Ideapad

Walkman nostalgia

March 12, 2026 /

I found all three of my Sony Walkmans on the walkman.land website.

WM-F10: my first Walkman, received when I was maybe eight years old. My parents really went for it! This was a high-quality, tiny cassette player with a built-in FM radio receiver (which I absolutely used). The build of this device was particularly clever, as the writeup notes:

Iconic expandable Sony walkman model, with manual FM radio tuner. … With no room in the main body of the machine, all the radio equipment had to be mounted in the cassette door. … The only control on the radio part of the WM-F10 was the tuning wheel (complete with a miniature scale and cord drive). Switching between radio and tape required an extra switch to be fitted to the main machine, next to those for tape type and Dolby NR. The Dolby switch was given an extra function as a control for the sensitivity of the radio (local/DX), though little was receivable in the “local” position.

In addition to the size, the sound quality was excellent. It had a toggle for chrome cassettes as well as a Dolby noise reduction option. Even though I was young, I knew I had a fancy-pants Walkman, with its slide-open cassette compartment. I quickly discovered the joys of portable, crystal-clear in-ear audio.

WM-F77: my replacement for the first Walkman, after the F10 developed a tendency to whir slowly into action when I pressed play. (I was sad.) I was around 13 at this point, and knew enough to ask for another metal Walkman, and not a more common plastic model, which my parents obliged. This was a much more physically substantial gadget than my first one, which was a brief disappointment, but it was a much more durable design. It too had the chrome and Dolby switches, which I absolutely used, as I had become a low-grade audiophile and teenage music pirate. It also had auto-reverse.

WM-F701c: for no good reason, I became obsessed with Sony’s two tenth-anniversary, ultra-low-profile Walkman designs. I don’t recall if I had this model or the sleeker WM-701c, but I’m pretty sure I opted for the model with a radio. It was gorgeous, if less of a workhorse than the 77.

After that, I had a (metal) Discman, which took me through college, so for a good 15 years I relied on Sony devices for portable audio. I loved every one.

Identity crisis

March 6, 2026 /

I’m at the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It’s a big space, the entryway to a health center, maybe 50 feet long with lots of couches. I’m sitting at the far end, one of around ten people waiting for their appointments.

A nurse comes out from a door on the other end of the waiting room and calls the next patient. “David?”

All ten people look at her. I stand up. So does the man across from me, and another man closer to her, by the front desk. We all smile.

“David who?” we ask, more or less in unison.

The nurse is a little surprised, but she checks her chart. “David H.,” she replies.

I sit down.

The man across from me says, “I’m David H.”

The man in front of her says, “I’m David H.”

The nurse blinks. The two men look at each other. One of the David H.es asks if she can be more specific. She’s obviously struggling with how to manage her patients’ privacy, but after a second, she gives up.

“David Hayes.”

The man across from me says, “I’m David Hayes.”

The man in front of her says, “I’m David Hayes!”

My local David Hayes bursts into laughter. He starts walking across the room to sort things out. The David Hayes closer to the nurse stops him. “I gotta shake your hand.”

As they’re approaching the desk, a second nurse comes out of a different door and says, “David?”

Macbook Neo

March 5, 2026 /

The Neo looks great! Amazing that you can buy a full-on Mac laptop for less than a late-model iPhone. I kind of wish I had a reason to buy one.

Keeping things, letting go

March 4, 2026 /

I am something of a packrat. I derive comfort and pleasure from the artifacts of my past. My parents’ house is still full of material remnants of my youth, from art projects to my physical music collection to once-beloved items of clothing.

Sometimes, this works out: last year, when my son got into thrifting culture, I pulled out all my concert T-shirts, most in fine condition, and three of them entered his regular rotation. Other times, not so much—the other day I dug out a folio and found a dozen tour books from those same concerts, all in great condition, all completely useless. Win some, lose some.

Now that I have kids and an apartment with insufficient storage, I’m much more judicious with my keepsakes, suburban archive aside. For example, I recently gave an outgrown kid’s bike to my cousin for his young son. We’ve given them stuff before; my first-cousin-once-removed is 10 years old and adorable. But this one hit different.

Two years ago, the kid got really into Lego. My own boys had accumulated an unfeasibly large Lego collection, and I took a fair amount of pleasure in bequeathing them to the next generation: there must be five thousand pieces! And all the instruction books! Please love them as we loved them!

I should note that I had my own Lego collection as a child, all hand-me-down, and I always planned on handing them down, too. But I never had anyone to give them to. My nieces and nephews weren’t really into Legos, and by the time my own kids were Lego-ing, my box of instructionless space theme pieces—many still assembled—wasn’t interesting. They’re still in my parents’ basement. But at least I could give away the recent ones. Please love them as we loved them.

Roughly eight months after an enthusiastic handover, my cousin suffered a major fire in his home. All those Legos are gone.

I haven’t worked out what metaphor exists in there, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Twenty years of the line diet

March 3, 2026 /

I’ve discussed this plenty over the past year, but I do want to mark a milestone: I first started tracking my weight with a spreadsheet and a line graph on March 10, 2006. At the time, I was working at a beauty company, surrounded by people who routinely looked their best. It was motivational for me to drop the 10 extra pounds I’d been carrying—and I did, according to the chart, that October.

That round of weight loss didn’t stick, but for some reason, the spreadsheet did. I wasn’t religious about it—there are gaps in the data as long as 16 months—but I’d use it for a few weeks or months on occasion, whenever I was thinking about my weight, or just to track my life in some way (cf.). I started making a new tab every couple of years to keep it manageable. Before I knew it, I had ten years of data, and I made a decade-long graph to see what I’d been up to.

Saving you a click: I wasn’t great at weight loss. The chart revealed that what I considered my default adult weight had slipped away. And the march of time from there only made it worse. After getting thin in my late 20s and early 30s, my weight crept up, and my target became like a basketball rim, something to leap toward and touch at best. Across an 18-year span, I only got to or below my target four times, and one of those was after I got food poisoning in Mexico City. At least I was pretty good at halting weight gain, thanks in part to the tracking.

All this built to the crowning achievement of my spreadsheet. When I began modifying my diet early last year, my doctor gave me a new weight target. I had the perfect tool for tracking my progress. I didn’t even have to resurrect it: I had dropped in my weight the week before. So as I committed myself to eating right, I started weighing myself every day, and recording the results.

A side note to most humans is that obsessing over daily weight changes is not always a mentally healthy approach. One needs to understand the fluctuations and not get discouraged. I’ve had events even in at the peak of my weight loss journey where I gained 2.5 pounds in a day. The right answer in these moments, by the way, is, “Oops.” Follow an unhealthy day with a healthy one and the data resolves itself. It’s not perfectly linear.

What was linear, for me, was the downward trend last year.

I reached my personal goal on May 23, then trended gently downward into the summertime, when my body settled into its new base weight. I moved comfortably in a three-pound range for several months, and then I had sinus surgery, which inadvertently made me lose more weight, and in late November I found myself a full 10 pounds below my goal. I’d never been underweight in my life! I took a couple of days in a food rumspringa—pizza, a Slurpee, Thanksgiving dinner—before returning to heart-healthy eating, and normalized at the same level.

I hit 20 years of the line diet with a year-plus of improved health and nine months of steady-state in my new weight class. And the spreadsheet marches on, all 15 tabs of it, alongside my much newer daily food tracker.

Fiddly App Friday

January 23, 2026 /

I was using one of my more niche apps this morning for a work project and got to thinking about the little productivity things I have on my Mac that most people don’t. I’m not talking about Fantastical or BBEdit, which are well-known tools; I’m talking about the “I solved a problem” apps, like Tyke, which scratched a specific itch for a specific thing.

My list is not long, but here they are.

Itsycal—Simple calendaring tool that also lets you customize the presentation of date and time in the menu bar. I click into the month view multiple times a week. I also prefer its date stamp to the default MacOS options.

Free Ruler—I think this has been on my machine in one form or another for 25 years. Measure stuff, straighten stuff. Leaves itself as a transparent overlay while you manipulate whatever it is you’re wrangling in the active app. Perfect.

Flickr Uploadr—I’m still a Flickr user, thanks to the thousands of tagged and captioned photos that I can’t seem to export with their full data sets. And when I want to upload new photos, the Uploader is a delight. Make a desktop folder, drop photos into it Dropbox-style, see photos on Flickr. That’s all it does. That’s all I need it to do.

(Dis)parity

January 16, 2026 /

Baseball headline of the week: Kyle Tucker, Dodgers agree to 4-year, $240M deal.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2026 payroll is larger than the bottom five Major League Baseball teams’ payrolls combined.

The Dodgers’ payroll is so big that the gap between them and the New York Mets’ #2 payroll is larger than six teams’ entire payrolls.

The Dodgers and the Mets are the only two teams with projected payrolls over $325 million. Fifteen other teams—half the league—are under $160 million. You could put any two of those teams on the field and play ball for less than the Dodgers or Mets pay for one dugout.

The Dodgers’ use of deferred money means they have $298 million in commitments for 2028 already. Twenty of the other 29 teams have less than $100 million on the books, and three have $0 (really).

I don’t know how this ends, and I root for the original large-market juggernaut, but this game needs some degree of payroll parity in the next agreement, because leagues need fair competition to stay interesting.

(Source)

The Year in Cities 2025

December 30, 2025 /

Many of the newsletters I read are publishing “best of 2025” wrap-ups where they rattle off the posts that either got the most attention or made their authors most proud. Which is nice and all, but I saw that content already. I guess the digital cadence means it’s better to do the newsletter version of a clip show than just not hit send for a week?

Here at the Ideapad, where there’s never been a post schedule, one thing that hits like clockwork is the Year in Cities recap. Herewith, the twenty-first edition. All the places I went and spent the night. A procession of weddings and ballparks, pretty much.

As with last year, the commitment to sleeping over eliminates some of the nuance: we went from Pittsburgh back to New York by way of Baltimore, because baseball. And that Kentucky stay was over the river from Cincinnati, a pedestrian bridge away from a Reds game, which was the point of our visit. But we’ll stick with the system, which allowed us spend a night in Kentucky, after all.

Repeat visits are noted with an asterisk.

New York *
Coral Gables, FL
Chicago, IL *
Palm Beach Gardens, FL *
Cleveland, OH *
Detroit, MI
Newport, KY
Pittsburgh, PA
Edgartown, MA *
Montecito, CA

On economics

December 8, 2025 /

I took a microeconomics class my first semester of college as an undergraduate. It was part of the core curriculum requirements. I found it incredibly boring. My distaste for it was part of the motivation for me to declare a major in English instead of something pre-business.

More than a decade later, I took a macroeconomics class, midway through my graduate coursework in business school. I found it fascinating and took to it easily. I enjoyed it so much that I went to my professor and asked him if it was too late to switch careers.

My professor leveled with me, and said that most professional economists pursue master’s and doctorate degrees straight out of undergrad, and my desire to pivot after nearly a decade in digital media was probably not the best course of action. So I stuck with the internet, but I never lost my taste for macroeconomics. I’ve kept up with the sector over the years, and I still think about whether I’d be good as an economist, or in a similar field, where I am trying to understand broader trends and figure out the near future (not unlike my many years in UX).

So when I discovered the Narcissist Forecasting Contest a few years ago, I was an instant yes. Adam Braff, who owns a data consultancy, runs a fun annual game that poses 25 probabilistic questions about the year ahead, predicted by 150 or so professional and armchair analysts. It’s equal parts macroeconomics, social science, political science and gut feelings.

This is the tenth year of the contest and the fourth year I’ve played. My first year, I was in over my head, but my second year I improbably finished in eleventh place. That was enough to make me a participant for life, and also a little confused—who was I to be any good at this?

I fell back to the middle of the pack in 2024, but in 2025 I combined research, contemplation, existing knowledge, and (mostly) my gut. Unexpectedly, I began seeing my name in the top ten of the standings every time Braff wrote about the contest. I had a near spit-take when my name showed up in his August update because I was in the lead—and then I held on to win the forecast as of late last night.

I have had fun morning reflecting on winning. I am irrationally proud of my victory. I’m also wondering again if I can do anything with the latent observational and predictive skills the forecast has awakened. Should I try my hand on Polymarket? Check in with my macro professor?

I actually took the time to talk to Braff about forecasting as a career angle; he works in big data, so it’s a parallel pursuit for him, too. I’ll probably stay the course with my professional life for now. But it’s fun to consider that my hunch in 2004 was a pretty good one.

The end of POP3 in Gmail

November 30, 2025 /

I have owned netwert.com since 1997. That’s a long time! I have a few dozen email aliases that route through this domain, for everything from work to shopping to family management.

I have had Gmail since shortly after it went public in 2004. That’s also a long time! Gmail is my default mail interface. I am completely acclimated to its approach and appreciate the robustness of its search features.

For as long as I can remember, I have had Gmail configured to check netwert.com emails as well as my gmail inbox, using an old internet protocol called POP3. This has made life very easy. Gmail even lets me toggle between addresses when composing, so I can email you from either my Gmail or my netwert email. I have my User Savvy email running through there, too. So easy! So useful! My consolidated inbox is 15GB of pure digital simplification.

At least, it was. Google quietly announced in October that they are shutting down POP3 access to external accounts, effective January 1. They emailed some users about it, although they didn’t email me. I read in a secondary source that this is being done for email security purposes, although I didn’t hear that from Google. Notably, they didn’t provide any alternatives, just a Google Reader-style ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and what is now a one-month deadline to do something about it. (They do still support IMAP, but I have concerns about consistent performance.)

This is, for me, very bad. Email is email, of course, and I can find a new tool for consolidating my inboxes. But I liked and stuck with Gmail for its relative permanency and best-in-breed user experience. Now I’m going to have to find a new solution—and I will probably wind up with two, because accessing Gmail from a non-Google solution is going to be undeniably worse than Gmail itself.

I’ve done a good job for many years with my digital continuity. I suppose I should be neither surprised nor disappointed that Google made a decision that’s not in the best interests of a geeky edge case. But I am, and I am.

Suggestions on better email solutions welcome. Maybe hit me up at my netwert email and not Gmail this time around.