I am driving to Connecticut tonight to pick up my mom and bring her back tomorrow for Thanksgiving. I am hoping that I left late enough to avoid a lot of the nasty rush hour traffic.

The oddest thing happened to me today. My neighbor texted me this morning saying that she heard a cat crying and thought it was stuck in my car, which was parked in my driveway. I went out to look—and looked pretty thoroughly—but saw and heard nothing of a cat. I thought my neighbor must have been mistaken.

An hour later my neighbor texted me again saying the cat was still in there, but stopped crying when I went outside to look. I went out again dutifully, looked again but far more quietly for the cat, and still found no trace of it.

An hour after that, my neighbor texted me again and said that the cat was crying louder and louder, and that she wanted to call animal control to get it out of my car. She asked me if that was OK with me, and I said yes. I went out a third time, and still did not observe in any way a cat in my car.

Finally, about 10 minutes after that, while I was in my house, I opened the window and then for the first time I heard a cat crying over and over and over again. I went out and heard the cat and the sound was coming from the engine block of my car. I still couldn’t see a cat though and did not know what to do.

Fortunately, a police officer and the animal control officer in my town came over and, after about half an hour of trying, were able to pluck out a tiny, tiny kitten that had m crawled beneath my car’s engine and lodged itself in there. Fortunately everything is all right with my car and nothing bad happened to the cat. They took it away in a cardboard box I gave them, and presumably brought it to a shelter.

My wife and I went grocery shopping together (without the kids), for the first time since my daughter was born 9 years ago. We went to a huge Italian market we had never been to before, bought a bunch of stuff we didn’t plan to, and had a really great time together. It’s funny that these little things can be so wonderful.

This is my handiwork for the night. Most of the kids’ Hanukkah presents are wrapped. 😮‍💨

After a week away from it, I finally sat down and wrote a little bit more of my article for my company’s newsletter. I still have about a week and half to complete it, and I am most of the way there.

My topic has drifted a bit from what I intended to write. I started with the intention of writing about how to execute a data call project. (A data call project is when a government organization asks private companies to send it data, which it then uses for analysis and reporting.) What I actually wrote so far is an introduction to how the insurance industry (which is the industry I worked in) extracts value from Big Data, and a call to action stating that insurance regulators should also leverage Big Data to help them regulate the industry. The whole thing will eventually serve as an introductory chapter to a much larger white paper (or is it a short book?) that I plan to complete over the course of next year.

It’s all very dry stuff, especially to those outside my field. It is important for me, though, to start writing down the things I know about at work. I think that getting published in industry journals, starting humbly with my own company’s periodic newsletter, will help me improve my profile in the industry, and is the best way for me to advance in my career and to make a difference. I know how to write clearly, which is a skill I have been undervaluing for many years. Now I plan to rely on that strength to move forward.

A real “rebuilding year” is when a sports team is broken down and reassembled, basically from scratch, after—and as a response to—a dreadful season. 2020 was a dreadful season for, well, everyone on earth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It certainly was for me. I experienced some deep trauma back in 2018 when my father died, which I thought went away after a few months, but never really did. Watching my father die (of Alzheimers and old age) completely messed me up. The emerging pandemic in early 2020 let the lingering feelings I had from that time metastasize into full-blown depression and anxiety. Work and home life were both stressful to me all the time. My relationships with everybody suffered. I was a wreck. So was everyone else at the time, which blinded me to how much of a mess I was. At some point, my eyes slowly opened to what was really going on with me, mental-health wise. My problem was that once I realized that my brain wasn’t working right (as in, rationally), I could not trust any of my thoughts, even the ones that could lead me to getting better. It took me months to figure out how to get help, even though, in hindsight, it wasn’t really that hard. By the end of 2020, I was well on the way to recovering from my mental health problems, but I hadn’t rebuilt my life yet.

2021 has been a rebuilding year for me, pretty much from its first day. I made it a point to reach out to people. At work, I set up one-on-one meetings with everybody in my department, and asked for coaching sessions from people higher than me in the organization. At home, I made efforts to listen and to be more present in my relationships with my family members. Internally, I tried to be less hard on myself. I gave up some activities that were productive but stressful. I decided to write a blog entry every day. I allowed myself to waste time on mindless fun, like just listening to music or playing video games, after the kids were in bed (or supposed to be in bed, at least). I had thought that I would get the COVID vaccine and society would get back to normal. Of course, that hasn’t quite happened yet, but I am optimistic that next year will be the time when masking and social distancing pretty much go away. (I’m aware that a lot of people don’t wear masks when they go out, but my wife and kids wear masks at school for hours and hours each day, so masking and social distancing are very much going strong for my family.)

Over the course of this rebuilding year, I have re-learned what I love to do, which I had forgotten over the past few years: Break complex things down to make them understandable; ask big, deep (or maybe dumb) questions; and to communicate ideas, especially in writing.

I am both doing less than I used to and doing more. I am programming less and writing more. I made it a point to improve my presentation skills, and I did that. I taught myself how to make better slides, even though it was very challenging at first, and how to rehearse and revise a talk until it is brisk and concise. I have given …five or more presentations at work this year, on department-level and company-level Webex calls. I created a slide deck for our managing partner to present to the board of directors. I am getting more well known for my technical skills and presentation skills at work, too, which makes me feel great about my job for the first time in years. I also made it a point to write an article for my company’s newsletter, and I am about 85% done with that now, and plan to wrap it up next week. Lastly, I learned to type in the Colemak-DH layout on an unusual, ortholinear keyboard (still really slowly, I admit), and that proved to me that my brain was flexible enough to do it. I am literally rewiring my brain.

By the end of the year, I will not be rebuilt, but will keep rebuilding. That is the most important thing I learned this year.

🎵 I have listened to Adele’s new album, 30, about five times today. I’m into it!

My wife teaches a public speaking course, and from time to time we talk about what examples of public speaking would be good for her students to watch. While we go through the usual speeches by luminaries such as President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and also pick apart the speeches of politicians of our day, I always argue that, if you want to learn public speaking, you could do a lot worse than viewing and analyzing Steve Jobs’s many famous product launches. So much has been made of Steve Jobs’s keynotes that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to them: Stevenote. He was a mesmerizing presenter.

I still think about how he unveiled the iPhone, which everyone in the audience at the time expected and knew would be a cell phone, but had no idea would be, well, the iPhone. He knew what the audience expected, and faked them out through the first half of his presentation about it. He said “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products” which upended the audience’s expectations. He repeated what those devices were—“An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet communicator”—as icons for those three things spun around on the big screen behind him, until the audience was laughing. Then he said, “are you getting it?” and people cheered as they realized that he was talking about a single product.

The thing that is amazing, re-watching the presentation, is that it is full of jokes, like the image of an iPod with a telephone rotary dial instead of a click wheel. It’s also amazing how Steve Jobs was able to sound so natural, even though he never ad-libs and never flubs a word. He extremely well rehearsed, and he made what he did look easy.

I like to think that he was genuinely excited about what he presented, and that is a key factor I have tried to bring to my own presentations. I’m not able to present anything as fascinating as the iPhone to my peers, but I have the creative freedom to come up with my own ideas when I made a presentation, and I can certainly be excited about them. The way I see it is that I present ideas, not just facts. Ideas are propulsive in ways that facts are not. Connecting ideas together is exciting—at least if done in such a way that you can keep the audience interested. Humor and surprise are effective tools to do so, as Steve Jobs so often demonstrated.

I don’t journal anymore, and I think…”what am I hiding from myself?”

🎵 I can’t wait to listen to Adele’s upcoming album, 30, which is coming out on the 19th. I have been looking forward to it for weeks.

My wife and I brought her car into the dealer tonight because its passenger-side-mirror lane-checking camera stopped working. I wonder if the global chip shortage is going to make a repair pretty much impossible.

I started playing Shantae on the Game Boy Color last night, and was blown away by its ambition and the technical prowess it exhibits. Although its resolution is indeed very low, it still offers every bit of the charm of the recent Shantae games, along with satisfying gameplay, great music, and fun character designs. It is hard to believe it was written for an 8-bit system, because it exhibits tricks like parallax scrolling backgrounds that I know were possible until the 16-bit era began. It is a gem, and is another reason I’m happy I got into retro gaming this fall.

I gave my presentation today. It went very well. It was all I achieved today, though. As soon as it was over, I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day.

My next presentation for work is tomorrow morning. I am really looking forward to it. I think I created a solid concept and structure for my team’s talk. I hope good things come of it.

🎮 I beat Metroid Zero Mission tonight. It is a fun game, and much better than the original game (Metroid) that is is a remake of.

When I cut somebody off in an online meeting, I now apologize to the person I spoke over and say “I’m just excited” about whatever it is we are talking about. It may be a lie (because how exciting is my job, anyway?) but I think it is usually appreciated. After I do this, I shut up and listen.

I almost never mean to cut people off in meetings, by the way. I find it hard, especially during conference calls or WebEx meetings, to know who should talk when a question is thrown out to all attendees at once. Sometimes I start talking at the same time someone else does, and I think we both feel embarrassed about it.

Two reasons:

1. Culture. The Puritan work ethic is one of the foundations of our culture, and has been since colonial times. Work is righteous and cleansing to the soul. Of course this is nonsensical, but it is baked into the culture. People are brought up hearing that our ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (itself a nonsensical idea if you think about it), and that when times get tough we should do the same rather than reach out to others for assistance. This idea can be termed rugged individualism.
2. Economic uncertainty. The US have a poor social safety net, and about half of all voters consistently vote to strip more and more of it away. I have it pretty good, economically speaking, but I feel like I am only a few months away from losing my house if my wife or I lose our jobs and can’t replace it incomes and our health insurance right away. Also, income inequality is such that there is always someone vastly richer than you to compare yourself to. That drives a lot of people to work harder, even though a lot of the very rich inherited their wealth (seed money at least) and/or the connections needed to grow it.

My Instant Pot beef stew came out very well. I didn’t use a recipe; otherwise I would share it. I simply dumped all the ingredients in raw, cooked it under high pressure for 40 minutes, let the pressure naturally, and let it sit on the warm setting for 40 more minutes. It was nearly perfect.

I’m attempting to cook a beef stew in the Instant Pot right now. I’m not sure if it will come out right. I don’t make stew that often, and when I do I usually use a slow cooker or (gasp!) my stove and oven. If it works, though, it could be a game changer for me. I both need to use the Instant Pot more often, to justify its place on my counter, and I need more convenience in my approach to cooking big meals.

One thing I didn’t expect when listening to Taylor Swift’s honest-to-goodness money-grab re-recording of her album Red is how good it is, and how many songs she added to it. Hell, Red (Taylor’s Version), even sounds better. The engineering and production are amazing, and I very much enjoy listening to it on my best speakers and headphones.

Now I am very much looking forward to Swift’s re-recordings of 1989 and Speak Now, which are my daughter’s favorite records. 1989 in particular already sounds fantastic, from an audiophile perspective; that’s going to be a tough act to follow.

🎮 I am enjoying my retro handheld very much. Yesterday I played through Super Mario Land for the first time since the 1990s. I also got through about 50% of Metroid Zero Mission, which I don’t think I ever played before. Some of my enjoyment is nostalgic, but most of it is because I have been playing some fantastic games.

I don’t know what I want for Hanukkah or Christmas. I feel like I’m letting down the people in my family who want to buy me a gift. It makes me sad to think about it.

I have a corner desk that is connected to a second, straight desk, which looks really cool, but is a pain (literally) to use. While it offers me enough space for two desktop computer setups: a necessarily sloppy-looking windows laptop-and-monitor setup for work, and a more streamlined Mac mini-and-monitor setup for home, it causes a lot of problems. The desktop is so high that it puts pressure on my forearms when I use the keyboard, which leads to wrist pain. The desktop on the Mac side is not level and there is no way to adjust it, so the monitor is always tilted slightly, which drives me crazy. The desk drawer and keyboard tray are too low and bang into the top of my legs. Lastly, the keyboard tray, when open, blocks the desk draw, which is super annoying.

There’s a lot more to it than just the desk setup. There are low cabinets and high bookshelves stretching across two walls of my office, all connected into a big L. You can see that it is made up of many different components, but they are all stuck together with no space between the seams. For the past eleven years I thought it was glued together by the house’s prior owners, but my father-in-law pointed out to me tonight that I was mistaken. The furniture is screwed together; it was designed to attach. Therefore, it will be a straightforward (though physically demanding) process to separate it and get it out of my house. I could even keep the bookcases and low cabinets that aren’t bothering me especially, to make room for a new, completely separate desk.

I am relieved to know that something can be done that falls short of hiring a demolition crew to break all this stuff apart and haul it away. I can get rid of the desk portions only, which I didn’t know was possible. That would leave me with 68 inches of space for a new desk. It will be more difficult to figure out how to accommodate both my Mac and PC setups, with all the USB peripherals and so on, but that is a problem that technology and money can probably solve.

In college, one of my humanities professors, Prof. Klein, told me that genius is being able to look at the same things everybody else does but see something different. She told me a story to illustrate:

One time she had company at her house—a friend and her kids—and they needed to find a place for three little kids to sleep for the night. There was only one bed, but it was a queen-sized bed, which she thought would only suit up to two people. The friend, however, knew right away that it would work. The friend realized that, because kids are short and small, they could be fit onto the bed, just not in the normal, expected way. The friend put three pillows on one side of the bed, arranged down the long way. Then she adjusted the sheet and blanket so they opened up on the side of the bed where she had put the pillows. Then the three kids slept in that bed, arranged sideways, and had plenty of room.

I always appreciated the simplicity of this story.

One fun thing I did with my daughter tonight is to compare the slide decks we are developing. I’m working on an InsurTech presentation for work, and she created a Civil Rights & Women’s Suffrage presentation for school. I think it’s fun for her to see that we are doing a similar thing.

Tonight I walked her through the concept of a build slide using one I created for my talk next week. On a build slide, the content pops in one element at a time, which allows you to step the audience through a step-by-step process without overwhelming them by showing all the steps up front. (If overused or distractingly animated, build slides are annoying. Judiciously used, they can be very effective.)

I also showed my daughter how I use different and varied visual layouts to make my slides visually appealing. I showed her that good slides tend to have only a few things on them—six or fewer, usually. I tried to explain how to incorporate icons with text, but my business-y examples of icons meant nothing to her, so I don’t think she grasped it.

She was most impressed to see that I write a lot of text in the speaker notes section, which is displayed below the slides. She said that they didn’t teach her to write speaker notes in school, which surprised me a little, because she is giving live presentations, not just turning in completed slide decks.

I use speaker notes extensively because I prefer to script my talks and revise the scripts as I rehearse them out loud. That process helps me cover my points in as few words as possible. It also helps me fit the words to my mouth, which is how I describe editing my text to sound more natural when I say it.

By the time I’m done, I have practically memorized the script, so I do not have to read it, and it feels very natural to say what I have prepared. That method requires writing skills that are beyond the fourth grade level, I’m afraid, but hopefully my daughter will be ready to learn how I do it someday.