What do programming, playing Starfield, an putting together jigsaw puzzles have in common?
Everything!
At least, if you look at them the right way.
Continue readingToday was a hard day. A busy day.
Not emotionally hard… just, really full of difficult, mentally challenging work, mixed in with the baseline labor of living – maintaining things, maintaining professional relationships, that sort of stuff.
My plan for the end of the day was to pop over to my boat to give her a shiny ceramic coating, only to discover when I arrived at the marina that I couldn’t park because of Comic-Con (which wouldn’t really start until the next day) – I was pissed, smack-the-steering-wheel pissed. I pulled a u-turn, ready to head back home, when it occurred to me that there was other parking, and indeed I found a nice spot nearby.
I spent the next 3 hours sweatily applying ceramic sealant to Azulita as the sun set. Birds peeked in, music played in the distance, and the polish was turning out spectacularly.
It all came together in a moment of gratitude, and that is when I started feeling happy.
Continue readingRecently I was walking around an airport and saw a tech ad for ‘creators’, with a very cool person sitting in front of a very cool audio mixing panel presumably creating very cool things.
Fair enough. It was meant to evoke the urge to create in all of us, especially those who don’t often get too. It certainly did so for me, at least momentarily.
It got me thinking, though… I am a creator, I have been my entire coding life. Coders make beautiful, invisible, tiny, intricate things – the most complex things ever made by humankind. More delicate than spiderwebs, more perplexing than Escher.
Continue readingI’ve had an amazing life. It’s easy to forget, especially with my fogbrain, but my life has been exceptional, exciting, stimulating. It feels normal to me because it’s always been consistently so, but looking back… wow.
Yes, it’s easy to forget, but from time to time I stumble across triggers that bring it all back. Today, that trigger was a bunch of old directories I peeked into when moving them to a new hard disk – it turned out they were archives of my old websites.
Cooking is a ancient thing, deeply and instinctually resonant. “Look at the beast I killed and brought home for you!” Also, chocolates.
“Grab some stuff, lets hit the beach”. No bad day ever started with these words. I’m from the Caribbean, where February is just another month, but after living in California nearly 3 decades, you start to appreciate just how special it is to live a few minutes from the Pacific – it keeps us warm in winter, and cool in summer, and is always putting on a show.
The funny thing is that the beach is there every day and the sunset happens nearly every day and we kind of forget about it. The world is a beautiful place, and it’s in our nature to normalize it, to let it fade into the background. I simultaneously envy and pity folks who live on the beach.
So, “grab some stuff, lets hit the beach” we said on some random Saturday, and we did, and it was awesome.
I ran across Zen Habits today. What an amazing blog – just reading a couple of posts reset my brain… highly recommended.
San Diego has always been a sailing-friendly area – it is part of the Santa Barbara ‘bubble’, which protects us from most of the gale-level winds north of Point Conception (our Cape Horn Jr.), but *occasionally* we get decent wind. Even then, it’s exceedingly well behaved decent wind :)
Here, the compression off Point Loma pushed the wind to 20+ knots, and Azulita loved it. I was able to get her to about 9.5kts, well above her hull speed. Keep an eye on the wake trailing the boat, and the bow wave we’re leaving behind (nothing compared to a motorboat, but massive for me :) )
San Diego sunsets are famously spectacular, and a perfect late December sail is arguably the best way to experience them. ‘Nuff said :)
Party? Who needs a ‘party’?
Photographic Evidence
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