October 17, 2026

• Some quick blog test — edited via Micropub update. And edited. Then re-edited.

October 14, 2026

• Last night we watched “Return of the Archons,” and that means tonight is “Space Seed” in the periodic re-view of TOS. That means it’s also time to rewatch The Wrath of Khan. That means it’s probably best to do ST:III and ST:IV to wrap up the Spock saga.

  Left in S1, of note:

  • This Side of Paradise
  • Errand of Mercy
  • City on the Edge of Forever

  I think I’m actually an S2 kinda guy. S1 has its charms, but there are a few real stretches of horse latitudes in there.

  My S1 nostalgia is for:

  • Arena, which is the first thing I ever remember seeing on tv.
  • Where No Man Has Gone Before, for the freaky eyeballs
  • The Enemy Within, for the good/evil horned poodles
  • The Menagerie, coz it’s cool but also just a clever way to reuse a failed pilot.
  • What Are Little Girls Made Of (freaked me out as a child when Lurch did other peoples’ voices)
  • The Galileo 7. As a kid I completely identified with Spock. As an adult, I think most of my leadership mistakes are pretty much me acting like Spock in The Galileo 7.
  • Tomorrow Is Yesterday, because it’s so hammy

October 9, 2026

• Not sure it’s possible to completely kick LinkedIn, but I did cancel my subscription and turned off anything that isn’t a message from a human.

  Every so often I come across people who don’t have profiles. It’s rare, but I guess I decided to convert my admiration to a step in the right direction.

  I could carry on about the slop-posts and all, but it really comes down to the fact that it somehow feels compulsory, so I hate it and don’t want to think about it.

October 7, 2026

• Funny tale of Lucasfilm IP guardians getting mad about a pacifist.

  To their point, I guess it is “Star WARS.”

October 4, 2026

• I remember taking Ethical Decision-Making. It was a 200-level Philosophy elective.

  We had a conversation about so-called lifeboat ethics, and even the one Reaganite in the class described that as an extreme metaphor. Like, even he thought “save that one for actual lifeboats.”

  My so-called “progressive caucus” city counselor — he isn’t in the DSA, though — talks about the “deserving poor” at town halls.

  Lifeboat ethics is pretty much entirely how we’re socially organized now.

October 3, 2026

• Say what you will about the CFO coming around and saying “I’m in a group chat with some other CFOs and they had some ideas about IT ratios,” at least it was a group chat with some other CFOs, not Sonnet on low effort.

September 30, 2026

• “The agonized ego is a ring of defense around nothing.”

  — Alan Watts

  Management and ego sort of travel together. On my worst days at work, I usually trace it back to ego, meaning things that seemed really god awful sort of diminish to “more annoying than tragic” once I ask “was this tragic or am I protecting myself from something?”

  I think that’s work for everybody, not just managers, but in the midst of a tough transition, I know my team is watching and appraising and there’s an extra burden: They want stability, advocacy, and a sense of up- and across-managing effectiveness.

  It’s not my favorite zone. Hero managers — performative “us against the world” types — feed off the cheap energy of a team they’ve quietly convinced is dependent on them for protection from whatever is out there. That’s unchecked ego. Gratification of the self at the expense of whatever common purpose we can somehow cobble together at work.

  I had my hero manager, Man of the People phase, and it hurt my team. My mode is more subdued these days, and that’s an opposite swing of the pendulum that doesn’t always read well in hard times.

September 27, 2026

• Life in IT is a series of interactions with technology that sometimes get you the expected outcome and sometimes do not. Leadership in IT is a series of decisions to delegate those interactions, then learning how they went.

  Sometimes things go wrong, and depending on how you choose to retrospect, you can undermine continuous improvement:

  “Understanding an issue is not the same as fixing it. A good explanation can make things worse. Once everyone agrees that the behaviour was reasonable, the urgency to change anything disappears.”

  I’d like more of a culture of “I don’t want the details,” but hold open some space for stepping through the details in another context, after the urgency to improve has been preserved. There are coaching opportunities in those kinds of conversations, and sometimes people just want to be reassured that they had done the reasonable thing.

September 26, 2026

• Saw Sleep here in Portland a few nights ago. Like I said, I dig Hempispheres. Seeing them live, playing their new stuff plus closing the night with Dragonaut, was great. The crowd loved it all.

  It’s def not the Sleep of before, but it is good in its own right. I was on the fence because early reviews of this tour were poor. I’m so glad I went. It is hard to convey how such a spare, heavy, bass-forward trio can elicit the kind of energy Sleep does.

  Try this 4:20 cut of “Have Spacesuit Will Travel.” It’s pretty much the thesis statement of this iteration of the band.

  https://youtu.be/KhwiNPsaPfA?is=ngb1r5p-KlfOetXa

  

September 24, 2026

• You generally want politicians to understand what politics even is, and I gotta say things are not looking good. Plainly some of these people don’t think they even have ideologies.