Notes

I was wrong about not wanting children at 23.

I was freshly married and talking to coworkers at the university. A couple of student workers were talking to me, and I was pontificating on how I thought there were enough children in the world and I didn't need to add to the number.

I was wrong.

Having kids isn't in the cards for everyone, but if it is for you and you've thought it's not for you and you're young, my advice is to simply give it a little time and you'll feel differently. Having my son and raising him with his cousins has been the best part of my life.

We're in a fertility crisis across the globe, but I'm afraid the seed of it was sown a generation or more ago, and we're now reaping what we sowed, and it will take another generation of messaging to fix.

You should go to every parent-teacher conference meeting you can as a general rule.

I’m constantly amazed at how few parents take advantage of this opportunity to meet their child’s teacher and have an open dialogue about their education and progression.

Our son’s school sent out a list of signups, and of the nearly 60 kids in his grade, only one-third or less took up the opportunity.

You should translate your own version of the Bible now that AI is so good. I’ve started mine. I’m working through the Gospel of Mark at the moment. I already have James 2, all of 1 Timothy, Matthew 5–7, and John. Next up will be Luke/Acts.

It’s not a matter of speed but rather using different texts to test and evaluate how I want the translation to flow.

For example, in John 21, the words for love get switched up when Jesus is restoring Peter. Jesus changes from agape to philia, and Jesus starts with agape and, on the last ask, switches. In English, this usually always comes out as just love. So how do you deal with this? It’s a fun exercise.

The guy at Moe’s taking our order ignored my son ordering to tell me they were out of chicken. Adults like to ignore kids. We have encouraged our son to be independent from an early age, including ordering his own food. We regularly have to tell people to stop ignoring our son and that he is capable of ordering on his own.

We lament how antisocial young people can be, but we do ourselves no favors ignoring them. No doubt, this is a vicious cycle, and I hold no great disdain for this employee. He is just a sign of the times.

Tyler Cowen has an old TEDx talk about the dangerous power of stories. I think this could be one such example.



https://youtu.be/RoEEDKwzNBw?si=5KWNyoBGyY8ETqrW

My son needed a way to send secret messages to his cousins. I whipped a fun Claude code web app and he’s been testing it.

“romantically unwell”

I work in pre-sales in cybersecurity. I want to just throw out some advice if you are buying software. I will have a few of these over time, so these are just a few items off the top of my head. This will help you have a good experience in your buying.

- Have a real project. This seems obvious, but I regularly talk to folks that tell me they want to have demos and do POCs and then don't have any real project or budget. This is infuriating for the seller team, but more importantly, it's a waste of your time. Make sure you have a real project.

- If you decide to POC a product, have success criteria for what you're going to actually test. This is the simplest way to make sure you're capturing real value from the product and comparing different vendors in the market.

- RFIs are only marginally useful. Understand that sales teams are incentivized to say yes to everything in an RFI up front, with the expectation of clarifying capabilities as you go along.

- Make sure you understand what you really want out of a product. There are a lot of cool features in products, but if, on the other end, it doesn't solve the real business problem you have, you're just wasting money.

- This is selfish for me, but don't be a jerk to the sales teams. I get it; we can be persistent and annoying in trying to get you to talk to just us, but once we're in the process of working with you on a deal, understand we're human and we didn't build the product. No product is perfect. I talk to lovely people all the time, but occasionally there are some dudes out there that have a real axe to grind. I'll put on a happy face because I want to get paid, but know that it only makes life harder and can cost you discounts on the backside if you're a real jerk.

There's a seller I work with that's always on his phone. He's either in an Uber, airport, walking to a meeting, etc. He's never in front of a laptop. I love him.

If you're a seller with a technical counterpart on your team, you will be their hero if you can effectively use the calendar to know when your team member is busy and not double-book them.

Hard agree

Some may wonder why I don’t just post on some platform like X. The answer is simply that I want to own my content experience.

ArmorCode does this well.

😆