Stories
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I setup Mastodon instances for my personal and professional domains. Over the last month I’ve invested time into understanding how this federated world works and doesn’t work, and began doing the hard work of building community in this new space. Numerous folks from my Twitter community have come over to Mastodon, but many I know have opted to stay in the Twitterverse, or opted to join other communities for a variety of reasons. The main reason I’ve seen is th...
We made it as far as Coalinga, CA, formerly known as Coaling Station A, before dark. This is where we’ll be spending two nights here before we continue on through Bakersfield to the edges of Death Valley. As one journeys to Death Valley you have to suspend your traditional views of the world, and no better place to do that than amongst the almond and orange orchards looking out across Interstate 5 outside of Coalinga, CA.
As we all sit and watch the dumpster fire that is Twitter it can be easy to cheer on the demise of this platform. Although as I stare into the multi-color flames I can’t help but think about tall the work we’ve done on the Twitter plantation of the years, and the role it plays it our world. One are that comes to mind is how many of us received public health news as Covid gripped the world via Twitter. I spent months working on a Covid tracking w...
I made a conscious decision in 1997 to immerse myself in the incoming technological apparatus that capitalism was unleashing on the world. Until this moment in time I had purposefully avoided capitalism, a career, and understanding how business was applying technology. I had spent the previous decade actively working to subvert the system from the outside-in, and for me to have the impact I wanted on society I knew that I had to get closer to the machine and operate from within, otherwise ...
I haven’t been writing about my apocalyptic upbringing lately because for the most part I’ve moved beyond it. Writing here on my blog and pondering the subject since the 2016 election has put me in a pretty sweet spot when it comes to living life and not stressing about the programming I was raised with. However, recently a story was shared with me about someone I grew up with sharing rantings about how the apocalypse was just around the corner and wanted to make sure this person I was tal...
I was driving my friend and fellow API conspirator Fran Mendez around Oakland this week while he was in town from Spain. I regularly drive people around Oakland, and most have had some experience in the city, but most have experienced West Oakland, and have very little awareness of the redlining that has shaped the city. Most people just see poverty and trash and assume a traditional racist stance and think that the people living here have chosen to live like this. When in reality, it has ...
I had just stood up the Mastodon instance for my API Evangelist account, logged in, and was staring at the empty message box. What would I say? I had no followers. Nobody would be listening even if I did say something. So I followed my Kin Lane account, and then followed API Evangelist back. Now at least I would be talking to myself. This seems much more appropriate. I don’t need an audience. I’ve always (that’s a lie) done API Evan...
I have been simmering on the whole Twitter drama lately, and the mass migration to Mastodon. As I said before, I am not being emotional about this, and want to think about this in the context of what I consider to be my overall domain strategy. I run my own websites, blogs, email, and I think the time has come for me to own my social network. It makes me sad and a little mad to s...
I got some inspiration lately and went hunting for a new Jekyll Theme to rule my blog universe. I love blogging across my domains, and I love the storytelling scaffolding of a Jekyll site running on Github. The balance of words and data with a GitOps API-driven approach to things just works for my brand of storytelling. This new “docs” themed template (https://jekyll-theme-docs.netlify.app/) has everything I love about Jekyll from a storytelling perspective but they have gone the extra dis...
I struggle with anxiety. I have most of my life. I have been able to find balance with it on a daily and weekly basis, and while I am able to function and even move forward, the impact of it in the moment is massive and heavy most days. I choose to find my own way through this jungle, as opposed to a pharmaceutical route, and have developed a number of coping mechanisms. But, as I get older I continue to seek more solutions, and as I roll over 50 years of age I think I have found the most ...
Once I began seeing family members start dropping like flies when it came to voting for Trump in 2016 election I knew there was no turning back for me. I’ve long been on a quest to come to terms with my own complicity in white supremacy, and this was the opportunity for me to shift things into overdrive and understand more about why and how I saw the world around me. After Trump was elected i wanted to develop better understand how people I care about could believe in such a horrible human...
I turned 50. This is a big milestone for anyone. For me personally, it is everything. As a result of the programming I received from those I grew up with, as I approached being an adult, I assumed I would die by the time I was 30. This isn’t me being dramatic at 50. Me, and several of my friends believed wholeheartedly that we would die is some grand event before we were 30 years old (couple friends achieved). This belief didn’t originate from any single source, but was an aggregate of the...
I am sitting on the couch at home in Oakland after an emotional week traveling to and from Southern Oregon. Leading up to Isaiah’s birthday and two years after he passed away from an overdose, his mother and I wanted to do something meaningful to celebrate his life. After two years of isolation due to Covid-19, we felt like it was time to get out, and I thought it would be a good idea to retrace some of the hikes I did back in 2016 as part of our Drone R...
One of the highlight of this last week, as well as my life in general is my girls, Audrey and Poppy (and Kaia who is in Korea at the moment). As I step back and evaluate the week I am full of gratitude for Audrey and Poppy. They are my rocks. My inspiration. My heart. None of this would be happening without Audrey as my sidekick and I am not sure we would be functioning human beings after Isaiah’s passing without the Poppy dog. I cannot end this week of processing without acknowledging the...
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.
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...
