Friday, April 25, 2025

Things I already miss about my father

 It’s only been 48 hours so these aren’t particularly deep thoughts. But they are thoughts nonetheless.



  • I just finished N K Jemisin's marvelous Broken Earth trilogy, and I really wanted to know what dad thought about it. He had zipped through all three volumes in barely 10 days, while it took me two months to finish them. He was a much faster reader than me. But he was waiting patiently until I finished the last volume before telling me. So now I'll never know.
  • I played some golf, which I enjoy but don't do often, and am not very good at. But my dad loved golf and was remarkably good at it , so I wanted to tell him some stories from my golf trip. Don't get to do that and have no one else to tell.
  • The golf courses were out in the desert and my dad had a phenomenal knowledge of desert plants; i wanted to tell him about the mesquite and the tamarisk and the locust and the acacia that were lining the course.
  • I was learning a bit about prediction markets and they are pretty abstract and so I wanted to talk to my dad about them to see what he thought. I think he would have found them fascinating

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Robert Leon Pendleton, 1937-2025

Just 72 hours ago, my father was sitting in the family room debating the virtues and challenges of artificial intelligence with my son.

Time goes by so fast.

I’ll have more to say down the line, for now it’s enough to say: dad, I miss you and I love you and every time I was with you I learned something.



Saturday, April 19, 2025

Star Wars Zero Company looks like a game I'd like

It seems that some of the team from XCOM have joined a new effort to build a Star Wars tactical turn-based game.

Star Wars: Zero Company Officially Revealed With 2026 Release Window

Zero Company takes place in the "twilight of the Clone Wars," and stars Hawks, a former Republic officer commanding an elite squad of operatives taking on a growing new threat. It's a single-player game, featuring turn-based tactics gameplay, and is said to incorporate "meaningful outcomes from player choices".

Star Wars: Zero Company to Be Officially Revealed From Respawn and Bit Reactor This Weekend

Developer Bit Reactor is a newly-formed strategy game studio made up of veterans from games like XCOM, Civilization, Gears of War, and Elder Scrolls Online.

Sounds like I've got at least 18 months to wait, but I'll look forward to learning more about what the team is up to.

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Happy four month birthday Olive

happy birthday to Olive the puppy, 33 pounds of muscle and energetic love.

Saturday, March 15, 2025

CRS

We have a tradition of going on a special trip over Martin Luther King day weekend.We also have a tradition of going on a special trip in mid-August for our anniversary.

But I find that I forget things so fast, and I can't remember where we went when.

And of course everything was a blur during COVID.

  • January, 2020: we were in Tucson, AZ. We're pretty sure Donna had COVID on that trip
  • January, 2021: we stayed home; COVID was too scary then
  • January, 2022: we were in Mendocino, CA. I got COVID on that trip
  • January, 2023: we were in Paso Robles, CA
  • January, 2024: we were in Petaluma, CA
  • January, 2025: we went back to Mendocino, CA. I did not get COVID on that trip
  • August, 2020: we went to Half Moon Bay. There were terrible fires in the Santa Cruz mountains.
  • August, 2021: we went to Sonoma and stayed at the Sonoma Mission Inn. It was a beautiful trip
  • August, 2022: we went to Timber Cove CA. Quiet and peaceful
  • August, 2023: we went to Occidental, CA. The redwood grove outside Occidental is glorious
  • August, 2024: we stayed home. Recovering from knee surgery
  • August, 2025: will be our 40th anniversary!

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Sigh, AI

At some point, Google turned their powerful AI systems loose on news.google.com, presumably hoping to improve its results.

Hmm, well.

One of those articles has something to do with Physics.

I guess Google thinks that 1 outta 3 ain't bad.

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

My relationship with my "office"

It's now been exactly five years since I came home on a Wednesday, and told my wife: "I don't think I'm going back in to my office for a while". The following Tuesday, the company notified me (and everyone else) of the truth of that statement.

I had spent the first 40 years of my professional career, through nine different jobs across three states and both coasts (three coasts if you count Lake Michigan), always in a "white collar" job where I had an assigned desk, with space to set up my computer and other equipment, hang my coat, put up a picture of my wife, have a desk drawer where I could store various necessities.

If anyone needed to find me, I had a phone and I was at my desk, unless I was away at a meeting. And if I needed to find anyone else to discuss things, I knew how to do that, too.

I was totally unprepared for any other way of doing software engineering.

I'd had about 10 years or so of Open Source activities, so I wasn't completely unaware that there were other ways to collaborate on large software projects, but I had no idea how completely unprepared I really was.

I rarely used social media chat programs for informal conversations with co-workers who were 5 feet away.

When I wanted to brainstorm ideas and describe large unfamiliar concepts, I was great at a whiteboard, but horrible at getting my thoughts across in a phone call.

And what was this video conference stuff? How did it work? What was all this unfamiliar software? Skype? Zoom? Google Meet? I knew the names of this stuff, but couldn't find the buttons to click. None of my computers had webcams.

Oh my how much I've learned in five years. Perhaps old dogs can indeed slowly learn some new tricks.

I still struggle mightily to organize and conduct a 25-person technical design review effectively. When I can't "read the room", it's hard for me to tell when I'm moving too slow, or moving too fast, and losing my audience either way. I often spend too much time on small talk when I should move on to the meat of the matter, or jump right into a challenging conversation with someone I've barely met before I've even gotten to know them.

And it's so, so, so hard for me to meet people online. I have colleagues with whom I've collaborated extensively, over hundreds of hours, but whom I've barely met face to face. I couldn't tell you how tall they are, whether they are left- or right-handed, or if they prefer slacks and a dress shirt or blue jeans and a hoodie.

The next generation will grow up completely comfortable with these topics that I only came to late, near the end of my career, and undoubtedly these sorts of things will fade away into the mists of time.

But my goodness what a difference five years has made in my life.