Get it? Ground-breaking?
So we bought this house in Portland, Oregon with audaciously bland landscaping. I know, first-world problems and all.
Since we were spending most of our time at home due to COVID, we decided to burn the existing yard to the ground and start fresh. We had a few stakes in the ground:
I moved to Portland in June 2020, relocating from the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived for 24 years. I was never particularly happy there, but my job at Apple was a great distraction. When I retired in 2019, my dislike of the area came boiling to the surface.
Having lived in Portland for 2 years now, I’ve fielded the inevitable questions about living here.…
One day when I was in college, I glanced up at a Burger King sign while I was driving. Then I looked at it again. It felt like something was new about it. Did they redesign it?
And I had a realization so powerful that I nearly drove my car over the curb.…
I often back the underdogs and tennis is no exception. In the past ten years, there have been 3 male newcomers that impressed me enormously the first time I saw them play. I would have put significant sums of money on them reaching the upper ranks, barring injuries. The last of the three, Carlos Alcaraz, entered the Top 10 for the first time today, one of the fastest rises in history.…
Looking back at my photo library from 2021 is a great way to remember all the good times and conveniently ignore the bad ones. Here are the broad highlights of the year. ⬇
I had a job at a concert arena in college. I worked only before and after the concert (sometimes until 6am!), so I was free to watch any of the shows if I wanted. Since the venue seated about 21,000 people, we tended to only get huge acts that were all pretty disappointing.…
The iPod was released on October 23, 2001 with the catchy slogan of 1,000 songs in your pocket.
This is inspired by my good friend Ben Haller, who writes an annual letter and sends it out in December. I’m a little late and more long-winded. I’ll mostly pretend COVID doesn’t exist as we’re all tired of it.
Carrying over from 2019, Eric and I were deep into investigating moving to Portland.…
One of the most popular articles I’ve written is called Why do stocks go up and down. The conclusions it draws are not what you are going to hear on CNBC or from financial analysts. It’s uncomfortable to think that stock movements have no direct connection to what they call “fundamentals” unless a critical mass believes that and acts on it in the market.…
Every few years I like to look at the list of songs I’ve liked in Spotify so I can see who my favorite artists are. It’s not that I don’t know who they are, it’s just interesting to quantify them and sometimes I’m surprised who is present and absent from my Top 10 list.…