.

(I’m sure people like Larry Summers would go to great lengths to convince people I’m wrong. Fortunately, he doesn’t even know I exist, so it’s not a big worry on my part.)

Why am I mentioning this? Because I have been absolutely astounded at how many people have reached out tell me how shocked they are; how they can’t believe my company would lay me off; how it’s a stupid move on the part of my company; asking how they can help. This isn’t just friends; it’s coworkers, former coworkers, and even distant acquaintances. I received the following text from a person I am embarrassed to admit I can’t remember at all:

I’m not putting this in to brag—or not much—but rather to note that, somehow, I seem to make an impact on people, and they remember me. People from jobs I worked at 15 years ago are reaching out. People I’ve never actually physically met. I make connections somehow.

Like my Dad did.

I have only recently realized that my tendency to chat with anyone and everyone, to try to make connections, find shared experiences (“Oh really? I was born in Connecticut!”), ask people about their backgrounds, interests, and thoughts, is something I acquired from my Dad. It’s something I picked up subconsciously. Something that I have never, ever thought about, and that I’m incredibly grateful for.

People are interesting! Almost all people. And it is the incredibly rare person I run into who I haven’t found some kind of connection with. You’re from the Canary Islands? Don’t they speak French there? I’ve been to France and speak really bad French; can we speak French? Oh, you’re Jewish, too? Oh, you like to dance West Coast Swing? You like Lord of the Rings too? How old were you when you first read it? Really? Wow; that’s young! Like my dad, I don’t care if they’re a garbage collector or a CEO; a sewer worker or a high-ranking naval officer; a teacher or a waiter or a phone support person. They all have lives, they all have stories, there’s almost always something in common.

I’d like to say “I make the effort,” but really, it doesn’t feel like an effort. It’s something I’ve done for almost as long as I can remember.

And now that I’m a bit on my heels from being laid off, I’m finding that this gift I received basically by osmosis from my Dad is something that actually gives back. That’s not why I do it; it’s not a transactional kind of thing at all. I do it because I enjoy it. Because it’s part of me. And it’s just incredibly gratifying to find out, so many years on, that people appreciate it.

I have gone through most of my life thinking I basically blend into the background, don’t make a mark on the groups and organizations I’m part of, that I’m essentially the Invisible Man. This was engrained in me in Middle and High School, where it was absolutely true; when I wasn’t being ignored, I was being bullied. That this changed significantly in college, and a very different experience has been true since I started working in high tech, just completely escaped me.

To all you people out there who think well of me, I just want to thank you. Finding out after so long is an incredible blessing.