Open water
I was in Santa Ana for the week for work stuff, and as one does in Santa Ana I found myself spending a lot of the time on a boat. I was talking with a broker...
Two tweets
Here are two tweets that have been stuck in my head since reading them: They are both true, and the contrast between them points to a fundamental tension...
Class of 1905 Senior Week
The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was in town this weekend, and naturally we went. There are few places that seem more worthy of love than the SABF; it takes...
Momentum
I've found that momentum in my side projects is easy to gain and easy to lose, especially for a project like Buttondown where there are a bunch of things...
Back home
It is overwhelming for me to be back home after time away. Overwhelming in a good way, I mean. My favorite part of any trip is the first two hours back in...
Resort switches
A quick email this week, because I promised myself leisure and I still have a few hours left in Paris: I picked up Ex-formation at a small bookshop in the...
Neglected herbs
One of my favorite possessions is 172 things to do in order to increase your level of accomplishment, a tiny booklet I picked up in The Regional Assembly of...
Red Zone Tasks
This Sunday marked the annual shift in Sunday habits: Out with a productive morning filled with a bike ride and maybe an omelette followed by reading in Cal...
A little bit older
I turned 25 this week. I wrote about it a little, and now I am tempted to write about writing about it. It was hard to write about turning 25 this year...
Knowing what's important
I mentioned last week that this month was my one-year anniversary at TenantBase: I have officially been living the startup/work-from-home lifestyle for a...
Run a line around your think
How do you do your best work? When I was at Amazon, there was a running joke that your IDE changed as you progressed in your career (or, to use the Amazon...
The source of the peach-blossom stream
The haze lifted yesterday, and with it came the first great summer day in a while. My partner was in New York this weekend, so I got to live like a bachelor....
The one about television
I. The Ringer wrote an interesting but mostly flawed piece arguing that television seasons are in general, too lean: And so, instead of 22 episodes of The...
Four days in Austin
We don't take enough trips. Let's just book some flights and figure out the rest later. A month later, we end up in Austin, on a balmy Thursday. My Apple...
Thirteen percent fluent
"In an old house in Paris / That was covered in vines / Lived twelve little girls / In two straight lines.” If you've been around me for the past week, you...
After the Sundance
This week is a reminder that when you live in a place for long enough, you have to watch some of your favorite parts of it fade: The Sundance on 9th is now...
Weekends
It is hard to go from a four-day weekend to a two-day weekend. It is literally half of the previous weekend. You get to Sunday, your hands are tired from...
Burger ROI
I was in California this week for work, from Wednesday to Friday. The office is in Orange County, which is not what most people imagine when I say "I was in...
Twelve hundred pounds of paint
Boeing offers a tour of their production facility (the largest building in the world by volume!), which is one of the auxiliary Seattle things that I never...
Thirty seven percent
A generalized answer to the optimal stopping problem (which is sort of a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which in my opinion is an infinitely...