I didn’t know Om Malik. But apparently I missed out, as he was universally, outwardly adored. The number of effusive farewell posts Om has received this week upon his passing at age 59 is something to behold.

Om’s status as Silicon Valley’s favorite eminence grise was not news. We can rest assured he knew he was loved. The blogosphere is just reminding us why. I particularly like Jim Nielsen’s, because it gives us a glimpse of Om’s nature:

One day on Twitter I got a DM…:

Jim I wanted to thank you for your blog. I am neither a developer or a designer but appreciate the web, the open web and in general normal, common sense writing from experts.

I have quietly enjoyed your work — and hope you hit the target of 72 posts in 2021. My highly selfish ask, as I know it will feed my brain good important stuff.

Have a wonderful weekend and a great writing year

I was flabbergasted. Who was this person with such a high follower count saying such kind words and I’d never heard of him? …

I thanked him graciously for taking the time to send a message whose importance seemed incredibly lopsided in my favor.

I can only aspire to have the kind of innate warmth and personal impact that Om seemed to impart on everyone he met. RIP.

Matt Glassman blogged about this topic yesterday, and I thought it was an interesting opportunity for reflection. As he wrote, here are “the national news events for which I can recall precisely where I was when I found out about them. Excludes sporting events, elections, (most) court decisions, and the passage of legislation, and must be a minimum of 5 years ago”:

1. Space Shuttle Columbia takes off on STS-1, April 12, 1981. We watched this live in school, in a library, on one of those TVs-on-wheeled-carts. I was in second grade. We may have watched Reagan’s inaugural address that way, too.
2. Challenger explodes, January 28, 1986. This one, which Matt listed, made me think of the Columbia above. I was in middle school. Some science classrooms (not mine) had tuned into it for Sally Ride, and kids started running in the halls, town criers yelling, “the Space Shuttle blew up!”
3. The Gulf War breaks out, February 24, 1991. I was out to dinner with my two best friends at a pub across town. We were seniors in high school. One of my friends had just turned eighteen; my birthday was five weeks away. Much of the dinner conversation was spent wondering whether the draft would be reinstated.
4. OJ Bronco chase, June 17, 1994. We were at my friend’s house (one of the two from the Gulf War item above) watching the Knicks game, until we weren’t.
5. OJ trial verdict, October 3, 1995. I was temping at Wiley Publishing as a new grad. We listened to the verdict over AM radio in someone’s office.
6. World Trade Center collapse, September 11, 2001. I was at home when it started, with the TV tuned to NY1, and at the Economist office when the towers came down. Fascinating to recall that it was a regular work day, and my boss was rather peeved that we all left early.
7. Eastern seaboard blackout, August 14, 2003. I was in my apartment, which was good, because it was on the eleventh floor, but bad that evening when the dog needed to go out.

Those last two items were experienced more than found out, of course. Matt has some interesting footnotes about that in his blog post that I generally agree with, although I think the lack of recent events is less about smartphones and more about the continuous nature of adulthood: apparently it takes a lot (blackouts, terrorist strikes) to shake us out of our rhythms.

Some of the recents events I considered—Matt wrote about covid lockdowns; I thought of the financial crisis—have been rolling incidents rather than moments in time. I also thought of some events that really mattered to people, like Kurt Cobain’s and Princess Diana’s deaths, but I don’t have a personal recollection of the moment. Interesting stuff.

Yankees’ Netflix debut is latest example of sports’ complicated TV landscape. The headline of this Andrew Marchand piece in the Athletic says it all. Did you know the Yankees’ regular-season games shuffle between eight different television outlets?

The Yanks are big enough that casual fans will find them here and there, and I guess that’s what outlets like Netflix are after: “Look, it’s the New York Yankees! Baseball on Netflix!”

But regular Yankees fans (like me) are not going to hunt down a single game on a random streaming service to catch one one-hundred-sixty-second of the season. It’s not enjoyable, and in truth, it’s not important enough. When the Yanks are not on their main broadcast outlet, even though I can usually figure out how to access the game, I often just skip it.

Yankees President Randy Levine acknowledges the frustration, and blames the league: “We would love to have all the games on YES and Amazon. We are part of MLB and they are allowed to place games on their national platforms. I feel bad for fans who have trouble finding the games and have to pay for additional subscriptions to watch the games.” MLB (and, apparently, YouTube) are hoping for a resolution to this in a few years, but in the meantime, it just degrades the experience.

Everything I think and feel about this issue is reflected in the article. Thanks for the catharsis, Andrew.

Like everyone, I’m busy developing expertise in harnessing AI, vibe coding in my spare time. I have a couple of product ideas I’d like to wrangle, but they’re going to take some time to get right. So I’ve been undertaking in-one-sitting projects and improving my prompting skill.

Last month, I had Claude pull this blog into a book: 730 pages in trade paperback format, suitable for binding in leather. It took three or four tries to get it to crawl my pre-CMS pages, but it worked. I have not sent it out to get printed but I might.

This evening, I wandered onto a friend’s consulting website, and realized my own was pretty out-of-date. (Honestly, it was just a placeholder when it launched, and it lasted seven years.) So I spent an hour alternating between March Madness and Claude, and now User Savvy has a spiffy new home.

More to come, I’m sure.

Really enjoyed this blog post that slowly traces the English language back in time for a thousand years.

I found all three of my Sony Walkmans on the walkman.land website.

WM-F10: my first Walkman, received when I was maybe ten years old. My parents really went for it! This was a high-quality, tiny cassette player with a built-in FM radio receiver (which I absolutely used). The build of this device was particularly clever, as the writeup notes:

Iconic expandable Sony walkman model, with manual FM radio tuner. … With no room in the main body of the machine, all the radio equipment had to be mounted in the cassette door. … The only control on the radio part of the WM-F10 was the tuning wheel (complete with a miniature scale and cord drive). Switching between radio and tape required an extra switch to be fitted to the main machine, next to those for tape type and Dolby NR. The Dolby switch was given an extra function as a control for the sensitivity of the radio (local/DX), though little was receivable in the “local” position.

In addition to the size, the sound quality was excellent. It had a toggle for chrome cassettes as well as a Dolby noise reduction option. Even though I was young, I knew I had a fancy-pants Walkman, with its slide-open cassette compartment. I quickly discovered the joys of portable, crystal-clear in-ear audio.

WM-F77: my replacement for the first Walkman, after the F10 developed a tendency to whir slowly into action when I pressed play. (I was sad.) I was around 14 at this point, and knew enough to ask for another metal Walkman, and not a more common plastic model, which my parents obliged. This was a much more physically substantial gadget than my first one, which was a brief disappointment, but it was a much more durable design. It too had the chrome and Dolby switches, which I absolutely used, as I had become a low-grade audiophile and teenage music pirate. It also had auto-reverse.

WM-F701c: for no good reason, I became obsessed with Sony’s two tenth-anniversary, ultra-low-profile Walkman designs. I don’t recall if I had this model or the sleeker WM-701c, but I’m pretty sure I opted for the model with a radio. It was gorgeous, if less of a workhorse than the 77.

After that, I had a (metal) Discman, which took me through college, so for a good 15 years I relied on Sony devices for portable audio. I loved every one.

I’m at the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It’s a big space, the entryway to a health center, maybe 50 feet long with lots of couches. I’m sitting at the far end, one of around ten people waiting for their appointments.

A nurse comes out from a door on the other end of the waiting room and calls the next patient. “David?”

All ten people look at her. I stand up. So does the man across from me, and another man closer to her, by the front desk. We all smile.

“David who?” we ask, more or less in unison.

The nurse is a little surprised, but she checks her chart. “David H.,” she replies.

I sit down.

The man across from me says, “I’m David H.”

The man in front of her says, “I’m David H.”

The nurse blinks. The two men look at each other. One of the David H.es asks if she can be more specific. She’s obviously struggling with how to manage her patients’ privacy, but after a second, she gives up.

“David Hayes.”

The man across from me says, “I’m David Hayes.”

The man in front of her says, “I’m David Hayes!”

My local David Hayes bursts into laughter. He starts walking across the room to sort things out. The David Hayes closer to the nurse stops him. “I gotta shake your hand.”

As they’re approaching the desk, a second nurse comes out of a different door and says, “David?”

I am something of a packrat. I derive comfort and pleasure from the artifacts of my past. My parents’ house is still full of material remnants of my youth, from art projects to my physical music collection to once-beloved items of clothing.

Sometimes, this works out: last year, when my son got into thrifting culture, I pulled out all my concert T-shirts, most in fine condition, and three of them entered his regular rotation. Other times, not so much—the other day I dug out a folio and found a dozen tour books from those same concerts, all in great condition, all completely useless. Win some, lose some.

Now that I have kids and an apartment with insufficient storage, I’m much more judicious with my keepsakes, suburban archive aside. For example, I recently gave an outgrown kid’s bike to my cousin for his young son. We’ve given them stuff before; my first-cousin-once-removed is 10 years old and adorable. But this one hit different.

Two years ago, the kid got really into Lego. My own boys had accumulated an unfeasibly large Lego collection, and I took a fair amount of pleasure in bequeathing them to the next generation: there must be five thousand pieces! And all the instruction books! Please love them as we loved them!

I should note that I had my own Lego collection as a child, all hand-me-down, and I always planned on handing them down, too. But I never had anyone to give them to. My nieces and nephews weren’t really into Legos, and by the time my own kids were Lego-ing, my box of instructionless space theme pieces—many still assembled—wasn’t interesting. They’re still in my parents’ basement. But at least I could give away the recent ones. Please love them as we loved them.

Roughly eight months after an enthusiastic handover, my cousin suffered a major fire in his home. All those Legos are gone.

I haven’t worked out what metaphor exists in there, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

I’ve discussed this plenty over the past year, but I do want to mark a milestone: I first started tracking my weight with a spreadsheet and a line graph on March 10, 2006. At the time, I was working at a beauty company, surrounded by people who routinely looked their best. It was motivational for me to drop the 10 extra pounds I’d been carrying—and I did, according to the chart, that October.

That round of weight loss didn’t stick, but for some reason, the spreadsheet did. I wasn’t religious about it—there are gaps in the data as long as 16 months—but I’d use it for a few weeks or months on occasion, whenever I was thinking about my weight, or just to track my life in some way (cf.). I started making a new tab every couple of years to keep it manageable. Before I knew it, I had ten years of data, and I made a decade-long graph to see what I’d been up to.

Saving you a click: I wasn’t great at weight loss. The chart revealed that what I considered my default adult weight had slipped away. And the march of time from there only made it worse. After getting thin in my late 20s and early 30s, my weight crept up, and my target became like a basketball rim, something to leap toward and touch at best. Across an 18-year span, I only got to or below my target four times, and one of those was after I got food poisoning in Mexico City. At least I was pretty good at halting weight gain, thanks in part to the tracking.

All this built to the crowning achievement of my spreadsheet. When I began modifying my diet early last year, my doctor gave me a new weight target. I had the perfect tool for tracking my progress. I didn’t even have to resurrect it: I had dropped in my weight the week before. So as I committed myself to eating right, I started weighing myself every day, and recording the results.

A side note to most humans is that obsessing over daily weight changes is not always a mentally healthy approach. One needs to understand the fluctuations and not get discouraged. I’ve had events even in at the peak of my weight loss journey where I gained 2.5 pounds in a day. The right answer in these moments, by the way, is, “Oops.” Follow an unhealthy day with a healthy one and the data resolves itself. It’s not perfectly linear.

What was linear, for me, was the downward trend last year.

I reached my personal goal on May 23, then trended gently downward into the summertime, when my body settled into its new base weight. I moved comfortably in a three-pound range for several months, and then I had sinus surgery, which inadvertently made me lose more weight, and in late November I found myself a full 10 pounds below my goal. I’d never been underweight in my life! I took a couple of days in a food rumspringa—pizza, a Slurpee, Thanksgiving dinner—before returning to heart-healthy eating, and normalized at the same level.

I hit 20 years of the line diet with a year-plus of improved health and nine months of steady-state in my new weight class. And the spreadsheet marches on, all 15 tabs of it, alongside my much newer daily food tracker.