New Jersey, Frozen
Christo has died. Reading his obituary unearthed a memory:
The only meaningful C++ program I’ve ever written was a command line animation of Christo’s gates in Central Park.
I was in high school and was incredibly cynical about the whole thing, so I made an animation of a very primitive ASCII Godzilla that would trample the gates after playing an ominous tune using Beeps.
Now of course I regret my dismissive stance (the gates were very beautiful), but I’ll never forget that C++ program.
I don’t normally do New Year’s resolutions, so I won’t. But I do want to make a commitment to myself and to my family to be more thoughtful and more deliberate about finding in 2020 something that has eluded me for a long time: balance.
I tend to be quite an intense person and particularly hard on myself. Although I’ve already begun working to improve my mental health and anxiety this year, I figure it can’t hurt to use the new year as an opportunity to set this intention specifically and deliberately.
In 2020, I commit to be conscientious about balancing:
Happy new year. Cheers.
First day of school. Dante’s calm, even excited. Dad’s panicky.
As we get older, as we move apart, it can be difficult to gather as we once did. My joy overflowed seeing Dante play with his cousins in Louisiana. Hope to get back down there again soon.
Published my first post at ft.io since redoing the whole thing. A few lessons from my career I thought I’d share: https://www.ft.io/blog/lessons/
Dante’s first time playing in the snow. Down the hill on a saucer a few times after eating a bit of clean powder and knocking over Dada’s sad little snowman.
![mp-photo-alt[]=](http://micro.ft.io/uploads/2019/049bb087f7.jpg)
Here’s to the first five and the next fifty.
![mp-photo-alt[]=mp-photo-alt[]=mp-photo-alt[]=](http://micro.ft.io/uploads/2019/ab5268a86a.jpg)
Rebooting micro.ft.io. All posts deleted.
If you’re a Facebook friend of mine, you might know that I logged out of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp everywhere. I haven’t deleted my accounts yet, but I expect I will soon.
It’s a funny thing — when I logged out, I thought I’d miss the addictive (but low-value) newsfeed most. I don’t share much. I’m really just there to see what my wife posts while I’m away for work. Of course it’s nice staying up to date on what my friends are doing, but now I do that by gasp talking to them using the ancient communication mechanism (telephone) that Apple hasn’t yet removed from my Pocket Supercomputer.
That said, I still feel a compulsion to document and share important moments with my family and friends. Here goes nothing.