On Returning

In 2005, this blog’s first post was a little joke: an apology for not having posted in a while—since 14,789 BC. The image had a cave painting with ASCII art.

Even in those early days of blogging, “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while” was already a cliché. So, I thought, why not take it to an illogical extreme?

Now the joke is on me. It’s been, uh, a while since my last post: almost 14 years.

I didn’t stop for any cataclysmic reason. I’d been blogging for seven years, and it felt like time for a break. Inertial forces then took over. The lack of blogging begat more lack of blogging. There are always other things to do, if you let that be the case.

So what changes in 14 years?

When I look back at this blog’s archive, I think, “That’s still me.” Some things don’t change much.

But other things do change.

At the time of my last post in 2012, my daughter was going into first grade. She just finished her second year in college.

I had just joined Responsys. A couple of years later, Oracle acquired us. I went on to lead product management for the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

In 2017, I joined DocuSign. We had quite a growth run in my five years there, including an IPO and our millionth customer.

My father died in 2020. In 2016, he had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. The doctors at Stanford removed five pounds of it, as well as parts of affected organs. Although we saw a lot of the healthcare system in the next four years, he was able to live a largely normal life. Modern medicine is amazing.

After twenty years, Jacqueline and I ended our marriage in 2020. It was a so-called “good divorce,” a term that does not mean good like happy; it just means not dysfunctional or bitter. We remain closely connected family-wise to this day. But between the divorce, my father’s death, and enduring the COVID era, 2020 was tough. Many others had it worse, I know.

Near the end of 2022, I left DocuSign and embarked on a new phase. It involves using technology for public service projects. The main one is Fairmind, which helps people have informed and fair-minded opinions about polarizing issues. Having registered fairmind.com in 2001, I’ve thought about this particular problem for decades. Now I’m at the point where I can take a shot at it, so I am.

In addition, I am wrapping up a one-year project called Americans Agree. It tracked where Democrats, Republicans, and Independents found common ground, and analyzed why these points of consensus did or did not become policy.

As part of Americans Agree, every two weeks I published an essay about a point of cross-partisan agreement. This got me back into the groove of writing regularly, including the thinking, creativity, and craft that comes with it. I was reminded why I wrote hundreds of blog posts over seven years: I liked doing it. Sometimes we forget such simple things.

With Americans Agree concluding, I wanted to keep my writing practice going. Re-energizing the Words & Numbers blog was the obvious thing to do. It had remained up all these years and was still attracting thousands of page views per month from search engines. That’s a lot of people getting something from what I did a long time ago.

So why not do more, starting now?

On returning, I’ve migrated all the old posts onto a new infrastructure. I’ve updated the visual design to work better with mobile devices and to support either light or dark mode. I’ve also added an option to deliver new posts by email—something Americans Agree did to good effect.

It’s all ready to go.

Starting now.