Greetings, friends. I hope you are well. The big news here is that Besha and I went to the Oregon Symphony last night to hear a two-fer: Brahms’s Symphony no. 4, one of my all-time favorites, followed by Itzhak Perlman performing Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1.

The evening’s aperitif was a piece by Samuel Barber called Overture to The School for Scandal, which was lively and delightful. The composition cast Barber in a very different light from his better-known, and IMHO, dreadfully boring Adagio for Strings. The overall impression was almost cinematic, as if Barber had been busy during his conservatory days consuming a steady diet of Stravinsky and maybe Gershwin. Which he probably was.

About Brahms 4, well, what is there to say. His last symphony is the culmination of the entire Romantic era of Western music, plain and simple, and I will fight anyone who wants to debate me on that.

Last night’s orchestra performance was impeccable. After the crashing finale to the opening Allegro, the conductor paused, then turned to the audience to quip, “… and that was just the first movement!”

Greetings, friends. How are you? I woke up groggy as usual but I’m feeling pretty good this morning. AutoSleep says I’m down to 4.4% sleep debt, which is my lowest in months. I think Besha’s good habits are rubbing off on me. I actually like getting up early now, even though this is my first time living north of the 45th parallel, which means rising before dawn in the Pacific Northwest winter. It makes me feel virtuous and productive.

Speaking of virtuous habits, I have been keeping up with Hal’s half-marathon pre-training program. I can run almost two miles without stopping now, and a good thing, too, because [fanfare] Michelle and I both got tickets to run the Brooklyn Half marathon in May! I am unreasonably excited to be cursing myself and my foolish ambitions of self-improvement about ten miles in, somewhere between Bensonhurst and Gravesend.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten some lovely responses from several of you in the last week that I’d like to touch on.

Eric and Jana, I hope you’re paying attention, because here’s some Latin for you.

Greetings, friends! This is entry #7, which means it’s been a whole week since I promised myself I would write 750 words or for 15 minutes every day. I will give myself a modest pat on the back. I can only aspire someday to match Rick’s 800-plus series of journal entries. It would seem contrary to my habits, but I’m already working on an 890 day Duolingo streak. Y pues, ya puedo hablar un poco español. I am an aging and lazy man, but I am finding the development of new habits of self-care extremely satisfying.

As of today, my memorial to Aaron Swartz has gotten 90-odd likes on Facebook, whereas my invective-filled rant about creeping white supremacism has gotten 11. I am permitting Facebook to leverage my journal to sell ads for your eyeballs, and undoubtedly a slightly sentimental recollection of an old friend is better for user engagement than a dark political screed. Apparently the almighty Algorithm values one over the other at a ratio of at least 8-to-1. It’s weird to see AI shadowbanning in such stark relief. All hail the mighty Algorithm!

Accordingly, I have pulled the covers off and made the journal public again. I wanted Quinn to be able to read my earlier post without having to sign up by email. I want Iván to have his RSS feed. I’d like my crotchety old Dad to be able to peer in now and again.

Greetings, friends. I have a fun topic for you today. Let’s talk about privilege, shall we?

[a dozen browser tabs close shut in unison]

Alka replied yesterday to say:

I appreciate the dialog, the way you ended acknowledging the privilege to own these arms.

Greetings, friends. First, let me say thank you to everyone who responded or commented on yesterday’s post.

I’ve been wrestling for the few days that I’ve been journaling in view of my friends as to whether or not to make this project fully public. My Facebook account is default private, but I started out with the Substack open by default. I thought about it for a day or so, and then switched the Substack to private, with approval required for subscription.

First off, this journal is addressed to you, my friends. Says so in the title. You are allowing to me to engage in a kind of (mostly one-way) group therapy, in which I have the freedom to be fairly open and honest and even, yes, vulnerable. Keeping it private like LiveJournal in the olden days, when dinosaurs crossed the information superhighway in large herds and modems creaked in the darkness.

But on the other hand, I do have ideas that I want to share, some of them quite passionately. I think our human world as a whole is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly fucked, in at least a couple different ways. I do not see this view being widely promoted in the mainstream, nor so much views on what to do about it. Sure, everyone knows that global climate change is happening, and fascism is on the rise everywhere, but what are we going to do about it? Oh, maybe not everyone knows that. Well fuck.

Greetings, friends. This past week was the 10th anniversary of the passing of Aaron Swartz, a fact to which I was alerted by a Facebook post of Rich’s. Obviously I can’t believe it’s been that long.

I know it is poor form to speak ill of the dead, but they were human in life, once. I think people have poured into Aaron’s memory that which they wanted to see in him, but to me it all feels like a cardboard cutout of who he really was.

Aaron was, to say the least, exasperating. I met him at some open wireless spectrum thing hosted by Lawrence Lessig at Stanford circa 2002. What I remember from that first meeting was going out for lunch with him and Cory Doctorow and, in my recollection, Wendy Seltzer at a Thai restaurant in Palo Alto. Aaron poured over the menu at the restaurant and wound up ordering white rice. He was a supertaster, apparently, which was a thing I had never heard of.

He was absolutely brilliant, no doubt. Aaron was 14 going on 44, able to keep up with the intellectual heavyweights in the tech industry before he was old enough to shave. And he was possessed of a profound sense of justice, and fairness, and freedom, and he was determined to work for it. But he was also obstinate, he loved to thumb his nose at authority, and he was intensely competitive.

Greetings, friends. As is now standard, some corrections: Kellan kindly wrote me this morning to explain that “reduction in force” absolutely does constitute a kind of legal positioning. I can’t say I’m surprised. I probably should’ve looked it up first. The opinions expressed in this journal are strictly my own, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Also, 30 years ago I did still fantasize about making a living as a writer. Specifically, I was fifteen and I wanted to be a “poet” but after the fashion of Jim Morrison. No one should be surprised by this and some of you may remember it. (Looking at you, Moon.)

25 years ago, even, I was still an ill-fated creative writing major at Temple University. 20 years ago, oddly enough, I was still working as a software engineer at what had been until very recently still called “O’Reilly & Associates”, and the following year they would give me and Rich and Jo a contract to write a book.

So maybe I have always wanted to write, and write for a living, and I would still if given the chance. I still don’t want your money for this though. And at this point, writing would probably slot in at best third on my list of desired backup careers, after astrophysicist (you know, like Brian May), and voice-over artist. Maybe fourth, now that I’ve seen Ford v. Ferrari.

Greetings, friends. First things first — it is entirely characteristic of me to write a first journal entry, and then, in the immediately subsequent entry, have to publish several factual corrections. Michelle ran a 10k, not a 5k, and I mixed up Kimmie’s Morning Pages practice with Kellianne’s 750words.com writing tool. The latter are similar in premise but not the same! My apologies to all three brilliant people whom I admire. Also, I will never not think of Kellianne as “Moon”.

Speaking of Moon, she posted yesterday her own journal entry, and credited me alongside Rick with inspiring her to journal more publicly. I love it when friends bring out the best in each other. I hope Moon and I both keep it up the way Rick has. Someone commented that it’s like 2003 all over again. I eagerly await the widespread resurgence of cheese sandwich blog posting.

The layoffs yesterday… could have been worse. No one on my team was affected and our current goals and scope of responsibility remain unchanged, for which I am truly grateful. I got to hand-pick the team of five engineers I supervise, and as I told them this morning, I am grateful every day when I sit down to work that I get to collaborate with such talented people. I always feel good after giving a pep talk. I don’t know if I do it for them or for me.

About 15% of the company was laid off, including, somewhat surprisingly to me, that same proportion of the Engineering department. To digress a moment, the company leadership unfailingly refers to the event as a RIF, which is shorthand for a “reduction in force”. While not technically inaccurate, the term to me smacks of a kind of disingenuous doublespeak. The more prosaic and commonly-used “layoffs” seems too tawdry, too indelicate, and therefore we must apply a more technical and impersonal euphemism, which we further euphemize by reducing to a three-letter acronym, which we pronounce as riff, like the guitar lick.

Greetings, friends. Today I’m starting what I intend to become a habit of writing daily and sharing it with you. I’m inspired partly by Kimmie’s 750 words a day journal and Rick’s Good Morning. Hello. How Are You?, the latter of which he crossposts to Facebook, and which the Algorithm has decided I want to read every morning. And it turns out, I sort of do want to read every morning what Rick has been thinking about. Sometimes he’s ruminating about culture or politics, and sometimes he’s talking about what his daughter said to him at breakfast, but Rick is a pretty interesting guy. I often learn things from his journal, and at the very least I get a warm fuzzy feeling from witnessing a friend’s train of thought rumble through the same mountain tunnel at exactly the same time of day every day.

So here we are. I don’t expect, and indeed don’t care whether anyone ever bothers to read this, but I do want to develop a habit of writing, and almost nothing motivates me more reliably than a sense of social obligation. If I have told you that I intend to write 750 words or for 15 minutes daily, whichever comes first, then I’m about 10000% more likely to actually do it.

In like fashion, it’s worth me mentioning here that I messaged Michelle over the weekend to congratulate her on running her first 5K, and she told me that she was training for the Brooklyn Half Marathon in May. Running a half marathon has been on my bucket list for years, and of course seeing an opportunity to hitch that intention to a bit of social accountability, I immediately offered to run it with her, and that led to me signing up for the Brooklyn Half ticket lottery. We shall see if either Michelle or I actually get a bib, but, if not, there are other races out there.