The past two weeks have been full of marching band. We’ve been following our kids attending parades for eight or nine years now, chaperoning for most of those. It’s a fast and furious summer competitive parade season, and they’ve had a blast with it. Jesse and I marched when we grew up. All of our kids have marched. We are a marching band people.

Marching band members perform in a street parade while a construction worker in a hard hat and high-visibility vest stands in the foreground directing them. — The youngest even has a tuba solo!

As a result of the above, our summers don’t really get started until July, and I’m getting older, so the amount of tired I am right now is pretty notable. Upcoming we have some nice time with family as well as relaxing time next to a lake on the schedule.

Pika has been humming along very nicely, with our biggest update in a long time, The Pika Pulse, arriving this week. It has definitely been fun to read all kinds of different blog posts being written on Pika. There’s a fascinating diversity of writing going on there. 😻

I’m also trying my best to shift down a gear on work for the summer. I, and we, have been pushing pretty hard in 2026. For the rest of the summer I’d like to close the laptop a little earlier, and take some Fridays off to catch up on all the other things life demands.

Do We Need Billionaires?

A significant portion of the population in the USA still thinks of Reaganomics as certified fact rather than a largely discredited theory. By this mindset the engine of our economy requires people to strive for a ton of money. A rising tide lifts all boats and all that.

First, I got to wondering, were US billionaires even a thing at the end of Reagan’s term? As a tween at the time, I couldn’t really remember. Turns out, yes:

Sam Walton • $6.7 billion • Wal-Mart Stores
John Kluge • $3.2 billion • Metromedia
Ross Perot • $3.0 billion • Electronic Data Systems
Donald Newhouse • $2.6 billion • Publishing
Samuel Newhouse Jr. • $2.6 billion • Publishing
Henry Hillman • $2.5 billion • Industrialist
Lester Crown • $2.3 billion • Inheritance / investments
Anne Cox Chambers • $2.25 billion • Inheritance / Cox Enterprises
Barbara Cox Anthony • $2.25 billion • Inheritance / Cox Enterprises
Warren Buffett • $2.2 billion • Stock market

Then, I needed some context for the difference between a million and a billion dollars. It kind of sounds like a similar thing, yes? Well, a clever internet person said, “The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is approximately a billion dollars.” In reality there’s a big difference between a million and a billion dollars, and I think it’s hard to understand it. Here are some comparisons between a million and a billion of something. Maybe one of these comparisons will help to register the vastness of the difference for you:

A million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds is 31.71 years.
A million marbles fills a bedroom closet. A billion marbles fills over one hundred 12 × 12 × 8 foot bedrooms.
Flying a million miles will have you circling the earth 40 times. Flying a billion miles circles the earth 40,000 times.
A million miles gets you two round trips to the moon. A billion miles gets you 2,000 round trips.
A million dollars in a stack of $100 bills is 3.6 feet tall. A billion dollars in $100 bills is almost ¾ of a mile tall.
A million dollar bills laid end-to-end would stretch 97 miles. A billion dollar bills laid end-to-end would circle the earth nearly four times.
If you spend $1,000 a day, a million dollars would last 2.7 years. A billion dollars would last 2,740 years.
If you spend $1,000,000 a day, a million dollars would last one day. A billion dollars would last 2.7 years.

Wow!

Happy Anniversary

It’s our 26th anniversary today. We had a nice lunch at Jesse's favorite restaurant. Very nice meal.

I've never had a banana split and have been trying to get Jesse to share one with me for a couple of years. So we walked to the ice cream shop and they had it on the menu.

We were too deep into it when we discovered that no one working had ever made a banana split before, so we got what you see in the picture complete with bruised banana, no whipped cream, and no cherry.

We went outside to eat at the sidewalk seating. Then construction workers started jack hammering the decorative rock the city installed just a couple years ago. We have no idea why.

Thankfully the wasps in the wasp nest that was at eye level about 18 inches from our faces didn't sting us. And the ice cream part of the banana split was good! 🤣

Jesse and I eating at a sidewalk table, with a mobile jackhammer and broken up rock strewn across the sidewalk.

The biggest event of the past week? Ava’s college graduation! Truth be told, she graduated last December, but the ceremony was last weekend and it was a great time. Quite a few family were able to make it to Des Moines to spend a fun weekend celebrating.

I got a little sidetracked early this week when I discovered there is an account that is basically using Pika as a nice dashboard for their company blog. They write posts on Pika and their company blog reads the Pika RSS feed to publish the posts on their company site. This isn’t a big deal, but their implementation (that I assume was vibe-coded) was hitting Pika with 100,000-150,000 requests every day. Woof!

Sometimes the national anthem at high school track meets can be a bit painful to listen to, but we were fortunate to hear a fantastic one by a high school junior this week.

I must say the effects at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child were fantastic. The play was good for those of us who are steeped in the lore. I imagine it was inaccessible for those who aren’t.

Stage preshow at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

Why am I thinking about dipping back into Mastodon and Bluesky? I’ve been away for six or seven (!) months and it’s been good. I feel a bit like I’d like I’m curious if I could do it in a way that would only be a fifteen-minute commitment each week. I have doubts, but I suppose then I could just eject again.

Hmm…I think I’ll resist a bit more.

How Everest Has Changed Since Into Thin Air (archive):

When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was only the 621st person to arrive there since the mountain was first summited, in May 1953. During the 30 years following my ascent, Everest was climbed approximately 13,000 times.

Sometimes a political cartoon hits so hard and direct that it brings a tear to your eye in more ways than one.

Spent this morning at Minnebar. This year was the 20th anniversary. I’ve had several posts about Minnebar on this blog through the years. I’ve only been able to go a couple times over the past ten years and it was good to see many familiar faces. (Even some Minnesota expats. 👋, Luke!)

(Oh, and I left my conference shirt in a room at some point and it was no longer there when I returned. If you have no conference shirt can you even say you were there?)

I called TRUNCATE on a Postgres database table in production for the first time. That was nerve wracking!

I did some wood work for the first time in a while. I’m working on a loft for Emma. I don’t know whether it’s time away from woodworking or just the type of project, but this felt a lot more like work and a lot less like hobby. Part of it might also be because it’s such a physically big project and that is a lot for my older body.

Four loft legs, each in an ‘L’ shape, each clamped with 5 woodworking clamps. — You can never have too many clamps

I’m way behind, but I just learned that Songkick was purchased by Suno. Did I know what Suno was before I learned that? No, but it sounds pretty ick. From their own home page:

Make any song you can imagine
Start with a simple prompt or dive into our pro editing tools, your next track is just a step away.

Yeah, ick. Time to migrate to Bandsintown? Something else? Give up?

I just finished the excellent Fela Kuti: Fear No Man podcast by Jad Abumrad and team. Highly recommended.

I think I might become an Onion paper subscriber. Anyone else going back to paper?

Discovered NOT A HOTEL. A man can dream.

An absurd home that I can’t describe on a mountain in Hokkaido, Japan.

This is a fun brainstorm about snail mail sign-ups. I’ve been trying some snail mail things to thank a handful of Pika customers. Unfortunately it hasn’t been very effective. There’s been almost a complete lack of response. I’m not even entirely sure if most people received my mail. So I think snail mail sign-up would effectively be no sign-up. Still this could be fun for a personal project or an art project experiment.

Drake Relays sunset over the track — Drake Relays

We’ve been working hard on Pika Pulse for a number of weeks. We keep hitting blockers, many in the form of our own lack of confidence in what we’ve built. With most things I’m a ship-fast-and-adjust sort of person, but this is one that really has us being cautious. This is not due to concerns about the specifics of anything, but more the general shape of Pulse. Being completely honest, we are also very aware of the possible lasting impact Pulse could have on the day-to-day working experience of our team of two.

A Dynamic Now Page with Pika

Since building Pika I’ve wanted to incorporate a “now and then” sort of now page with dynamic history. With the recent flurry of updates to Pika variables, I realized that my dream could now be made reality. It turns out that my recent habit of writing Friday posts is effectively me writing what I’m doing/seeing/thinking, well, now(ish).

So now my now page is no longer chronically stale! If you happen to write a “general state of things” post every week or month, you can do the same thing on your own Pika site.

The page is pretty simple. First I wrote “Now” as my title. Then in the page body:

{{ posts_in_stream tag: “Friday” with_excerpts: no limit: 1 }}

### Then

Here’s to now pages past:

{{ posts tag: “Friday” skip: 1 }}

I put the body text above in a code block and wrote it as Markdown to avoid variables rendering on this post here. You may or may not be able to copy-paste the above variables into your Pika editor.

And that’s it. You may notice that my “Then” pages are linked dates without any titles. AI helped me with some wild CSS to modify Pika’s default output to what you see there. If you want something similar, you’re welcome to look at the CSS in my now page’s source to get started. Just look for .post-link in the page source.

The HomePod Can Hear Alarms

Did you know that the Apple HomePod can recognize alarms in your home and alert you about them?

We discovered this a few weeks ago while we were vacationing in Phoenix. While relaxing in the sun, every member of our household received an alert on their phones. I cannot remember exactly what it said, but it was in notification center and said something to the effect of, “An alarm is sounding in your home.”

This certainly got our adrenaline pumping! We quickly checked the other smart device we have in our home: Nest smoke detectors. There were no alerts, neither of the smoke nor carbon monoxide variety, coming from those devices.

I was a bit confused at this point as tapping the notification center alert took me to Apple Home, but I could not see any alerts on the screen it took me to, nor could I find any notifications within the app. Perhaps this is because “The notification remains in the Home app until the alarm sound stops”? That seems like an odd implementation.

It’s a weird state to be in with my work feeling like a vocation. I love doing it, I love making progress on Pika, and I’m super grateful to be in this position. Yet there are some things I enjoy in life that I can’t seem to find time to do these days. I see movies, but not as many as I’d like. I’d like to spin some records and just listen. Ironically I’m having trouble finding time to blog. Etc.

I wonder if I should start a blogging series about watching all of, say, the AFI 100 movies or maybe Ebert’s The Great Movies since I have his first book on my shelf? But…the idea of such a blogging series makes me want to build an integrated movie posting/collection feature into Pika. 🤔

Try to deliver your tech-job application in person, I dare you!

Could you leave your application at the loading bay? Behind the building, where the trucks bring things... because that's where physical things go...

I did a telehealth call this week about some third-party blood test results. As with most things in your forties, the cure is to lose some weight, exercise, and get better sleep. For whatever reason I feel like this might be the year I pull it off. 🤞

My brother-in-law told me about a woman who was arrested and jailed for over five months based on AI facial recognition. I definitely was listening to him talk about it and saying, “There must be more to this.” Nope, it appears there is no more to it. Yet. There’s gotta be more to it, doesn’t there? Please?!

At the moment I’m choosing to be blissfully unaware of the politics around any of this and just enjoying the pictures.

The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background. This image was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT, on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side. In this image, the dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater. — A setting earth (c/o NASA)

Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling.

We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions of the story on their own terms.

We got in to Phoenix late on a Friday, stayed at a hotel, and kicked around the city proper on Saturday before checking into our VRBO. Out of nowhere I found an afternoon performance of Come From Away at The Phoenix Theatre. It was our first time seeing the musical, and it was fantastic. Lots of memories flooded back for those of us who lived through 9/11.

Come From Away program in the Phoenix Theatre.

If you are even a mild St. Vincent fan, I recommend her fantastic new live album:

Delta Air Lines…responded to the continuing shutdown by suspending special services for members of Congress, including airport escorts and red coat services.

I applaud Delta for doing this, but why the heck do members of congress get special services in the first place? Sure, for certain situations I could see it, but generally they should be in the airport mixed in with the rest of us citizens. Pat them down!

Related, we’re flying out of Des Moines today, heading down to Phoenix. With some time to kill we took some inspiration from the Thingelstads:

Barry, Jesse, and Emma posing after finishing The Kidnapping escape room. — We had…a few clues

Ava is traveling and shared this from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

A plaque in a museum that says: Good Enough 1900–Now The idea of frugal innovation or jugaad (as it is termed in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi) can be loosely translated as ‘hack’ or ‘quick fix’. It describes how designs can be redeployed or optimised for diverse circumstances. Jugaad has gained momentum in an increasingly globalised world where peoples’ needs vary greatly. People have sought a quick fix or made things that are ‘good enough’ throughout the 20th century and continue to do so today. Limited access to materials and financial constraints have posed challenges that designers, makers, architects and engineers have met with imaginative solutions. Technologically-engaged yet energy- and infrastructure-scarce communities are innovating for themselves. To meet their specific needs, they are creating gadgets and appliances to enable better access to light, power and digital connectivity.

A lengthy, imperfect article on how much Minnesota mattered this winter. (archive)

The challenge of this work week has been trying to figure out a way to streamline the moderating Pika blog posts. With only two of us on the team, it’s impractical for us to read every blog post and look for rules violations. Especially when you consider that there are many blogs on the platform with hundreds and thousands of posts. Choosing posts or blogs that we’d rather not include in the soon-to-return Pika Pulse is an even more subtle and nuanced task.

It seems obvious that LLMs could be engaged to help us with this, and in testing in my local development environment it is absolutely true that it would be a big help. We are still strong believers in not training AIs on Pika blogs. The terms published by APIs for these services are clear that when sending anything to them the default position is to not train on that content. You must opt-in.

Do we trust them? Not exactly. So we’re going to keep looking for alternatives that stay away from LLM cloud services. 🤔 I have a Mac Mini lying around here that could maybe run an LLM that has no access to these motherships…

This time of year I do a lot of working from my couch with basketball games on TV. It’s not nearly as compelling these days with NIL and players constantly transferring between schools, but old habits die hard.

Johnny.Decimal

I learned about Johnny.Decimal from Pika blogger Michael Borland. The last post on his blog clued me in. Sadly he has since passed away. RIP Michael. ❤

I’ve dipped in and out of Getting Things Done (GTD) many times over the years. The most organized I’ve felt in life is when I was truly adhering to the process, including physical tickler folders in a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet!

Today Johnny.Decimal came across my view, and I think I might give it a go. The current state I’m in is this:

My work has been all-consuming, in a good way.
- My work is not organized, but rather little note papers on the desk, a million Basecamp to-dos, and a general trust that the most important things will remain in my brain or come to the fore as necessary.
- With the productivity power of LLMs, I’m putting more and more balls in the air every day.
- While I know I can’t copy-paste a personal system onto our work to-dos, I hope Johnny.Decimal can help bridge that gap.
My home projects are abandoned.
- There are papers piling up on my office floor, awaiting organization.
- My office is a mess.
- I’m daily making small decisions about what is important to get done (pay the bills) and what isn’t (scan the documents).
- I have notes and reminders spread across Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, and Obsidian.
- I’ve uncharacteristically missed some important tasks over the past year. Late estimated tax payments being one glaring example.
- There are little projects to do, but my system has become disorganized and overwhelming. So any spare moments with energy I generally pour down the drain of internet distraction.
- I have lots of woodworking ideas that I can’t work on now, but I suspect I’ll pick back up in the next decade.

At this point in life I’m not seeking to be an efficiency master. I’m well aware that I’ll never get everything done. I’m happy to sit and read a book or watch a movie. Yet I would like to feel that my ideas and projects are organized in a way that I can find (or be reminded of them) again later. I’ve had that feeling before and it was the first year after starting GTD.

I’m watching some introduction videos now, and I might actually pony up for the course to get my bearings. If only I could justify the time…

I’ve been sick for half of this past week, so not much drivel to share this Friday.

The core of my love for reading grew through affordable mass market paperbacks. While it’s not new news, it’s a little sad to see them leaving. Still, I really would prefer not to read that tiny, cramped print these days.

I saw this a few places, so now you get to see this:

Previously on “A Writing Workstation”

A couple months ago I put together a fairly lengthy post about getting an old MacBook set up to be a writing machine. It was pretty encouraging, the idea of having a machine that would just be for one thing. At the time of writing that post I was diving pretty deep into my work and I realized I was not in a “writing mode,” but I was also hopeful a little writing would happen with this new, old laptop.

I’m not going to blame it all on this one thing, but at the end of that post I said:

I hate the feeling of typing on this thing enough that I’m considering an inexpensive Keychron keyboard to sit on my lap while I write. That doesn’t seem conducive to actually writing, though.

I wrote once with that laptop and never went back.

So I’ve been on the lookout for a different option. My finger has hovered over the order buttons for both a Freewrite Traveler and a used MacBook One. With the Freewrite, I was hesitant about the lag between typing and the screen, and lets not talk about the price versus general utility. For the latter, I suspected I would dislike the keyboard as much as I dislike the keyboard on my old MacBook Air.

Then came the Neo. With the education price¹, I could get the Neo for less than the Freewrite Traveler. I don’t mind typing on my work MacBook Pro at all, so I’m pretty confident I’d be happy with the Neo keyboard. No reviews thus far have suggested keyboard problems.

So I decided to give it a shot, clicking the trade-in button for that MacBook Air in the process. I initially felt like embracing the low end and rolling with an Indigo 256 GB with no Touch ID. In the end, though, I figured I’d save my future self a few headaches with the 512 GB.

TIL at checkout: Education savings: Available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers of all grade levels.

The Discernment Gap

I really enjoyed Justin Duke’s thoughts in “The death of software, the A24 of software”.

A24 didn't succeed despite the streaming era — they succeeded because of it. The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for curation, for a brand that stood for something. When everything is abundant and most of it is forgettable, the scarce thing is discernment.

Yes!

We are fortunate at Good Enough to be given these powerful LLM tools at a perfect time in our careers. (I have more to say about that timing, but not today.) We can guide agents very successfully given our breadth of experience in programming and design. Perhaps more importantly we have also developed a deep level of taste for the way interfaces work, and honed our attention-to-detail muscles to a fine degree. And our belief in human (humane?) customer service runs completely counter to million/billion dollar companies that ship you to an algorithm and don’t want to talk to you person-to-person unless you embarrass them online (archive).

Household-name status isn’t what we’re after, so the A24 comparison isn’t really apt for us, but there is a lot of room in the marketplace of software products for those teams that are able to stand out based on heaps of quality. I just hope discovery tools continue evolving so that regular folks are able to find the excellent software that is going be made.

It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes.

I’ve mentioned the photographs of Ragnar Axelsson (Rax) a couple of times here in the past. I recently discovered the availability of the short BBC documentary featuring him: Last Days of the Arctic. Having studied hundreds of his pictures by this point, it was fascinating to see him and his subjects moving through the very environments where the photos were captured.

Please contribute to Number Research (via Shawn).

If you want a new song that feels thrown back to the 80’s, I recommend “be the girl!” by hemlocke springs.

Thank you, Mike O. Thank you.