Family Photo: Effort Over the last month, Calvin and Lawrence have participated in the weekly soccer clinic at Cal Poly. The clinic is a free community program where the kids get to practice soccer, coached by the Cal Poly soccer players, on the same field where the Cal Poly teams play their games. They're broken into groups by age. Calvin's group usually does dribbling and passing drills before scrimmaging. Lawrence's group usually plays redlight-greenlight before duck-duck-goose. I was...
18 days ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Wealth Luana got us a fancy new toaster. It works much better than our old toaster. Our old toaster was just me throwing bread into the oven, forgetting about it, and walking away until somebody finally said, "Hey, what's that burning smell?" The new toaster has illuminated touchscreen icons for selecting the item to be toasted (Bread, Bagel, Waffle, Pastry, English Muffin), as well as its desired level of toasted-ness (ranging from 'Warmed-Up-Bread' to...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Back-to-School School started last week! This is our third first day of school, but it's our first one where Calvin and Lawrence will both spend all day at school. (Just like Lasts, anything can be a First if you are specific enough. This is your first time reading my 213th newsletter. Every day is a new day.) Yet still, these are exciting milestones. This is our first year dropping Lawrence off at his kindergarten classroom in the morning. This is our first year not walking...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: Instruments The neighbor a few houses down has a band. It's a pretty big band: a couple singers, a couple guitars, a bass, drums, violin. They practice in his garage, and we can hear the music when we pass by. They mostly play Fleetwood Mac covers and other stuff like that. They're quite good. We bumped into the neighbor one day on our way to the park. One thing led to another, we mentioned we liked his music, and he invited us to visit their next practice session. So we did....
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Family Photo: Glasses Glasses make us look different. Calvin grabs Grandpa's reading glasses. It makes me smile. He looks so grown up. Another time, Cousin Nolan puts on his father's glasses. "Uncle Nolan! Uncle Nolan!" Calvin and Lawrence cry out in their singsong voices. Laughter fills their mouths, rolls off their tongues, and bounces around the room. No wonder Lois Lane could never recognize Superman in the office. Glasses make us entirely different people. Glasses make us look different....
2 months ago • 2 min read
Family Photo: Water Fight To celebrate a neighbor-friend's birthday, the kids had a water fight at the park. The water fight had no rules, but it settled into an equilibrium where three big kids walked around like Terminators (complete with sunglasses), using slow, measured steps in relentless pursuit of the little kids—completely unperturbed by any amount of water splashed back in their direction. The little kids, meanwhile, scurried around the big kids, huddled for cover, tactically...
3 months ago • 7 min read
Family Photo: Fair Play Last week, we attended a San Luis Obispo Blues baseball game with some friends from Leadership SLO. I thought this might be a good chance to teach Calvin and Lawrence about baseball - strikes and balls; fair and foul - but in the end it was a difficult venue to hold a conversation. Our group sat near the PA system, so the start of any discussion was punctured by 10-second music clips of player walk-up songs or sponsorship announcements. It was fine though. The kids...
3 months ago • 8 min read
Family Photo: Memory Lawrence's beveled mirror reflection. Friend of the Newsletter Aaron sent me a very nerdy article about ways to use AI. The main point was that the AI models will continue to improve, but they are most useful because of our specific interactions with them. The article proposed a method to capture these AI model interactions so that you could port the interaction context across other models to avoid getting locked in—Anthropic's Fable and ChatGPT's Sol would be conditioned...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Family Photo: Generational Wealth Our lives are built atop unfathomable piles of generational wealth. Generations of innovators took us from hunter-gathering, to subsistence farming, to the industrial revolution to...whatever this is. Each generation improves our understanding of science and our use of technology a little bit. Part of what makes a city so valuable is its compounding infrastructure investments across generations. I read that 250 years ago about half of children died before age...
4 months ago • 3 min read