Talk Prep and a Night of Music

Morning routine. Worked on the Philomath Salon talk. Set up new AirPods. Bus downtown to meet Tom at Old World Deli for the recorder. Dinner at Common Fields with family and friends. The Umbra Vipera album release at Old World Deli. The Fifth Element.

A data center talk takes shape, and a family night out ends at Sam's show

Events and activities that occurred on Saturday, October 24, 2026

Most of the day went into the talk I'm giving at Sunday's Philomath Salon, "What a Place Can Carry." Its argument is that whether a data center is good or bad for a town depends less on how big it is than on how big it is compared with the place that hosts it. A deck is never really finished the day before a talk, but by Saturday this one had reached the stage where each pass made it a little sharper instead of a little different.

Between sessions at the desk I set up a new pair of AirPods Pro with their hearing-assistance mode. It's a small thing that matters more than I expected. Pressing and holding the stem cycles through the listening modes, which turns the amplification on and off, so I can decide how much of the room I want to hear. It seemed a fitting thing to have figured out on the afternoon before a night of live music.

In the afternoon I took the bus to the transit center and walked from there to Old World Deli to meet Tom, who had driven up from Eugene to return my sound recorder. Meeting downtown was easier than having him come to the house, and the handoff gave us a few minutes to catch up. The recorder came back just in time for its next job, which turned out to be in the same room a few hours later.

The evening belonged to family. My daughters and grandsons and I gathered at Common Fields for dinner at a big outdoor table near the play area, joined by a friend of Loni's and her son. Then we all went on to Old World Deli for the album release of Umbra Vipera, Sam's side project. John Huyck opened the night. Mightiest Monster came next, with Sam on lead guitar and Joel on bass. Sam closed the night with JD on drums, and his set anchored the whole evening. We watched from a VIP table, where we met some genuinely wonderful people. The recorder ran through all three acts, and I'm hopeful it caught the night well enough to keep.

There is a particular pleasure in watching someone you love do the thing they are good at, surrounded by your own people and a room of strangers who become friendly by the end of the set. Back home I checked in on the Salon deck one more time, decided it could wait for morning, and let The Fifth Element carry the night out. It was, all told, a really wonderful evening.