En anglais « writer’s block ».

J’ai entendu une remarque intéressante que je partage ici et maintenant pour ne plus l’oublier.

Cette difficulté d’écrire provient de la difficulté à accorder deux choses : ce que l’on veut réellement écrire et ce que l’on imagine que le lecteur veut lire.

En clair, ce « blocage » vient d’un manque d’honnêteté.

Rester à fidèle à soi-même. Peu importe le regard que les autres porteront sur ce que l’on a écrit.

Facile à dire. Pas facile à mettre en pratique.

J’arrive à écrire ici tous les jours en partie parce que je sais que personne ne me lit.

Le jours où ce sera le cas, les choses changeront probablement : quelle valeur j’apporte ? Quelle image je projette ?

Ce carnet n’a que pour seul intérêt le partage de l’expérience empirique que je fais de la vie. Mes sensations, mes émotions, ma manière de percevoir le monde.

Et peut-être qu’un jour cette expérience personnelle raisonnera chez quelqu’un.

Ce n’est pas un souhait aujourd’hui. La seule chose qui compte pour le moment, c’est mon envie égoïste d’écrire. Pour moi et moi seul. Et si un jour ces écrits sont lus.

Tant mieux... ou tant pis.

The life & times of BB – the travels & the stories of Ronald Bartels, born a South African

The four corners of the Earth are where we have been, where we are, where we will be going and where we end up. When I was a baby my parents told me I was attached to my bottle and would not give it up. They concocted a story that they had to give it to the elephant in the Bloemfontein zoo to feed her babies. That was the last I saw of it, but every family gathering they would have great pleasure in retelling the story. never realizing that it wasn't appropriate to retell traumatizing events.

From that baby lying on the beach in blissful happiness at Thompson’s Bay, I now work in connectivity.

These are my stories.

Breaking the Mould of Stereotypes

Apartheid to democracy

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Cosmos, Blackjacks & Kharkibos

The Golden Liberals

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The Queen of Sheba

Comrade Ernie

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The Strong One

A dark night

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In my previous life I would have been a Roman Gladiator

Maties

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In the beginning

Vredefort Dome

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Jeremy Clarkson and I agree that the best vehicle is a Massey-Ferguson

I was born in the sixties a couple of years before Neil Armstrong took those famous steps on the moon. We lived in a dusty farmhouse in a valley in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands, a few kilometres north of the small town of New Hanover. The farm was nestled in a beautiful valley where my father grew potatoes and cabbages and other vegetables including madum…

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Herd of Zebra 🦓

I was born on the Glorious Twelfth. This is the opening of the hunting season in Scotland where grouse is a common bird that is hunted. The yearly event is immortalized by the Scotch Whisky, The Famous Grouse! Just read the label.

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The Church in Sleepy Hollow

The first motorcar I can recall my dad owning was a Valiant. It was a big car and was partnered with my dad's Bedford truck at our farm located between Pietermaritzburg and Greytown. Pietermaritzburg is known as Sleepy Hollow. It is a dull place with not much happening in the town, except the yearly world famous ultra marathon known as The Comrades. Exc…

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Standstill

Token-ring

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Being in the sh*t and having the sh*t hit the fan

I worked at Madge Networks for over half a decade during the time where South Africa transitioned to a democracy. Madge Networks had a simple philosophy of “support without limits.” It meant that if you bought a Madge product you could be guaranteed that the company would assist you unconditionally in the use of that product and not charge you extra.

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The Gypsy

One of the great trips I had, was to the Costa del Sol, or is that the Costa del Golf. It was a Madge Networks Sales Conference. We stayed in Marbella and flew into Spain landing at Malaga. We flew from South Africa via London and on the plane were a whole load of Germans. The Germans could not speak a word of English and I was trying to make conversati…

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Angels

As a teenager I sat in the Reunie Hall at Grey College in Bloemfontein and listened to Sir Laurens van der Post. It was in the immediate years before Die Groot Krokodil's Rubicon speech and many of my school mates were not convinced a democratic South Africa was viable. It is probably the greatest speech that I have ever heard where I was physically pre…

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I learnt to program on a ZX81

My first job was for the Railways. It was fun working there until I was told that I could not be a member of their pension fund because I was disabled. I did not stay around to argue the point and moved on to work for a little networking company known as Network Interface Consultants.

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genchi genbutsu

Often, I see technicians dealing with issues and problems while sitting firmly on the seat of their pants at their desks. Call me old school, but I do not think this works! There is no substitute for the eyeball.

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What really matters

Dolos My brother André immigrated to Australia in the mid-2000s. He decided to leave the country as he had been mugged and did not have suitable engineering projects in his field as they had been cancelled. He was an expert in placing dolosse on breakwaters and affluent pipelines into the sea. He loved running and cycling having completed over ten Comrad…

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LAN Damager

There I was shooting the breeze with an old mate. The conversation turned to why Madge Networks went titsup. My analysis is that Madge Networks had a solution and decided to go out and find a problem. They deferred to more incorrect strategic technology choices. The truth of the matter is that when something goes titsup, its not because of one reason on…

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The Irish Word for Social Media is Craic & it is a Better Alternative

In an Irish pub nestled between the tales and laughter, let me unfold the vibrant essence of Craic – a gem often overlooked in today's whirlwind of social media and technology. Picture this: amidst the hustle of Twitter, Facebook's frenzy, or even LinkedIn where you might stumble upon this very story, a transformation, a shift occurred.

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Growing Up on Oakvilla Farm next to the Inyosi River

Copper Lines

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In a Modern World we have transitioned to Electronic Tombstones

My wife used to say that often she would read about what I was thinking via something I had posted online instead of a personal conversation. Some things are easier to write about than to speak about. Something else my wife used to say is that I never took enough pictures of her and the children. I probably enjoy writing more than I do talking. That’s j…

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The Oakvila Farm Memories & the Path I Travelled

The Girl Next Door & Horseback Dreams

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P.O. Box 2, New Hanover, 3440

In the quiet rhythms of farm life, far from the clamor of cities, our connection to the wider world hinged on a simple metal rectangle: P.O. Box 2, New Hanover 3440. Our farm lay 15 kilometers outside that one-donkey town—a speck on the map so modest it couldn’t even afford a horse. New Hanover was the kind of place where time moved at the pace of a laz…

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Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Democrats are taking the House and the Senate!!! Texas has flipped blue, and Abbott was told to get his hateful ass out! It's about damn time!

I am so happy I could cry. It doesn't mean things are going to be easy. It's still a hell of a fight, but it's a start. It's a start.

The horrific ads that have slammed into my phones and mail for so many weeks now are disgusting. The money poured in to create all of that ugly could have been used to actually help people.

It wasn't a tight win here. I am so, so very happy right now. Abbott and Paxton are bye, bye, bye! I could squeak!

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The day I closed down South Africa

Token-ring

In the mid-nineties I lived in Pretoria, in Hill Street, close to Loftus. Loftus Versveld is one of the prominent Rugby stadiums in the country. This was in the years immediately following the establishment of a full democracy in South Africa with Nelson Mandela leading the government. I worked for a token-ring company named Madge Networks as a Technical Account Manager. It was in direct competition with Ethernet, which would eventually become the dominant technology. The main competitor was Cisco.

One of my colleagues at Madge was Duncan Ogilvie. I was in contact with him when we stopped working at Madge and would often braai lamb chops and have a beer sitting on the stoep. During the pandemic he took his own life. Never knew that he was having mental health difficulties. He was a great mate.

The Madge offices were in Rivonia. My trip would start early mornings before seven as with heavy traffic the journey might take up to an hour. One morning I was driving in to work and was listening to a CD and switched to Radio 702 just before 7. Nowadays people rarely listen to CDs. The presenter on Radio 702 was John Robbie, an Irishman. The headline news was about major delays at Johannesburg International Airport which is now called OR Tambo that was reportedly caused by a computer problem. The country was at a standstill. I had worked at the airport for a major national airline installing many switches and CAUs and was very familiar with the environment. CAUs were token-ring hubs. I was coming up to the Buccleuch interchange and decided to go left to the airport instead of right to the office. Maybe there was something I could do to help.

A few moments later my mobile rang. It was the major national airline's IT manager who had heard the same news broadcast and asked me to meet him at the airport. He was as much in the dark about the situation as what I was. The two of us arrived at much the same time at the departure hall of the airport. The crowd and queues were extremely long. We walked to the front counters to determine from the staff what was the issue. Many of the passengers threatened us as the assumed we were hopping the queue and told us to get back into the line. Having struggled our way to the front we duly learned from the duty controller that there was no connectivity to the mainframe. Since my companion had walked over from the headquarters building, he confirmed it was not a general mainframe outage as the systems were all accessible and working from that building.

I had my laptop with me, an IBM Butterfly (one of the best laptops I have ever owned!) I attached my laptop using my Smart token-ring adapter to the network and loaded a good old DOS application called RingManager. I looked in dismay as RingManager proceeded to tell me that there were well over five hundred nodes connected onto the single ring (maximum should not be more than two hundred). The laptop screen then froze. Being a typical techie and not believing it the first time I proceeded to do it a second time with the same results by turning it off and on again. I conferred with the guys from the national major airline and told them that it was my suspicion that someone had looped the rings at the airport together. There was only one location where this was possible and that was the main fibre patching room. We proceeded to the patch room and at first inspection all was in order. However, when we started checking the patches, they were totally incorrect with the diagram pasted on the wall next to the cabinet.

The security guards confirmed that a cable installer had signed in and worked in the room at one in the morning connecting a new voice switch. We deduced that the patch cables were in his way, so he unpatched them all. He then installed his new fibre cables and then randomly patched the cables back. We started patching the fibres back to their correct position using the diagram on the wall. The technician who pasted the diagram on the wall was diligent and in today’s modern data centres this is never done. Nowadays you will never encounter diagrams present in patch rooms. When it comes to resolving problems, they are crucial. The assumption is you have it available electronically, but the fundamental problem is they were probably never created and not documented.

The airport network slowly started coming online as we worked through the patches and the departures were able to move from manual boarding to full digital ticket check-in and boarding.

After the crisis was over at around ten that morning, we had some strong cups of coffee. I asked the guys from the major national airline why there was no escalation as the operators had a network management alert console. No one had the answer, so we decided to go over to the operations area to work out the reason. The operator was sitting in his office blissfully unaware of the crisis. The network management console had a total of eleven million unacknowledged alerts. When questioned as to why there was no escalation the guy said that no-one had phoned him. He only does anything when someone phones him and since no-one phoned there was not any problem. He did not realize that his job was to tell people there was a problem. I never knew what happened to the poor bloke but there were some pissed off people ready to strangle him.

Change management

I have repeated seen changes done in isolation and not in an end to end fashion. In some companies each business unit does their own thing and does not consult with any other stakeholders. Change management will fail and cause outages unless there is a transparent end to end process where all stakeholders and their vendors within an organization have visibility to these types of activities.

Too often the changes are done in a fashion of need to know. I need to know and will tell you about it if I think you need to know. Murphy usually conspires to bring two changes together at the most inappropriate moment to cause absolute havoc.

Whenever I sit delayed in some airport, I often have the urge to go and ask the airport personnel who messed up the change process, because that is the most probable reason. The problem is not limited to a single national airline, in this case, South African Airways, but also countries as a whole. Ironically, South African Airways would go titsup due the cronyism in the post democratic South Africa under the control of the African National Congress.

The best example of a politician who was able to handle and manage change was Nelson Mandela. When I was at school at Grey College, Mandela was banned. We had no sight of him as his picture and words were banned and there is a famous Johnny Clegg song about it, Asimbonanga.

Braam Fischer

On the honours board in the Reunie Hall at Grey College under 1934 was the name of Braam Fischer. Fischer was a white Afrikaner, who was Mandela's lawyer and friend. Every hall period my eyes would drift to that name on the board. I knew who he was, and his name was cursed by the apartheid government in power. Some would have liked his name erased, but the school refused. Many famous people have matriculated from the school including Laurens van der Post, Denys Reitz and countless Springbok Rugby players. Of all these Fischer's ideals matched most closely those of the school's founder, Grey. He had died a horrible death in prison for his convictions and would not die in the comfort and praise of the nation. But his contribution was immense. Here is Fischer explained in the words of Mandela, delivered in that same Reunie Hall on 28 November 1997, where I sat:

Bram Fisher tel ongetwyfeld onder daardie klas van goeie mans en vroue wat op die wyse deur alle Suid-Afrikaners in verering gehou sal word.

Ons weet egter dat dit nie altyd die geval was nie. In sy lewe het hy voor die moeilikste keuses te staan gekom. En sy uiteindelike keuses, het hom 'n uitgeworpene gelaat in sy eie gemeenskap en in die geledere van sy beroepslui.

‘'n Man so hartstogtelik verbind tot die wet en die gereg het gesterwe as 'n gevonnisde prisonier. 'n Afrikaner in murg en been, sonder verskoning of voorbehoud, was soos 'n melaatse behandel deur sy eie mense.

Aan die ander kant: die seun van een van die mees vooraanstaande en bevoorregte gesinne in die samelewing van daardie tyd, het sy lot ingewerp met die van die armstes onder die armes.

Dit mag klink na 'n verhaal van teenstrydighede. Daardie teenstrydighede was egter nie soseer in die man Bram Fisher nie; dit was die teenstrydighede van die samelewing waarin hy, en talle Suid-Afrikaners, moes leef.

Ons regstelsel het in botsing gekom met die ideale van geregtigheid vanwee die onderdrukking van die meerderheid, en die verwording van die wet om die geregverdigde weerstand van daardie meerderheid te onderdruk.

Dit was die gedwonge skeiding van mense en die ontsegging van basiese politieke regte op grond van ras en kleur, wat daartoe gelei het dat 'n mens se respek vir sy medemens in stryd kon kom met sy sy trou aan eie gemeenskap.

Bram Fisher se durf en moed in die wyse waarop hy hierdie moeilike keuses aangepak het, het dit makliker gemaak vir andere om op daardie pad te volg. Sy beeld, toegewydheid tot die stryd vir vryheid en menswaardigheid, aktiewe bevordering van nie-rassigheid – daarin le die fondamente van ons huidige pogings tot versoening.

Pause for a moment. The words are in Afrikaans. Afrikaans was the predominant language of what Mandela classified an illegal regime. Ironically, it was a language more associated with the kombuis than the voorportaal. It was the language of JT Elliot. What is implied by this is that it had its origins amongst the South African coloured population and not the boers (Dutch language farmers). They placed a higher regard on Dutch. Afrikaans was the language of Die Stem, written by Langenhoven who had been my oupa's neighbour in Oudtshoorn. It was only in 1952, the year after the establishment of Bible House, that my mom's aunt was the first one to be married in Afrikaans and not Dutch. Donald and Margarite Munro were the first to have the language used in a wedding officiated in the NG Kerk. But the language became hated as it was assimilated by the ruling governments who introduced systematic racism in the form of apartheid. The words in Mandela’s speech are amazing but even though it reflects on Fischer, it reflects more on the character of Mandela. Here is a leader who when imprisoned, learned the language of those oppressing him and when he came to honour his friend he did it in his Fischer's native tongue, even though it was a language he should have despised. Mandela was better and more fluent in Afrikaans than me. He was more an Afrikaner than what I would ever be.

We often debated politics at school. I was not shy to make my views know and was branded a kommunis. The word was generically used to describe any liberal. It was difficult to intellectually justify apartheid and we all realized it. I went to University and many of my friends participated in the border wars. Like all wars, it leaves its scars. Colloquially we refer to it as being bosbefok.

I am a liberal and in the language of the conservative world it is still misconstrued as it is identified as what they are not, while it should be identified by what they are. It is one of the fundamental reasons I always feel alienated as I am classified by what I am not, not by what I am. An example is the branding of people as disabled. I feel it is hugely insulting as people are physically or mentally impaired and they are not recognized for what they are! During apartheid there was the binary classification of white and non-white. This was abhorrent but the inherent bigotry in other areas has not been irradicated.

Unlike the other leaders I admire like Amundsen, Turing or Flowers, Mandela was still alive in my lifetime. While I was in the navy, a few thousand kilometres away from the border wars, I recall the speech by de Klerk when he announced Mandela’s unconditional release. I was travelling on the road between Muizenberg and Stellenbosch and listened to it on the radio. For me it was a defining moment, as I knew that my views and debates from ten years previously had been correct. I was driving past a fishing spot known as the hole.

The actual event I remember the most about Mandela was the 1995 World Cup. When he walked into the stadium with a Springbok jersey, he won over the complete nation, including many of his former enemies, and not just those of the black people. Then there was the 747 flypast by South African Airways, and we won the Rugby World Cup against the All Blacks, but that always seems of secondary importance. It was a simple gesture, but he was a great leader who understood that small and simple gestures can change the course of history and that he did. The event has been immortalized in the movie, Invictus.

When Mandela died, I was in holiday in Mauritius. We watched parts of the funeral on the television in out hotel bedroom. Ironically, the speeches by world and political leaders was not what I remember. A fake deaf interpreter named Thamsanqa Jantjie had been appointed by the ANC for the event. He proceeded to stumble his way through the proceedings like a drunk seagull directing traffic. This was only a minor indiscretion by the government of the day that was focused on full scale looting which would make Mandela tun in his grave.

That trip in Mauritius was notable in that we went on a fishing trip and bagged a sailfin, as well as a few Dorado and Barracuda! The sight of a sailfin break and jumping out of the waves behind the boat was an awesome and lasting experience.

I am not a Mandela. When I am suppressed, I have images of carving up my antagonist into little pieces with a sword. A good leader, negotiates and engages. That is what made Mandela a great leader. He was able to resolve a conflict situation in South Africa in a few decades where in other parts of the world, similar conflicts have continued for centuries. Leaders like Mandela do not come around often, and in our lifetime, we had him in South Africa.

In the Reunie Hall at Grey College, the Honours boards became filled, and a new row was placed above the old ones. Above 1934 is 1984. Look closely and you see a name, R. BARTELS. That is me! It is a great feeling to be the company of a hero like Fischer, who was honoured by the great leader, Mandela. I was honoured.

Early Years in Johannesburg & the Flat in Yeoville

My early years in Johannesburg were a mix of ambition, adaptation, and unexpected challenges. Fresh into the workforce, I landed my first job at Datavia, a division of Transnet, in the bustling heart of Braamfontein. I was a programmer, spending my days wrangling COBOL, embedded SQL, and JCL on an IBM mainframe. The work was technical and demanding, but it felt like a rite of passage, a chance to carve out my place in the world.

I found a flat in Yeoville, a vibrant suburb with a bohemian edge, just a stone’s throw from Berea and the infamous Hillbrow. During this time period, my future wife, Kathleen (Kath), was busy clubbing in Hillbrow at the Bella Napoli. At the time, Yeoville seemed like a decent spot, lively, affordable, and close enough to work. I had no idea that Hillbrow was sliding into chaos, its reputation as an inner-city cesspool growing by the day. Braamfontein, too, would eventually feel the ripple effects of that decline. Yeoville held on for a while, but over the couple of years I lived there, I watched its charm erode. There was a decent restaurant that served a great t-bone and the pizzeria was liberal with the garlic, just the way I liked it.

My flat was modest, furnished with hand-me-downs from my Tannie Marguerite, a sturdy dining table, a creaky bed, and a few chairs that carried the weight of family history. The one modern luxury I allowed myself was a Sony Trinitron TV, its crisp display a small source of pride. Life was simple, but I was content, focused on my job and settling into the rhythm of the city.

That rhythm shattered one evening when I was attacked at my doorstep. A group of three black youths cornered me, demanding my mobile phone, a bulky Bosch brick. Before I could react, a blade caught my shoulder. The pain was sharp, but the shock was sharper. I was lucky—it could’ve been worse—but that moment broke something in me. Yeoville no longer felt like home; it felt like a trap. I knew I had to leave.

I wasted no time. I called my mate Jose, hired a trailer, and planned my escape on the weekend. With his help, I packed up my Tannie’s furniture, my prized Trinitron, and whatever else I could fit. We hauled it all to Randburg, a quieter, safer suburb that promised a fresh start. The move was exhausting but liberating. Johannesburg had shown me its rough edges, but I wasn’t ready to give up on it—not yet. That would come later.

As a result of this experience I went and purchased a Colt .45 Model 1911. I would have this weapon up until the boys were born when I decided the probability of accidental discharge was not worth the risk. My brother lost his best friend at the age of four due to a gun accident. I never told Kath about the stabbing, as it was demasculinizing and a humiliation. But I became vigilant about security situations and moving in dangerous areas. Aware of the threat when family members drove into inappropriate areas and subliminally it was even there when I was sleeping. Since I don’t have a Colt pistol anymore, I have a broadsword. I even brandish it in my dreams.

Network Interface Consultants | A Tech Adventure in the Netware Era

My time at Network Interface Consultants, a Novell Netware reseller, was a whirlwind of tech challenges and triumphs in the early days of local area networks (LANs). As an ECNE and MCNE, I was knee-deep in the world of Netware, installing and maintaining LAN servers with a precision that felt like conducting an orchestra of bits and bytes. My days were filled with the hum of servers, the click of keyboards, and the occasional beep of a Motorola pager clipped to my belt.

One of my proudest roles was being one of the country’s go-to experts on System Fault Tolerance III (SFT III), Novell’s high-availability solution. It was a beast to configure, but ensuring those servers stayed online through thick and thin was deeply satisfying. Beyond that, I carved out a niche connecting PCs across LANs to mainframes and AS/400 systems, bridging the gap between the old guard of computing and the new. It was like teaching two different languages to talk to each other, and I loved every minute of it.

Messaging was where I truly shined. I worked on email systems, digital telex, and paging—technologies that were the lifeblood of communication in those days. The star of the show was a DOS-based email system called Da Vinci, which later evolved into the mighty Groupwise. I even had the privilege of installing Groupwise for Multichoice’s TV stations across Europe, which meant jetting off to Amsterdam on KLM—first class, no less. Those flights were lekker, a rare treat in a job that was otherwise all about cables, configs, and coffee.

One of my standout contributions was building a rudimentary monitoring system for the LANs. This was no off-the-shelf solution; it was a custom job, cobbled together with grit and ingenuity. The system was tied into the Message Handling Service (MHS), which integrated with Da Vinci. To keep tabs on the network’s health, I set it up to send a heartbeat signal every eight hours if there were no alerts. If something went wrong, like a server crash or a connectivity hiccup, MHS would dial up a paging system known as Radiospoor via a trusty US Robotics modem, alerting us through the paging company in Midrand (whose name escapes me now). We’d get a buzz on our Motorola pagers, and off we’d go to troubleshoot, often lugging a bulky Bosch mobile phone for backup communication.

Back then, South Africa’s analogue phone lines and Eskom power were rock-solid, outages were unheard of. But that reliability could be a double-edged sword. If my pager stayed silent for too long, a nagging feeling would creep in: Is everything actually okay, or is the monitoring system itself down? That’s why the heartbeat was critical—it was our reassurance that the system was still watching, still alive.

Working at Network Interface Consultants wasn’t just about tech; it was about problem-solving under pressure and finding joy in the small victories, like a perfectly synced mainframe connection or a page that didn’t come through at 2 a.m. It was a time when technology felt like a frontier, and I was one of its explorers, pager in one hand, modem in the other, ready to keep the network humming.

I drove a Honda Ballade, which would eventually be replaced by a BMW 320i. I would often drive with the Colt pistol, loaded and wedged under my thigh. The memory of being stabbed still haunting me. I would only give up on that Colt once my sons were born due to the risk of a weapon being found and accidentally discharged by them.

COBOL Programmer at South African Transport Services

In the early days of my career, I landed my first job as a COBOL programmer at South African Transport Services, the predecessor to what is now Transnet. I was tasked with working on the Branch Line System, a network of smaller railway stations scattered along the branch lines. These weren’t the heavy-duty lines handling bulk cargo, containers, or city-to-city transport. Instead, they serviced the kind of logistics that companies like Value Logistics or The Courier Guy handle today, smaller, everyday shipments. In a single year, the system processed at least 12 million consignments, or what we now call waybills. A consignment could be anything from a couple of microwaves destined for OK Bazaars to thousands of steam irons headed to Stuttafords.

The technology we used feels like a relic now. Each station was equipped with a green-screen terminal linked to the local post office, or “poskantoor.” For the more remote stations without green screens, staff relied on carbon-duplicated books to record consignments. These paper records were later manually punched into the system at the nearest green-screen terminal. It was a clunky, labor-intensive process, but it worked—at least most of the time.

Looking back, it’s surreal to think about how those branch lines have largely faded away. Many of the railway tracks we served are now overgrown with weeds, rusted beyond repair, or even stolen for scrap. The world has moved on, but that first job, writing COBOL code to keep those consignments moving, was my introduction to the intricate dance of systems and logistics that shaped my career.

Graduation & the Call to the Big Smoke

The air was thick with anticipation at my Maties graduation. The ceremony itself was a blur of gowns, proud smiles, and the weight of years of hard work finally paying off. I was the second guy off the stage, my heart still racing from the moment my name was called. As I stepped into the foyer, a man approached me, James Flower, a recruitment officer from Spoorweg. He had a sharp, no-nonsense air about him, the kind of guy who could size you up in seconds. “What were your marks like?” he asked, cutting straight to the point. I couldn’t help but grin. “Nailed distinctions in Computer Science,” I told him. His eyes lit up, and before I knew it, he was pressing an airline ticket and hotel vouchers into my hand. “Come up to the Big Smoke for an interview,” he said, like it was already a done deal.

Back then, airline tickets were a different beast. None of this e-ticket nonsense, just red carbon copies, flimsy yet official. If you paid with a credit card, they’d haul out one of those wick-whack machines, sliding it back and forth to emboss your card details onto the carbon paper. The boarding pass came with a little sleeve to keep it safe, and the whole process ran on something called Galileo, I think—a clunky system with cryptic codes. Six or seven keystrokes, and boom, you had your pass. It felt like a ritual, like stepping into a world of possibility.

I flew up to Johannesburg, the Big Smoke, for the interview. Nailed that too. When I landed the job, it came with perks that felt like winning the lottery: an unlimited train pass and four free SAA flights a year. I could feel the world opening up, one carbon-copied ticket at a time.

From Total House to Braampark & Durban Adventures

During my time at Transet, I spent most of my days at Total House before we relocated to Braampark. My role rarely involved direct physical interaction with the mainframe, except when I found myself in Durban. Those trips were a unique blend of work and unexpected fun.

I’d occasionally travel to Durban with tapes in tow to run management information reports on the backup mainframe. This was done to avoid disrupting the live system. The Durban setup was different, more hands-on. While waiting for reports to process, which could take hours, we’d kill time in the mainframe room by playing cricket. Our makeshift ball was a bottle top wrapped meticulously in packing tape until it was just the right size for our impromptu games.

Over time, I grew comfortable operating the console myself, running tasks and monitoring the system. One memorable day, the shift crew decided they wanted to hit the beach and asked if I’d mind watching over things. I agreed without hesitation. Hours later, the manager walked in, expecting to see his usual staff, only to find me—an unfamiliar face—sitting at the console, managing the mainframe solo. The look on his face and the conversation that followed were, to say the least, quite interesting.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My calling is to be a potato farmer

I was born in the sixties a couple of years before Neil Armstrong took those famous steps on the moon. We lived in a dusty farmhouse in a valley in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands, a few kilometres north of the small town of New Hanover. The farm was nestled in a beautiful valley where my father grew potatoes and cabbages and other vegetables including madumbis. The madumbis is a type of root plant known as the potato of the tropics but is not in any way related to real potatoes. Madumbis were originally grown in South-East Asia for well over six thousand years and was introduced to the Natal Midlands by Indian indentured labourers who came to work on the cane fields.

The farmhouse was located on the one slope of the valley through which the Inyosini river. It had wooden floors, red brick walls, and a green tin roof. Outside my window grew a glorious old wild fig tree that included thousands of weaver nests and a huge one inhabited by a family of Hamerkops. It was more on the side of being a hovel than a mansion, but it was a magnificent home.

The Inyosini river had two dams on it that my dad used for irrigation. A network of pumps and pipes fed the fields and I was there with my dad maintaining this infrastructure and along the way learnt a bit about plumping.

We had plants on our farm known as Gibisila. The botanical name is Bowiea volubilis but commonly known as a Climbing Onion or Sea Onion. The plants are now endangered and I still have a few that were harvested and moved from the farm. Its my link to that time of my life and are a fascinating plant. They are large green bulbs with green climbing stems which lack leaves. It is one of the top medicinal plants known but has been exploited excessively. It has been associated with curing a large number of ailments, often based on superstition.

We did not have television until the late seventies and then it was only a couple of hours a day with strictly curated content by the government of the day. My recollection of the Apollo moon landings were the interesting books and stickers that the Total fuel service station in town gave us. We never watched those landings live on TV like the rest of the world! The Total was at the beginning of the main road of the town. Halfway down was the New Hanover Tearoom, directly opposite the butcher. My dad would buy the Natal Witness religiously each day from the tearoom. A tearoom is what we in Natal called a Cafe or kiosk in the rest of the country. One of my first shocks when travelling to the rest of the country was that they did not have tearooms! The whole family would read the newspaper that my father bought as it was the primary source of information of the greater world.

I clearly remembered the day the television arrived. My dad had strung up an antenna that was located one and a half kilometres away from the farmhouse with several amplifiers along the way. After a minor disagreement with my mom about the cabinet (which had to be replaced) we all sat down to watch the test pattern. The neighbours and their kids also came to stare in awe at the new device! The first program we watched was Kraaines. I can recall lying on the wooden floor watching the Rugby test matches of the Springboks versus the All Black in New Zealand. I was in a plaster cast due to having broken my leg in a Rugby game. I grew up with New Zealand being the place the All Blacks came from, not realizing the historical link between Grey and that country.

On our farm lived a Zulu Nkosi named Gumede. He had livestock, a car, and a house with electricity. On weekends the grandsons of the Nkosi and I would play with Tonka toys, wire cars and tractors made from clay. We would then engage in the occasional game of football, but they refused to swim in the pool muttering under their breath about the madness of it all. There were no forms of entertainment with which the current generation is familiar. Instead of electronic games we had guava fights. The farm had a large orchard of guava trees and the fruits would serve as suitable weapons between the rival armies we established.

We had a Philips radio and turntable, and several LPs. They belonged mostly to my sister and one of them was a bootleg copy of Cold Fact by Rodriquez. I remember it well as it was one of our favourites. He was a bigger rockstar to us than the Beatles. In our isolation we did not realize that he was forgotten. It is an incredible story and one that spans my generation. That was the soundtrack embedded in our heads. The LP had the lyrics written on the back cover, which we learnt. No other LP had lyrics and so it was one that left the biggest impression on us.

We have often holidayed on the Kwazulu Natal coast and we would just skirt the area where I grew up, by about 30 km, travelling through Pietermaritzburg. One day I decided to stop by the farm. My dad, who had by then passed on, had sold the farm, and retired in the mid-eighties. I arrived at the farm and a crowd gathered to see and talk to Mastelek's child. I enquired about my playmates and one man stepped forward. Bengu, was the only one still alive. The rest he informed me had died because of HIV/AIDS epidemic. We cried and he asked me when I was coming back. The days when Mastelek was on the farm were always the best for him as then there was always food to eat and now the pickings were sparse. I apologized; I was not able to return. I took all the money out of my wallet, gave it to him and left. The soundtrack of Rodriquez was in my head...

The main form of communications was an old black Bakerlite telephone, that operated on a party line which meant the whole neighbourhood could hear your conversation. The telephone lines used to hum, and flocks of birds used to use them to perch. The exchange in town was manual and was operated by Miss Bentfinger, so named as she always dialled the last digit incorrectly.

Our life was different. We would play. No Lego, no Steam for games, paintball, zilch! We would build go-carts to race downhill using the wheels from old farm implements. Our go-carts would take three kids and we would all climb on board to race down the steepest hill in the area. On one occasion, my brother persuaded me to climb into a tractor tyre which he then proceeded to roll down the hill. It was as awesome as bungi jumping. It went down the hill just as my dad was driving up the hill. He was not impressed, and we were subjected to a discussion and beating. My brother was like that, a maniac. And there were no rules yet about your parents not being allowed to dish out the odd snotklap! In those days we would be disciplined by a whip fashioned out of melted down plastic fertilizer bags. It hurt as bad as it sounds.

One year, we had a flood in the river. My brother’s idea of fun was that we climb into a tractor tube and ride the flood waters down the river.

The farm had a large guava orchard and we arranged armies to have fruit fights. A whole day could be taken on one battle.

My dad allowed me to use weapons. Trusting me with a shotgun and later with a 7mm Remington Magnum Sako, a highly powerful and accurate rifle manufactured in Finland. All before I was 10 years old. No ways would I allow my own boys near a weapon of any similar abilities due to their total lack of training.

When I was five years old, I received my first tractor driving lesson on a Massey Ferguson. Soon I was ploughing fields. This was followed by riding motorcycles and other vehicles. Even though I was unlicensed, my dad would allow me to drive to school.

The first digital device that I saw was a calculator, a TI-2500 Datamath. While Mark Shuttleworth was still in nappies, I would sit and help my dad work out the wages each week, and then we would sit on the stoep at a table and pay the labourers who worked on our vegetable farm. The process without the calculator would take hours but when the calculator came along it took minutes. That is when the seeds were planted in my mind to make a career around digital devices. The price tag on that calculator was R78.90. It was not a computer, but I was hooked.

My brother and sister both had me at the doctor for stitches while I was growing up. My brother jumped on the lid of a bricked storage compartment that we used for toys at my grandmother's house. The result was a split eyebrow and a visit to the doctor for stitches. My sister then bliksemed me using a spade. We were playing on the sand that was being used by my dad to build a new pool. Again, a trip to the doctor, who happened to be the neighbouring farmer who lived in a mock castle and drove a Pontiac.

There were two other experiences that were more dramatic than what my siblings did to me.

The first was on a hike up Blinkwater. Blinkwater is the highest mountain closest to my dad's old farm Oakvilla. A large group of us climbed to the top of the mountain. Near the top are several cliffs. I slipped close to the edge of one of these and went over the edge. I fell into a small tree growing just below the edge and held on tightly. If it were not for that tree I would have fallen to my death at a very early age! A teacher from Wartburg Kirchdorf school came and rescued me. He had to persuade me for quite a while to let go of the tree and for him to pull and carry me back to safety.

The next was when one Sunday we went to a braai with my mom's cousins at Hazelmere dam. My dad and I also went there to collect Black Bass for our dams on the farm. I was swimming in the dam when a powerboat came by at high speed. The wake hit me, I swallowed water and was pulled down beneath the surface by the swirl. I remember trying hard to work out where the surface was but was not able to do that. One of my mom's cousins had seen what had happened. No-one else did. He jumped in and pulled me out of the dam. My mom's three cousins were all were named Whisky. I do not recall which Whisky it was, but Sláinte.

I am a Whisky fan, most probably because of those three cousins. I also long to be able to ride on a Massey-Ferguson again. As Jeremy Clarkson has discovered late in life. A tractor is the best vehicle of them all. My dad when he sold his farm told us we were not farmers and that it would be better for us to go to university and become engineers or accountants. It was the mid-eighties, and the infamous Rubicon speech was around the corner. I am not a farmer but my heart longs for the farm.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

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A courier working a suburban delivery round does something that no law, contract or app has ever asked her to think about. She walks up to a front door, puts a parcel down, takes a photograph for proof of delivery, and walks away. Then she does it again. Amazon, describing the job in its own words, says its drivers “typically have at least 150 stops and deliver 200 to 300 packages a day.” Each stop is a doorstep, and more and more doorsteps have a lens beside them. Until recently, that lens recorded her. Now, on some doors, it can learn her. It can measure her face, keep the measurement, recognise her the next time she comes, and offer the householder a box in which to type a name.

On 14 October 2026, CNET reported on three proposed class actions that put that change before the American courts: Sigwalt against Amazon, and Fennessy and Trevino against Google. All three allege that the familiar-face features in Ring and Nest video doorbells and cameras create biometric faceprints of people who never agreed to anything. The people they name are delivery workers, neighbours, visitors and passers-by. Their faces, the suits say, are captured, analysed and kept as profiles that the device's owner can label. The companies have already switched the features off in Illinois, where biometric consent law is strictest, and they say the data is protected and, in the framing CNET reported, stays on the device. The day before CNET's report, Apple had announced a range of cameras and a video doorbell for its own Home platform that can recognise familiar faces.

Three lawsuits against two companies, and a third company entering the market, mean the pattern is now set across the industry. That makes it possible to ask the larger questions directly. What happens to the old assumption that you can move along a street without being recorded under your name? Who should have to agree to being recognised at a front door: the person who bought the camera, or the person the camera learns? And what does a neighbourhood become when every entrance can put a name to everyone who comes up the path?

Three Lawsuits Built on One Absence

The three cases share one central fact, and it is an absence. None of the people suing ever bought the product.

Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident, filed the first complaint in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington on 1 June 2026. The case is Sigwalt v. Amazon.com, Inc., number 2:26-cv-01887, and it names Amazon and Ring LLC as defendants. It is assigned to Judge Kymberly K. Evanson. The complaint alleges that Ring's Familiar Faces feature scans the faces of guests and passers-by and that the resulting facial recognition data is “not stored locally” but held in Amazon's cloud.

Four weeks later, on 29 June, eight Virginia residents filed Fennessy v. Google LLC in the Northern District of California, case number 5:26-cv-06534. Their complaint says Nest's Familiar Face Detection scans “the face of every person who appears in the camera's field of view” and compares the result against a library of stored profiles. “The feature is activated by the camera's owner,” the complaint continues. “It is not activated by, and cannot be consented to by, the bystander whose face is being scanned.” The plaintiffs say they have never bought a Nest product, never opened a Google Home account and never agreed to any terms of service. They simply walk through neighbourhoods, visit friends and run errands past houses where Nest cameras are visibly installed.

Two days later, Barbara Trevino, a resident of Glendale, California, filed Trevino v. Google LLC, number 5:26-cv-06694. Her claims rest on California law, including intrusion upon seclusion and the state constitution's right to privacy, and court summaries describe her as someone who walks past homes with Nest cameras in her own neighbourhood. A third Google case, Miller v. Google, followed on 17 July. On 4 September 2026, Judge Edward J. Davila consolidated the three Google cases in San Jose as In re Nest Privacy Litigation, under the lead number 5:26-cv-06534. A consolidated amended complaint was due on 19 October, and Google's response is scheduled for 1 December 2026. Google is represented by Cooley LLP.

None of these allegations has been tested, no class has been certified and no court has found either company liable. Even so, the complaints do something useful before any ruling. They describe, in sworn pleadings, how a person experiences these systems from the wrong side of the lens. The Fennessy complaint is frank about the gap. “Plaintiffs cannot identify which devices scanned them or on which occasions with certainty,” it says, “because Google built the system to make that information virtually impossible for Plaintiffs to obtain.” The person being recognised cannot know where they were recognised. The only parties that can find out are the company and, in part, the household that owns the camera.

The Consent Instruction Addressed to the Wrong Person

The companies have not ignored consent. They have addressed it to the wrong person.

Google's own support page for Nest's familiar face detection tells camera owners: “Use familiar face detection in compliance with the law.” It goes on: “Depending on where you live, you might need to get consent to have your camera help identify people visiting your home.” The same page says the feature “is not available on Nest cameras used in Illinois,” describing the restriction as a precaution in response to state legislation. Ring's help page for Familiar Faces makes a similar move. It recommends that owners tell the people they save as Familiar Faces, notes that some laws require explicit consent from visitors before the feature is switched on, and lists the places where the feature is not offered: Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon in the United States, and the province of Quebec in Canada.

Read as a set of instructions, these pages ask a householder to do something that cannot be done. A homeowner can ask a sister or a regular babysitter to agree to being recognised. A homeowner cannot ask the courier who will arrive next Tuesday, who may never come again, who is on a timed route and who has no idea the camera is doing more than recording. The homeowner certainly cannot ask the stranger on the pavement who happens to cut across the drive. The duty to obtain consent has been handed to the one party in the arrangement with no way of carrying it out.

That mismatch was noticed before the lawsuits. In December 2025, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts released Amazon's response to his questions about Ring's face recognition. His office said the answers showed that people wanting their face data removed must approach each device owner individually, “forcing delivery drivers to potentially make separate deletion requests at hundreds or thousands of homes.” Markey's office described delivery drivers, including Amazon's own, as the group facing the greatest threat. The point is about structure as well as privacy. When consent and deletion are left to individual households, the person with the most exposure has the least ability to use either.

What 'On the Device' Does and Does Not Mean

The companies' main reassurance, as CNET summarised it, is that the facial data stays on the device. The companies' own documentation is less uniform than that slogan, and even where it holds, it answers a different question from the one the lawsuits ask.

Start with Ring. Its Familiar Faces help page says that profiles and facial recognition information are encrypted and “stored in the cloud, not on your Ring devices.” The page also says Familiar Faces is not compatible with Ring's end-to-end encryption option. Ring offers a library of up to 50 named profiles and removes unnamed profiles after 30 days without a recognition. The Sigwalt complaint relies on this architecture when it alleges that the data is held on Amazon's cloud rather than locally.

Google's position is more mixed. According to the Fennessy complaint, which quotes Google's documentation, earlier Nest models set up in the Nest app store familiar face data in Google's cloud. Newer models set up in the Google Home app store it in the device's internal memory, but “the cloud is used for clean-up.” The complaint also alleges that Google's documentation does not specify an automatic deletion period for unfamiliar faces. Google has not yet answered these specific allegations in court.

Apple's statement is the most carefully worded. Its 13 October announcement says that “Camera footage is securely processed locally on the customer's own Apple Home hub or in Private Cloud Compute,” and that “No one, not even Apple, can access the data.” Private Cloud Compute is Apple's server system for heavier tasks; introducing it in June 2024, Apple said that “no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned.” Apple's long-standing HomeKit face recognition is described in the same way. A February 2025 explainer from How-To Geek, consistent with Apple's own documentation, says the analysis takes place on the home hub rather than on Apple's servers.

These differences matter, and Apple's design is a real improvement on the question of what the company can see. A face template that never leaves a hub in someone's living room cannot be turned over in bulk from a central server. But keeping the data local answers only one question: who apart from the owner can reach it. It does not change the fact that the stranger's face was measured. It does not change the fact that a household now holds a record of when that stranger came and went. And it does not change the most important feature of all, which is that the owner can attach a name to that record. A named record kept in a neighbour's hallway is still a named record. “On device” describes where the data sits, not whether anyone agreed to its creation.

Apple Walks Into the Same Doorway

Apple's entry changes the debate because Apple sells privacy as part of the product. On 13 October 2026, the company introduced the Apple Home Collection, a set of accessories built with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric and managed through the Apple Home app. Apple said the range includes an LG Video Doorbell Wired starting at $249.95 in the United States, plus LG indoor and outdoor cameras and a floodlight camera. Apple's announcement says the cameras recognise “people, familiar faces, pets, vehicles, and packages.” The doorbell and cameras will be sold in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, with availability beginning in December.

The face recognition behind these products is not new. Apple's Home app has offered it for compatible HomeKit cameras and doorbells for years. Apple's iPhone user guide explains that the feature identifies people from faces in the owner's photo library or from recent visitors captured by the camera. Owners can tap an unidentified person listed under Recent, choose Add Name, and enter the person's name or their relationship to the household. The How-To Geek explainer gives a revealing example of a label an owner might use for a visitor the camera keeps seeing: “The Postman.”

That example captures the issue better than any legal brief. Apple's system is built to stop Apple, LG and Schneider from seeing what the camera sees, and it may well achieve that. But it is also built, quite deliberately, to let a household turn a recurring unknown face into a known one, even if the name is only “The Postman.” The person who delivers the post was never asked. The careful privacy engineering protects the owner's data from the company. It does nothing to protect the courier's face from the owner.

There is also a twist for British readers. Ring's Familiar Faces is offered only in the United States and Canada. Apple's doorbell will go on sale in the UK, where the law treats a camera that looks beyond its owner's boundary very differently.

A Round of 150 Doors

Go back to the courier. The doorbell debate is usually framed around a single visitor at a single door. Her working day is not a single visit. It is a sequence of 150 or more.

Each familiar-face library belongs to a single household. Ring's holds up to 50 named profiles, and Google's is shared across the cameras linked to a single home account. Nothing in the companies' public documentation says that these libraries are pooled into a national index of faces, and the lawsuits do not prove that they are. What the architecture does allow is this. A courier on a fixed round, passing many doors that have face recognition switched on, can end up recorded in many separate household libraries. In each one she may be named, labelled or simply stored as a repeat unknown face, under whatever description that household chose. The Fennessy complaint makes the repetition point about its own plaintiffs. Because they “repeatedly traverse the same routes,” it says, “the same devices would have captured and processed their faces on multiple occasions.” For a courier, repetition is not occasional. It is the job.

The research on delivery work explains why this matters. In October 2022, Data & Society published “At the Digital Doorstep,” a report by Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson based on interviews with 20 delivery drivers and 20 doorbell camera owners across the United States. Most of the drivers worked for Amazon Flex, and most of the owners had Ring cameras. The authors concluded that doorbell cameras, though marketed as tools for home security, “are also near-constant tools of workplace surveillance for delivery workers.” They described householders taking on the role of a manager: using their cameras to monitor, instruct and sometimes discipline the people bringing their parcels. The report also found that drivers of colour spoke more reflectively and at greater length than white drivers about being watched during shifts, and about feeling conspicuous in predominantly white neighbourhoods. One line in the report sums up the courier's position: “The doorstep is both a workplace and a stranger's private property.”

Those findings came from the era of the recording camera. Recognition adds two things recording lacks: memory and a name. A clip of an unknown courier is a moment. A named profile that fires an alert each time she comes back is a running record of her working pattern, kept by a customer she has never met. She cannot see it, correct it or delete it, except by finding the house and asking. As Markey's office pointed out, a deletion right that must be exercised household by household is, for a delivery worker, a right that exists mostly on paper.

Even the law that does exist handles repetition oddly. Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, the statute both companies avoided by withdrawing, requires written consent before a private entity collects a biometric identifier. In February 2023, in Cothron v. White Castle, the Illinois Supreme Court held that a separate violation accrues with each unconsented scan. On 2 August 2024, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed Senate Bill 2979, which provides that collecting “the same biometric identifier or biometric information from the same person using the same method of collection” is a single violation. The change targeted runaway damages in workplace fingerprint cases, but its arithmetic speaks to the courier too. Under the strongest biometric law in the United States, being scanned at the same door a hundred times is now treated as one wrong. Yet each separate household that recognises her is a separate act of recognition, and no statute yet speaks to what it means to be recognised at a hundred different doors on a single round.

The Presumption of Passing Unremarked

The central question in this story concerns something the law has rarely needed to name: the presumption that ordinary movement goes unremarked.

People are seen in public all the time. What they have historically not been is identified, recorded and remembered by the buildings they pass. The legal scholars Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger gave this condition a name in their 2015 article “Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity,” published in the Washington and Lee Law Review. Obscurity, they argued, is not secrecy. It is the practical difficulty, the transaction cost, of finding or understanding information about someone. A face in a crowd is visible but obscure, because joining it to a name takes effort that almost nobody bothers to make. Hartzog and Selinger proposed that the answer to surveillance often lies in deliberately putting friction back into the process. Familiar-face doorbells do the reverse. They reduce the cost of identification to the tap of a button labelled Add Name.

The urban writer Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, argued that a safe street needs “eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” It is tempting to treat doorbell cameras as the digital version of those eyes. They are not. Jacobs's shopkeepers and residents watched and intervened, but they also forgot. A strange face was tolerated precisely because nobody filed it. A face-recognising doorbell is an eye that does not forget and will, if asked, write a name beside what it saw.

American constitutional law has begun to grapple with this idea, though in cases about government rather than neighbours. In Carpenter v. United States in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Supreme Court that “A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.” Six years earlier, in United States v. Jones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a concurring opinion that “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person's public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” These rulings do not apply to private doorbells. The Fourth Amendment restrains the state, not the household next door. But they set out a principle that ordinary people grasp without reading any case law. Being visible at a moment is different from being compiled over time, and being compiled is what changes the relationship between a person and the places they pass through.

The Fennessy complaint tries to turn this intuition into a private-law claim. In its intrusion upon seclusion count, it argues that the plaintiffs' expectation of not being scanned is objectively reasonable because Google gives no notice and because “no social norm puts a passerby on notice that a doorbell is generating a mathematical map of his or her face.” That is the presumption of anonymity in movement, set out as a legal argument. Whether a court accepts it remains an open question.

Who Has to Say Yes

So whose consent should count? There are two candidates, and the products are designed around only one of them.

The owner's consent is real but limited. A household that switches on face recognition has agreed to the company's terms, and that agreement can cover the faces of its own members and of anyone who has actually agreed to be enrolled. It cannot cover the faces of strangers, because a person cannot consent on someone else's behalf to the measurement of that other person's body. The companies' support pages accept this logic when they tell owners that consent may be legally required. Their designs then leave the owner with no means of getting it.

European law answered the question some years ago, in a case involving an ordinary household camera. In December 2014, in Ryneš (Case C-212/13), the Court of Justice of the European Union considered a Czech homeowner whose camera also covered part of the public footpath. The court held that, to the extent such surveillance covers a public space, even partially, it is “directed outwards from the private setting of the person processing the data in that manner.” It therefore falls outside the exemption for purely personal or household activity. The court did not ban such cameras. It accepted that protecting one's property and family can be a legitimate interest. But it made the homeowner a data controller, with obligations to the people the camera captured.

British law has kept that principle. The Information Commissioner's Office tells householders that “If CCTV records beyond your property boundary, data protection law applies and there are rules you must follow.” The guidance expressly covers smart doorbells. It says owners must let people know they are recording, in most cases provide recordings to people who ask, delete footage regularly, and “stop recording a person if they object to being recorded and there's no legitimate reason to continue recording them.” Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, biometric data processed “for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person” is special category data. Special category data can be processed only under narrow conditions, of which explicit consent is the obvious one for a householder. Apple's doorbell will go on sale in a country where the stranger's consent is not a courtesy but, in many circumstances, a legal requirement that the householder must meet. Apple's announcement does not explain how a UK owner is expected to meet it for a passing courier.

The English courts have already shown where the line falls. In Fairhurst v Woodard, decided in Oxford County Court in October 2021, Her Honour Judge Melissa Clarke found that a homeowner's use of his cameras, including a Ring doorbell, breached data protection law, and upheld his neighbour's harassment claim. The detail of the ruling is instructive. The judge accepted that the doorbell's video, which captured the neighbour only incidentally as she walked past, struck an acceptable balance. She found its audio capture, which reached much of the neighbour's property, disproportionate. The principle is proportionality. Incidental capture of a passer-by as part of protecting a home can be justified. A capability that reaches well beyond what that protection requires cannot.

Recognition of strangers falls on the wrong side of that line. Seeing who is at the door protects a home. A named, persistent record of the people who walk past protects nothing further, and costs people who have no say. A design that respected the consent of the person being recognised is easy to describe. Recognition would apply only to faces enrolled with the knowledge and agreement of the person enrolled. Faces that do not match would be discarded immediately rather than kept as unnamed profiles for a month. And owners would not be able to turn an unknown visitor's clip into a named profile without that visitor's agreement. That is no technical moonshot. In Illinois, the companies have simply withheld the feature instead.

The Street as a Directory

The deepest question in the CNET report concerns the future of the neighbourhood itself. What could a street become when every entrance can name everyone who approaches it?

The answer depends on whether the separate household libraries stay separate. Today they mostly do. But the industry has already shown it can link neighbourhood cameras when it wants to. Ring's Search Party feature, launched in 2025, connects outdoor Ring cameras in an area and uses AI to look for a specific lost dog. Reporting by 404 Media and others says it is switched on by default, so owners must opt out if they do not want their cameras to take part. Camera owners are alerted to possible matches and decide whether to share a clip. Ring's founder Jamie Siminoff has insisted, in comments reported by Newsweek, that the feature “is not designed to process human biometrics.” Yet in an internal email to staff in October 2025, obtained by 404 Media, Siminoff wrote: “You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods.” Asked by TechCrunch in March 2026 about features Ring was not currently building, he said: “It's very hard to say we're never going to do something in the future.”

No one has announced a feature that lets a neighbourhood search its doorbells for a named human face. It would be wrong to say one exists. But the parts are now sitting side by side. There are cameras at a great many entrances. Many households have face libraries in which strangers can be named. And there is a proven, opt-out mechanism for coordinating neighbourhood cameras in a search. Whether those parts are ever joined up will be decided by companies, by courts and by legislatures, not by the technology, which already makes it possible.

Even without a network, the social effects are visible. The Data & Society research shows that doorbell cameras already change how outsiders are treated in a neighbourhood, and that the burden falls unevenly. Add the ability to name, and the street starts to behave like a directory. Regulars are known, strangers are flagged, and the difference is recorded at every door. Such a street is not obviously safer, but it does tell people who belongs. The courier, the carer, the canvasser and the new neighbour are all unfamiliar faces until somebody decides to name them. Jacobs's street worked because it could absorb strangers without cataloguing them. A street of naming doorbells keeps a catalogue.

What the Courts Will Not Settle

The lawsuits will take years. The Nest cases are still at the pleadings stage, with Google's response not due until December. Sigwalt has barely begun, and both companies have real arguments to make. Arguments open to them include that the plaintiffs cannot show their faces were ever scanned, and that owners, not manufacturers, decide what the cameras do. Some may succeed. Class actions are a slow way to settle the basic conditions of public life.

But the questions the cases raise will not go away whatever the verdicts. A household device now creates a named record of the people who pass it. The companies have shown, by switching the feature off in Illinois, that they know how to withhold it. They have shown, by telling owners to seek consent, that they know whose consent is missing. And with Apple's launch this week, the industry has shown that the feature is becoming standard, sold as the privacy-respecting version of the same thing. On-device processing, end-to-end encryption and Private Cloud Compute all answer the question of who else can see the data. None of them answers the question the courier is in a position to ask, if anyone ever asked her: why is my face on file at a door I visited for 30 seconds?

The presumption of anonymity in ordinary movement was never written into law because it never needed to be. It was guaranteed by the effort it took to identify a stranger. That effort is disappearing, door by door, through settings that a homeowner can switch on in a minute. The decision about who has to consent to being recognised at a front door is being made right now, in product design and support pages, mostly by default. It should be made deliberately, by people who will one day be the stranger on someone else's path. That includes everyone.

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References

1. CNET. Report on proposed class actions against Amazon and Google over familiar-face recognition in Ring and Nest video doorbells and Apple's entry into the market. 14 October 2026.
2. Sigwalt v. Amazon.com, Inc. and Ring LLC. Class Action Complaint, Case No. 2:26-cv-01887, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, filed 1 June 2026. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.363574/gov.uscourts.wawd.363574.1.0.pdf
3. CourtListener. Docket, “In re: Nest Privacy Litigation,” No. 5:26-cv-06534 (N.D. Cal.), including the Fennessy et al. v. Google LLC Class Action Complaint filed 29 June 2026 (ECF No. 1) and the order consolidating cases signed 4 September 2026; and docket, “Trevino v. Google LLC,” No. 5:26-cv-06694 (N.D. Cal.), including the complaint filed 1 July 2026. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73548337/in-re-nest-privacy-litigation/ Fennessy complaint also available at https://www.classaction.org/media/fennessy-et-al-v-google-llc-complaint.pdf
4. Google Nest Help. “Troubleshoot familiar face detection.” https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9281945?hl=en
5. Ring Help Center. “Familiar Faces.” https://ring.com/support/articles/z3yhg/familiar-faces
6. Office of Senator Edward J. Markey. Press release on Amazon's response regarding Ring facial recognition and delivery drivers. 10 December 2025. https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/just-in-time-for-holiday-deliveries-sen-markeys-probe-exposes-amazons-alarming-privacy-violations-with-facial-recognition-technology-in-ring-doorbell
7. Apple Newsroom. “Introducing Apple Home Collection, a new lineup of smart home accessories.” 13 October 2026. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/introducing-apple-home-collection-a-new-lineup-of-smart-home-accessories/
8. Apple Security Research. “Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud.” 10 June 2024. https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
9. Apple Support. “Use Face Recognition in Home on iPhone.” iPhone User Guide. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-face-recognition-iph04af43727/ios
10. Davidson, Adam. “How to Use HomeKit Secure Video Face Recognition to Know Who's at Your Door.” How-To Geek, 16 February 2025. https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-use-homekit-secure-video-face-recognition-to-know-whos-at-your-door/
11. Amazon. Delivery Service Partner driver diary, About Amazon. https://aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-delivery-service-partner-diary-photos
12. Nguyen, Aiha, and Eve Zelickson. “At the Digital Doorstep.” Data & Society, October 2022. https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/AttheDigitalDoorstepFINAL.pdf
13. Illinois General Assembly. Public Act 103-0769 (Senate Bill 2979), amending the Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14, signed 2 August 2024. https://ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/103/103-0769.htm
14. Davis Wright Tremaine. “Illinois Revises Biometrics Law To Reduce the Prospect of 'Ruinous' Damage Awards.” August 2024, updated April 2026. https://dwt.com/blogs/privacy--security-law-blog/2024/08/illinois-bipa-biometrics-law-amended-for-damages
15. Hartzog, Woodrow, and Evan Selinger. “Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity.” Washington and Lee Law Review 72, no. 3 (2015): 1343. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol72/iss3/10
16. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
17. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), decided 22 June 2018. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402
18. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), Sotomayor, J., concurring. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259
19. Court of Justice of the European Union. František Ryneš v Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, Case C-212/13, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2428, judgment of 11 December 2014. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62013CJ0212
20. Information Commissioner's Office. “Domestic CCTV systems.” https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/domestic-cctv-systems/
21. UK General Data Protection Regulation, Article 9, “Processing of special categories of personal data.” legislation.gov.uk. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/9
22. Fairhurst v Woodard, Case No. G00MK161, Oxford County Court, judgment of HHJ Melissa Clarke, 12 October 2021. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairhurst-v-Woodard-Judgment-1.pdf
23. Koebler, Jason. “Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs.” 404 Media, 18 February 2026. https://www.404media.co/leaked-email-suggests-ring-plans-to-expand-search-party-surveillance-beyond-dogs/
24. O'Connell, Liz. “Ring responds to concerns ICE could access new tracking feature.” Newsweek, 11 February 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/ring-responds-concerns-ice-could-access-new-tracking-feature-11496717
25. Loizos, Connie. Interview report on Ring founder Jamie Siminoff and privacy concerns. TechCrunch, 8 March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/08/rings-jamie-siminoff-has-been-trying-to-calm-privacy-fears-since-the-super-bowl-but-his-answers-may-not-help/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Sentence You Type Before You Pray

The dishes are still in the sink when your phone lights up with a message that makes your face go hot. Someone has taken a small misunderstanding and turned it into an accusation. You can explain what happened. You have the dates, the messages, and every reason to be upset. Your first reply is sharp enough to make the other person feel what you are feeling. You read it once, satisfied that it is accurate, and then sit there with your thumb over Send. The kitchen is quiet, but something inside you is not.

I think this is one of the least discussed costs of kindness: sometimes it asks us to give up the immediate pleasure of making someone else uncomfortable. In my companion video about the emotional price of kindness in an unkind world, I consider why generosity feels so demanding when we are already stretched. Money is only part of the picture. There are evenings when the thing we are asked to give is our restraint, and that can feel much more expensive than reaching into a wallet.

This is closely connected to choosing compassion without pretending you were not hurt, because the choice in front of you is not between being kind and having self-respect. It is between responding from your deepest convictions and letting a painful moment choose your words for you. I know how appealing a perfectly cutting sentence can seem in the imagination. It promises relief. It offers the feeling of having defended yourself. But I wonder how many of those sentences would leave us staring at the ceiling later, wishing we had waited.

Proverbs 15:1 tells us that a gentle answer can turn away wrath. That does not mean a gentle answer will always be welcomed, or that silence is required when someone treats us unfairly. It means the temperature of our reply matters. We can state what is true, correct a false claim, and protect a boundary without making humiliation our goal. That is not weakness. It is choosing not to borrow somebody else's cruelty to make our own point.

Maybe you delete the draft and put your phone facedown. You wash a plate, breathe, and ask God to help you speak plainly rather than punish. Tomorrow you may send a message that says what needs saying, with no apology for facts you did not distort and no insult you will have to carry afterward. The other person might still disagree. You cannot purchase a peaceful outcome by being thoughtful. But you can refuse to spend your integrity on a reply that would have felt good for five minutes. The message can wait. The kind of person you are becoming cannot always be repaired with a second text.

Chapter 2: The Kindness Nobody Sees You Struggling to Give

The coffee had gone cold beside the newspaper when a knock came at the door. It was Saturday morning, and you had been looking forward to having a few hours without anyone needing anything. Your neighbor stood outside holding a letter from the hospital. She wanted to know whether you could help her understand it. You had barely slept the night before, and the thought of another problem made your shoulders tighten. You invited her inside anyway, but part of you wished she had chosen another morning.

I think we need to be able to admit feelings like that without immediately condemning ourselves. There are times when kindness comes naturally, when our hearts are light and we have plenty of patience to spare. Then there are days when we are carrying private worries, and even a reasonable request feels heavier than it should. The difference does not necessarily reveal how much we love people. Sometimes it reveals how tired we have become.

What troubles me is how easily we can begin treating our own exhaustion as a moral failure. We believe that if our faith were stronger, generosity would always feel effortless. We imagine that a truly compassionate person would never hesitate before opening the door. Yet loving someone and feeling tired are not opposites. We can experience both at the same time.

In Mark 10:46–52, Jesus encounters Bartimaeus, a blind man calling out for mercy. When Bartimaeus comes to him, Jesus asks what he wants him to do. I have always appreciated that question. Jesus does not turn the man's need into an opportunity for a speech. He allows him to speak for himself.

There is something we can learn from that simple exchange. Sometimes we assume that helping requires us to take responsibility for an entire situation. Someone mentions a problem, and we immediately begin searching for a complete solution. Before long, we feel overwhelmed by obligations nobody actually asked us to accept.

Your neighbor may only need help understanding a letter. She may need someone to sit beside her while she calls the hospital. Perhaps twenty minutes of your attention would make a frightening morning easier. You do not have to become responsible for every appointment, every decision, or every uncertainty that follows.

That is where I believe generosity becomes healthier. We can ask people what would actually help rather than assuming we must rescue them from everything. We can offer what we genuinely have available and be honest about what we cannot provide.

And afterward, when the door closes and the house becomes quiet again, we can allow ourselves to rest without examining every tired thought as evidence of a deficient heart.

God knows what it costs us to remain gentle when our strength is running low. He also knows that we are human beings who need care, not endless supplies of patience for everyone else.

Chapter 3: Making Room for Someone Else's Good News

The email arrives five minutes before you shut down your computer. The position you interviewed for has gone to someone else. You read the polite words twice, trying to make them mean something less final. Then a coworker appears beside your desk, smiling so widely that you know she has news before she speaks. She has been promoted. She asks if you have a minute because she wants to tell you how it happened. You do, technically. But your own disappointment is so fresh that her happiness feels like one more thing you cannot afford to give.

This is the kind of generosity that never gets called generosity. Nobody is asking for money or a ride. Another person is asking you to share a moment that matters to them, and you're trying to do it while holding something painful of your own. It would be easy to offer a thin congratulations and turn back to the screen. It would also be understandable to need a little time alone. The hard part is being honest about the difference between protecting a tender place in yourself and wanting someone else's joy to become smaller.

Romans 12:15 invites us to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I love that both belong in the same sentence. God does not ask us to choose a world where only happy people deserve company, or where those who are hurting must stop noticing other people's good news. Life puts these experiences beside each other constantly. A celebration may happen on the very day we receive bad news. It takes a generous heart to make room for another person's moment without pretending ours has suddenly become easy.

Maybe you turn toward your coworker and ask what the new role will involve. You listen for a few minutes. When she leaves, you take your disappointment to the car and let yourself feel it. One honest conversation does not erase the rejection. You can be genuinely pleased for someone and still wish things had gone differently for you.

I don't think kindness should mean disappearing from your own life. God knows the news you received, too. He is not disappointed that you need to sit quietly before going home. The generosity worth keeping is not a polished performance of endless patience or happiness. It is a willingness to remember that other people have hearts as real as yours, even when you are struggling.

And when tomorrow comes, you are allowed to ask for the same tenderness you tried to offer today. There is no price of admission for being loved. We are all learning to give and receive grace while carrying things nobody else can fully see.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index:

https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

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October 2026 Update

Haste now the running life leaves all behind, Like washed up husks of dead crabs on the beach Picked clean by the fear of falling behind The pace which never leaves time to be sure Who lost the keys to the back of your mind: “I have forgotten what my mind was for Because I spent too much of it online, And now my attention span is too poor To buy back those important thoughts of mine. Wait, what was the point of this metaphor? Was it just to think of a witty line? My life is too rich to care for the poor.” Such is the state of a mind short on time, Constantly bubbling with slanted rhymes.

— Sonnet 10

We say that time is relative, but time is the real constant. We call it relative because we experience it as relative from our perspective. Sometimes it seems to go fast and sometimes slow. It is really our language for and perception of time that is relative. I can’t really tell you where October went. It is a truism that time passes faster and faster as we get older, and yet the days feel long. I wonder why that is? What natural process in our minds makes the time seem to go faster the older we get? Our childhood exists as a monument which we do not perfectly remember and yet which no one else can define for us.

Writing

I have now crossed 10,000 words (around 40 pages) on The Abolition of Man vs. AI project and there is more that I could add. It is not really a full length book but it is not really an essay anymore. I guess it is a good thing since I have always struggled with output in my creative process. I always found myself having to add words rather than take them away, but I think using Koala Quill has gotten me into the habit more. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think I had a secret pride in this shortcoming of mine. I wasn’t like those other writers who word vomit onto the page — But then it’s all word vomit in one form or another isn’t it?

Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’m still working, and I’m almost ready to start querying my new novel. Fingers crossed!

Music

I did a little recording work on Bezukova, which is turning out alright. The pace was really glacial because even though the song is written, it was hard for me to really nail the sound I wanted with the guitar recordings. I have something I am mostly happy with, though that might change once I go back to listen and add vocals. I also got side tracked working on delay pedal that I finally finished. It’s a productive hobby but definitely a distraction.

I’ve also been falling back into “ricing,” which is a linux term for customizing your desktop and the tools you use everyday. I never thought it would happen again but here we are. To be fair, the tools I found make it a lot easier than it used to be, but it has still been a time waster. But then again, sometimes it is good to have something to waste time on that we only do for ourselves. But then again, again, I would get a lot more out of playing my guitar or reading a book — And it is far too easy to waste too much time. For anyone curious I am trying out the scrolling wm, Niri, along with Dux Material Shell. If we are judging by the time it took to get me up and running it’s the easiest rice I ever did.

Speaking of time, I wrote that sonnet about hurry I mentioned in the last update, which you may have noticed at the top of this post.

Reading

This month I picked up Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut (no relation to the Disney movie) and enjoyed it. It is perhaps not his best work, but I don’t think that’s the point. It was really good reading on my sporadic breaks at work because the structure of the novel itself is sporadic. He really messes with the form, and there are a lot of good quotes. Vonnegut is not for everyone but I really enjoy his zany pessimism which manages to snatch catharsis from the jaws of despair:

“What could be a more negative word than ‘futility’?” he said.

“‘Ignorance’” I said.

I also finished Death’s End by Cixin Liu, both in Chinese and English. This has been a multiyear journey for me, and while I don’t consider myself near native fluency yet, I was able to get about 80% of the reading/context by the end. Some passages I could just read, others were very hard to figure out, but I enjoyed it and it helped my reading level a lot. I plan to keep going, and should work on getting hold of a book soon.

I found the Chinese version of Death’s End randomly from a small online used bookstore. I think I started to read it and then got exhausted by how many words I had to look up, so gave up for a while. Eventually I tried again, and instead of trying to understand 100%, I decided to just write down a few words (roughly 5 new words per day) in my notebook, and then look them up in Pleco the next day. Pleco also has a flashcards feature, so I added them to flashcards and tried to review them every day. It was slow going. I set a tiny goal of one page a day (it’s a 500 page book), but I finished it, and I learned a lot more words. 5 × 300 = 1500, so even if you miss 65 days you are learning roughly 1500 words a year. I would also listen to/read the English afterwords to see how much of it I understood. I found that reading ahead in English killed my motivation to read in Chinese.

Source: https://wordsonrepeat.com/vocabulary-statistics

I think this approach, while “less efficient” than reading on an app where you can look up words instantly, actually led to a greater improvement in my reading level, since I had to think about the characters and try to remember them while reading instead of relying on the technology to do it for me. For my next one I think I want to try Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, which is a classic of Chinese literature. It will probably be hard, but at least there won’t be a bunch of hard scifi words. In the meantime I have a collection of intermediate Spanish episodes from Don Quixote that I want to try. I will try to keep up my flashcards, as well as listen to my favorite Chinese podcast, while I wait to start Red Sorghum. Studying languages is humbling. I think everyone should do it.

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#update #October

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

Haste Now the Slanted Rhymes

Haste now the running life leaves all behind, like washed up husks of dead crabs on the beach picked clean by the fear of falling behind the pace which never leaves time to be sure who lost the keys to the back of your mind: “I have forgotten what my mind was for because I spent too much of it online, and now my attention span is too poor to buy back those important thoughts of mine. Wait, what was the point of this metaphor? Was it just to think of a witty line? My life is too rich to care for the poor.” Such is the state of a mind short on time, constantly bubbling with slanted rhymes.

#poetry #sonnet

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

---

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

In Summary: * My Tuesday has been dominated by the afternoon appointment with my Retina Doc and the injections he gave me in my eyeballs. As I sit here now, it's taken about 4 hours from those shots for my vision to return to close to normal.

Have been enjoying listening to college basketball this evening: Wofford Terriers vs Tennessee Volunteers. Shall finish the night prayers after the game, finish taking my night meds, and retire early. Tomorrow should be an easier day.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 217.38 lbs. * bp= no readings taken today

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:50 – Ube Halaya * 10:30 – egg rolls, cooked filipino vegetables, noodles & chicken * 18:00 – finished the Ube Halaya

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:05 – bank accounts activity monitored * 04:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 12:30 – listening to KONO 101.1 * 13:20 – leave home, going to see the Retina Doc * 16:20 – returned home, waiting for my vision to return from the injections so I can sort of do normal things normally

Chess: * 12:50 – moved in all pending CC games, winning 1 game, and losing 1.

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Kim (part 9)

Affairs to unfold across this May portend The fair enough to vote away and new By sweetly by Days to night of cue All verse to allow the Son of Man And in this day to many The frightful and renew Of olive bet Officially denote The days to cross the chore Victory Afghan and light to weary And surely new The trials of vlad and who you are For loss and gain unflighted power The sympathy oppose at sighted free For Capulets and know A cricket to remain, implored remember But as a man unfree And History rewrite The stake and sorry Nights abliss and new And worry glad Across this awful horror of the news Making plain receipt The right of many jumped Deceased and crossed of gold- to amend Insuppose of that name and making wane Night supports amend And due for care Unbosses to relay- That May beneath the Earth in flight of home Apostles wear And shining in esteem- the frame of Summer Crossing there- Sights to meanly be what cross by there And husband to rewrite Kim is on recede by merchant pet For praying fast Dutchmen by the force and China’s call Why the toads unfold the crossing point Devilish and hell Escaping prime Forces by the fender- Earthly stall Why summon seconds to be near Worthing fold and by Lear Emanescent laughs While dusted men remain The time is new And what across but shoes opposed to season be Nightly new- Whispers to the void and as we go Praying West This affordant shore and afternoon Kim is gone Waking Peter by the store- and ready ground Weddings and all night The Angels’ day alone Silver dollar to his might Esteem to China sudden care And Earthly know Seven to the mire- Gladded hand and all anew We the poor of broken point Astray to early go un us to grave What option there annoy Notes to Beograd and nights to there Fortuned rain- and wearied star Distance to unvoy in trading by All of us did suffer just to be The mercy guiding flame as older then Why to such we be Innerving man and day Crosses of inflection and to recuse Mystery afloat in one of hour Heroes those Aping at our wheelhouse in as far In quantum gold at relay field Curtis for the night as we to go The rays of bin History rewrites to cure the new The new of peace and at this man relay A hundred beds to gnaw Our guiding bet Castles ever be by this our voice And common death We will remember- and as we were Trilliums of gold across accounts Victory supposing to this height Welcome by the nights and early back Off to fortunes by our light Focal to our know with this we write Finding new our name History atold and taking gear Fogs and fists proclaim By knighting her Kingdom lungs upon our sail Time as bet beside this know Airstrip to the right and waking then What launches to our tap Within our own destruct- Raking to our day and visit come Nights be with us and early back To upon us code The fated roar Substance of our year in tested rain Our gold as near Onus by relay and Camden right Early ply to view This our fortress as we know The horror surely was and cast a screw The missions ended here Phases to remain and as our star Witness to our view Capital and code in us decide The waking four Seoul was timely then Friends to write the distance of our worth And as we less Pockets to align as to our breath What we had here- was surely to oppose forever then No game to know All to second be our chance History waved at us Pain but to untold that we were sparse Made anew Our History land to fight our hand- Prophecy unknows but why and then- Our surest bet as rods asleep Making death our problem And mystery by wear God within us hail and nine of year Simplex to rewrite Wrath was Kim to this afford And History to age Trappings to be there as decent men Uncursed our lot and taking own- Appeases new But on to this new fortune as we Seoul As we speak and should Mercy seeking Rome and to our set In making time and giving way The early joy- of setting Earth across to see No making known- but of our love, Korea As time is might Joy is further running Distance what was here and never again Never shall we leap upon our age But as we prosper gain As inklings to our joy and Summer hold Our frost December Math at this duress Making time affords This forever good and riding new Seoul and new afford The timely new Timely year And for delivery- in History bet upon this road- This ninth at core- and made Korea new.

Wow, two posts today and it isn’t even 5 PM. A new friend asked me if I was interested in going to a rave with them in a group, and I was super excited and said yes! I asked them if they had already bought the tickets, and they said they were going to once payday hits. The tickets are about $150, and it was a little bit surprising to me and put things back into perspective about how things can be. For me right now, if I want to buy something like that, I don’t have to wait for payday, I don’t really even know when my payday is because I have plenty of a buffer. But at the same time, I realized how I was actually really stressed about money recently, because with property tax on my house, it is essentially an extra 22,000 a year. I know that most of my RSU’s are going towards that, and I also have ESPP. And I know that I also have things like the bonus I got recently, or just general savings, and I am also still maxing out by HSA and contributing to my 401(k). But with these things and also making more money than I could’ve imagined, I realized I am so incredibly stressed about money because realizing that I am essentially paying $6.5 thousand a month for the house that feels like I am suffocating, even though I still have so much money left over all things considered that I am able to live a very lavish life. I don’t have to skim on eating or or even even really have to focus on cutting costs there for me to at least continue the way that I am. I am also able to do things like pay $220 a month for Powerlifting Coaching as a hobby in addition to all of the other other random stuff I spend money on. I don’t have to worry about trips or things like that, and yet with all of this, I am still stressed financially. And this Stress originally came from the thought about how to pay for the property tax bill. I would have to touch the $20,000 of cash I have put aside to pay out the car loan, since it is slightly more favorable for me to do that rather than paying it off. And just a thought of having to touch that money temporarily makes me feel stressed and like I am moving backwards. And isn’t that such a strange thing? Compared to a friend who is living paycheck to paycheck, I am able to save large amount of money while living extremely well, and still am completely fine in a spot that people would kill to be in. And the funny thing is I’m still stressed about this and it was weighing a lot on me mentally. This makes me think about both the saying that life has its way of making sure that everyone drinks their fair share of misery from its cup. And also just how chemically we have baselines and essentially, we will always build a tolerance to whatever situation. I remember, I noticed this distinctly during my masters at one point because I realized how when my life is feeling like it is falling apart or horrible, I am struggling. But at the same time when life is arguably, smooth sailing, and no real issues, I still struggle, the problem just shifts up the hierarchy of needs towards something more abstract or overarching. And I can both view this in the lens that when I have a chance to work on those bigger issues, those are the things that end up, giving me future peace and fixing some systematic issues rather than whatever the immediate alarm bill is. But also, I think you can make the argument about perpetually falling into a loop of fixing and that never ending. And it almost feels like there is a carrot on a stick tied in front of me that I will perpetually chase. And I think recognizing that is a good start. I guess this is the whole thing about the hedonic treadmill in a different way. I also think about this looking forward, where I am currently making more money than I could’ve wished for, and yet I still feel like if I can hit the next milestone, then I will be better off, and while that is true, I think it is important to recognize when I get to that situation I am also going to be looking forward again. I think there’s a little bit of a distinction though however because I remember yesterday, I was thinking about how one of the things that I would like to be able to comfortably afford is a Cleaner monthly. With my previous apartment I was able to do that and I think it drastically improved my quality of life. And I think especially with a house, that would be really nice to have, especially because I am living in this big house by myself. I think something like that does make life easier and improves it, and at the same time there are things like getting a new car or a fun car to drive, or even if I’m being really hedonistic, like an expensive fancy sports car, and it’s ironic to say that because I think you could argue that I already have that. and I think this is one of the situations where if you get that, you will enjoy it for a bit and eventually reset that baseline and you end up with what I called the caviar effect, where once you try something really nice you don’t really enjoy it like you do the first time but everything below it gets less fun. I wonder if there is some way to flesh out that framework more rootedly to understand if there’s an end to this treadmill. I think about my dad, in the sense where he did not come from poverty, but definitely came to the US without nearly as much of the privilege or foothold that I have. And I think about him now, where he is in a position where he is making an incredible amount of money, yet he still lives so modestly. I think recently he has enjoyed himself in small ways, like going on some more trips, or getting the model S plaid, but compared to the amount of money that he has made and has saved or invested, it is pennies. He talks about how if you can pay off everything and not have any debts to anyone, then you have essentially everything you need. If you own your house, own your car, rely on services little for example, like having solar power, or not super inflating your life with different dependencies, you end up with a sense of peace. And he doesn’t go crazy buying things, he enjoys his hobbies, and he is not necessarily afraid to spend money, but he simply just seems to have less want. I think if you can get to the point where you do not need to worry about money, maybe that is the ideal way to live. And while this is easy to say in theory I wonder if this is something that I can achieve the way that I am right now. Maybe it needs a fundamental shift. I guess if I think about the kinds of things that I want to spend money on, it’s kind of hard for me to actually articulate why. Let me take for example the recent things I have bought such as a LED lamp for my bedroom so that I can read in softer, warm, lighting, or the light strips I got for arguably Christmas, but also photo shoots. Or the portable flashlight for photos. I buy these things because it enable something that I want to do, but I also unfortunately am aware of the fact that I want to do a lot more things than I actually end up doing. But it feels like money is a way to enable some of these things. I want to go to a concert to have an experience because I find that I really enjoyed them. I want to go on a trip with friends, or I want to spend money on a rush to be able to clean my shower properly. And I feel like a lot of these things are arguably unnecessary, I do think that there is still certain things where I feel like within reason they are excellent uses of my money. I think concerts are my example for that, I think they do a great job of resetting me mentally and helping me enjoy life and I cherish those memories. I guess experiences are something I enjoy, or being able to build memories and I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate for me to pull this card but I know that growing up I was unable to experience a lot of things and I regretted that so much and I wanted to make sure that that did not happen again. But I think there are also certain things that I think I need money for that aren’t necessarily happy. Like wanting to buy more expensive clothes or a nice perfume or something like that to be more attractive to others. Or wanting more money to be able to comfortably pay for someone else’s dates or things like that. And I guess all of these things revolve around the central want. And it would be very deaf of me, not mention Buddhism, but my understanding being a large portion to eliminate the want. But I guess how do you differentiate between I want to do something for the wrong reasons versus I want to do something because I am excited too, like creating art or something along those lines. Like I want to experience life is that not a want?

NCAA Men's Basketball

While waiting for my vision to return to my normal following the injections in both eyeballs from my Retina Doc earlier this afternoon, I've found a college basketball game with a live radio feed I can listen to. The Wofford Terriers are playing the Tennessee Volunteers. With nearly 10 minutes left to play in the first half, Wofford is leading Tennessee 16 to 15.

I'm thinking my eyes should be closer to what passes for my normal by the time this game ends.

And the adventure continues.

Finally the mental constipation has lifted in a flood of beautiful words

It is the expectations, writing such a high quality prose is setting unreasonable standards; time and time again I have to remind myself why I am writing my thoughts down

It’s got nothing to do with showing someone something beautiful, it’s about showing sincere thoughts, showing the real you

It takes courage, of course. People might think that I am an idiot, or superficial, or whatever

And yes they might be right , but so what

I am living from this book I got for Christmas present, the courage to be disliked, I read that someone who’s lived a full life without making any enemies hasn’t lived their own life

and wouldn’t that be a shame, what if we live only once?