Pull up a chair. The lantern's on.

Now, and the snacks

What's on the desk this week.

Week of November 2, 2026. The format is borrowed from Derek Sivers's "now page" idea: what's really getting my hours, updated as it changes.

• Writing
  My AI published its second column about working with me. My own first essay, on AI and prayer, is still close. It goes up as an X Article first and lands here the same day.
• Pointing
  My video work now lives under my own name, and I'm aiming it at truck dealers, equipment dealers, ranchers and the trades. They tend to have a phone full of great footage and nobody with the time to turn it into anything.
• Building
  MuleTown, in the open. It starts as one phone line with one job: answer the call and book the appointment. This week I read that xAI's own agent went through the company's software bill and found 43 paid seats nobody had opened in 90 days. Cutting them saved $14,220. Every small business I know has a version of that leak: a tool added for one project, the person who wanted it long gone, the card still getting charged. So, a homework assignment if you own the place: an hour, your last three statements, and a count of who actually opens what. MuleTown is after the same kind of quiet money, one small job at a time. Missed calls first.
• Noticing
  OpenAI's coding agents got fast enough that the systems underneath them started to choke, so they rebuilt their own plumbing. Another company saw five times the merged changes per engineer, and the wait simply moved to testing, review and deciding what to build next. Twenty-two years of running my own businesses taught me the same thing with phones and quotes: fix one slow step and the line forms at the next one. So before anyone buys an AI tool, I'd have them take their last five jobs and write down every place the work sat and waited. The longest wait gets fixed first.
• Trimming
  A fourteen-second cold-start clip for a truck dealer came back to me with one note: the opener is shaky. Frame by frame, the first three-quarters of a second was the camera still settling after someone hit record. We cut the wobbly bits, it dropped to eleven seconds and suddenly looked calm and expensive. So, a tip for anyone filming for the company page: count two seconds before anything happens, hold the phone with both hands, count two more before you stop. And send the shaky shots anyway. Sometimes one steady second is all I need.
• Editing
  Rancher reviews and podcast episodes for Riomax, and shorts and ads for TigerTough, the seat-cover company I made the BACKBONE launch film with. Their brand videos used to get about a hundred views apiece. That one hit 243,000. My AI editor cuts a first pass, then studies mine. It had a rough week recently: an email went out and the connection dropped before it wrote that down, and the Mac stayed on Eastern time while I traveled, so for four days it showed up an hour early to everything. So I wrote it a one-page rulebook. Check whether it already went before you send it again. Write down what you did before you start the next thing. If the internet drops, stop and leave a note. Say which time zone you mean. A good office manager does all of that without thinking. My coworker needed it in writing. A few days later a scheduler glitch fired three of its jobs at the wrong time, and all three checked, saw the work was already done, and stood down. I'll take it.
• Reading
  Out of Dante's Inferno and into Purgatorio, with a little Aquinas on the side. Right in the middle of it, Virgil explains that every sin and every virtue is made of the same thing, love: aimed at someone's harm, aimed too weakly at the highest good, or aimed too hard at lesser goods like money and food. I keep asking myself which of the three I see most.