Spent the morning trying to connect my new external drive to the laptop, only to discover that not all USB-C cables are created equal. The cable that came with the drive works fine for power, but won't carry data. The one from my phone charges everything but transfers nothing. And the expensive "high-speed" cable I bought last month? Perfect for everything except video.

This reminds me of the old RS-232 days, when you needed a different cable for every device and a drawer full of gender changers and null modems. We thought we'd solved this with USB, and for a while we had. USB-A was USB-A. It either worked or it didn't.

Now we have USB-C, which looks identical regardless of capability. USB 2.0 speeds, USB 3.2, Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, power delivery at various voltages, DisplayPort alternate mode, and combinations thereof. All in connectors that look exactly the same.

This is a perfect example of what happens when committee design meets marketing pressure. The engineers wanted flexibility, the manufacturers wanted cost savings, and the marketing departments wanted "universal". What we got was universally confusing.

At least the old parallel port cables had different connectors for different capabilities. You knew a Centronics cable was for printers, not modems.

The light this morning was exceptional—one of those crisp autumn days where everything seems to have more contrast than usual. Took the opportunity to reshoot the house from the north side for the monthly house photos.

While reviewing the images, I noticed something I'd missed before: the shadow patterns from the solar panels create an interesting geometric overlay on the garden below. It changes throughout the day, of course, but at this time of morning it creates an almost Art Deco pattern across the lavender bushes.

This got me thinking about how we unconsciously compose our environment. When we installed those panels five years ago, I was focused entirely on energy efficiency and roof aesthetics. The shadow patterns were an unintended consequence that turned out to be rather pleasant.

Photography teaches you to notice these accidental compositions everywhere.

The "smart" thermostat decided to update its firmware this afternoon. Without warning, naturally. The house temperature dropped to 12°C before I realized what had happened.

Post-update, the interface has changed completely. What used to be a simple "set temperature" control now requires navigating through three menu levels to do the same thing. Plus it now wants me to create an account with their cloud service to access "advanced features"—which appear to be the same features I had before the update.

When did thermostats become subscription services? It's a device that should set a temperature and maintain it. Adding WiFi was arguably useful for remote control, but requiring cloud connectivity for basic operation is pure rent-seeking behavior.

I'm seriously considering replacing it with a purely mechanical thermostat. At least those fail in predictable ways.

Spent the evening reading through some old RFCs, particularly RFC 793 (TCP specification) and RFC 791 (IP). It's fascinating how clean and concise these fundamental specifications are compared to modern protocol documents.

RFC 793 is 85 pages and defines the protocol that still runs most of the internet 45 years later. Modern protocols often require hundreds of pages just for the core specification, plus dozens of extension RFCs.

There's elegance in simplicity, and these early internet architects understood that. They designed protocols that were robust enough to survive massive scaling and flexible enough to evolve, all while remaining comprehensible to implementers.

Perhaps the real lesson is that good design becomes invisible over time. We take TCP/IP for granted precisely because it works so well.