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.

I have been writing for an hour and forty five minutes tonight and have come up with, maybe, one paragraph of useful text for the Big Data/Data Calls article I am writing for work. I am not blocked. I am not distracted. I am pushing sentences around like a kid pushing peas around on a plate. The right way to connect my ideas and my sentences together is just not coming. Time to bail—at least for tonight.

One of my coworkers called me today and, before talking about business, he praised me for my presentation skills, based on presentations I gave weeks ago. 😊

This is my music find of the week.

I asked my Amazon Echo speaker to play “cool music” while I was making dinner and had no idea what I wanted to listen to. (I was hungry and tired, and couldn’t even name an artist of a genre at that point.) Alexa starting playing a “Cool Jazz” radio station on Apple Music, and it was actually perfect background music for making and eating dinner. Now I have an alternative to “lo-fi hip hop” which the rest of my family hates. (OK, to be fair, my kids hate the jazz music too.)

Writing for three hours at night sure makes me hungry. It’s nearly 11 PM. Do I risk eating a snack so late? How could I even avoid it?

One of the disheartening but more interesting things you learn in business school is that most of the growth in the stock market can be attributed to inflation. That’s why I’m not that excited that my retirement portfolio has been growing quickly lately as the stock markets keep reaching new highs. I know that there’s a catch. Those dollars aren’t worth as much, and that’s part of the reason that markets are rising.

My wife and I started watching The Americans this weekend. We stumbled upon it when browsing Amazon Prime Video. It’s good to have something to watch on Prime Video, because it is criminally underutilized in my house. The last thing I watched on it was Invincible and I don’t even remember how long ago that was.

Looking back on last week, I played a lot of video games. A lot more than usual actually. It’s a sort of thing I do when my brain is so tired I can’t do anything else, not even focus on a TV show. I have been working really hard writing system walkthroughs or performing data analysis during the day, and working on a presentation and an article for publication in my company’s newsletter during the evenings. I realized that I have been staving off mental exhaustion by escaping into the world of Pokémon or Metroid in the late night hours before I go to bed. This might keep happening for the next few weeks. It is an absolute sprint for me until December 3, I’m afraid. At least at the end of the year we get the last week off.

🎮 I finally beat Metroid Dread! I thought it would be impossible, but I persevered. What a cool game!

My daughter got her first COVID-19 vaccine today. I am grateful that she will be fully vaccinated relatively soon. I think my 4-year-old son will have to wait until his fifth birthday to get the jab.

Do I like Foo Fighters now? Today I’m loving when their tracks come up on my randomized Apple Music post-album ∞ (“infinity”) playlist.

I have had a grudge against that band since I saw them in concert almost 20 years ago and hated their set. Maybe Dave Grohl was having a bad day that day. I thought he hated the crowd, of which a small majority, including me, were there to see the co-headliner, Weezer, who performed before him.

My retro handheld, perhaps understandably but not by design, has become a dedicated Pokémon machine. I never played a Pokémon game before last week, and honestly never understood their appeal. Last night, when my brain was too tired for anything else, I had fun grinding away at Pokémon Yellow for hours. I am missing out on the game’s social features like trading and battling. It must have been amazing to have been a little kid with a Game Boy, a link cable, and like-minded friends.

I may never beat Metroid Dread’s final boss, Raven Beak. I’m just not fast enough on the controller, and I don’t have the time or patience to “git gud”. That’s OK with me. I could never beat the true final boss of Hollow Knight, The Radiance, either, and have played through that game, start-to-nearly-the-finish many times. Playing through the game is fun; finishing it is optional for me.

The New Jersey governor’s election is certainly a nail-biter! Maybe Phil Murphy will pull out a win after all. I can’t help thinking, though, that there is no good reason any statewide election should be this close.

If, after enjoying double-digit leads in Monmouth University and Fairleigh Dickinson polls last week, Murphy loses the New Jersey gubernatorial race (which seems pretty likely right now), the pollsters deserve to be roundly criticized, once again, for relying on unrepresentative sampling or making incorrect assumptions in their production modeling. Campaigns rely on these polls to gauge the impact of their efforts, and voters see large leads in the polls as an excuse to stay home, as their votes are not needed for their candidate to win.

I’m working on an article for my company newsletter right now, and it feels like I am just pushing words back and forth and nothing is gelling together. I write, I delete, I move things around, and my word count stays the same, and each section remains unpublishable.

It is Election Day today in New Jersey. Everyone in my family voted early, by mail (as it should be), so there’s nothing to do but wait until evening when the results start rolling in. I’m hoping that Phil Murphy wins re-election, and that we don’t have a repeat of the 2009 gubernatorial race. The year after Obama won the White House, Republican Chris Christie was voted in as our governor. His disdain of funding schools and infrastructure set our state back for his entire tenure. I’m not ready to go through that again.

Barbara Sprunt reports for NPR today:

Sen. Joe Manchin has announced he cannot yet support the $1.75 trillion framework for President Biden’s social spending package that congressional Democrats were hoping to push through this week.

“I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it will have on our national debt, our economy and, most importantly, all of our American people," the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement Monday afternoon.

I feel like she could have written this article any day this year, since Joe Biden was inaugurated. Sen. Joe Manchin is destined to be the Joe Lieberman of 2021. Like Lieberman, who killed the ACA’s “public option” to protect his insurance company donors in Connecticut, Manchin will be responsible for neutering the most impactful legislation since the ACA, all because of a price tag that is (1) going to be spread out over a decade; (2) will represent a tiny percentage of GDP over that period; and (3) has been cut in half since this spring. Point 1 is just the standard Republican talking points about any kind of spending that isn’t a tax cut.

This rigamarole has gone so long that I don’t think the Democrats can reach him with any kind of progressive legislation. It is dangerous to anger him too much over this, too, because he could flip parties, and then the Democrats would lose the Senate. Overall, he is an untrustworthy person to negotiate with. As for the similarly “centrist” Kyrsten Sinema, she is at a whole other level of incomprehensibility, and could still be a spoiler to the Democrats even if Manchin eventually agrees to some bill. Neither one of them are fighting for anything of value for their constituents. I would be surprised if they remain in office after their next elections, no matter what they do from this point forward. It’s hyperbole, of course, but I want to say: “Never has so much been lost for so little gain.”

I carved a happy jack o’lantern this Halloween.

Double chocolate cupcakes for Halloween.

🎃 Lots to do today for Halloween! We’re making cupcakes (my kids can’t eat much candy due to allergies), chili, and cornbread for a family party, and we’re trick-or-treating, too.

In America, we could all unite politically, but only if we all decided to be Republicans. That is what happened, briefly, after 9/11. It could never have gone the other way; there is no way we could all put down our differences and become Democrats for a while. That is by design. For as long as I have been alive, Republicans have defined what Democrats are. To them, Democrats are many horrible things, but they are primarily unpatriotic, ineffectual, and toxic. (To be honest, there are also racist and homophobic stereotypes thrown in, too.) Many Republicans would gladly vote for a dog over a Democrat, mainly because right-wing messaging has tarnished the party label completely and relentlessly in a large portion of the country for decades.

I have been a Democrat all my life. Even I find it incredibly hard to define what a Democrat is without relying on terms and caricatures invented my Republicans. I don’t think most people understand that they have the same blind spot. I see it all the time in news articles, opinion essays, blog posts and tweets. I see most people using the language of Republicans defining what Democrats are. I see some people who are disheartened with Republican politicians or policies refuse on principle to see Democrats as sensible alternatives. I want to say to those authors: You don’t really know what a Democrat is because it has been defined by the opposing party for its own benefit.

I think Democrats—even most Democratic politicians—believe in their own bad press, too, because it has been so pervasive over my lifetime that it is part of American culture and ideology. I want to say to these people: You are not how others perceive you; you are what you do.

A vaccination, blood test, and an MRI all in one 24-hour period was too much for me. 😮‍💨

Today I watched some videos from Great Art Explained on YouTube. The videos on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights are fascinating. Watching them have me some serious flashbacks to my art history class in college.