My 2025

January 01, 2026

2025: what a year! So much happened, it's hard to keep track of. So here's a big collection of photos from my year.

Our year began in Littleton, New Hampshire. Well, actually no -- our year began around the pellet stove at Meg's parents' house in Chittenango, New York. But our home was in Littleton, so at least we were figuratively there.

The year started with some gorgeous cross country skiing conditions:

But it wasn't long before we visited New York City. Thus began our darkest hours of 2025:

But we hadn't gone totally insane yet. I devoted myself fully to Littletonian things like bicycle maintenance:

...more cross country skiing:

...and expensive eggs:

We took some time to relax at our local haunts:

And I exploited the local trails to the utter maximum, even opting to cross country ski instead of downhill ski because prkr trails are just. that. good:

But I failed to see the (substantial!) value in our mountain home. So we visited NYC again to view some apartments to plan our next move:

There were some highlights of the spring, though. For instance, some very very good friends of ours got married:

And Meg's parents visited us in our lovely mountain home before we descended into the flatlands:

On a trail run, I saw a remarkably cute house right next to my favorite trail entrance removing some trees. I shrugged, thought "tree removal is why this town is going to the dogs", and moved on. I wonder who lives there now?

And then, like the fool that I am, I hopped on a train and moved to the big city:

Meg soon joined me in my massive monumentally boneheaded mistake. Good on her for sticking with me:

I soon adapted to working in office again, bicycle commuting across the Brooklyn Bridge and up the West Side bike path:

And before long we settled nicely into our tiny box in the sky:

Returning to Vermont in the Spring for a combined Kooky Pins birthday gathering was a nice highlight of the spring:

And Meg and I managed to find niches of fun in the big city:

We returned to upstate NY for my dad's wedding, though as per usual we entirely forgot to get a photo until we got home to Meg's parents':

And then it got hot in NYC. So we started to spend nights playing video games instead of venturing out into the sticky stank:

Smoke started to invade our lives even way south in the city:

We celebrated Meg's grandmother's 90th birthday:

Our top tier friends visited us down in the city:

Meg and I attempted to avoid melting (it didn't really work):

And then we came to our senses and visited Littleton again, this time as unbearable NYC tourists:

Before long, we came to our senses, took a victory lap in the city:

And of course continued playing an unhealthy amount of video games so we didn't have to venture out into the city, sweat through our clothes, and then deal with our abysmal always-full, always-broken, expensive, slow, unreliable, laundry room:

... and then viewed that remarkably cute house:

I briefly tried out a gig as home chef at our friend's household:

Things felt correct the moment we woke up to a blaze of autumn color:

And I felt amazing to once again share outdoor passions with new friends:

Before long, the leaves had fallen and the first whispers of winter worked their way through our draftiest door:

Late this year, an unexpected casualty rocked the household: my dear old Crossland CC1. I suspect the steam valve was damaged when our movers dropped the moving box during our rainy, hot, double parked, incredibly stressful move from the city. I explored alternative machines for a while, but I ultimately settled on Bill 2.0 because the Crossland CC1 is just that good, and incredibly cheap compared to the competition. To distinguish Bill 2.0 from OG Bill, I painted him before drafting him into service. It turned out OK, but I may have underestimated the ventilation requirements of spray paint in the basement/garage of a small home. But let's be honest, I wasn't really using those brain cells anyway:

We spent Thanksgiving at Meg's parents. When we returned to Littleton, our mountain home soon transformed into a winter wonderland. The first 3 weeks of December felt like living atop the Rocky Mountains, with blue skies, strong sun, deep cold, and some of the best cross country skiing I have ever experienced:

Just before christmas, a rain storm slapped the entire Northeast with enough rain to blow away all of our accumulated snowpack. So we headed back to central NY for the holidays:

We visited our (now happily married) Buffalonian friends and hung out with their new child:

Christmas week was a relaxing period of book reading around the pellet stove in our Christmas sweaters, with plenty of family visits sprinkled throughout:

So how did this year go?

Home

We took a chance on NYC. Our logic? We want to live someplace walkable. A small New England town has that to some degree. But obviously New York City is the most walkable place in the country, and it has in person tech jobs to boot. Turns out, we can't stand the climate of the big city, and even more importantly we have way too many mountain hobbies to live down in the flatlands. In person work is fine, but I'd rather work remotely and live where I want. A swing and a miss.

We bought a house. It was stressful, but it feels so good to have a home that we can improve, that can't be stolen out from under us by a landlord, and to no longer pay rent. Worth every single penny and every single iota of stress.

I'm glad to be back in Littleton for the long haul. This place is truly special.

Job stuff

I left a unique and challenging tech job at Raspberry Pi. That was a dumb move. But ultimately Raspberry Pi has a strong in-office culture, and being the odd man out, 5 hours removed, remote, was an awkward way to run the documentation org. I miss my coworkers at the Pi, and my Cambridge trips. But long term they're probably better off with an in-office writer who can keep better tabs on ongoing projects and releases. I helped hire my successor, and from what I've seen and heard, she seems to be doing a brilliant job. Better than me, even. So to some degree, things have worked out.

I tried a new job at a tech startup in NYC. It wasn't a good fit. The culture was all wrong for me, their management style was far too top-down, far too bureaucratic, and featured far too many decisionmakers for my comfort. It's hard enough having one picky boss who demands too much output and doesn't account for any onboarding. It's much harder having four bosses who simultaneously demand too much (conflicting) output, as well as a CEO who occasionally takes a sledgehammer to low-level PRs and who doesn't appreciate documentation in the first place. This year's career move was the most stressful of my entire life, and it was all due to inhuman management. Good riddance. It's taken me months to work through the anxiety and stress created by multiple awful bosses.

This year, I gave AI/LLMs an honest shot. For small one-off coding tasks, scripting really, it's fine. Nothing much better than stack overflow, but definitely helpful for generating ideas if you get stuck on a confusing error message or a weird malfunction. LLMs can write tests OK, from what I can tell. For writing? LLMs are a goddamn plague. Even the simplest docs page written by an AI will likely contain dozens of inaccuracies, oversights, and errors. Code samples will likely look correct, but malfunction if you copy/paste. And because AIs don't seem to understand abstraction in writing (consistently?), the structure is often... weird and obviously inhuman. Bluntly, they're a shitty tool for writing documentation. They write poorly. But they can sometimes help with docs infra, which is usually a massive pile of poorly written scripts anyway.

Home server

These days, I'm working for another tech startup, based out of Colorado, in the Identity space (think: authentication, authorization, login for short). Work/life balance seems good so far. I'm already making an impact on the documentation, shipping some long-stagnant updates to old and outdated documentation. I have plenty to wrap my head around, and I'm still learning. But learning is good. Learning keeps you sharp.

On a less professional note, I've done a lot of reading and home automation this year. See my book log for some information on the books I've read. I finally upgraded my home server from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a proper NAS, a terramaster 4-bay, 3-ssd enclosure with a high-efficiency intel n150 processor inside, passively cooled in a big aluminum block. It's better than the Pi for Jellyfin transcoding, but more of a sidegrade than I originally imagined. Honestly, the speed difference is negligible, and it might actually be a bit slower for Jellyfin browsing. But already feels nice to have 18TB of RAID1 HDD storage and 4TB of SSD storage for my music and movie collection. No more worrying about storage space! And I can always add two more HDDs and two more SSDs if I need more. I suspect this server will last me at least 10 years, maybe even 20.

I tried to update my aging Airport Extreme router to an OpenWRT One this year. Unfortunately, my WireGuard configuration never worked correctly for more than one device, and tweaking bridge settings to try to fix it ultimately broke and fully reset all settings on the router. Rats. So I switched back to my Airport Extreme. I'll try to switch back sometime soon, offloading Wireguard and ad-blocking to my home server. But my experience so far has not been particularly positive: for some reason, OpenWRT wi-fi performance, especially 2.4Ghz, is really, really bad. Like, worse than my 13 year old Airport Extreme bad. Latency is super high for no reason I can tell on 2.4Ghz, and buffer bloat is pretty awful unless you limit your connection to 80% of your ISP-provided speeds with SQM. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to eke out better performance eventually.

Looking forward

I have a few basic goals for the new year:

• hike more
• bike more
• read more
• learn to cook 5 new dishes
• improve the house, specifically the basement
• spend more time with friends in-person, especially those with young kids who can't travel easily
• learn 5 new skills (home repair is fine, even encouraged)
• use my phone, and doomscrolling in general, less. especially in bed before sleeping and before getting up in the morning
• relax. my life is not high stakes enough to stress much! i have it awfully good.

If you read the news, browse reddit, or spend much time on social media (or whatever we're supposed to call the shambling mound of suggested content, hot-take flame wars, and short-form video generative garbage that Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have become), you might be fooled into thinking that life sucks these days. If you touch some grass, you might find that the world is as beautiful as it ever was, even if some people in Washington DC and San Francisco are acting like total shitheads. In the coming year, I plan to devote my precious thinking to friends, family, and fun. Because devoting any of our mental space to The Powers That Be is just not worth it as a little person who only makes small local impacts.

On Christmas Eve, I finished a reread of Cloud Atlas. I was once again struck by the closing line:

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

In college, I thought this line referred to collective action -- how, with enough grassroots effort, people can change the world. Something like the American Revolution or the Civil Rights movement. Get enough drops to do the right thing, and you can make things better.

These days, my interpretation is a bit different. I'm not interested in the ocean any more. I just want to spend my limited time on this planet with the drops that matter to me, doing things that I care about, making a positive impact on the drops around me. Sure, I can spend my time obsessing over the global movements of the ocean. But life is short. The ocean millions of drops away doesn't matter to me, as much as I want everyone to be happy and healthy. War will happen. Politicians will abuse, gaslight, and manipulate us plebeians.

I've found the drops that matter to me in that limitless ocean. Now I just have to do my best to help those drops.