Digest #6: Cruising into a New Year
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It’s funny odd that I’m down here in Mexico while Trump takes office. I was also out of the country when Trump first got elected, doing a two day workshop in Germany for SAP. Day 1 was election eve, and when pressed, I assured my German friends Trump wouldn’t win. When I walked back into the building on day 2, they demanded an explanation.
Couldn’t explain it then, can’t explain it now. While my situation is different - down here in Puerto Vallarta for the annual Wirepine offsite - my Mexican friends don’t seem to care too much.
While Wirepine was putting in the hard work of FY25 planning, our competition - those other Tech Oligarchs - were making news at some Inauguration:
I wrote a political piece after the election (first and last?) called Tech bends the knee. While I tried to explain tech’s hard right turn, it’s still surreal, so I’ll be watching this crazy train with interest. How is this even going to turn out!?? As far as I can tell, Microsoft wasn’t there, so thank you Satya for sitting this one out.
If you can remember last week’s news, there was a day - I think it was Thursday - when two of our newly minted oligarchs held a competition to see who could launch the bigger rocket. First bro Musk launched Starship flight 7 with mixed results - they made another amazing booster catch but the starship itself exploded soon after staging. Hard body Bezos finally launched a big boy rocket to compete with Starship called the New Glenn.
Yeah, I’m still infatuated with Rockets and plotting to see a launch - I wrote about that my new years piece The future keeps happening (part II).
My best writing effort was Seduced in the dark. A story from time spent in darkrooms when I was 15 and the pictures I took.
The most important articles personally (I call it Substack as Therapy or SaT) - were ones dealing with the death of both my parents last year including the sale of my childhood home in F* Around and Find Out and getting through my dad’s affairs in How I lost the paper war. I’m really glad I got my dad’s house sold before the LA fires. The Sunset Fire, up in the hills I used to explore when I was a kid, came scary close.
DEADBEEF is a fun piece about nerd, geek and tech enthusiast humor, similar to last week’s piece digging into the phenomenon that even as tech advances - perhaps faster than we’d like - it’s not necessarily getting any easier to use.
The best technical article I wrote was Talking to the Wizard behind the curtain, demystifying how we can now talk to computers - and they understand us and talk back! This takes us into AI and the next frontier of conversational computers which is going to be another fun one to track this year. This theme pops up in several other pieces including last week’s Is tech getting any easier?
Interesting and just a little terrifying, I got spun up on China for a couple of weeks. First tracing global trade, trying to get my head around how the Wirepine Christmas Keychains were shipped from halfway around the world. Then I went on a choo choo journey looking at the fastest trains in the world (China wins) as a background on how the same tech looks very different when implemented in different countries.
My most popular piece in this rollup (I think from fellow writers on substack checking it out) - is The 1%. It’s about how tough it is to get engagement in an online community. Finally, I wrote a bit on having faith in yourself called Nurture your ego.
Thanks for liking or commenting or reading or even when you just give my contemplations a scroll - I appreciate you!
Coming up, I’m working on some TechTales to spin from The Amazing Spider-Van 🕷️
Best, Andrew
2025 is gonna be the weirdest year yet, only to be eclipsed by 2026, which will make this year look like a yawning IBM employee by comparison. Are you back in the US now? I might (like 10 or 20% chance) visit Mexico this year.
so, did you get the van?