I Can't Keep This Inside Any More...

Every ukulele instructor will tell you that you will learn faster and better on a good-sounding ukulele. They are absolutely correct !  Unfortunately, most low-end ukes sound terrible.  But this does not mean your first ukulele should be expensive. It seems silly to pay extra up-front when starting a new hobby, when there's a real risk you'll not pursue it. Instead, I usually suggest to my fellow ukulele beginners (I'm a perma-beginner myself) that they start with an inexpensive uke on sale at a local music store (ideally a ukulele store, and certainly not Walmart). Then also buy a set of D'Addario strings (not the best, but absolutely the best bang-for-the-buck), a replacement saddle, and a replacement nut, all of which costs about $10 total. Load two apps on your phone: A ukulele tuner app (I like DaTuner Pro) and a metronome app (I like Metronome Beats). Instructions for tuning a ukulele are easy to find, if they are not included with the ukulele. Then go to a loca...

I recently watched this SmarterEveryDay video , where toward the end Destin talks about how he failed to see things from his collaborator's perspective, and emotionally tried to block him out, rather than seek understanding. I keep having to relearn this, the power of perspective, the power of seeing from multiple perspectives, and how experience and education can actively block efforts in that direction, especially when the retreating mind resorts to emotional tricks to further cloud the rational mind. While between jobs in early 2017, I spent 6 months volunteering full-time as an algebra tutor at a high school whose mission was to target students who were failed by other schools in the district (in both senses of the phrase) , especially those who were about to age out of the system.  Many of these students had life stresses with which I had no direct experience whatsoever: Homelessness, violence, poverty, and more.  Yet they kept showing up to school, despite having jo...

I just finished watching a rare video by the popular machining and engineering blogger AvE, where he gives some useful life-advice .  Even allowing for AvE's "colorful" language, it's still some very solid advice. Please watch the video first, else what follows may not make much sense. The next most important thing is to give yourself permission to change or reorder your goals, and to do so by treating the goal selection process itself as a goal, something to pursue and learn to do well. In my case, back in the early 1970's I was a very dysfunctional teenager who happened to get decent grades, and who everyone assumed would go directly to a good university.  I desperately wanted some breathing room to figure myself out (I was depressed and silently suicidal, with one older brother dead to suicide and the other extremely emotionally disturbed).  I didn't disagree that college was in my future, but I knew I wasn't ready.  Yet I didn't see any alter...

Some recent minor events came together for me as a powerful realization about myself. I have a friend, a former co-worker, who used her engineering career to put her husband through medical school debt-free.  Once he was established, they bought a house and she spent the next decade building their family, with some engineering contracting/consulting on the side, both to keep her skills active and to have a little extra income.  Once their youngest was in third grade, she started her tech-focused MBA, and he shifted toward academia (with a huge pay cut), together ensuring their family was always well-parented. Not only are they the most joyous family I know, but their kids are simply fantastic individuals. They both plan to be working when their kids start college, to ensure they all graduate debt-free.  Their empty-nest dream was to semi-retire together and travel the world, but now they're talking about adopting teenagers. This family-focused partnership started we...

Andrew Yang is a "dark-horse" candidate campaigning to become the 2020 Democratic Presidential nominee. The first and largest plank in his policy platform is a version of Universal Basic Income (UBI) he calls the " Freedom Dividend ". Many view UBI as a non-starter issue. While the general notion is easily understood, detailed definitions and proposed implementations vary widely. Andrew Yang's reconceptualization of implementing UBI does add a solid dose of practicality, and deserves a closer look and ongoing discussion. I believe my own story may be relevant to the UBI debate: On my 60th birthday in October of 2016 I started receiving $1000/month from the government as a delayed result of retiring from the US Navy Reserves back in 1996. I'm from a family with a history of living active lives into their 90s. Several worked into their 80s. Getting a "retirement" at age 60 seemed a bit ironic to me, as I expect to work for two more decades (I'v...

I just finished reading Juliana Piskorz' piece at The Guardian , and was left with some thoughts to share.  She writes about how traditional life and work dreams don't map well to the lives many Millennials are experiencing, and the resulting sense of hopelessness and despair. First, this feeling isn't at all unique to Millennials.  Pretty much everyone experiences it, often multiple times.  Especially after traumatic events like losing a job or a relationship, or merely when comparing yourself to others in your circle (the "Greener Grass" syndrome). Second, the problem isn't having a poor outlook.  That's putting it backwards.  It starts with having toxic dreams.  Such dreams have nothing whatsoever to do with who you are, and are typically taken in as whole cloth because we were raised on them by family, culture, media and society. Please, push back against all such toxic dreams.  Free yourself from their pernicious grasp.  It would be bet...

In the summer of 2014, the owners of my employer at the time chose to stop investing in the company and close it down, just as we had performed a series of very successful field demos for the prototype of our new flagship product.  This product had been my primary focus for two years, pushing me to some of my best engineering efforts. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!  That shutdown took the wind out of my sails, making me wonder if I wanted to ever work that hard on anything ever again.  In particular, I wasn't sure I wanted to tie my career so tightly to a single employer. After taking some time off, I chose to pursue shorter-term employment via both contracts with technical temp firms and independent consulting.  Both turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated.  In particular, the list of contacts and references I had built over the years had been depleted by retirements and relocations: My network had largely evaporated. ...

My freezer is full.  It is always full.  This is due to the amazing variety and quality of flash-frozen food. And the fact that it occasionally goes on sale. I have flash-frozen vacuum-packed meat and fish fillets that are delicious many months after purchase.  I buy my breakfast sausage frozen in bulk whenever it goes on sale, and enjoy it for the next several months.  A sale on carnitas keeps me happy for a long time. My huge selection of flash-frozen fruits lets me make any smoothie anytime, no matter what is in or out of season. I also stopped discarding over-ripe bananas: Freezing them for smoothies worked wonderfully. Best of all, my enormous stock of flash-frozen dark green vegetables proved to be my dietary and nutritional salvation as a single person who loves to cook but who hates left-overs and hates discarding fresh produce I failed to consume rapidly enough. Earlier this week I encountered an awesome sale on mini-chubs of my favorite breakfast sa...

I have some empathy for Senator Franklin's behavior during his prior career as a comedian.  I actually have some relevant experience! I was in the US Navy from 1975 to 1981.  At the time, the Navy was working very hard to cope with enormous problems like racism and illicit drug use (with gradual but steady success).  This was also during the difficult transition from the draft to the all-volunteer military, which greatly impacted both the number and quality of recruits.  To obtain better personnel, the Navy recruited more women into a service that still had rampant problems with sexism and violence against women (as both service members, spouses and even the general public). In this environment I became know as a good joke teller. I couldn't create or write jokes, but I understood how to deliver them with pinpoint precision, as targeted weapons tailored to whatever audience was present.  I told any joke that would get a laugh, no matter the subject or conten...

As part of my ongoing effort to stay out of the "echo chamber" and learn about my biases, I recently took a look at the science and technology writers I follow, the folks I rely upon as reliable sci/tech news reporters and analysts. What I found is that my list is about 75% female. I know I wasn't merely "chasing skirts", so I decided to dig a bit deeper to see if there were attributes these female writers possessed that were different from, or less prevalent in, male authors. I looked first to see if the women preferentially covered topics that matched my interests, but I found no such general emphasis compared to male writers. This meant I had to look at the writing itself.  This investigation was made more difficult by my lack of an adequate liberal arts education, something not required for engineers when I was in college.  So I was not really prepared to do a serious lit-crit comparative analysis. As best I could, I looked at the flow of many arti...

The recent wave of sexual assault and harassment claims against prominent people and celebrities has made me to think more deeply about my own sex- and gender-related biases. Looking back at high school, being a social recluse I treated everyone pretty much much the same, doing my best to avoid being noticed or giving offense, in particular trying to avoid passing on any of the bullying and teasing behavior I had experienced. That changed when I enlisted in the US Navy, which at the time (mid 1970's) was challenged on a few key fronts: Recovering from the Vietnam War, and combating racism and drugs.  This was also near the start of the new "all-volunteer" US military with the end of the draft in 1973, which resulted in more women being recruited to meet staffing goals. At the time the Navy had a terrible sexism problem, not solely toward it's own female members.  The cultural view of many (most?) male sailors was that females were prey to be pursued and captured...

I appeared on the TSA Watch List about a year after it came into existence soon after 9/11. Every time I was flagged and delayed, I repeatedly raised holy hell with everyone in the entire chain: Ticket counter agent, manager, TSA rep, and occasionally even my Representative in Congrees and my Senator. After about 9 months of this, to remove me from the list.the TSA asked me to submit an extensive form to provide MORE data, which I refused to do. This form was actually longer and more detailed than the forms I submitted for my security clearances with multiple US government agencies! If they couldn't even connect those dots, they certainly didn't deserve to get MORE information from me. It was their data that was bad, it was entered without my participation or consent, and I had no reason to help them fix their mess. In fact, I had every incentive to make their errors as costly as possible for as long as possible, to encourage them to get a system that WORKED. So I sim...

I just turned 61, and I can't recall a time when the American population was more divided. Even during the Vietnam War and the riots of the late '60's and early '70's, the divisive issues were relatively few in number compared to today. The most general divisive statement I can recall from those days was: "Don't trust anyone over 30." Back then, we could disagree about specific issues without denigrating or rejecting the entirety of the other person. I see that sensibility fading, especially during the past decade. Rather than having opinions on issues, we are now seemingly forced to join one camp or another. The ability to be a complex person with diverse beliefs is fading: Uniformity of identity is becoming the rule rather than the fringe exception. The main problem, as I see it, isn't just what "they" believe versus what "we" believe. The main problem is the "echo chamber" where we hear only those who agre...