I didn’t get everything I wanted to do done this week. I’m OK with that. Life intervened. Stressful things came and went. I did right by my family each day. That has to be the most important thing. It’s time for a holiday weekend and then Rosh Hashanah. Onward.

I am trying a new keyboard layout, Colemak DH, and have switched around keys and reprogrammed the Planck EZ to enable it. Colemak is proving easier now that I can look at the key legends for the correct letter.

My daughter’s elementary school will not require masks if the outside temperature is 75°F or over. They said that means masks will effectively not be worn on classrooms for the entire month of September, and probably through October as well. In general, the COVID measures are based on outdated conjectures about how the disease is spread, and will be ineffective against an airborne pathogen. My wife wants to pull our daughter out of school. I’m not sure what the right call is, because I’m not sure how to quantify the risk or be sure about what would be equitable for my daughter.

Vulnerability is a new ideal masculine trait. Being open, honest about, and comfortable with your flaws is nontraditional, unexpected, and disarming.

But that isn’t vulnerability. It’s invulnerability. You need to be tremendously self-assured to take social risks and not be flummoxed if things do not go your way.

When I was in college, I longed not to be learned but to be wise. I was learning rapidly, and soaking up new ideas all the time. I was making connections between all sorts of different systems of thought and culture. I thought I had human nature all figured out.

I was, however, wise enough at the time to know that I would be foolish to consider myself wise. That paradox never really resolves itself. The moment you think yourself wise, you have made a fool of yourself. Go ahead…try it, then wait a while.

Still, I must have shot my mouth off about how wise I was, because some people thought I was wise, and would ask me to help them sort out problems in their personal or academic lives. I was foolish enough back then to try to help them.

Now that I am middle-aged and raising two children with my wife, I feel both smarter and more foolish than ever. It is hard to feel wise when you can’t get your kids to do the simplest things most of the time. I find people–even the ones I am closest to–to be, at turns, more predictable and more inscrutable than ever. It is much easier to predict what people will do than it is to understand why.

What does it really mean to be wise? It’s certainly different than being smart, clever, or quick–though all those things don’t hurt. Being wise is about seeing the big picture, especially when those around you have lost sight of it, and using that viewpoint to help others help themselves.

I can write. I always could.

In high school, I wrote cogently and forcefully, like someone who read the up-Ed pages of two newspapers every day. Unlike most of my peers I had figured out how to revise and shape text—how to edit out hedging and weasel words and unfinished thoughts. Essay structure and organization fascinated me.

In college I wrote passionately with explosive figurative language. I wrote and put on a play: a farce poking fun a dorm life at my school. My seniors honors theses had jokes in them and won awards. My prose was called “airtight” in creative writing class.

As a young adult, I thought I might write professionally. I wrote four or five nights a week, at the local library, after work and dinner were done. I worked on short stories and screenplays that, sadly, didn’t end up going anywhere.

Writing was a lonely hobby for me. I had no community. I lived in the suburbs and didn’t think I could even find a writing community near me. I envied friends who lived in cities and could join writing classes or groups. The worst part of it was that I couldn’t figure out how to create interesting plots. I could write stories, but I had no stories to tell. I have no gift for plots—only for telling. Eventually I stopped writing entirely, in favor of business school and other things.

So, I can write. I have a voice. But I don’t have much to say. I never know what to write about. I lack ideas, which is frustrating when I have the ability (perhaps the gift) to shape and communicate them clearly.

Recently, I decided to write and publish…something, maybe something small, maybe a whole essay…every day, to force myself to think, write, revise, and publish even when the ideas don’t come. I think that the activity will help me get over whatever block or self-editing has been standing in the way of my writing endeavors for so long.

My caffeine experiment is almost at its end. For the past week, I have only drunk decaffeinated coffee. One funny thing I noticed is that decaf coffee is not nearly as disappointing when you are no longer addicted to caffeine.

My caffeine free (or almost free) lifestyle thus far has left me with no downsides: my energy level is just fine all day. I am not tired at all during work hours, and I no longer desperately crave an afternoon coffee each day. I do fall asleep earlier at night and more easily, which is a benefit. Instead of not being able to sleep until 2 A.M. most nights, I am ready to turn in by midnight, and sometimes even earlier, which puts me more in sync with my wife.

All in all, after a rocky start with three days of withdrawal symptoms, my experiment has been a success.

Today I started flashing custom layouts to my new Planck EZ keyboard. It runs QMK firmware, but the manufacturer has tools call Oryx and Wally that make customizing and flashing simple. On a software level, it is the best keyboard I have ever used. On a hardware level, it is solid, too, but I am not used to the ortholinear layout yet or the layers system. Typing with my left hand, especially the letters C and X, is a little problematic for me, because the Planck requires the use of different fingers than what I use for those keys on staggered layouts. Also, I my fingers tend to land in between the keys sometimes when I have to stretch my index finger or pinkie to reach a key.

I have been taking Matt Gemmel’s blog posts about the Planck as an inspiration for customizing it. Following his example, I created a numpad layout today, which will come in handy for work. I also turned on automatic capitalization, which capitalizes letters if you hold them down a tiny bit longer than a normal keypress. It is a cool feature, and may be more important for ergonomics than the layer system is for me.

I have also been practicing the Colemak layout on Keybr.com. Strangely, I could not get the web app to understand my keyboard layout unless it is in QWERTY mode; I have to emulate Colemak in the app, which is kind of a mixed blessing for now, when I could not even log into my computer in the Colemak layout.

All in all, it is fun to try something new. I wonder if I can actually learn the Colemak layout well enough to use it full time.

I always used to dread meeting new people. They always asked “what do you do?” And what I do (for work, naturally) has mostly been nebulous and boring and unglamorous.

When I worked in corporate systems, I was too young to be an interesting (read: rich) tech nerd. When I worked in management consulting, no one really knew what that meant, and neither did I. When I worked in internal audit, no one wanted to hear about it. (Let’s just say people like to complain about auditors.)

For much of my career I’ve had the same kind of job: an ill-defined amalgam of consultant, auditor, and regulatory examiner. When I met someone new, we would be inevitably get into conversations like this:

“Do you work in insurance?”

“No; not really.”

“Do you work in audit?”

“No; not really.”

“Do you work for the state?”

“No; not really.”

You would basically need a weeklong seminar in an absurdly dull hotel conference center to understand what we do at my company and why it is important. It is technical. It is dull. It involves financial solvency (yawn). It involves close reading of legislation that even the legislators probably don’t understand.

Recently, I figured out a better way to express what I do: I help regulators make sure insurance companies are doing what they are supposed to do. That simple, vague explanation seems to be the best one I have come up with yet. Insurance may be dull, but it has the benefit of being, well, hated by a lot of people. Everyone wants to make sure insurance companies they are customers of do what they are supposed to do.

I think the best answer to “what do you do?” is always “I help people.” Because if you don’t help people, then what purpose is there to anything you do.

📺 Ted Lasso Season 2 Isn’t In A Slump, It’s Headed For A Breakdown: This is a great analysis of what’s going on with the tonal shift in Ted Lasso season 2.

We stayed at the beach until it got dark tonight, which was a first for us. We like to go at dinner time and stay until dusk. It is quieter and cooler then. Sunset was pretty, if a bit subdued compared to the last couple times we have gone. This time, I brought my camera, though.

Work has become stressful again. I don’t have enough time to do everything I have to do—not just work, but taking care of my family and house, too. I’m taking my wife and kids to the beach tonight to just hang out, which is wildly irresponsible, but may be the thing I need to clear my head.

I have started to learn the Colemak keyboard layout on my new ortholinear keyboard. Colemak is a modern keyboard layout designed to reduce finger travel (and overall hand movement around the keyboard), while preserving the position of some keys that are vital for chording with the Command or Control keys: C, V, X, and Z.

It has been brutally slow going. I have been a touch typer on normal, staggered QWERTY keyboards for over 30 years. I taught myself touch typing on my mom’s electric typewriter from audio tapes she borrowed for me from the library. Those tapes dated from the World War II. They were Army training tapes, and their oft shouted message was that good typing skills would help defeat the Nazis, which was a pretty crazy idea to me as a child in the early 1990s. When I was in high school, I took up guitar and played all the time. As an unexpected side effect, my typing speed increased dramatically, thanks to increased dexterity honed in guitar practice.

My typing speed probably peaked in college at about 100 words per minute. It has slowly diminished since, due to repetitive stress injury, acute injuries to my hands and forearms, and generally bad genetic luck when it comes to wrists. I believe my typing speed now ranges between 40 and 75 WPM, at about 95% accuracy. That is certainly good enough for me, most of the time. What isn’t is that sometimes typing hurts, and often when that is the case, I don’t have the luxury to stop, because I have to type for work.

Right now, on my new keyboard, with Colemak layout, my typing speed is about 8 WPM, and that’s with only five letters in the mix! It is interesting to be tackling something I am this bad at. I feel the struggle as I practice typing. Even when I know the correct key to push, I end up pushing the wrong one (the QWERTY one) sometimes. YouTube videos on the subject have taught me to focus on accuracy rather than on speed, so that us what I am doing thus far. I plan to practice daily for a while before changing my layout permanently.

I typically argue that one should further develop strengths rather than try to eliminate weaknesses. It is far better to be great at a particular thing than to be average at a ton of things. At this task, though, my goal is to be average rather than a typing speed demon, just not in pain while doing it. I have been a good typer, and probably could be again if it weren’t so painful to type blazing fast for more than a new minutes at a time.

A COVID vaccine for under-12 kids cannot come soon enough. It looks like Pfizer is a few months ahead of Moderna on this front, but it has been a frustratingly long wait. The Delta variant, which seems to be more virulent in children than o.g. COVID, has made me quite anxious.

My birthday present arrived a couple months early: a Planck EZ 40% ortholinear keyboard. Please excuse me for a while: I need to relearn how to type. 😅

In college, I studied literature. What I learned about literature is that history, religion, and general knowledge are all wrapped up in narrative. So are our memories. We are the story we tell ourselves, as individuals, as nations, as peoples. Narrative is memory, and sometimes the narrator is an untrustworthy one.

I learned a lot about literature there, but I missed the important lesson: Why do we study literature? To learn empathy.

Lack of empathy is a fundamental problem in our society. Blame social media. Blame political polarization. Blame whatever you want. You could argue that society fractured in large part because we no longer share a common literature. We don’t read the foundational texts that, in part, make up our culture. We don’t read the foundational texts that make up other cultures—which may just help us understand other people. In school, whatever books we do read, that are “taught” to us, are dissected and analyzed, but not often enough put back together again and connected to anything real.

I think literature should be taught to teach empathy to students. Students should be told that is what it is for, and stories should be compared to real life events—not just personal experience, which is limited—as much as possible. We should think about making connections to ourselves and others, not just about connections between texts and ourselves.

When I was in high school, I was a guitar teacher. I was probably a terrible guitar teacher, but it wasn’t a job I wanted, it was a job I kind of couldn’t get out of. I had only one student, the son of a very nice teacher at my high school. After school in the drafting classroom, my student and I would listen to music he liked and try to transcribe it and learn how to play it.

Several times he asked me a question as we puzzled through a guitar solo: “There’s no way I’m ever going to be as good as Jimmi Hendrix, so why should I even bother playing at all?” I answered: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters that it’s yours. It matters that you did it, and it reflect what you as a person were feeling at the time.”

Maybe you can’t be as good at guitar as Jimmi Hendrix was, but you can be your best self at whatever you put yourself to: poetry, songwriting, fiction, musicianship, business, charity. The list goes on.

To err is human. To forgive, divine. But to have a good chance to detect and correct mistakes, you need controls. That’s what I have learned in my audit career.

A control helps you understand if a transaction or business process completed completely, correctly, and timely. It is designed to answer the auditor’s most probing question: “How do you know?”

The term itself is jargon, and isn’t widely understood outside of accounting, finance, audit, and compliance circles—unless you are pulled into an audit of some kind as a subject matter expert. One of my bosses used to say all the time, as a joking impersonation of management, “What is a control?” (It would be silly to say that joke killed, but we all got it.)

Of course “control” has a slightly different meaning in everyday language. I think most people want control over their lives: freedom, autonomy, and independence; and also, somewhat paradoxically, stability and predictability. As societal norms and expectations shift, and political, environmental and economic pressures escalate, the present feels more and more uncertain over time—it is literally out of control. As a counterweight to that, a lot of people long for strong leaders who promise to exert control by force of will, or just by force—in other words, authoritarian control.

The problem is that all leaders, both good and bad, know that it is easier to assert that things are correct rather than to actually correct them. In the business world, the same kind of situation applies. An executive can say that a company is doing everything it can in certain areas, but without controls and transparency, there is no way to know if such a statement is true.

On an individual basis, we can’t control everything that happens in our lives. What we can do, however, on an everyday personal level, is to implement the controls (in the audit sense) over what we do and the decisions we make. These can be gaurdrails and double-checks as simple as The Golden Rule and Measure Twice, Cut Once. Just ask yourself sometimes: How do you know if what you’re doing is right?

After over twenty years as a coffee drinker, I am now the owner of a drip coffee maker for the first time. Its make and model are nothing special, and it doesn’t actually brew better coffee than my AeroPress or French Press or Chemex ever did. In fact, the coffee it produces (with far less manual effort) is actually a little worse. Strangely enough, that is the whole point. I want coffee to be less enticing to me, because I am trying to wean myself off caffeine and maybe even cut coffee out of my diet entirely.

I think my (modest) coffee habit is causing me some health problems, and I finally came to a mindset where it seemed possible to do something about it. So far, in the few weeks since I drastically reduced my daily caffeine intake, I have noticed digestive benefits, which I expected, and also, unexpectedly, a decrease in day-to-day anxiety—which is something I didn’t even know I had until it was gone. Up until this week I worried about removing something pleasurable from my daily routine, but I am finding that there is something pleasurable in being even keeled, and, of course, in not being dependent on a drug, albeit a socially acceptable one.

Last night I told my wife I was going to go entirely to decaffeinated coffee starting today. After one look from her, I chickened out, and revised my goal to “quarter decaf”: half decaf in the morning, and full decaf in the afternoon. I still plan to eliminate (almost all) caffeine from my diet, but I am not sure if I will just drink decaf coffee twice a day, to preserve my warm beverage habit, or if I will forego coffee altogether. The latter would probably simplify my life a little bit, and is attractive, but I might go crazy drinking only water day and night.

Today I, along with a small team, gave the biggest presentation I’ve done in years: a webinar for my company’s clients. We did an outstanding job. Now that it is over, I feel relieved and exhausted.

I spent several months earlier this year gearing up for this day. I decided early on to level up my presentation skills, which I thought were already very good. I took the learning process very seriously. I watched hundreds of hours of video: other people’s presentations, TED talks, Apple keynotes, lectures on speaking and communication, and instructional videos about visual design, slide decks, and PowerPoint. I made prototype slide decks in which I tried different techniques, and also tried to make some of the new techniques I liked work with my company’s PowerPoint template. I threw out and revised every slide I created several times. I practiced the entire talk out loud and made revisions to the visuals and to my script to communicate my ideas more succinctly. In the revision process, the true message of my presentation became more clear, and I was able to focus more on that. Lastly, I wrote almost the entire talk down in the speaker notes, to preserve the best part of my presentation, even though I had nearly memorized the entire thing while working on it.

This is all probably normal stuff to professional presenters, but I’m not one of them. For the past ten years or so, I have typically presented only once or twice a year, and most of those presentations were to my coworkers (sometimes the whole company, but it’s a small company). Before this year, I didn’t rehearse my talks, and my slides, while uncluttered, were usually not visually interesting. Now, after having put in so much hard work, I think I can present very well. I have gained confidence in myself for future presentations, and feel proud of myself for what I have achieved.

I read James Joyce’s classic short story collection, Dubliners, while I was on my vacation. I read it as part of my presswork for tackling Ulysses, which I am slowly navigating now.

I don’t normally enjoy short stories because they usually seem incomplete—cut off just before they got interesting. Short story collections are usually disjointed; I prefer collections that have common characters or plot threads that run through all the stories. I have been reading more this year than in the past, including Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again which I enjoyed very much. (They are called “novels,” but are in fact short story collections.)

The stories in Dubliners, of course, compose one of the archetypical collections of short stories. They are famous for the epiphanies that characters arrive at toward the end of each tale, and are devastating for the reader because those characters who recognize their personal failings or their poor lot end up doing nothing to fix things. Over and over again throughout the collection, his characters live rigid, bleak, repetitive lives, and choose comfort—and not even much comfort at all—and certainly over fulfillment and uncertainty.

I see the same themes in my own life. Everyone I know, including and especially myself—lives inside a rigid, repetitive routine: school, work, cooking, cleaning, a little leisure, maybe a vacation once or twice a year. Furthermore, I know that I, like some of Joyce’s characters, have chosen comfort over fulfillment—at least in terms of my career choices, and in some respects in terms of vacation travel as well. If I had taken more risks, perhaps I would have more money or status, and I might have made more of an impact on the world. My life, however, is nowhere near as bleak as the Dubliners Joyce writes about. I have a great family, a great home, and have done some great things I can be proud of. But it is chilling to think how repetitive everyday life is, and how much drudgery it entails; like Joyce’s characters in Dubliners each of us is stuck in a loop.

Sometimes when I’m working, I want music playing, but I don’t really know what I want to listen to, and I don’t have the patience to think about it. In these situations, I have tried listening to classical music, jazz, and lo-fi (hip-hop/trip-hop, etc.). Over the past week, I gave Endel an honest try, too.

While I enjoy classical music in a live setting, I don’t like listening to it in my headphones. Its wide dynamic range makes it so that I can’t hear some sections of it, and other sections are too loud. That doesn’t work for me; I want something that is not too loud, but is completely audible, all the time.

Jazz (especially classic jazz) was what I listened to almost exclusively during my senior year of college. It got me through reading and writing hundreds and hundreds of pages of text. However, I find my engagement with jazz to be all over the map. I love some of it and I hate some of it, and the kind of jazz you can just have on, not listening to—smooth jazz, I suppose—is just bad. All in all, I find jazz too distracting to listen to while I work, unless I listen to a single album that I already know and love.

Lo-fi hip hop is my favorite background music at this point. I appreciate its nearly constant beat, somewhat consistent tempos, and there appears to be a never-ending supply of it. My wife hates when I play it in the house when I am doing chores or writing, though, which means I can only really listen to it via headphones when I’m around her. It works great on my headphones while I read on my iPad, or through my loudspeakers when I work.

Over the past two weeks, I tried to get into Endel, which offers an AI-based soundscape that constantly changes and continually evolves as you listen to it. I like the idea a lot more than the reality of it, though I think it has a lot to do with my tinnitus. Endel is extremely treble-heavy and bass-light (really, there is no bass at all), and only one of its scenarios, Focus, has a beat. I would not describe the sounds as shrill, but they aggravate my tinnitus instead of helping me ignore it. Last week, I listened to Endel exclusively through headphones (my B&O H9s and my AirPods) while I did chores like the dishes and laundry. This morning, now that I am back at work, I tried listening to the Focus soundscape for a few hours through my loudspeakers. It drove my wife and both my kids absolutely bananas. Each of them yelled at me to stop playing it, even though it was not playing loudly, and they were on a different level of the house. After that experience, I think I will not be buying an Endel lifetime subscription.

Tomorrow I plan to listen to Lofi Girl for much of my workday. That is the best bet for me, when I can’t make up my mind about music and need to focus on my work more than what I am listening to.

Today is my first day back at work after my vacation. I have found that, now that I consume less caffeine, I am finding all of the catching up, surprises, and unexpected requests to be less stressful than in prior years. Let’s see how I feel (maybe tired?) later this afternoon and evening.

After thinking about it quite a bit (too much really) I ordered a 4-pack of Apple AirTags. I think it will be useful for my wife and I to have them on our keychains and in our go-bags, especially because we are spending more time away from home now. I look forward to kicking the Tile app off my phone.