Links

My Stuff

Quotes

Lines I come back to

Wine logs

2026 · Cabernet Sauvignon
2025 · Syrah

Dr. Robert Buckenmeyer’s philosophy courses

American River College, 2001–2008

“draw a banana”

Same prompt, twelve models

Start Here

Randy Pausch

76 min

“Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”

His “last lecture,” given after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Funnier than you’d expect and not sad at all.

Paul Graham

20 min

“What You’ll Wish You’d Known”

Written as a talk for high schoolers, but it lands at any age: stay upwind and keep your options open.

John Allspaw

15 min

“On Being a Senior Engineer”

The best description I know of what “senior” should mean. Most of it is about working with people, not code.

David Foster Wallace

23 min

“This is Water”

Kenyon College commencement, 2005. Choosing what you pay attention to on the most boring days.

Engineering

• The Ops Identity Crisis — Susan J. Fowler7 min Where operations engineers fit once most of the job is software.
• Evolution of SRE — Ben Purgason51 min SREcon18 Asia. How an SRE org grows up, stage by stage.
• The Mother of All Demos — Douglas Engelbart1 hr 41 min The mouse, hypertext, video calls and shared editing, all demoed live in 1968.
• Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things — Patrick Collison8 min The Empire State Building, the P-80, the Alaska Highway… a good answer to “that’ll take years.”

David Henke

Ran engineering at LinkedIn and Yahoo!, after eight years at SGI. A legendary leader.

• Learning to Lead54 min UC Santa Barbara talk looking back on leading engineering at Yahoo! and LinkedIn.
• The Wisdom of David Henke — Josh Clemm A collection of Henke-isms.

Communication

• Common Structure of Greatest Communicators — Nancy Duarte18 min Great speeches bounce between “what is” and “what could be.” You’ll see it everywhere afterward.
• Why Your Critics Aren’t the Ones Who Count — Brené Brown23 min The “man in the arena” talk. Only take feedback from people who are in there with you.

Podcasts & Newsletters

• Pivot Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on tech and business news.
• Stratechery Ben Thompson on the strategy and business of tech.
• Search Engine PJ Vogt chases down questions he can’t stop thinking about.
• Song Exploder Musicians take one of their songs apart, track by track.

Handy

• Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot — Ian Fieggen Shoelaces that stay tied. It changed my life a little.

Entertaining

• The Princess Bride Home Movie68 min The whole film remade at home, scene by scene, during the 2020 lockdown.
• Daft Punk — Discovery (original videos) The Leiji Matsumoto anime videos that became Interstella 5555.
• Super Mario Athletic Rag, sight-read — Tom Brier4 min The Super Mario athletic theme as a rag, played at first sight.

Nerd

• Darmok & Jalad at Tanagra band poster For Star Trek: TNG fans. “Temba, his arms wide”
• The Problem with Time & Timezones — Computerphile10 min Tom Scott on why you should never write your own timezone code.
• Where GREP Came From — Computerphile10 min Brian Kernighan tells the origin story.

Funny

• Sorry, we don’t take Discover — Futurama10 sec 1000 years later and Discover still isn’t accepted.
• Rejected — Don Hertzfeldt9 min Oscar-nominated animated short. “My spoon is too big.”
• Asian Jim — The Office2 min Jim’s best prank on Dwight.
• Pachinko Commercials — Nicolas Cage3 min Yes, these are real.

Friends

• RC
  Cockeyed Rob Cockerham’s long-running site of pranks and experiments.
• EW
  Emotion Eric Emotion last conveyed in 2004.
• CF
  Cody Frost SF artist aka Qwert aka Mr. Mission 2012.
• SB
  Scott Berg, Aikido of Alamo Thoughts of an Aikidoist, highlighting the importance of relationship in experiences.