Truman Heisel

“No matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail”

2011-2022

There were tears, there were nose boops, there was steak, there was peanut butter whiskey.

Truman had just beat lymphoma in June, when he first went into respiratory distress from congestive heart disease. He, Erica and I have been fighting that and pulmonary hypertension since. It’s a balancing act between being able to breath and kidney failure.

He started eating less this past weekend, stumbling around, then not eating anything. Then yesterday he had a grand mal seizure in the yard.

He was telling us it was time to go.

“Peace and long rest for weary old heart and head and limbs, and eternal sleep in the earth I have loved so well. Perhaps, after all, this is best.” – Eugene O’Neill’s will for his dog

I know he’s in a better place. Digging (and eating) in the dirt with abandon on fully functional knees. It’s always “Truman weather” (cold but not freezing, sunny and never raining), and his parents let him eat all the street pizza and chicken bones he can find.

Farewell my sweet, good, good boy.

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LEM rotation instead of transposition, docking and extraction?

If you can get past the “one weird trick” algorithm, YouTube has a decent collection of historical aerospace films. In my Apollo collection is this gem of a video that I’d love to get more details on.

It shows an early concept for getting the LEM from behind the command module to the docking port. Instead of the transposition, docking and extraction maneuver we’ve come to know, it shows a set of arms physically rotating it into position. The arms are jettisoned when the LEM descends to the Moon, and the LEM docks as we came to expect it when it returns from the surface.

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Why America can’t build quickly anymore

It is well and good to have the government handle large externalities, or quantifiable ones. I should pay for the wear and tear my car puts on the road. I should pay for the carbon impact of my emissions. But by expanding government’s scope to handle small externalities, and unquantifiable ones, they’ve created a system where few things are doable as-of-right, everything is up for debate, and people are incentivized to exaggerate or even fake grievances.

Alan Cole on fullstackeconomics.com

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Umpires, not kings

“Winners will always seek to entrench themselves, buying up competitors or starving them of resources and seizing control of political power and forums for speech and debate.”

“It’s long past time to replace the idolatry of innovators with a reinvigorated respect for the rules and the umpires who enforce them.”

From Umpires, Not Kings by Scott Galloway over at No Mercy / No Malice

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The Anatomy of a 1:1

The Anatomy of a 1:1 by Cate over at Accidentally in Code is a fantastic breakdown of how one manager structures their one-on-one meetings. I love the structured thinking, especially the development conversation flow.

My favorite 1:1 conversation continuer and relationship builder question is “Tell me more?”. When you get those single sentance answers to a question, or your counterpart comes to the end of a thought.

“… and the sellers really enjoyed the feature.” “Tell me more?”

“I really liked what you said in your top of minds e-mail about dealing with outages.” “Tell me more?”

“I’m interested in doing more strategy work, but I don’t have the time.” “Tell me more?”

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