it’s not been a great week. The return-to-office mandate is still unpleasant, loud, and demoralizing, with too few bathrooms, a broken ice machine, and barely functioning network services. It adds a good hour to my “working” time given the commute, traffic on the interstate, lines at the badge check at the gate, and “differently functional” […]

After more than five years of remote work, today I returned to the commuting office life. It was…fine. In the most general of terms, it’s not really *that* much of an inconvenience, though to be honest, it’s kind of a bummer, just because. I likely could have waited until Monday to come in, though I […]

It’s coming folks.   77 million voters fucked around; now they’re going to find out. While the rumors of the Port of Seattle being completely empty this week were perhaps somewhat overblown, shipments of products from China and other Asian countries to the United States are slowing down rapidly thanks to those tariffs, and pretty […]

…and that’s another one in the books.  This year’s Ravencon ended up being a good experience, largely due to the presence of some very good friends I don’t see often enough and a reasonably relaxed vibe when I wasn’t rushing to sit panels, play shows, running equally-busy offspring to off-site commitments, or working around inconveniently […]

As the title of this post suggests, we’re smack in the middle of that stretch of springtime with a total dearth of federal holidays; this year with 96 days between Washington’s Birthday (observed) and Memorial Day. In public service, one can usually count on a long weekend or some such break every six weeks or […]

There’s everything and nothing going on all at the same time, and I can’t find motivation or focus for more than two or three hours at a time. Sure, I’ve kind of hit the “acceptance” stage of the whole current American experience and it’s constant threats to my livelihood, but the constant load is a […]

My personal week looked an awful lot like the curve of the stock markets this week. A couple of middling peaks, but mostly trending down and occasionally cratering. Most of the highs involved interactions with media, which…okay. Since my lovely spouse picked up an iPad a couple of weeks ago (she’s swinging her train into […]

So, Ret-Con last week was cool. I was made to feel very welcome by all, and had fun doing neat panels, even if I didn’t get much of an audience for my show. Oh well, it happens. This past week in the real world, as you might imagine, seriously sucked, apart from my regular after-work […]

So….yeah. Another week; thousands of probationary employees all over the government fired, so many of us glued to r/fednews for the latest rumors, all-hands Teams meetings where HR guys in rumpled suits allude to “huge RIF” using all kinds of words except for those two. The new SECDEF (who’s a moron) doing a video townhall […]

Been another week getting lost in the work (the last few days? A hugely successful development sprint for much-needed budget and planning data reporting tools) and trying to not think too hard about the larger world, at least when it’s not intruding into my work inbox. I’ve been mostly successful, I think; the fact that […]