Personal
We traveled to Des Moines for the baby shower for our upcoming grandson. We had a lovely time. Driving across the Midwest is one of my favorite things to do.
Isabella is back to college this month for her junior year.
Gabrielle started working in the NICU this month. She’s working three 12-hour shifts every week. She’s caring for the tiniest little babies.
I spent a weekend visiting a friend in Ottawa. Never been there before – it was gorgeous. I got to visit my second of the Grand Canadian Railyway Hotels.
I took a couple trains across different stretches of Canada. I love trains.
I’m coming to believe that coffee from Casey’s convenience stores has the best taste-to-price ratio, followed closely by McDonalds. Starbucks is pretty far down that list, I fear.
Professional
I’m settling into my position as Vice-President of Digital Experience Consulting at Valtech. I’m currently doing quite a bit of sales enablement, along with some front-line consulting work. In August, I managed to visit the Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal offices.
I spoke at the Universal CMS Summit in Montreal about the value of assigning names to things, in the context of using “universal CMS” as descriptor for an architecture and methodology.
Right after that, I co-led the closing discussion at CMS Connect about the value prop behind a professional organization for people working in CMS.
I’ll be speaking in Sioux Falls in September at the WIN in Workforce Summit
I’ve become really interested in JSONata – a transformation language for JSON (yes, it’s basically XSLT for JSON, which proves we’re just re-inventing everything XML ever did…). I wrote a C# deserialization wrapper for it.
VanJS is the simplest client-side JavaScript UI framework in the world. It only has, like, four functions. I’ve built some really neat little apps with it.
Playing around with AI-based grammar checking
Reading
Still powering through Questlove’s Hip-Hop Is History. Listening to an audiobook while not on a road trip is really weird for me. (I did manage to pick up the hardcover, but now I’m kind of hooked on listening to Questlove read it.)
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human are both by John Mark Comer and talk about the purpose of work and rest in a Biblical and scriptural context. They both got me thinking about trying to do an actual Sabbath every week – one day, sundown to sundown, no real work of any kind.
(It’s not the first thing that’s tempted me to try this. I follow Sofia the Jew on various socials, and she’s made me want to try it too. And Four Thousand Weeks talked quite a bit about the impact Shabbos has on strengthening Jewish community.)
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives is a delightful look at all the ways having a mess – or even just something that’s not perfect – is to our benefit. It makes me want to read Antifragile again (though Taleb drives me nuts sometimes). Also, see A Perfect Mess
How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling made me feel guilty for ordering from Amazon. It’s a combination of interviews with booksellers, and a look into the bookselling business, which is valuable, but a little depressing.
What’s Bred in the Bone is an epic novel, which I enjoyed. A friend told me it was quitessentially Canadian.
The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade is a compelling and frustrating book about the intractability of the Mexican drug trade. (Spoiler: it’s not going away until the demand for it goes away, and 99% of that demand is from the U.S.)
Watching
I watched the first episode of Firefly. There are only 24 episodes (and a movie), but it has a cult following. I’m surprised at how serious and dark it is. I always thought of Nathan Fillion as a comedy actor, but he’s kinda grim in this. I haven’t gotten back to it after the first episode.
Hit Man was a great Netflix movie, starring Glen Powell. Really fun.
However, most of my watching this month was a letdown –
I watched the first season of Sex and the City. I don’t think I’ll continue it. It hasn’t aged well – it’s basically the story of four women who define themselves through men. (Consider Carrie’s relationship with Big in the first season. He’s constantly portrayed as cool and collected, while she’s a neurotic, obsessive mess. I was annoyed by this.)
I watched the first episode of Trailer Park Boys, but no more than that. I was looking for another Letterkenny, but TPB has no heart. The people in Letterkenny were good and productive and dependable. TPB is very cynical.
I like John Cena, but the first episode of Peacemaker was confusing without the backstory of the two Suicide Squad movies. Didn’t get back to any more of that either.
Listening
Hip-Hop Is History continues to inform a lot of my listening. The latest song I’ve fallen (back) in love with is “They Want EFX” from Das EFX. For 1992, this was just wild.
I’ve been listening to The Spins from (the late) Mac Miller. The lyrics are sketchy in places, but it has So. Much. Energy. The synthesizer that comes in at 0:30 is straight out of 1980s yacht rock.
The book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives introduced me to The Koln Concert by Keith Jarret, and the fascinating backstory behind it.
Messy also introduced me to Kind of Blue from Miles Davis. Coincidetnally, I found an 8-bit version called Kind of Bloop.
I spent some time with my Dad last month, and he introduced me to this ELO concert from 2017 and this performance of “It Never Rains in Southern California” by Barry Manilow.
Random Thoughts and Trivia
The cheapest place to be a billionaire right now is Iran. You could have one billion Iranian Rials and therefore legitimately claim to be a “billionaire,” even though you’d only have about $24,000 U.S. dollars. (See: Dollar Billionaire)
Barry Manilow was a commercial jingle writer back in the 1960s. He’s responsible for the tag line, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” He was paid $500 for that.
This year’s men’s 100m sprint in the Olympics was remarkable in the sense that only .18 seconds separated first and last place. Additionally, the time of the last place sprinter this year would have won the gold medal in 1988.
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