In our home we some times enjoy some prepared frozen breaded fish. A box usually comes with four pieces of fish. Occasionally, when the stars align, there are five pieces.

When this happens, we celebrate this bounty by singing “Bonus fish! Bonus fish!” to the tune of Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit Gloria.

So, things aren’t all bad.

When you see video of a rocket launch, you hear them talk about “max q.” This is the point where the rocket is under the maximum amount of dynamic pressure from the atmosphere.

As the rocket accelerates, the pressure from pushing through the atmosphere increases. Eventually, though, the atmosphere thins, and the pressure reduces. There’s a crossover point where the pressure is highest: max q.

Similarly, when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle at home over the holidays, the puzzle process has a max q.

The difficultly of a puzzle decreases with each piece you place, as fewer options are left for the remaining pieces.

However, the difficulty of placing a piece increases as you run out of easy and obvious placements.

There’s a crossover point somewhere in the middle where a puzzle is at its most difficult. There are still lots of pieces and positions left, and the easy placements have run out. This is puzzle max q.

You might think someone in their late-forties, like myself, is too set in their ways to change their life. Well, dear reader, I switched to putting the tabs on the side of my browser! It’s never too late.

If you’re anything like me, when you can’t sleep and your phone is too nearby, you might find yourself going down a YouTube rabbit hole.

Maybe it’s heart-warming surprise virtuoso performances at TV-show singing contests (the apparent shock here is often than people who aren’t traditionally attractive can be talented). For me, it’s live concerts where the crowd sings along with the audience. Maybe it’s the crowd helping out Lewis Capaldi when he’s struggling to get through a song, or the singer of Snow Patrol marvelling at the festival audience taking over for him. I love these. Especially when the artist themselves are obviously delighted. It’s like emotional candy.

Of course, enjoying this experience in real life is even better. I’ve gotten to sing Better Man along with a baseball stadium full of other Pearl Jam fans in Boston – or sing Sonny’s Dream along with The Once at the St. Mary’s Church in Indian River, PEI.

Once of these YouTube rabbit-holes brought me to the video for the song Monsters by James Blunt. If you have or have ever had either a soul or a father, it will probably make you cry. If you’ve lost a parent, It might need a full-on emotional content warning.

The video is such an obvious tear-jerker that there seems to be an entire sub-genre of reaction videos on YouTube where you can watch people experience it for the first time:

The further I get through life, the more I realize that most things in live can be seen as trade-offs.

Some things are obviously trade-offs. Should you take that new job? On one hand, you’ll get better pay. On the other hand, you may not get on as well the the team as your current job.

Beyond the obvious cases, I’ve come to believe that everything is a trade-off. On top of that, we usually don’t have a great sense of what we’re trading off.

Obviously-bad choices are just trade offs that are weighted against our preferred outcome. Obviously-good choices are trade offs that are weighted to our preferred outcome.

I find thinking of things as a trade-off helps with post-decision regret. If you made a big decision and it’s not perfect, just remember that this decision had trade-offs, and any other choice would have just had a different set of trade-offs (maybe much worse).

There’s no sense in making sweeping absolute statements about aesthetics.

That said, no electric guitar should have gold hardware.

My MacBook Pro froze the other day. Like, really froze. The cursor didn’t move, the keyboard didn’t do anything, and even the haptic feedback that makes the touchpad feel like it “clicks” didn’t trigger. This frozen touchpad added a physical layer to the freeze. It felt almost like it would if you could no longer physically depress keys on a keyboard.

What surprised me most about this computer freeze was that I was surprised at all.

Years ago, a computer would easily freeze a couple of times per week, or per day. It was frustrating – but not surprising. It was frustrating how unsurprising it was.

Sometimes it seems like everything is getting worse (and in many ways, things are obviously getting worse). In one small corner, stability on a typical computer, things have gotten better.

Resumability is not a word, but it’s an important concept to me.

When I say Resumability, I’m talking about the ability to quickly interrupt and later resume a task.

The task doesn’t have to be productive. The greatest resumable device I’ve ever owned is the Nintendo DS.

The DS was a clamshell-shaped portable gaming system. If you needed to stop playing, you could just slam the case shut (with a satisfying clunk sound).

Two hours (or two days) later, you could flip open the DS and you were immediately exactly where you left off. You could just un-pause and keep playing as though no time had passed.

There was no boot up, no menus to navigate, no agreements to confirm. You just keep playing.

When you’re a tired parent without much time for video games, resumability is key. If it’s going to take me two or three minutes to get into the game, I may have just used up half of the time I had available in the first place.

Other devices that are good at resumability:

• Most dedicated e-reader devices like the Kindle or Kobo resume exactly where you left off.
• Modern smart phones: Press an Off button, slide it in your pocket, take it out later and unlock it with your fingerprint or face, and you are exactly where you left off (feeding your dopamine addiction at the cost of your relationships and connection to society)
• Slack, the work chat app, is resumable even across devices. If I’m in the middle of typing a long message and my laptop flies out of my hands into the ocean, I can pick up where I left off from my phone.

Sometimes resumability needs to be designed into a device, like the examples above. For some types of devices, they are resumable by their very nature. A book with a bookmark is always ready to go. When you pressed STOP on an old audio cassette player, it just sat there in a physical arrangement ready to resume exactly where you left off a year later.

We don’t always want such a friction-less experience though. Friction is safe. It keeps you from falling down. Friction in an entertainment device, can also help keep you from excessive unwanted distraction.

If my TV takes 20 seconds to boot up, that might be just enough friction to keep me walking past it rather than getting sucked into watching something I don’t even really want to see.

Just don’t make me wait 3 seconds to resume my New Super Mario Bros. game.