Last week, our daughter designed and built a roller coaster from materials at home. Watching the girl press against her 3rd grade deadline surfaced messy memories of late night college studios.
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Ten!
Two kids and a remodel,
Still together,
A big anniversary.
(Another quiet day)I worked at the office.
Rushed to the community center.
The girl checked out a theater class.
(The boy quickly lost interest)Crossed the street,
Passed through a skate park,
The four of us ran around.
(Inside the bowl)At the playground,
He swung slowly,
She crossed the monkey bars.
(I did a couple pull-ups)Heading home,
Watched teens at the skate park.
Backflips on scooters!
(Dangerous)
She cooked a late dinner.
Penne and sauce,
Sardines, cucumbers, onions, and artichoke hearts.
(I stole most of a celebratory soda)The kids pressured mom,
“Make a cake!”
Too late.
(9:00)They ran off,
I cleared the table,
Celebrated again.
(We split a surreptitious popsicle)We outlasted:
The reception venue (Firefly now Nacho Daddy)
The wedding venue (Bonnie Springs, demolished)
The rehearsal dinner venue (HK Star and its many replacements)Nothing is guaranteed,
I’m grateful things have worked out.
On to the next decade.
(Hoping for more quiet days) -
He sculpted a blue playdough figure (with a tail) called the “Girl Stratosphere Tower” (the Statue of Liberty).
He told momma,
I found it on the “process shelf“.What’s the “process shelf”?
He pointed at the bathroom countertop.
Let’s start the process at 8:30.
It’s 10 o’clock! How come we haven’t started the process yet?
OK, time to wash up and brush your teeth!Now that they’re older,
Going to bed isn’t a battle.
But it’s still a process.
If we let them.
They’d drag it out
Process,
All night long,䷓䷴
witness
after
gloaming
before
somnolence
ablutions -
OPM.40 Basecamp Explosion
Two years ago, a third of Basecamp (now 37signals) quit after the owners suddenly shut down the DEI committee and banned all political talk on their internal chat. I’m certain that number was inflated because they offered a generous separation package of up to six month’s pay to those who quit.
I’m not going to argue the merits of those decisions, but there are three lessons from the drama worth highlighting. Two lessons relate to our craft as Owner Project Managers, the third is a question that I ponder whenever I think about my career.
Communication
The owners should not have announced the policy change via a blog post. The staff would have objected to the policy change no matter how it was delivered, but it sure made things worse. The ham handed delivery approach blew any chance at keeping the benefit of doubt within the team.
As an OPM, I’ve had three calls with firm principals to discuss concerns about their teams’ performances. Each of those old heads knew how to play the game — I felt amazing after each of those calls. Smooth motherfuckers.
The Basecamp owners forgot that they owe the same charm towards their employees when instituting big, unpopular changes. An employee serves at the pleasure of the employer, but they can walk. The transaction cuts both ways.
Your farts *do* stink
As owners it’s easy to forget that people have to act like they enjoy your presence. They respond quicker and laugh harder at your jokes when you’re their cashflow. The mass exodus shows that Basecamp wasn’t as utopian or attractive as their owners thought it was; their business books were more aspirational than descriptive.
I’ve seen this dynamic as an employee. The boss deludes themselves into believing their place is more than a job. Mission—Family—Culture—Movement—etc. Let’s get real, a company is the owners’ playground, no matter what they call it. That’s the privilege they purchase when those checks clear every other Friday.
Strip away the collective fiction and you might find out that you aren’t actually best buds, especially after offering them three to six months wages to walk away.
Would you quit for half a year’s cash?
I love my job and I love my employer. But I got options as a skilled professional in a good economy.
Would I take the deal? In my current place, I don’t think so. I’m too far from retirement and I enjoy my colleagues too much. But could I live with dragging myself to the office for the next half year, knowing it was pro bono? What if my favorite coworkers quit?
That’s where meaning kicks in. It’s one thing to grab a fat check. But what next? I still have to work. Where? At a place where I might not enjoy the company? It’s been a privilege to serve my fellow citizens. Do I have the patience to serve pushy private clients?
Of course, we’re not tech workers so it’s all hypothetical (I’m not winning the lottery either). But fantasy challenges our assumptions about daily life. It pushes us through a series of “why’s”. Why do we work? Why did we chose this specific employer, this profession? Why do we stay? Why are we still in this game?
~
Some Links
I’ve always been fond of electronica, starting with .mod files on the 16-bit Sound Blaster on our 386. I listened to Glitch Mob’s Drink the Sea on repeat while doing mad overtime in Houston and I’ve gone through a few other electronica phases in the past decade at Vegas.
Lately I’ve been working so hard that I can only listen to music with a strong beat. Last week, I finally stumbled across the term “Glitch Hop” on the title card to Defqwop’s Heart Afire.
Once I found a name, I dug into google. Here’s an hour long mix by Xefox, overview by last.fm, and a brief primer on Bandcamp. This music isn’t as highbrow as last week’s discovery of Ahmad Jamal, but it’s enough off the beaten path to be worth sharing.
~
Woonona Camp, New South Wales, (uncredited), 1938 ~
Thanks for reading!
Justus Pang, RA -
They delayed tidying the living room by jumping on the bed and cheerleading their father folding fresh laundry.
Claire!
Claire!Who’s Claire?
Oh wait!
She’s your imaginary friend, right?No! She’s our imaginary little sister!
…
Charles!
Charles!Who’s Charles?
He’s our imaginary baby brother!
Really?
When did he join the family?
Last week?No! He’s been with us for a year!
.
.
.An hour later, I asked my wife if she had met Claire and Charles.
What are you talking about?!
䷺䷓
apostolic sea
auspicious foam
ambitious dissolve -
Fractured: Fairy Tales Remixed, Tara Trudel, 2023
There’s only one possible option for today’s #MondayNightMusic — Fractured: Fairy Tales Remixed!
Tara has been sharing her journey towards releasing this album for past half year….and now it’s out!
I hope we will meet many more Tara’s online and IRL — accomplished, funny, thoughtful, enthusiastic advocates for everyone to share their art.
When I first joined Post.news, I was overwhelmed by comparing my own stuff against best of the world. I considered clamming up. Her encouragement nudged me to keep sharing — which naturally led to more making.
And of course the album’s great! You think she’d release anything less?
Congrats!
If something is holding you back from sharing, let me help you shove your self-doubt down the stairs Nomi Malone-style.
imPOSTer Syndrome
The things you make are enough. Putting them into the world can feel risky. It’s also powerful.
You never know when a piece will resonate with someone, or help you form a community, or catapult you into something totally unexpected.Ooh, an apple! What could go wrong?
~
PS: Shoutout to James Yang, the cover illustrator.
~
PPS: Check out Tara’s post on the Goal Pyramid.
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500!
So I hit half a thousand.
I hear you’re cheating on Post!
As some of y’all might have noticed, I’ve dipped my toe into Substack. So here’s a comparison of the platforms to celebrate this big round number.
When I was at Berkeley, I hung out with the art majors. We always felt there was a divide between the East Bay folks who did wacky things and the San Francisco snobs who made boring high art.
That’s Post and Substack.
Over here are folks who are experimenting and playing, picking up the stray tip. Out there is a polished crowd, with their paid subscription income streams.
Why on earth did I sneak out across the bay to check out those people?
Well, you get tired of living in a dingy warehouse where it looks like the landlord is more interested in side projects other than the shit that you care about.
We’ve been waiting for comment notifications for half a year. And yeah, that comment count bug in April broke me.
What’s it like out there with the white wine sippers?
They got a clean interface. And their notification system actually works.
But damn, they are really geared towards newsletters. It’s possible to follow someone on Substack Notes without subscribing to their newsletter, but it’s not obvious.
More problematic than an overstuffed email inbox, it’s almost impossible to get traction as a small account. You think things have gotten quiet here? Try saying anything out there unless you’re responding to someone else. Substack doesn’t have an “explore feed”, so the only way anyone might see your comments is to either build a big subscription base first or to hope than an author looks at their “My Subscribers” tab and notice your comment among the scores of other comments to sift through.
Don’t get me wrong, the authors at substack are all super nice and welcoming. But it doesn’t feel great to know that anything you say won’t get engagement unless you’re actively piggybacking on someone else. (Then again this comparison might be my Post privilege speaking as an early beta user here).
From what I can tell, the Substack crowd is super focused on the craft of writing (not surprising since it’s a newsletter subscription platform), and of course there is plenty of politics cause that’s the new established religion of our democracy. But I miss the wide variety of art and photography that I find my follow here on Post. I hope it’s there on Substack, but I haven’t found out yet.
Still, Substack is one helluva platform for newsletters, so my recent dalliance has gotten me writing regularly again and finally make some progress my “year of catching up”.
So where next?
I sure as hell ain’t going to a place that is run by the current or former CEO of Twitter. If I’m doing pro-bono content creation, it’s not going to be in the service of either type of fucking incompetence.
Structurally, I prefer micropayments over the long term commitments of a subscription economy. As one might guess from the way I’ve framed the comparison, I’m fond of the Post crowd that has coalesced in the past six months. But there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and I’ve lost confidence that my priorities are the platform’s priorities.
That leaves me with writing on my home blog and cross posting to both Substack and Post. I don’t mind cutting and pasting once, but more than that is unsustainable, especially if I include the distracting subconscious tug to check notifications on multiple platforms.
But hell, I’ll keep it up for another week or two.
Once I hit late May, I should a difficult decision.
In the meantime, let’s keep this party going, shall we?
On to 600!
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Go make a portfolio!
With all the calls and emails I’ve fielded over the past two years, this week was the first time that someone looked at my online portfolio before contacting me. (LinkedIn recruiters are shockingly lazy!)
The opportunity wasn’t a good fit, but we had a great conversation, and I learned about an exciting position to share with younger architects.
~
My portfolio is a simple WordPress site with the Twenty Fourteen template and these plug-ins:
- Disable Comments
- Fourteen Colors (to change the colors in the template)
- Really Simple SSL
- SSL Insecure Content Fixer
- WP Meta and Date Remover
If this looks like too much, remember the imperative is to have a portfolio. Use a free site builder. (The creative director that I met had their work on Behance.)
~
I’m a paranoid employment prepper. I graduated into the dotcom bust of 2001 and finished my masters in 2008. An online portfolio is an essential piece in my professional go-bag (along with a current resume, LinkedIn account, and preprinted work samples).
More than forestalling doom and gloom and compiling old work, building a portfolio signals where you want to go.
It forces you to write.
Writing makes you think.I built this iteration in 2020. Amidst the global chaos, it was salutary to appreciate my career and ponder the future. As always, the process is more than the final product.
Go make a portfolio!
You’ll get more than a portfolio. -
Angry aardvarks advertantly abducted an airship at Akita Airport absurdly assuming acerbic albatrosses abducted an adolescent aye aye.
Many years ago, a BoardGameGeek user in Australia asked me to receive several shipments before his arrival in Vegas to attend a friend’s steampunk themed wedding.
When he came to pick up the games, his wife gave me this pink handmade pillow with chibi Star Wars characters for my newborn daughter.
Last year, I joined Post.news. The open and accepting crowd inspired me to start drawing again after years of fearful, constipated dormancy.
I started a series of hand sketches forming the ASL manual alphabet.
After a few letters I started adding alliterative sentences.
A month into this exercise, I was forced back into the office.Reinserting a commute into my routine was so disruptive that I dropped the project before completing it.
~
A couple weeks ago I also joined Substack Notes. One of the first folks I met was Charlene Storey, who started a weekly ritual to share pictures of “everyday magic”.
Given my interest in the mundane objects that surround us (I earned my 2003 NaNoWriMo by writing about the stuff in my tiny garage apartment), it’s a perfect way to jump into the new stream.
~
I should finish the alphabet series, but I also like this new weekly thing and I don’t want to wait half a year before archiving these memories.
So for the next 26 weeks, I’ll be doing a series of unplanned diptychs. Let’s see how it goes.
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OPM.39 (notes on) Dream Big, Greg MacGillivray, 2017
Dream Big is a modern industry propaganda film with the all-American narration of Jeff Bridges, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
It highlights the altruistic sides of the engineering profession — building a bridge in rural Haiti, earthquake analysis in Nepal, and teaching robotics to disadvantaged children. It didn’t convince my daughter to enter the industry, but I enjoyed the heartwarming reminder of why I got into this business.
We joined this profession for a good job, but we didn’t just stay for a tidy nest egg. We change physical reality — we walk over, under, and into our projects. Other professions can’t provide such tangible results.
Taken one step further, this is why I joined the government. There’s great psychic value in knowing that my projects will directly benefit the public. All real estate development involves spreadsheets, but my numbers come directly from the people to serve the people.
It’s an awesome responsibility to be employed by my fellow citizens to spend their tax dollars. And it’s damn satisfying to hand them a properly constructed building, on budget and on time.
~
Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal passed away at 92 in mid-April. Ted Gioia celebrated his work with a great essay.
I’m slowly borrowing Jamal’s albums on Hoopla, one week at a time (I’m currently enjoying Volume IV which has a great cover). Each of album so far has had a moment that sent tingles down my spine — 3 for 3 is a great hit rate!
Of the three so far, my favorite is The Awakening, which was sampled by many hip hop artists (as outlined in this blog post and video). It’s easily a classic alongside Waltz for Debby and Brilliant Corners.
~
Brooklyn, Bridge, Jet Lowe, 1982 ~
Thanks for reading!
Justus Pang, RA