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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #203 (Home)

Published 8 days ago • 6 min read

Family Photo:
No Place Like Home

I attended DynamicsCon 2026 last week.

This year's event was in Las Vegas, which apparently piqued my dad's interest in Microsoft's enterprise SaaS offerings...so we drove out and attended the event together. One evening, after learning the latest about inventory costing, demand planning, and Power BI administration, we headed off property to watch The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere.

The Sphere is a monument to immersive entertainment. Its dome is 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, making it 60 feet taller (and some 450 feet wider) than the Statue of Liberty. The interior wraparound display covers 160,000 square feet, with its 16K × 16K resolution producing more than a quarter billion pixels. It would take roughly 20,000 55-inch TVs to tile 160,000 square feet which, coincidentally, is The Sphere's show capacity.

In his Atlantic profile, Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas, Charlie Warzel wrote:

I wanted to be cynical about the Sphere and all it represents—our phones as appendages, screens as a mediated form of experiencing the world. There’s plenty to dislike about the thing—the impersonal flashiness of it all, its $30 tequila sodas, the likely staggering electricity bills. But it is also my solemn duty to report to you that the Sphere slaps...

And it does. The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere experience was augmented with precision sound, haptic seats, and physical effects. They even used giant fans to create a dusty tornado in the theatre.

It was cool. But by the time Dorothy was clicking her ruby red slippers together, I found myself thinking about home. It's fun to travel and see things, but it's more meaningful having a place to go back to and people to share those stories with.

Calvin's been reading The Wizard of Oz in school, so the best part of the week was coming home on Friday showing him my pictures, and telling him all about The Sphere and what it was like to watch the movie there.

There's no place like home.

Dad Joke:
Home Rescue

Source: The Onion​

Highlights:
Home Building

​Making a home together by Henrik Karlsson​

For me, this is Johanna. We first met when she was 21 and I was 22 and later became a couple. What is me in me has unfolded primarily in her company. This has been a mutual unfolding; we spoke each other into being.
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This essay is about how we made our first home together. By home I don’t mean just the physical structure, but the emotional space in which the coevolutionary loop plays out.
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Now, it wasn’t obvious that our lives would have a solution that satisfied both. Sometimes people intersect at one point in time and love each other, but then the arrows of their lives continue in separate directions. When I contemplated this possibility, I saw myself sitting in New York at 40, Johanna somewhere in the forests where Sweden bleeds into Norway, both thinking, it didn’t really get better than that.
...
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The house, built by my grandfather and two teenagers he hired in 1957, was conceived a simple cube of bricks perched atop a small hill. But over six decades, it had grown and changed, adapting to its environment and its inhabitants. My grandfather bricked over a window to make the living room easier to furnish. A door was moved, walls put up. In the 1970s, a new wing was added, going out at a southwestern angle to create a warm, shielded terrace on the backside, where they could grow grapes and block out the prefabricated houses that were creeping up around them.
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This process of gradual adaptation, which Stewart Brand calls how buildings learn, is a type of coevolutionary loop, like that which fitted the orchid to the moth and vice versa: the house was changed to fit my grandparent’s life, but the house also changed them.
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Because of this loop, the house, when Johanna first visited in February 2015, felt deeply human in a way that new houses do not. The design choices were layered with insights that had occurred over decades of lived experience. It was an architectural manifestation of my grandparents.
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Not all houses age like this. For it to happen, the mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander writes, the design must allow you to “mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever.” Often, modern houses make this harder. They force you to live inside a preplanned, static vision. Unresponsive to your evolution, they alienate.
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There is a corollary for relationships. Some relationships are hard, or even impossible, to change. As an individual, you grow—but your father won’t acknowledge that change or adapt to it, and the relationship gets stuck. Other relationships are fluid and open-ended, they grow to fit you better and better the more time you invest in them, like an old house where you rearrange the walls, doors, and furniture until the light falls just right.
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As the spring of 2015 became summer became fall became winter again, we settled into routines:
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—the dish brush goes here;
—the trash can gets pulled to the road on Tuesday night;
—Sundays are for listing everything that went wrong during the week on the blackboard we painted on the wall of my study, so we can figure out what needs to change.
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This latter habit was the most important. I was learning to program, and so I liked to think about our life as a piece of software. We had our routines and our principles, this was the code. We ran the code by living it. The list on the blackboard was the bug log, a record of the ways our routines broke down in contact with reality. We kept going through the code until our life did what we wanted it to do, more or less.
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The bug log was, I realize now, a way of making the coevolutionary loop explicit. Writing down everything that went wrong helped us pinpoint the bottlenecks, the frictions. It also forced us to put words to our goals, values, and assumptions, opening those up for discussion and refinement. Is that really what you want? What are you willing to give up to achieve it? How do you feel about it?
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This, day after day, was how we grew a home.

​Designing a New Old Home: Curiosity by Simon Sarris​

To put it another way, every single decision you do not make, some architect or builder or contractor is either going to have to ask you, or in many cases they are simply going to make it for you. And you cannot rely on them asking you.
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So you must acquaint yourself with the details and small decisions of home design. Professionals you work with will not always ask, they will in many cases simply pick the most common option, perhaps out of laziness or simply wanting to speed things along, or because they assume that if you do not ask about it, you do not care. This of course contributes to the sameness experienced in most new construction. Many builders themselves seem to forget that there are options.
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What then, are you to do?
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The world is built from materials. I recommend that you become obsessed with finding out what they are. What are your walls made of? Interior? Exterior? The most beautiful places you go regularly, can you remember what the floors are made of? Return and look. What about at your work? The gym? Think about the tiles in the bathrooms you visit, even commercial, on the floors and walls. What colors are they? What makes up the ceiling of your basement? Can you see how the floor is built?
What’s your kitchen table made out of? Is it wood, or does it just look like wood? How are the legs fastened to the top? Why do some wood floors look like shiny plastic? Why do some showers look dumpy, and others luxurious? What makes them feel this way? Is it the tile? The floor material? A liner? The lighting?
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You must take notice when you find beautiful places. It is not just materials and components that create these places, but patterns and interactions between materials. Beautiful places do not repeat identically the world over, but they do rhyme. I suggest you start to collect some of these places.
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You home is more than just a place to sleep and do chores, it must also be a place where you can enact daily rituals, and let its beauty dawn on you.
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“Home” is the set of rituals you make for yourself and others there, in order to dwell poetically in a place. It is worth cultivating an understanding of beauty and rituals as compelling forces, and it is worth listening when environments speak to you, even if you never have the chance to design a home. (Regardless of where they live, most people have more control over their environment — and their environment has more control over them — than they realize.)

​The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson​

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

iamJoshKnox Highlights:
Going Home

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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