Category: Personal (Page 1 of 27)

Where were you when you found out about [X]?

April 3, 2026 /

Matt Glassman blogged about this topic yesterday, and I thought it was an interesting opportunity for reflection. As he wrote, here are “the national news events for which I can recall precisely where I was when I found out about them. Excludes sporting events, elections, (most) court decisions, and the passage of legislation, and must be a minimum of 5 years ago”:

Space Shuttle Columbia takes off on STS-1, April 12, 1981. We watched this live in school, in a library, on one of those TVs-on-wheeled-carts. I was in second grade. We may have watched Reagan’s inaugural address that way, too.
Challenger explodes, January 28, 1986. This one, which Matt listed, made me think of the Columbia above. I was in middle school. Some science classrooms (not mine) had tuned into it for Sally Ride, and kids started running in the halls, town criers yelling, “the Space Shuttle blew up!”
The Gulf War breaks out, February 24, 1991. I was out to dinner with my two best friends at a pub across town. We were seniors in high school. One of my friends had just turned eighteen; my birthday was five weeks away. Much of the dinner conversation was spent wondering whether the draft would be reinstated.
OJ Bronco chase, June 17, 1994. We were at my friend’s house (one of the two from the Gulf War item above) watching the Knicks game, until we weren’t.
OJ trial verdict, October 3, 1995. I was temping at Wiley Publishing as a new grad. We listened to the verdict over AM radio in someone’s office.
World Trade Center collapse, September 11, 2001. I was at home when it started, with the TV tuned to NY1, and at the Economist office when the towers came down. Fascinating to recall that it was a regular work day, and my boss was rather peeved that we all left early.
Eastern seaboard blackout, August 14, 2003. I was in my apartment, which was good, because it was on the eleventh floor, but bad that evening when the dog needed to go out.

Those last two items were experienced more than found out, of course. Matt has some interesting footnotes about that in his blog post that I generally agree with, although I think the lack of recent events is less about smartphones and more about the continuous nature of adulthood: apparently it takes a lot (blackouts, terrorist strikes) to shake us out of our rhythms.

Some of the recents events I considered—Matt wrote about covid lockdowns; I thought of the financial crisis—have been rolling incidents rather than moments in time. I also thought of some events that really mattered to people, like Curt Cobain’s and Princess Diana’s deaths, but I don’t have a personal recollection of the moment. Interesting stuff.

Fun with Claude

March 19, 2026 /

Like everyone, I’m busy developing expertise in harnessing AI, vibe coding in my spare time. I have a couple of product ideas I’d like to wrangle, but they’re going to take some time to get right. So I’ve been undertaking in-one-sitting projects and improving my prompting skill.

Last month, I had Claude pull this blog into a book: 730 pages in trade paperback format, suitable for binding in leather. It took three or four tries to get it to crawl my pre-CMS pages, but it worked. I have not sent it out to get printed but I might.

This evening, I wandered onto a friend’s consulting website, and realized my own was pretty out-of-date. (Honestly, it was just a placeholder when it launched, and it lasted seven years.) So I spent an hour alternating between March Madness and Claude, and now User Savvy has a spiffy new home.

More to come, I’m sure.

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 ten 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 14 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?”

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.

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.

Some of my best-evers

October 31, 2025 /

I recently pulled out my old Helly Hansen all-weather coat. My wife bought it for me on a trip to Norway back in 2007. It developed a small tear in the nylon on the chest, so I moved onto other jackets, including two more Helly Hansens. But I never let go of the first one, for a reason: it’s easily the best jacket I’ve ever owned.

I can list some of the reasons why. It’s warm but not too warm. It’s comfortable, with a soft interior and good movement. It has great practical features, including zipper pockets, a spacious exterior breast pocket, and a good hood. And it’s seriously weatherproof: I’ve coached soccer games in 43-degree pelting rain and strong winds and kept reasonably warm and dry. I wore it for yesterday’s storm, nylon tear and all, and will pull it out the next time the weather requires it.

But that’s not exactly the point. What I find interesting is that it’s lodged in my memory (past and present) as the categorical best, something I knew in the moment was as good for me as that thing would ever be.

Since grabbing the Helly Hansen yesterday, I’ve been thinking about other categorical bests from my past. Sometimes this is impossible; I couldn’t pick a vacation, I’d have three, or seven. But when you know, you know. I’m sure there are many (and I will update this post if I think of more) but here are a few:

Sneakers: Bo Jackson Nike Air SC3s, circa 1991. Man, I was still a teenager, but I was unequivocal back then: these were the best sneakers ever. I still remember them well: great looks, great support, comfortable, long-lasting. I still wear Nikes and some of them are great. But none of them were these.
Lobster: Roy Moore Lobster Company, Bearskin Neck, Rockport, Mass. I didn’t like lobster until I was an adult, and Roy Moore is what got me going. Nothing beats their straight-from-the-lobster-boat, boiled-in-seawater freshness and sweetness. It can be emulated—Jordan Lobster Farms on Long Island cooks the same way, and I once watched my buddy Rob walk down to the beach with a lobster pot, with equal results—but Roy Moore, sitting alongside some of the country’s most venerable lobstermen, stands above.
Stargazing: I’ve had a lot of special moments, from the 2024 total eclipse to the three (!) comets I’ve seen with my family the past few years. But the 2002 Leonid meteor storm tops the list. I woke up my wife and parents well past midnight and we all laid on a soccer field at the local elementary school on a frigid night, huddled under wool blankets and watching. What we got were hundreds of meteors, a barrage of flares and dreams and inspiration.
Computing: as I wrote here previously, while I’ve used many computers for countless hours dating back to 1981, the only one I’ve really loved wasn’t even mine. It was the well-loved Mac SE/30 in the editor’s office at the college newspaper. Friendly, fast and with clarity of purpose, I was never happier at a monitor. Repeating myself: “I had on it Eudora, Microsoft Word 5.1a, and a Klondike solitaire app, and it was just about perfect.”

What have you experienced as the absolute best?