We’ve had a rough winter. Penetrating cold that clings to your bones. Ice dams, pipe freeze protocols, shutting down the upstairs bathroom. The kind of winter where the days blur together and you realize somewhere along the way that you’ve been going through motions rather than actually living inside them. You suspect you need something. You’re just not sure what, or how much.

I’ve been thinking about the gap between the list of things I want to get done and the things I actually get done. For a long time, my attention went almost entirely to what wasn’t finished, and kept getting pushed back. Recently I’ve been trying to flip that around and look at what did happen. Turns out it’s usually plenty. Writing. Teaching. Following through on things that matter. The list of what’s actually getting done is longer than I give it credit for.

The first time I heard about what would become the Khmer Magic Music Bus, I wasn’t even in Cambodia. I was listening to my colleague Steve describe a rest stop on a long drive through the countryside.

There’s a moment every computer person eventually has, usually more than once, where something gets deleted that can’t come back. Working in the command line for years, I’ve been there. It teaches you, more than anything, that the things you can’t take back deserve a different kind of attention than the things you can.