Stories

We spent the second half of our journey this week in Crescent City, CA, a little town on the coast of the Oregon and California border. It is a town I have a lot of history with, and a town I have literally gone out of my way to bypass for the last 30 years. I was skeptical of spending time in Crescent City, but I wanted to try and revisit some of the trails Isaiah and I hike in the redwoods back in 2016. Like with Isaiah, I suspended by dislike of the town while I was there with Audrey, a...

Another hike I did with Isaiah back in 2016 as part of our Drone Recovery summer was up to Bolan Lake Lookout. Like Kerby Peak, I found that Isaiah was more alert and aware up at Bolan Lake, and he even smiled for me as we were goofing around at the lookout. After Kerby Peak, Bolan Lake Lookout was the next place I wanted to share with Audrey, so that we could make the place behind this picture a little more real for her. Read more →

I put the most brutal and meaningful hike to celebrate Isaiah first up in the week. Isaiah and I did Kerby Peak back in 2016 and it nearly broke us. Kerby Peak was one of the few spots where Isaiah became lucid and would talk to me, which was a common pattern I’d see in only the most remote and hardcore of natural locations. The further away we got from cities, the more Isaiah opened up, pulled down his hoodie and engaged in conversation. I wanted Audrey to experience the beauty and hardne...

I’ve been working hard lately. It is an understatement to say that I have a lot on my plate. My team has grown to 25, and I have a number of big projects front and center right now. While I have many different projects to think about big and small, there is one particular project that happens every year around this time that has intense deadlines and deliverables that are out of my control, and I am the only person with enough of a handle on the big picture to tackle. I need to be on my ga...

I am fascinated in recent years by the stories I absorbed in my youthful and more formative years. I feel like my 20s were spent figuring out who I was, and my 30s were spent figuring out the world, and I guess here in my 40s I thought it would all be a cake walk, but now I feel like my 40s were about unwinding all the shit I was programmed with before I turned 20. For me, it isn’t just the realization that a significant number of the stories I was exposed with growing up were bullshit, it...

I grew up on a steady diet of information programming me to believe that cities are bad, and rural areas are good. Something I regularly see reinforced with memes here on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. To continue de-programming myself, and push back on this narrative, I am developing a list of reasons why I will live out the rest of my life in the city, and while I will always respectfully visit rural areas and the wilderness, the majority of my life will be spent roaming around the ur...

It is a phrase I hear a lot from my white friends in response to awful white supremacist speech on and offline-—that you have to protect the worst of the free speech in order to protect free speech for everyone. Up until about 2012 it was a go to line for myself. It is easy to learn and repeat, and doesn’t require much scrutiny or thought. From within your narrow white bubble it seems logical, and you get to feel like you are doing something good for everyone—-at least you’ve convinced you...

I possess amazing powers of manifestation. I have a strong ability to see something in the future and make it happen. It has been something I became aware of at an early age, but have struggled my entire life with wielding in meaningful or purposeful ways. It can be tough to “see” something clearly enough in my minds eye and plot a course towards this thing or event, but more critically, it can be difficult to ensure that that this thing or event is something that benefits me and the world...

Times are hard right now. It takes a lot of work just to keep balance during a pandemic. I am thankful that I have a good job in this reality. I have the stability of a regular paycheck, healthcare, and comfortable apartment. Even with this stability, I work hard to find balance in everything I do, acknowledging that I need to keep working, but I also need to take care of my mental and physical health, otherwise I might burnout. I am very familiar with burnout, and have a number of tactics...

My kiddo asked me to write something about what it is like to be hard of hearing during the pandemic. They have a class project where they are doing a zine, and they wanted share my experiences during the pandemic for their contribution to the publication. I have 100% loss of hearing in one of my ears from an infection I had years ago, and the other ear has about 30% loss of capacity. Making it pretty difficult for me to understand what is happening in noisy situations, which has only gott...

I grew up in a rural area of Oregon where the nearest town was 1,200 people, and the next biggest town was 19,000 people. I grew up believing that the country was better than the city and that the country was safe and cities were dangerous and scary. By the time I reached my twenties cities were still dangerous and scary, but they were a place where interesting things were happening and there were interesting people living there. It took me almost 30 years for me to tame my view of what ci...

Audrey and I walk around Lake Merritt every day. At 5:00 AM we rise and walk around the lake with Poppy, slowly waking ourselves up with all of the human and non-human life that exists around the lake that early in the day. One of the characters you encounter while walking around the lake that early are the night herons, who hunch around the edges of the lake fixated into what seems like an alternative dimension waiting for a fish to emerge. When we began our walks early in 2021 we would s...

I have been captivated by Audrey talking about how we learn empathy as children by reading stories and having stories read to us. Something she learned about while reading Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by by Maryanne Wolf. It is a thought that has dominated my thinking since she shared it with me, and is coloring how I see people in my life in new ways, while also bringing me back to my own writing, so that I can strengthen my empathy and awareness of peo...

I built the awareness that came along with API Evangelist using my Google Reader and RSS feeds, and when Google deprecated the application I developed my own custom solution for consuming feeds. Somewhere in 2018 or 2019 I began falling out of love with processing my feeds each day. I lost interest in why I enjoyed doing it, and just didn’t believe it was worthwhile anymore. Since then I have had little interest in looking into Feedly or reading news...

What an emotional week. Sunday through Saturday of the previous week was the first major trip out into the world where we took care of some important life events while also breaking free of the clutches of the pandemic for just a little while. Our travels took us up Interstate 5 through Oregon to Portland for a memorial for the kid with family and friends, over to the coast to spread his ashes where his dad’ were also spread, then back down to southern Oregon for the funeral of one of my c...

I am reading Capital Volume One by Karl Marx (I know ;-). After getting over the hump of the introduction and the first couple of chapters, I am really getting into it. I just finished the chapter on how the work day was defined over the course of a couple decades in the 19th century, and it is fascinating to think about all the forces on both sides of the equation that have gone into defining the eight hour workday, but also the industries we work in. I’ll spend more time thinking about t...

My world is pretty wrapped with Internet technology. My career centers around it, my mind thrives on thinking about it, but I am also painfully aware how much damage Internet technology is inflicting around the world, as well as how too much focus on the digital world can leave my physical and mental self in a weakened state. I have wrestled with all of this heavily over the last five years as I was forced to come to terms with just how exploitative much of the world I am a champion for ha...

I started this Kin Lane blog back in 2007. For many years it saw one or two posts every couple months about whatever I was seeing online. Then somewhere around 2012 I began waking up more to not just the world around me, but to who I was, who I had been, and I began doing a lot of thinking about who I wanted to be. The Kin Lane blog became my therapist. It was where I would post something that I needed to get off of my shoulders. The domain was a safe place for me to put my thoughts out th...

I had one of my best friends check out of this chaos last weekend. He was my brother. I love him so very much. Not that I would have dealt with it well in any moment, but it came on the heals of losing the kid, as well as another death in the family due to cancer. I recently wrote about another friend of my who decided to take their life a l...

I did it. I cleaned up your space one last time. You weren’t there, but everything was just as you left it. Your hoodie and headphones were thrown over the edge of the couch, next to all the tools of your trade. They did a serious job cleaning every molecule from the bathroom where you exited this chaotic world. Your apartment door was just one of many doors that had sadness and loneliness seeping out of the cracks.

This decade was a big one for me. Many life and world changing things occurred to me in the last ten years. I am not one to make predictions about what the next decade will hold, but I am big on learning from my past and thinking deeply about what has happened to me. I suspect I will be learning from this last decade for some time to come, as there were many lessons which emerged for me that I am still processing and learning from. The last decade forever changed my world view on multiple ...

One of the reasons I stopped doing API Evangelist at the end of 2018 is that I felt the ground beneath my feet became unstable over the eight years of doing my research. The more research I conducted into the world of APIs and the layers of this Internet fueled world we are building, the more I saw the often invisible real world influences that surround and drive our belief in technology. I feel that these influences have always been there, but becaus...

This is my first blog post after putting down API Evangelist, and taking over a month off from technology. It is very overwhelming to reboot my storytelling in a world where I am not the API Evangelist. The persona had become a very critical part of the way I write and tell stories, and I’m unsure where to go next. I figured that I would start with the basics of what makes me happy, working with existing material from my past, until I find my voice again.

I find it is easy to lose our focus on humanity when when you work in technology. I’ve been working with databases for over 30 years, and it is easy for me to just see things as records, instead of about the information those records might contain. When you see a new signup come in from your service, the marketing funnel encourages to see this human as a demographic, a lead within a larger corporate sales opportunity, and part of a group of personas that we put into a single bucket. The te...

I was reading about the Netgear Orbi Voice, a router and smart speaker combo, and found myself thinking more about what the future will hold when it comes to surveillance using APIs. I predict we will see voice enablement, and smart speaker “listening” creep further into the router layer of our lives. This isn’t just a smart home hub play for Netgear, this will become a play for dominance at the network level, and who has access to...