Posts tagged "personal" - nolan caudill's internet house

Biking is fun

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:28:49 -0700

I’ve gotten the biking bug. Last summer, I picked up a nice gravel bike and didn’t actually ride it that much. But after tweaking my knee running and getting tired of cycling on the indoor bike, I took a few more adventurous (for me) rides out and over the past 2-3 weeks have gone out nearly every day.

I’m loving it. I’m seeing parts of the city I normally don’t see. I’m climbing hills I could not have climbed even a couple of months ago and getting a real sense of accomplishment by doing so. I’m making new friends who also go out and ride. And, I’m getting a ton of exercise and getting stronger and fitter.

Here are a few photos from some rides I did this week. It is wild that these sorts of views and climbs are right in my backyard.

Golden Gate Bridge, from Vista Point Overlook

Hawk Hill as seen, from the SF side

View of China Beach from Immigration Point Overlook in SF

Houses on the hill, from Sausalito

Golden Gate Bridge from the top of Hawk Hill

Week Roundup: 2024-09-02

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 14:28:17 +0000

Fogwall over the bay, Aug 28

Today is Labor Day and due to a work perk (a Friday off every month), I am on day 3 of a 4 day weekend. Often weekends are a bust as far as moving anything forward, but we got some good stuff done this weekend.

Around the house

Cleaned out the whole garage! Ezra was biking in the driveway and while I was out there, I started to clear off the workbench that had been buried in “things that need to go elsewhere.” When the bench was clear, I kept going. And by the end of it we had a swept, tidy (well, tidier) garage with a small pile of things to throw away or donate. The notable find: a slightly expired MRE (meals-ready-to-eat) package. The kids sampled a cookie that probably taste stale when it was “freshly” baked, and found it passable.

On Saturday night, we had a family over with similar aged boys and while they watched a movie and played laser tag, we enjoyed a bottle or two of wine and some adult conversation in relative peace and quiet.

New fun toy: I had read that robot vacuums had gotten much smarter since our last one 5 years ago and set a new one up. Now with the mapping and no-go zones set up, the war against dustballs and cat hair has turned. The other bonus of having a robot vacuum on a schedule is motivation to keep the kids’ toys off the floor. Win, win.

Music and movies

The band of choice this weekend has been lots of Tangerine Dream, specifically the movie soundtracks of Sorcerer (1977) and Three O’Clock High (1987). The moody synths make for great late-night reading music.

In a perhaps-questionable parenting choice, we watched Godzilla (2014) as a family last night. Finn has been obsessing some over Godzilla, and decided to put Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) on for him. Ezra joined in and not being able to read the subtitles, we switched over to Godzilla. Kids loved it and no nightmares (yet).

After the kids have gone down to bed, we’ve been on bit of a movie binge. The highlights for me was watching Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (which I loved) for the first time, and rewatched Shaun of the Dead for probably the 10th time.

Reading

I’m in between books at the moment so I’ve been taking time to cleaning up my to-do lists which meant dipping in and out of the Getting Things Done book. I’ve moved all lists, mail, calendars and notes over to the Apple ecosystem and I’m finding Reminders very good so far.

The kids are heading to the playground so with that, I’m signing off. I haven’t written a post here in a long time, but wanted to try a quick stream-of-consciousness, unedited braindump for once.

Hello, Slack

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, I started at Tiny Speck as their engineering manager, working on Slack. Slack is getting bigger in almost every way that matters and I’m excited about getting to take part in it.

So what does taking this particular role at this particular company mean to me? It means I’m working for the same people that built the company that hired me that moved me from the east coast to San Francisco. It means I’m managing at a company that shaped most of my thoughts about software development and how to build products that people love. It also means I get to take those experiences and principles and help build frameworks where we keep doing those good things but at a different scale than we are all used to.

So, is this a little scary? You betcha. Am I excited? Oh yeah.

Afternoon Chats with the Navy

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0000

This morning, I read Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay The Ivy League Was Another Planet about the college application process for an American rural high schooler. Her story was nearly identical to my experience. My high school had one overworked guidance counselor that also doubled as a college counselor. She was a very nice woman that seemed concerned about our futures, but there were only so many hours in the day for her. I vaguely remember my one or two sessions with her consisting of showing me the SAT testing calendar and pointing me towards the federal aid forms. Through some of confusion of mine, I didn’t think I needed to fill out these aid forms. These turned out to have been a prerequisite for many merit-based scholarships as well, which would have been useful information. Somehow I escaped these sessions with only applying to one school, the main state school in North Carolina. I chose this school because a couple of my good friends were going there and I knew it was a “good school.” No one let me know that applying to just one university was a bad idea. I did really well in high school and not going to college if I had missed on this one application would have been a disaster. Even the only application I filled out was a disaster-in-waiting. Like most college applications, it required an essay. I don’t remember getting anyone to proofread mine. I can barely write my name without a grammar mistake so I’m surprised they even let me on campus. Who knows, maybe they saw me as a great fixer-upper. Watkins’ memories of taking the SAT were reminiscent of my own. The test was paid for out of pocket, and it didn’t seem to be guided by any internal force in school. It was just one of those things that we knew we needed to look into and apply to take. Afterwards, I learned from people that went to other high schools that the SAT was something that was taken multiple times and that taking preparation classes was commonplace. I took the sample test in the SAT packet and felt like I was being extra studious by even doing that. I had college friends that had studied hard for the math portion, rested during the verbal sections, and then did the inverse on another taking since you’re allowed to combine your best scores from your sittings. We could have probably figured out this strategy for ourselves, but the thing is we shouldn’t have had to. Even so, taking a $50 test multiple times would definitely have been out of reach for most of my classmates. Our entire class also took the ASVAB. This test was administered in the school cafeteria and we got out of an afternoon’s worth of classes to take it. I did well on this test and within a week I had military recruiters calling me. The Navy must have called dibs on me as every afternoon after school, a Navy recruiter would call and we would chat. He was an excellent salesmen. He nearly convinced me that living in a submarine for months at a stretch was a completely normal life choice. The military’s rigid environment appealed to me at the time and I was probably a 60/40 split between going to college or joining the Navy. I realized this morning that if I had enlisted, I would have probably been at basic training during the September 11th attacks. My high school ended up sending roughly half of my graduating class to college, half of those to the local community college and the other half going to a four-year school. Half of the four-year students went to Appalachian State University, which is a great school up in the mountains about an hour’s drive from the high school. I imagine the high application rate to this school was the same phenomenon that Watkins mentioned in that it was the closest four-year college to our high school and there were a lot of alumni around. I know people who went to elite private schools that applying to college was a multi-year process with the school helping you research colleges that matched your academic needs, keeping track of application dates, paying for tests, and generally herding you through the often-confusing and always-expensive process of something that is still one of the best ways to improve one lot’s in life. Colleges in the US, I believe, are welcoming and available to everyone with the wide range of diversity and financial aid scholarships they offer but, like too many things, some are already starting a few steps closer to the finish line.

All the Cereal You'd Want

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 +0000

One of the first things I remember about college was walking into the cafeteria for the first time and seeing the row of cereal dispensers. The college stocked any cereal you’d want, from the healthy ones your parents would buy for you to the really unhealthy ones, with their unnaturally colored blobs of sugar. Even though it was lunchtime and the hot bar was admirably staffed with smiling people really to hand me a well-cooked meal, I wanted cereal. I walked up to the dispensers and picked the most brightly-colored one I could see. I spun the little handle on the machine and it doled out one serving of the stuff. I picked up my bowl and started to step down to the milk. A girl that had been queued behind me called after me, “You can get more cereal than that if you want.” I paused, thought about it, then stepped back and spun the handle once more and got another pile of cereal. She was right, they didn’t care how much you poured.

Growing up with Guns

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 07:00:00 +0000

I have no interest in guns. I’ve never owned anything more powerful than a BB gun. I’ve never been hunting. Growing up, I was more of an exception to the norm – people around me loved guns.

My father owned a double-barreled, break-action 12-gauge shotgun propped up in the closet with buckshot shells in a nearby dresser drawer. Part of the physical education course we all had to take in high school involved a hunter’s safety section that culminated by skeet-shooting on the football field with real rifles with real ammunition. People would call out of work or school on the beginning of hunting seasons.

My brother is not like me in that he loves guns. He collects them and now has a small arsenal consisting of handguns, a shotgun or two, and a few rifles. He has a concealed carry permit, meaning that he has a legal right to carry a handgun on his person. One of the guns he owns, I bought for him, meaning I’ve gone through distinctly American process of purchasing a weapon.

It was the Christmas after I graduated college and had started to make a little money. I wanted to buy larger gifts for my immediate family than my former college student budget could afford, so I decided to buy my brother a shotgun. I walked into a Dick’s Sporting Goods, straight back to the gun counter and got the rundown on the various models in my given price range.

At the counter, I got the various specs of all manner of weaponry: muzzle velocities, magazine counts, and bore sizes. The sales pitch was analytical: scientific and all numbers, vaguely militaristic. Like most things where we don’t want to acknowledge the true nature of, this specific jargon was a disguised way of asking, “If I were to point and shoot this gun at something, how big of a hole will it leave? What kind of damage can I, as a small human, do to something?”

The gun I selected was a Mossberg 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun: a black, all-metal, military-looking affair. The man behind the counter took my driver’s license to the computer, entered in my information, and then a few minutes later gave me a ticket to take to the front registers in order to pay for the gun. I was a bit confused by the process so I asked him to clarify. He said, “For safety reasons, we don’t want our customers carrying guns and ammo around the store.” That seemed perfectly reasonable.

He walked up to the front counter with me, carrying the gun and ammunition. He waited until I had paid, then, while standing not 6 feet away from the register, he handed me the gun and wished me a good night. So here I was, standing in a crowded store, near registers overflowing with Christmas money, holding a very powerful weapon. I was shaking from nervousness, not because I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but from the complete disjointedness of holding a gun in a public place and how it all just felt wrong.

Getting a gun was too easy and I had to prove too little about my skills and mental capacity to be an owner of that weapon. For comparison, in North Carolina, in order to get my full driver’s license, I had to take a multi-week written course, followed by a multi-week driving course, with a multi-month probationary period, followed by another written course and one more in-car test, just in order to legally drive a car. I probably waited longer in line at the DMV than it took for me to go from non-gun-owner to gun-owner. Our bureaucratic government showers every piece of its workings with red tape yet, for some reason, makes it simple to acquire something that is so closely associated with crime, civil unrest, and some of the worst massacres outside of acts of war on American soil.

As an American, from a gun-loving area of the country, do I know why Americans are so weird about guns? No, not really. I honestly believe that the overwhelming majority of gun owners I’ve met are well-trained and take proper precautions (Dad with the shotgun in the closet not withstanding). But it’s the crazy people that I worry about. And people aren’t always crazy. Some perfectly sane, say-hi-at-the-market people have minds that turn and need professional help. Combine this with how easy it is to acquire guns with a society that has choked down that visceral reaction to weaponry, and in fact celebrates it (either through movies that glorify outlaws or war, or as some twisted symbol of citizenry in contentious political times), and the ingredients are there for the terrible things like the past few months happening.

Caleb

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 07:00:00 +0000

In middle school, there was a boy named Caleb who would routinely eat things off the cafeteria floor, claiming it helped his immune system. He never got sick so maybe he was right.

During lunch one day, another boy reached for a chicken nugget off Caleb’s hard plastic cafeteria tray. Mid-reach, Caleb stabbed the other boy in the hand with his fork, causing a bit of bleeding and a lot of bruising. To Caleb, this was hilarious.

A few of us would go over to Caleb’s house where we pretended to be professional wrestlers and play paintball, at the same time. I never got the connection between Hulk Hogan and shooting balls of paint at one another from way too close range, but the others had no problem making that leap. The whole spectacle probably had something to do with our endocrine systems just starting the flood of testosterone, pushing us as children towards manhood, and impersonating costumed, steroid abusers prancing around in their underwear on TV, combined with shooting each other in pretend-war was, in our hormonally-hazed minds, what Men did. Caleb had the best paintball gun, had the best aim with his good gun, and also knew all the catchphrases and signature moves of every wrestler. He dominated this “game” and I was glad to be included in this make-believe world.

Caleb moved to South Carolina during middle school and years went by and we forgot about him.

During our senior year of high school, a bunch of us skipped class on a day we dubbed “Senior Skip Day” (for obvious reasons). Senior Skip Day not-so-coincidentally fell on the opening day of trout season. Stone Mountain State Park, with its many rivers and creeks flowing through it, was a 15-minute drive from the high school, so the bulk of the kids skipping ended up here, with their trucks and fishing gear in tow. The teachers knew about it but didn’t stop it, partly because I think they were jealous but mostly because they were glad to be rid of us for the day.

We were walking along one of the rivers, and we noticed a few people lazily floating by in inner tubes. One of the men in the tubes yelled up at us and out of the river came Caleb.

There was a lot to catch up on in the time spanning shooting each other with paintballs when we were 11 years old and nearly-grown men finishing up high school, too much, in fact, to exchange anything but the high-level details. Indeed he had moved to South Carolina and was currently working in construction (as he had dropped out of school). Behind the short, awkward sentences, I could still tell Caleb had a wildness about him, but, at that age, wildness was less paintball guns and re-enacting fake wrestling matches, and more something else entirely.

Without saying it, we both seemed to decide that our friendship and commonalities were from a different time, so we politely said our goodbyes as he pushed back off into the river and that was the last I ever saw Caleb, just floating away.

Dipstick

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

My mom called to let me know that they had to put Dipstick down today due to the kind of things that happen to cats when they get old. She actually ended up being 14 years old, which was older than I thought she was.

It’s a cruel fate that takes away these constant companions, especially ones that lived as quietly as she did, not asking for anymore than a small laundry room, a bowl full of food, and a few pats on the head as we walked by.

So, with that, I’ll be hugging Oliver and Lola a bit harder tonight.

A New Razor

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

As a Christmas gift, Meghan gave me a new razor, one of the “old-fashioned” safety razors, complete with a shaving brush and soap that smells vaguely of tobacco. I had actually been eyeing this setup for a few months as I’ve been using one of the modern razors with 3-5 blades for years, and I was always disappointed with the quality of the shave, as well as how quickly my coarse facial hair would wear down the blade. I watched a few YouTube videos on optimal lathering technique with the brush and soap and the proper angle and direction to pull the razor. (I’m sure our grandfathers learned the same way…) And just like any ritual, there are as many ways to do it as there are are people performing it. So wanting a possibly better shave was a major reason for wanting (and receiving) this shaving setup, but I’d be lying if I said that was the only reason. Sure, there’s that slightly Mad-Menish flair of dragging a sharp blade across your throat with a chromed-out razor, but for me, it appealed to my love of little rituals. Up to a year or so ago, the pieces of my day were mostly the same, many of them spent in front of my computer. Like I’d imagine a lot of people that “live” on the Internet, I divided my chunks of time into roughly 15 second slices: read 1 email, switch to Twitter and read the top few most recent messages, switch to the feed reader and skim a dozen headlines, oh look a new Twitter message, ooh more email, and so on and so on. I knew I needed a reprieve from getting that constant stream of endorphins from making all the numbers go down. The first little ritual I introduced was brewing a cup of coffee and making oatmeal on the stove every morning. Such a little thing became a real meditation. I could only do one thing at a time and I had to pay attention. This was a complete flip from the non-stop information gluttony I usually participated in and this was good. So this new shaving process in the morning is a similar thing. (And as a side benefit, I’m getting a better shave!) Another thought, that might be related: Over the holidays, Meghan and I went and stayed with her parents in a beach house on the Florida Panhandle. Her brother would turn the TV own after our afternoon walks on the beach and around 6pm, Meghan’s mother would ask for him to to change the channel to the news. Ten years ago, this would have seemed commonplace, but today, the idea of sitting down with the frame of mind of “now, I will consume the news for 30 minutes” is noteworthy. With an always-on, usually-tuned-in Internet connection, there’s no official news time. It’s all the time, whether you like it or not. Instead of watching the talking heads, I tried to decide which mode is better. With the Internet, I can know of any world event within seconds of it happening. With the TV, I get a daily condensed version of the highlights. I think I decided that getting the news, in whatever form, once a day in a solid chunk might be the best way. Beyond living in ignorance for a few hours in the day, not knowing normal news events until later usually has very little direct impact on my life. It’s also another ritual, a devoted time set aside for one purpose. Do I need to be constantly awash in world news? I’d say no. Getting that dose of information in one chunk probably also lets you digest it better and it also lets others (definitely for better or worse) filter out a lot of the noise. I also realized that a big reason that I would constantly refresh cnn.com or nytimes.com was that I was bored. Why was I bored? Because there was nothing new on those pages. I realized that’s a pretty harsh cycle to be caught up in. So that’s why I’m taking solace in what little rituals like shaving with a safety razor, or sitting down to watch the evening news, or grinding and pressing a pot of coffee has on my always plugged-in attitude. And I’m learning that the old saying is true: sometimes you need to stop and smell roses, or, in this case, the tobacco-scented shaving soap.

The Cat in the Laundry Room

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

My parents have a cat that I cleverly named “Dipstick”, due to her solid blackness with a white-tipped tail. This cat was born at our house in the laundry room which is an exterior room off the garage. With a washer and dryer in there, it was always warm and with the garage door closed, wild animals weren’t a concern, so it was a safe spot to birth and raise a litter of kittens. Dipstick was the runt of the lot and was born not breathing. My father was watching over the natural progression of things and quickly swooped in, as naturally, this would have been that for that kitten. He held it upside down and pumped its chest, and fluid poured out, and it started mewing. We’ve always had multiple cats wandering around the house, and we’ve let them decide if they wanted to be indoor or outdoor cats. We’ve had some cats that would only go outside once a week or so (and less than that in the winter), and some cats that stayed completely outside, only swinging by to eat. Dipstick was a cat that lived in limbo, not really an indoor nor an outdoor cat, instead deciding to live entirely in the same laundry room she was born in. So where she could have a warm house to sleep in, or dozens of wooded acres to wander through, she has instead decided to spend her entire existence in a 48 square foot room. Dipstick is now approaching 12 or 13 years old. This cat has spent all but a few minutes per day in this crowded little room. This makes me sad on some level, as she’ll pass on eventually within a few feet of where she was born, but she doesn’t seem to be in bad spirits at all about it, and she knows both what the inside and the outside holds, and she’s chosen her lot. I’m not sure why I think so much of this cat when I’m home. Now that I’m only coming home once a year or so, things are always slightly different and off from the last time I visited, but that black cat with the white-tipped tail is always curled up in the same spot she’s literally spent her entire life in and that kind of constancy is reassuring, especially when my own travels have taken me very far away from home.