Buckle up. I grew up in the 1970s. I remember going to the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a child, meeting Holocaust survivors, hearing the stories, seeing the tattoos, watching videos of camps being liberated, looking at pictures of dead, emaciated human beings stacked like cordwood. Adults in those days didn’t shrink from talking about the […]
Tag Archives: Personal
Dear readers, I haven’t been entirely straight with you. Three years ago, on the eve of New Years 2014, I started on a diet and exercise regimen – every month I added another rule, until there were over twenty separate restrictions, each infraction punished by a $100 donation to charity. I did this for eighteen months, during which […]
When I left TripAdvisor a year and a half ago, I wasn’t expecting to return. I’d had a great time over the preceding six and a half years, learned a lot, made an impact, and climbed the ladder. I’d worked on a dozen different teams across the Core Product department, finished up with a helping […]
Most people think of networking as something to do when they need a favor – they’re looking for a new job, mentor, advice, etc., so, time to start sending out the emails. This is the worst method, of course – people like to be treated like people, not favor dispensers. Good networkers are always trying to keep up with professional […]
I love to cook. I love wandering through a grocery store looking for interesting ingredients, paging through cookbooks, chopping vegetables, measuring, mixing, sautéing, baking. As a programmer / manager, I don’t have that many opportunities to make something physical, but cooking is an intensely pleasurable experience, especially when the results match the intentions. Unsurprisingly, I don’t like […]
I love to cook. It has all the visceral satisfactions of creating something real, developing mastery, and (if things go well) being yummy. Although I’m mostly known on my team for my quick breads (seriously, I just follow the recipe), I generally prefer savory to sweet. And so, I thought I’d share a couple of […]
So, I’ve been a bit bad about reporting on my exercise/diet regimen, and since I’m about to descend into the valley of the shadow of a new job at a startup, I figured I should probably post this now, before it’s too late. First off, I’ve pretty much given up on finding a gym nearby. […]
Not much time for a full report this month, so just a quickie before turning in. Bottom line is that while the sheer tonnage of snow dumped on Boston has been a pain in the ass, shoveling snow is really good aerobic exercise. And, I must say, a Roku streaming stick + Amazon Prime has made […]
This is going to be brief. First, because I don’t have anything deep and meaningful to say about habit, reward, and personal improvement this month. And second, because I was on call and up all weekend with a neverending stream of devops emergencies that had to be addressed, and I desperately need the sleep. [As […]
The three numbers in the universe that matter most are zero, one, and many. Think about life – tweak the fundamental physical constants a little, and you can imagine a universe in which it never happened. Never could have happened. Or maybe it’s so astonishingly unlikely, such a bizarrely, unimaginably low probability – the equivalent […]