PART 1 - The New Norm

Before properly starting the story about Marty's experience of teaching through a pandemic, I need to address a few administrative matters.

I'm not sure if you have ever personally taught in a formal setting or not. I believe that to be a hard-prerequisite to having a qualified opinion about the art of teaching. For me, I "taught" for four y...

most everyone has some level of chaos behind their computing setup. wires are just part of the package when you get into computers and their accessories. the bigger your rig, the more wiring you have to contend with. i have been battling this cable mayhem since getting my first true home computer, a gateway desktop in the early 90s. though the word 'battle' implies that there is some give and take in the situation, but that is unfortunately not the case here. i have never won or even come close to winning this altercation. it has been nothing but a full-on beatdown from day one. and my internal OCD-wiring, which is thankfully better organized, has felt this loss every hour since i powered up that first gateway computer.

when i thought about any unfinished business i had with my forties, this curiously enough, came to the forefront. i concluded that i wanted my computing "basement" (e.g. wiring) to be every bit as presentable as my computing "living room" (e.g. desktop). that was my challenge.

i spent a week, maybe two, just thinking about my options. once i had a viable idea in hand, i took to it. i shut down the operation and gutted the works. and when i say the works, i mean everything had to come out. the magnitude of this may not land for most, but i have been sitting at the same desk for nineteen years. for someone that works and dabbles in tech, this equals a lot of wiring buildup, some vital and some that may have been decommissioned as long as ten years ago. in example, the wires below my desk could still support a palm pilot, something i haven't used in at least, cough, three years. but all new visions require a pristine palette to start, so that is why it all had to be cleared out.

this project has produced a new issue though--now the underbelly of my desk is such a piece of art, i wish it wasn't so hidden away.
















to the obvious question of what is the round thing on the floor. it is a 50's circular fan and doubles as a (1) footrest year-round, and (2) a fan in the summer months to combat the heat produced by my yoked mac tower.

to a less obvious but still relevant question, yes, that main outlet strip across the top does have pivoting lights which makes working on the setup not only easy, but almost fun.

what follows is a talk my friend sam gave at a gave developer microtalk event. the talks of the night, expectedly, dealt with coding and development and the act of creating. mercifully batting cleanup, sam's talk, generically lableled PROCESS, blew the lid off the tenth floor of a twenty-five story building.

i recently shared this Khoi Vinh quote with a young man who works for me that has been in a bit of a funk recently. i told him that this was something i read every morning before starting work to remind myself of the import of my daily effort. i then added that as i've gotten older i've discovered that a lot of design and technology theory seems to be fully relevant to our personal lives too (and near-surely any industry you can imagine). i find the above example to be abundantly and beautifully evident of this observation.

last week was high on troy week. at every turn it seemed i was being lavished with a body of compliments and kudos and appreciation for a variety of things, unrelated, from a variety of folks, also unrelated. some of the people i see weekly and some of the people i hadn't heard from in many months and in one case many years. the many years person rounded the week out, coming in on saturday evening. it came as such a surprise and carried such an unexpected remark, it is the only specific item from the week i'm going to share: the "pager site" mentioned would be the third website i ever made in my life, which justifies my friend's astonishment that it could have possibly withstood any test of time. regardless, if that isn't a puff of wind up a fella's skirt, i don't know what would be. thanks j. and thanks not for having the thought, but for having the consideration and going to the effort of letting me know you had the thought. i appreciate this doesn't always happen, or doesn't happen enough in today's frenzy-filled days at least.

and then monday morning as i walked anthony to school i took in my scene. my four year was energetically charging on his bike towards school, which he is still thankfully crazily excited about. i was appreciative of the early fall weather. i had a solid night of sleep. i had a good swim the day before. i thought of the previous week and how dear and giving my world had been to me. as i studied the blue sky i thought that perhaps this life of adulation may be my new standard and i could now routinely expect such generous feedback from the folks in my life. perhaps this was the universe making good on all of the karmic rewards surely due a soul as kind and gentle and needy as mine. then at work, before i had logged the first hour at my desk, a young co-worker told me that some of my behaviors were indicative of a high-functioning autistic and she wondered, aloud to me, and believe it or not, innocently, if i'd ever been tested. before her sentence was complete, i heard the magic bubble that had been following me around for the last seven days implode with a wispy simper behind me. and that quickly the universe i thought may have so recently changed in my favor, appeared to have righted itself.

a student of mine from last year forwarded me a link today. he said that after seeing this interview he felt it might be of interest to me and of possible use in future classes. i opened the link. this was the first thing i heard. after that line i paused the video, now fifteen seconds into a thirty one minute interview, readied a reply to my student and wrote, "that is possibly the single greatest line i've heard in regard to technology since i've begun working in technology."

i've never heard of stephen fry but after listening to thirty minutes of him free-styling here, i can assure you that three months from now i will be very familiar with his thoughts on technology and life's chase.

you can all thank luke, the most stylish student i've ever had the pleasure of working with for this juicy and marbled slab of greatness. and, send good thoughts and karma his way as he looks for a curious endeavor with a non-profit in the atlanta region.

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

it's quite remarkable what a fella can achieve when he's not trying to entertain a bunch of folks he doesn't even know.

marty and i have been married just over four years and i have finally, just now, convinced her to do away with the metal undercarriage to our bed. now the box spring is right on the floor and the mattress, obviously, sits on top of that. some people think it's silly, stupid and without point. those people are wrong. and simple. and waste their hatred of things on really, really dumb stuff. if you are going to hate, you should hate something of consequence, something that merits your venom, like walgreens or people who say that titanic was really an ok movie.

reasons we are better off without the metalworks beneath our bed.

1. bella can climb in and out of the bed without the aid of a stepstool or boost from marty given her little baby legs.
2. troy can climb in and out of the bed without the aid of a stepstool or boost from marty given his malformed stub legs.
3. not tempted or able to store meaningless stuff under the bed.
4. more room in our room for my bursting ego.
5. summer is coming and we live in st louis and heat rises.
6. when in bed, the room looks super big and you can play the "i'm a little munchkin living in a mushroom house and it all looks wildly out of proportion but that's because i'm a munchkin guy and i am also wildly out of proportion" game.
7. the metal framework holding your box spring does not do anything. the fact that you think it serves a need is the result of a capitalist conspiracy.
8. after peeing the bed in the middle of the night and getting angrily thrown out by marty i don't have as far to plummet.

now i just have to convince marty to let me hang up my black felt iron maiden posters and my vision will be complete.

One tastefully completed bathroom wall. One lamp. One frame. One muted tone of paint. And one insignia which I'm thinking was not part of the original vision. Outright vandalism or public character? While part of me hates this lack of respect for others property, a shred of me appreciates these flares of individuality for the extra cycle my mind's forced into while it plays an adult version of Whe...

Someone recently turned me onto this website called Web Pages that Suck. Being a student of the genre I was anxious to pay the place a visit and get new and fresh insights. What a chasm of disappointment I tumbled into. This Vincent Flanders fellow is a complete self-aggrandizing fool and guru-wannabe. Here he has dedicated an entire effort to highlighting the sub-par and uninformed work of others but overlooked one significant requirement of such a venture ? The nay-sayer should most likely demonstrate a mastery of the medium before bashing others. You're site sucks V.F. And, I'm putting it at the top of my list of crappy sites, not because it is the worst but because your scathing reviews of others jettison you to the bottom of the food chain. It's called negative style points.

Now, don't misunderstand me, many of the sites on the web could be improved. But, this guy is not the Macgyver we've been waiting for to point out what and who they are. Furthermore, it's OSHA-safe to say if this guy orchestrated all web development, it would be the fad that the 50-year old guy in my office claims it to be. But, when it comes down to it, I predominately feel sorry for aspiring developers who actually listen to this dullard. It's like Jonestown all over again.