Adam Keys is Thinking

This is a story about a tiny toy table. Well, a couple of them.

Courtney and I play pub quiz, a lot. We play with a regular group of people at a couple of venues across town. We aim to take a “podium place” home. We come up with a fresh, topical team name every week. We are a bit competitive. It’s a thing.

One of our team rules is: avoid second-guessing ourselves¹. The first reasonably confident person to provide the answer to our “quiz scribe” holds sway. Typically, they’re right or confident enough that no further discussion is needed and the answer is scribed to the answer sheet. A terrible way to run a company or government, but an okay way to run a quiz team.

Occasionally, it happens, during a quiz, that two folks will feel that the answer to a question must or must not be something. For instance, there are very frequently questions on the numerically outstanding planets in our solar system. It’s almost always Jupiter or Saturn, but it’s hard to say which. “It’s Jupiter because it has a ton of moons” or “it can’t be Jupiter because Saturn has even more moons”! Well, given the no-second-guessing rule, now we have a pickle. Two conflicting answers, or a non-answer, and what to do about it?

Regardless of how we arrive at it, we can only write one answer. This leaves the door open for us to have the right answer, but write down the wrong answer. Little indignations in jest. We are a bit competitive.

Enter the flipping table

Possibly, you’ve seen the table-flip “emoji”: (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻. It’s a shorthand for “this makes me have a big, not-good feeling” in online conversation. If not, here’s the late, great Alan Rickman “performing it”:

That’s how it feels when you suggested the right answer and your quiz team went with the wrong answer anyway. Actually flipping tables would get us kicked out and banned from the venues we frequent, so that’s not an option. However, it happens, tables come in all sizes. Including, very tiny simulacrum of tables.

So one night after quiz, I scoured the internet for tiny tables that we could flip. Once I dialed in the search (there are many ways to search for “toy table” on Amazon that will not yield tables that are toys or tables that are flippable amongst polite company), a table was ordered. A few days later, thanks to the magic of just-in-time supply chain logistics², we had a toy table. So it came that every night, as we were preparing for the quiz, we set out our little (toy) table on top of the (actual) table in case there was a moment of indignation.

Our reputation precedes us

Turns out, flipping a tiny table with your finger is pretty cathartic. The tiny table got a lot of use. We really liked our tiny table.

Even better, a table of adults with a tiny toy table in the center of them is a curious thing. Other teams and quiz hosts inquired about our table. We explained it, let them flip the table. People liked it.

Word of our flipping table spread amongst the Austin pub-quiz community. When new hosts would fill in for our normal quiz host, they would introduce themselves and ask to see our flipping table.

Our reputation for flipping tables preceded us. One could have a worse reputation!

Epilogue for a tiny toy table

As is common of tiny toys delivered by a logistics machine optimized for low cost, the flipping table was not particularly strong. Eventually, we lost or broke it, I don’t remember which.

In any case, a second, slightly larger and fancier flipping table was provisioned. This one even had place settings. Fast-forward a few months, it too broke. One of our quiz teammates took it upon themselves to repair said table. At this point, we had a very robust flipping table, and some of its place settings remaining.

Sadly, our regular quizzing was curtailed by the pandemic, shutting down basically all bars wherein one would play pub quiz. I’m not sure where the flipping table ended up; we haven’t used it in the year since we started quizzing again.

But those months we had a flipping table; glory days!

Or: Texas, the Good Parts. (Despite the title!)

Or: it sounds like Texas, to me. (Again, despite the title.)

Hayes Carll is my favorite under-the-radar, “this is what country music should sound like” musician. Wit, remorse, nostalgia. Storytelling, quirky characters, relatable characters. Little bit of rock, little bit of western. An ideal Americana mix. It’s all there.

Plus, at 40 minutes, it’s a perfect road trip selection. Always moving forward, but never long-winded.

I jumped into a short un-conference organized/hosted by Andy Matuschak last weekend. Within this humble Gather, I came across lots of intriguing people and energizing ideas. Some notes and a few follow-up ideas:

Napkin is space for ideas and not, it seems, about note capture as an end. Rather, it’s about throwing ideas or quotes at the (metaphorical) wall and letting the system organize them into clusters or connections. If you like some of those idea, you organize the ideas into a linear outline and export that to whatever you like to write with.

Nutshell is about adding an extra dimension to documents on the web. The creator, Nicky Case, described it as a “tool for expandable explanation”. Those explanations take the form of popovers that may contain a bit of text (like a footnote/annotation), a scraped reference to another page (transclusion), or a fully interactive gizmo to explore an idea in a more tactile manner.

Excitement about applying language models (e.g. GPT-3 or DALL-E) to generative creativity came up a few times. Some of the applications demoed were already using language models to augment insight or obviate manual human organization. Using models to ‘read between the lines’ of captured notes/human input and generate new ideas came up as well.

Dissatisfaction with some current PKM tools came up a couple times. In particular, seeking note capture or memory recall as a (customer) engagement end rather than as a means to thinking more/better thoughts. I think I heard a couple criticisms that some tool was “too IT”, but I’m not sure I even heard it correctly or what that would even mean! 😆

Overall: highly recommend seeking folks using computers to augment their ability to create and remember instead of stopping at “finally got my notes app just the way I like it”!

About a year ago, I added a curiously pretentious object to my repertoire of productivity hacks. Analog is a) a paper productivity notation not unlike Bullet Journaling b) printed on pleasantly thick index cards and c) a bit of desk furniture to prop up the cards and store the last couple dozen of them.

The idea is you write your tasks down for today/later/someday. Those tasks sit right in front of you, taunting you. You cross them off as you get stuff done. Now you’ve done a productivity!

Reductionist jokes aside, it’s a fine system. The cards are printed with “Today”, “Next”, or “Someday” at the top and lines to encourage writing down several, but not too many, tasks. It’s a good way to think about organizing what you need/want to get done. As productivity systems go, it’s clear and non-invasive¹.

Dave Rupert uses/tried Analog too and has a good take on it.

Tactility is Analog’s leg up. It’s nice to start the day writing out some tasks, looking over the previous day’s cards, shuffling the cards from previous days. Even Things, the best task software, can’t provide the tactile “ahhhh”-moment of crossing an item off your list. Tasteful animation, design, and haptics get close, but touching glass isn’t as good as pen and paper.

That said, I’m not tempted to discard Things. It’s literally one of the best applications I’ve used, ever. That said, it’s charming to have a redundant, back-up scheme for reminding myself of the most important things to accomplish today. Analog is like having a (very handsome) back-up alarm clock to the alarm clock one intends to wake up to. It’s always pleasant to look at, and every so often it is the difference between an energetic day and a day played catching up.

Spooky dad rock - Trent Reznor

Sad dad rock - the National, LCD Soundsystem

Quirky dad rock - Cake

Over-enthusiastic dad rock - Foo Fighters

This ended up covering late Davis stuff. He’s basically inventing a new genre of jazz every album or two now.

• On the Corner: Davis invents funk/soul jazz.
• A Tribute to Jack Johnson: Davis invents rock/jazz fusion.
• Tutu: Davis invents synth-jazz/the thing that would get distilled and warped down to New Age/Kenny G jazz in the 90s.

There are numerous live albums! I didn’t go down the rabbit hole on this part. Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux features Quincy Jones and is a pretty great end-of-career retrospective.

“Willie Nelson” on Directions is surprisingly funky.

Overall, I could have gone for less Birth of the Cool-esque and more Bitches Brew. 🤷I like bop, but funk and fusion are more legible to my modest jazz-harmony ear.

Highlights: On the Corner, Jack Johnson, Tutu. The last was originally planned as a Miles Davis/Prince collaboration (❗ ❗ ❗) which fell through. Still pretty good.

What I’d hoped to get out of this, and indeed did, was hearing the invention of large swaths of the jazz landscape over time, album by album. In this way, Miles Davis was a singular influence on the course of music, a lot like Beethoven was.

Hopefully, in my lifetime, we’ll realize another musician has come around and broadly invented entire genres of music every few albums. (I’m assuming we’ll still have albums!)

Previously: Notes from the Miles-verse Parts 1 and 2, Into the Miles-verse.

Should engineering managers write code?:

Spending time in meetings and working through complex team relationship issues leaves you feeling more drained than energized most days. You look longingly at your team and feel a slight tinge of envy. You want to code again.

The good news is that you can! The bad news is that you shouldn’t. At least not directly on your team’s codebase and not on any critical path work.

Good ideas therein! Let me emphasize one I’m particularly fond of.

In my first engineering management role, I had the opportunity to go completely hands off. For a while, I found it a little off-putting. I really like solving problems with code! (I later realized leadership and management are solving problems with people, but that’s for another time.)

I felt a lot better about engineering management once I figured out it gave me license to code on impractical things. When you’re an EM (the hands-off variety, not the sitting-on-the-fence variety), you have the opportunity to code on whatever draws your interest, knowing it won’t block your team.

That’s a pretty rad opportunity for someone like me who’s a bit of an esoteric tinkerer.

If you’re less of a tinkerer and more of a shipper or solver, even the highest functioning teams have some pile of ambitions and ideas they aren’t actively pursuing. An engineering manager can explore the frontiers on these ideas. Maybe a plan is made, research is noted, or its found the idea isn’t all that great after all. Still a win!

As long as your code doesn’t create challenges or blockers for your organization: dive into it, have fun, explore the space!

Wherein I’m listening to Miles Davis’ studio albums in chronological order. Priors: I have listened to Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew a lot. I’m mostly familiar with “earl years” sort of stuff.

Basically bop

• Collector’s Item: this album starts to sound “Idiomatically Miles Davis”. Which I guess means “rather abstract bop-vibe”.
• Bag’s Groove: this is very hip.
• Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet: I’ll take basically any version of “My Funny Valentine”, same as I will listen to any version of “Caravan”.

The albums Davis made with Gil Evans are my early new-favorites. Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain all sound more lofty, less improvised than the earlier stuff. Almost composed, classical music, not unlike some of Mingus’ work.

Very much not bop

Getting into Davis’ fusion era (1968–1991) is my big discovery. I know Bitches Brew is a thing, but where it fits chronologically is the missing piece. Davis entirely switching gears from bop to an entirely different vibe must have been as jarring as Rite of Spring was to Parisans. Favorites so far: Filles De Kilimanjaro, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, On the Corner. In a Silent Way is entirely different from the albums around it in this era, but I like how it’s basically a long song.

Currently listening: Circle in the Round.

Previously: Into the Miles-verse.

Rabbit-hole-athon - it doesn’t look like an event is scheduled, but I dig the idea:

Tl;dr, we are organizing a weekend long IRL rabbit-hole-athon for technologists: an intimate retreat/hackathon dedicated to reading, thinking deeply about a topic, and sharing your learnings with others.

Like a hackathon or BarCamp, but with the intent to focus an individual’s attention on a topic of their choosing instead of diffusing it. (Which is fine, on balance!)

We believe that being a good builder and problem solver is rooted in being a clear thinker. Intentionally dedicating time to exploring, pursuing your curiosity, and understanding things deeply is an important part of exercising this muscle. We believe this is essential in shaping the next generation of technologists, builders, founders, and researchers.

That’s a snappy manifesto! The notion of taking an afternoon/day/weekend to throw tactics to the wind and go deep on a topic is exciting. I’m already thinking about topics I could go down the rabbit hole on. 🧠

I saw this local band Adam’s Farm (no relation, promise) a few times when I was 15 or so. In the era of mixing bass guitar out of rock music (no thanks, Metallica), these fellows stood out by being having an EP where I could clearly hear all the instruments. It was almost 25 years later that I’d learn that “Girlfriend” in particular is a Modern Lovers cover.

Sidenote: it seemed like this local band was lost to the internet until recently as well. I figured I’d ripped one of the only copies of this CD, but Adam’s Farm music appeared on YouTube recently. Fancy that!

William Shatner’s cover of “Common People” is less difficult to find, but possibly equally obscure. Back in the late ’90s, Shatner did some voice overs on a Ben Folds pre-solo album Fear of Pop. In the mid ‘00s, Folds produced William Shatner’s album of songs with tons of guests doing the singing and Shatner mostly talking about mortality and aging. Again, it was several years before I heard the original of “Common People”.

I rather like these two covers better than the originals. So it goes with a notable cover!

The modern marvel that moves commodities, sub-assemblies, finished product, and people across the planet is largely invisible. Except when I’m bumped from an overbooked flight. Or when I can’t buy your favorite kind of candy because the trucks to move the containers from the ships to the stores are in the wrong place. Or when one can’t build a car in Germany because semiconductor fabrication plants aren’t as elastic as some executive thought they were. Then it becomes all too apparent that the default state of transportation is, absent considerable effort and coordination, for the wheels to fly off constantly.

Hence, A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics is a great primer for understanding the weird state of our world:

The whole shipping process involves dozens of actors, from the exporter, through a long chain of companies who handle the container (incurring costs on behalf of the shipment), all the way to the importer. This creates a trust problem: who is responsible for the problems that arise when one part of this chain goes wrong? Some of these companies are hired by the shipping company, others by the exporter or importer, or even by a logistics company acting as a middle man. This is usually solved by some kind of chain of custody, where any problem with the container must be immediately noted and complained about by the relevant party.

Adjacent: Venkatesh Rao, Remystifying Supply Chains:

Supply chains are a new class of engineered-emergent artifact, one that includes a few other globe-spanning things like the internet, the air travel system, and low earth orbit, that exist at a level of Gaian phenomenology, terraforming, and planet-scale husbandry. We only ever catch local glimpses of these things. The wholes are too big to fit in a single human mind, and the physical embodiments are too vast to capture even on a single map, let alone in a single photograph.

We have to understand these beasts, in all their evolving, learning glory, while living within their bellies. Abstract slicing and dicing of the phenomenology, via aspects like computation, circularity, and situatedness, can only get us so far. To finish the picture, we have to develop a sensitivity to how we inhabit these beasts at a human scale.

This is extremely my jam. Beethoven Symphonies Abstracted:

To accompany the National Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven & American Masters concert series, author and illustrator Mo Willems presents Beethoven Symphonies Abstracted, an exhibition of nine large-scale, painted abstractions inspired by the music and genius of Beethoven. Each large-scale work is a response to one of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, divided into panels that visually interpret each symphonic movement.

(Via Austin Kleon)

Previously: my affection for symphonies seven and eight, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” animated.

Fancy some near-term imagination on the opportunities the re-commercialization of space presents us? Yes, have some! Science upside for Starship:

It is, however, a fun exercise to enumerate all the ways in which Starship and related technologies can help execute bold, ambitious missions of scientific discovery.

Giant, poly-lithic space telescopes? Sure.

Probably the coolest telescope concept enabled by Starship, though, is the giant segmented telescope to end all giant segmented telescopes. An unmodified Starship can deliver perhaps a dozen 8 m monolithic hexagonal free-flying segments per launch to a target location such as L2, where they self assemble, calibrate, and then focus incoming light. Over a few dozen Starship flights, a truly enormous spherical mirror section perhaps 1000 m in diameter and with a focal length of 1000 km or so can be assembled behind a free-flying sun shade, pointed in a direction of general interest.

Heating (low-key terraforming) Mars with constellations of mirrors? Okay.

The second is mass producing light sails on Earth, launching them into LEO, then flying them to Mars where they can lurk near Mars-Sun L2 and reflect light back at the planet, reducing heat loss during the Martian night.

“Flood the zone” of our planetary neighbors with exploratory robots? As you wish.

Why shouldn’t we have a dedicated orbiter, lander, rover, helicopter, and submarine on every discrete body in the solar system over, say, 100 km in diameter? Let’s build a fleet of clockwork automatons for Venus and an armada of submarines for Europa, Enceladus, and Titan. Let’s darken the Martian skies with helicopters. Let’s drive rovers across the frozen nitrogen plains of Pluto.

I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds from these pull-quotes. I’ll bet that SpaceX’s starship won’t meet some of these expectations. We will have to hold our nose or plug our ears as Musk bloviates. Despite all that, it’s exciting that folks are thinking, writing, and blogging about this and some of it could come to fruition in my lifetime!

Favorite tracks: “Suck My Kiss”, “Sir Psychosexy”, “Power of Equality”, “The Righteous & the Wicked”.

The essential (in my opinion) Red Hot Chili Peppers album is, for me, a few things:

• One of the first albums I heard with good bass playing (I ‘grew up’ in the age after Metallica had mixed bass guitar entirely out of their albums and many others followed suit)
• One of the first albums I heard that was great from end to end and where many of the songs flowed into each other as if played live, meant to fit together, or like they weren’t even separate songs
• Extremely teenage and horny, of which I was both when I first heard it

It’s an album that has aged well for me. It was an excellent album when I first heard it, and is still an excellent album when I listen to it today.

There are other nice qualities too: Rick Rubin’s production work. When it’s not extremely horny, it has some good lyrics. It’s rooted in the RHCP musical predecessors with intelligent awareness, not than blind copying. They are seeing further by standing on the shoulders of George Clinton, not just sitting on his shoulders for a free ride. It’s just good funk.

And yes, the RHCP joke in The Good Place is superb.