And we'll all float on, okay

It ain't just Pearl Jam that makes me think of Ericka.

I’ve Actually Got a Whole Backstory Related to This One

Photograph and Yellow Tulips:

A little nearer please. And a little nearer
we move to the window, to the polished table.
Objects become professional: mannequins preening
themselves before an audience. Only the tulips
interrogate the camera with yellow oaths.

Smile please. And so we smile. Pose that
never was, time that could never be! And
the long-necked tulips sinuous out of the vase
bend over the polished table entranced
by their own puffed and smudgy reflections.

Hold it. Our two smiling faces caught
on a branch of silence consider shy vacancy.
Soon the tulips, like yellow swans, will
dip their heads into the polished table
frightening us, and so we turn truly smiling.

Thank you. And later, next year or after,
we shall hold it, this most sad witness,
and smile please and come a little nearer
to a time that was never twice, to a place
that could never be thanked enough, so that

now never again may we see such tulips
as tulips, but rather as effulgent swans
sailing through a yellow interior of air
where faces and fantasies will be caught forever
in that black coffin dearly carrying us.

Dannie Abse.

Think about how many times I have fallen

All the time.

On Marblehead

Dawn:

5am: the frogs

ask what is it, what is it?

It is what it is.

Campbell McGrath.

A wave came crashin' like a fist to the jaw

Always reminds me of a particularly savage punch to my head that punctured my eardrum (took six weeks for my ear to stop whistling, no joke) and partially detached my retina (obscured vision in my right eye to this day).

A Warning for the Age of AI

Why Poetry Cannot Be Skimmed:

The barn was in the Netherlands,

in a field where fierce night wind

caught the straw as if to fuse

the winter stars to their coldness.

A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing

his animals would be agitated,

walked to the barn and by lantern

brushed the tails of his horses.

In calming them he gathered

many long, gleaming strands

of their nut-brown hair. Given over

to what he heard in the swishing of their tails—

the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow,

persistence turned to rhythmic movement—

he hoped that if he listened long enough

the layered sound would become a salve.

He rolled the strands together, laid out

along the windowsills of the barn.

Then, once dry enough in spring,

he rolled them in paraffin wax

to preserve the sound

and left them to absorb

all the varied rays of sun, the spills

of rain, and then snow flying fast

across the latched windows and the slats,

the rhythm of other breathing,

animals plodding by the barn walls.

The wax melted as the years progressed

and other horses resided in the stalls,

and their tail strands were added

to the aging threads.  From that encased sound

deepening over years, a rope,

pulled strong and taut, would resonate.

Then another generation worked the land

and waxed the horse-tail cord again,

and in turn when it caught

that century’s light, was spun

into amber. Woven into the cells of hair:

the tones of canal and field,

pasture, furrows of plough,

leaf and shadow, straw and stone,

the human calling, the animal uttering.

And when melted again, incrementally

strands from other horses living there

were added until there were enough

layers of sound, set with the nourishment

of grass and salt, to be given away

and the space the hair had occupied

would be returned to emptiness.

The horse-hair cord was brought

by a farmer to a luthier’s shop

along a canal, and it was a perfect fit,

she said, for a violin bow

she had carved a few months earlier,

waiting, and for the bow-less violin

someone had just given her.  She knew

rosin carrying a current through

pastures, filled thirst, and the grief

of night wind and scavenged apples

made the gathered pieces a whole.

And now they are together in your hands

this moment to make

unrehearsed, immediate,

after all those animals’ years,

when you bring the instrument to your chin,

when you raise the hair-strung bow,

again their elemental sounding,

and then their measured note, their first.

Jessica Jopp.

So When Is AI Gonna Take My Job?

Busy times at Chez NTodd.  Which is better than the alternative, although I'm still suffering from extreme decision fatigue, as well as physical fatigue, plus my bad back has been acting up, and the kids have been home sick all week.

But anyway, this modern Age of AI has made me busier than ever.  The building-focused, challenge-based methodology that I piloted this summer is gaining traction with teams across all our geos.  I've rebranded my AI companion tool, which worked beautifully (much to my surprise), and now I'm working on new backend dev to automate more components so it can be used at scale.  I continue to learn a lot in the process.

There is a moderately scary piece to this, as we are piloting an instructor-less approach for two European cohorts (one full of interns, the other full-time architects).  Oh no, if it works, who will need Todd?  But that's kind of okay because I'm actually going to be teaching more than I did in the summer for the new North American cohort I kicked off yesterday, and there still is a great appreciation for the value of human-based training and social learning in most quarters.  How I show up is changing, but I'm still alive and kicking for a while longer.

Also, all of this is intentional on my part.  Before the big reorg that killed my legacy training program (TechU), my boss asked me about my preferences as to what my role might look like after things got shaken up.  I naturally still want to teach, but part of teaching for me has always been about exploring new ways to create a good learning environment, so I told her that I'd prefer to continue doing innovative work as opposed to just yammering on podium until I die.

Ultimately things worked out the way I'd hoped, and I'm being pulled into a lot of interesting projects (and some fucking tedious ones, too, lol).  If I might brag a bit, I had a meeting last week with the cofounder, CTO, and CEO of our lab platform vendor because they were very interested in what I've been building, and it looks like we'll be partnering with them to really raise the bar on how to give our learners more practical and engaging building experiences, as opposed to the type of rote, step-by-step exercises that I've fought against my entire career.

I'm also still doing Thursdays with Todd sessions for my re/Start learners, which is a true joy because they are an awesome, hungry audience, and I essentially have carte blanche to do whatever I want at this point.  I increased access to the classes by recording them (which was previously verboten) to enable folks on the other side of the world to tune in without having to be up at like 2am local time, and I built out a distribution process (with the help of Amazon Quick) which itself made for a great class session about things like Content Delivery Networks and whatnot.  The last several weeks I've been riffing off learner questions about AI/ML to deliver a series of deep dives into model training and deployment, building apps, security and ethics, etc.

Looks like I might even get elevated permissions in the aforementioned lab platform so I can fix some stale exercises that are not completely working (always risky to let Todd touch production, but I see exactly what needs doing and the blast radius is small).  Those have been great teaching opportunities, where we go well beyond the instructions to troubleshoot and work around the problems, discuss what we could do to make them function properly and how difficult maintenance really is, etc, but it would be nice if they just did what they are supposed to do (another age-old complaint).

On the home front, other than being sick, my highschoolers are highschoolin'.  Sadie is locked in.  Sam turns seventeen (17!) on Tuesday, and he had going to the Seahawks game next Sunday on his birthday list, so we're doing that.  The house is a fucking disaster area, but at least it's safe and quiet.

Boy, am I tired.

I'll be stumblin' away

Slowly learnin' that life is okay.

facere

Facts:

Tell me anything
I knew it 

What a coincidence
it always is 

I recognized you
the minute I saw you 

Aram Saroyan.

In restless dreams I walked alone

Dude wrote this in his bathroom in the dark when he was 21.

How to Be a Poet

iii:

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

Wendell Berry.