Review: The Attachment Effect

The Attachment Effect: Exploring the Powerful Ways Our Earliest Bond Shapes Our Relationships and Lives by Peter Lovenheim was an easy book to read. Through our Foster Care Training, Shira and I have been taught about the importance of attachment. Along with basic safety, it's among our top priorities when caring for children. Whether it's establishing ourselves as reliable attachment figures, or helping birth-parents do the same, it's not unusual for us to explicitly think about attachment when we're in foster-parent mode.

To have an entire text who's thesis is that childhood attachment plays a critical role in one's life is both sensible and appreciated.

Lovenheim, to his credit, has taken the topic of attachment and looked at it from every angle. This goes beyond understanding your own attachment style and how your parenting may be impacting your children's style. He looked at how childhood attachment impacts marriage, dating, work, religious life and so on. After each chapter, I found myself recounting some part of it to Shira, usually underscoring how attachment shows up in our lives in unexpected ways.

The text takes the reader through the four broad types of attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized). Unlike many personality traits, like say being an introvert vs extrovert, being securely attached is decidedly advantageous. Yet, all is not lost for those who didn't win the attachment lottery. Lovenheim talks about how one can tweak or otherwise work-around his or her attachment style. He also makes the case for attachment style diversity in groups. Still, secure attachment is a tremendously helpful goal parents and caretakers should strive for.

One risk with the text is that it's possible to get too focused on attachment and try to use it to explain every quirk in ourselves or those around us. This isn't Lovenheim's intention, of course. Personalities are complex and attachment is just one factor that makes us act the way we do. 

Another aspect of the book that made the text so readable is much of it takes place in either Rochester, NY or Washington, DC. That's where I was born, and where I live. Add to that, that the author is Jewish and much of the text just feels familiar.

Between reading the book and taking the Experiences in Close Relationships questionnaire, my sense is that I am securely attached. Much credit goes to my parents for giving me this trait, the fruits of which are hard to quantify. Thanks Mom and Dad, you guys rock!

On The Timelessness of Coding

I have this hypothesis that if you can write clean, elegant, modular forth code to solve a problem, then you truly understand the essence of problem solving.

I suggest this because forth is so flexible that while it is possible to build something beautiful, it's much easier to go terribly wrong and create an unreadable, unmaintainable, monstrosity.

To test this hypothesis, I've been carefully making my way through the 1984 text Thinking Forth, a classic book that tries to teach problems solving through the lens of Forth.

In the section on sharing components, there's an example of coding a feature within a text formatter. While the example is not the most arcane in the book, it still seems dated to say the least. Here's some of the sample code, found on page 294:

: [DISPLAY] ...
( the original definition, always does the output) ... ;
VARIABLE ’LOOKAHEAD? ( t=looking-ahead)
: <DISPLAY> ’LOOKAHEAD? @ NOT IF [DISPLAY] THEN ;
VARIABLE ’TOC? ( t=setting-table-of-contents)
: DISPLAY ’TOC? @ NOT IF <DISPLAY> THEN ;

Old school, right?

The day after I read this section I received a feature request from one of my customers: a PDF file was occasionally rendering with a page break at just the wrong location. The result was a legal document with the notary's signature block on page two by itself. The request was to detect this scenario, and move some of the previous page's text to the second page, thereby making the document kosher.

I'm using PHP's fpdf library to build the PDF and it provides no built in way of handling this scenario. I am going to have to craft a custom solution.

What struck as remarkable was how the example from the forth code was surprisingly similar to the problem I was solving today. Both called for the ability to execute layout code in an invisible way and then re-execute that code in a visible fashion, this time informed by what was learned during the first execution.

So much as changed in computing since 1984. And yet, the problems and their solutions remain eerily similar.

In Praise of Samsung's Night Mode

These photos were snapped two nights ago in very low light, without a tripod. They should be blurry, grainy and almost unusable. Yet, here they are:

This is the magic of Android's Night Mode. Every once in a while technology delivers a game changing feature, and this is one of them.

In short, my Galaxy S10+ is able to bend the physics of how photography works. Amazing.

A DC United Game In Two Pics

We attended DC United's last regular season match. Here's how it went.

3 minutes in: it's in the net! Whoo! We're the greatest team to ever play the game!

90 minutes in: down 3 to 1 to Columbus. Booooo! What the hell, Columbus? How dare you try to win. And these refs, could they be any more incompetent?

After 94 minutes of play we lost and fans around us were blaming everyone but the team for it. It was not sportsmanship's finest moment.

On the plus side, I got to enjoy tasty pupusas at the game (even if I did have to take out a second mortgage to pay for them). Good times!

US Open 2021, Day 2

[Composed 9/4/2021]

Us vs Waiting To Get Into The Stadium

As is our habit, we arrived at the South Gate Enterance an hour before the gates would open. We were joined by a few die-hard fans who also wanted to skip the lines to get in. To occupy the time we came prepared with a downloaded movie: The Courier.

The Courier is a Cold War film about a 'normal' business man who gets co-opted into the spy business. I'm often disappointed by Cold War era movies because: (1) they can rely on a subtle, yet confusing plotlines and (2) you know how they end. The world can't blow up, because, well, the world didn't blow up.

And yet, the first hour of The Courier was absolutely delightful. The story sucked us in and we truly enjoyed it. It certainly made our time waiting to get into the stadium a breeze.

Matteo Berrettini vs Ilya Ivashka

Once past the ticket agents, we made a beeline to Grandstand to catch Matteo Berrettini take on Ilya Ivashka. Judging by the crowd, comments by the usher and general chatter, Berrettini's reputation as being the most handsome man in tennis continues to prevail. He even played some quality tennis!

One highlight of the match was Shira's seat selection. When we arrived at the stadium, it was empty and we could choose any general admission seat we wished. Shira opted for an upper row in the Southern quadrant of the stadium. Throughout the match, the sun covered more and more of the stadium, but we had a sliver of shade to protect us the whole time. Well done babe!

Novak Djokovic vs Kei Nishikori

Before the Berrettini match was over, we ducked out to see Djokovic take on Nishikori. We're pulling for Djokovic to get the grand slam, and this is one of the matches he had to win to do that.

As is Djokovic's way, he dropped the first set, but came roaring back to close out the match in a dominant fashion. The dream of a grandslam continues!

Ash Barty vs Shelby Rogers

While we were in Ashe stadium, we opted to stay and cheer on American Shelby Rogers take on Ash Barty. We'd seen Barty steamroll her opponents in the Western & Southern Open, so while we were hoping for a Rogers victory we weren't surprised when she found herself in the third set at 5-2, on the verge of losing. Shelby had played a fantastic first set, but had given up the second set at 1-6, and it looked like Ash was going to cruise to an easy victory.

Then Shelby managed to win her next game, making the score 5-3, giving us fans a glimmer of hope. We did our part, cheering her on and she managed to keep the momentum going. Much to everyone's joy, Rogers pulled off the win, making this the most remarkable comeback we'd seen in years.

Watching Rogers celebrate, you'd think she'd won the whole tournament. Good for her, this was an impressive victory and it was a true pleasure to watch it unfold.

Alexander Zverev vs Jack Sock

Immediately following the elation of the Rogers match, fellow American Jack Sock had his work cut out for him. He was facing number three in the world, Alexander Zverev. While Sock has earned his reputation as a doubles star, we couldn't recall any recent success he's had as a singles player.

And yet, for the first set of the match, Sock was absolutely on fire. He played the tennis of his life, delivering a shock-and-awe form of tennis that left Zverev stunned.

Alas, he couldn't keep the momentum going. Early in the second set he appeared to get injured. He limped his way through the second set and finally retired during the third set. We were sorry to see him go, but man, had he put on a show for that first set. Zverev said it best in his post match, on court interview :

If Jack would have continued playing the way he was playing in the first set it would have been done in an hour-and-a-half and I would have planned my holidays and I would have had a good time next week somewhere in the south of France,” Zverev said in his on-court interview. “Jack is an incredible player. He’s been Top 10, he’s beaten me multiple times, he’s beaten top players multiple times. He’s a Masters 1000 champion and he showed it in the first set.

“He hit three-thousand winners and zero unforced errors in that first set, so when he’s playing like that, I’ve actually never seen that before. I’ve never played against anybody who was playing at that level, so I hope he can get healthy again and he’ll be at the top of the game very soon.”

Here's to hoping Sock gets himself injury free and figures out to how to play consistently next level tennis.

Batman Returns. For More Candy.

“It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.”
- Batman, 'Batman Begins'.

“And what we do is eat candy until we're stuffed! Oh, and we also enjoy the neighborhood Halloween parade. But mostly we eat candy!”
- Uncle Ben, Halloween Begins

US Open 2021, Day 1

[Composed 9/3/2021]

Let's Tennis

By all indications, today was supposed to be anything but a normal day at the US Open. We've got a pandemic going on, there's a new vaccination requirement to get access to the grounds, earlier in the week attendees waited for hours in a chaotic line to access the stadium and last night a deadly storm careened through the area.

And yet, our US Open experience was essentially normal. Yes, we flashed our vaccine cards to get into the stadium, and yes we wore masks when sitting adjacent to strangers. But other than that, the day felt essentially normal. We watched a whole lot of tennis with a whole lot of tennis fans.

We arrived at the South Gate an hour before the grounds opened. We waited with some equally excited fans, and 2 minutes after they started letting folks in, we were through the gates.

We made our way immediately to Louis Armstrong stadium where we hoped to catch our first few matches of the day. We kicked back and watched Medvedev and his team do a practice session and eat fresh baked goods from Iris Bakery. What more could I ask for?

Simona Halep vs Elana Rybakina

Our first match of the day was Halep vs. Rybakina. Ever since the 'Hi Simona' incident, we've been fans of Halep. This match was a slow start for Halep who was down 0-3 as the match began. Ultimately, Halep took the first set to a tie breaker which she won 13-11. Rybakina took the second set, and Halep the third. It was a delightful match to start the day.

Daniil Medvedev vs Pablo Andujar

The Medvedev vs Andujar match was pretty much what you'd expect in a #2 vs #92 matchup. Medvedev cruised by Andujar as though he were continuing his practice session from earlier in the day.

Sam Stosur / Zhang Shuai vs Miyu Kato / Sabrina Santamaria

On paper, the Stosur / Zhang vs Kato / Santamaria matchup doesn't look like much. But factor in that it was played on a side court that put us just feet from the action and that we recently followed Stosur / Zhang at the Western & Southern Open and we knew we wanted to take in this match. And it didn't disappoint. Doubles action is always fast, and even though Kato and Santamaria ended up losing pretty definitively, they gave off remarkably happy vibes.

It was fun to watch Stosur and Zhang continue their team dominance.

Sloane Stephens vs Angelique Kerber

After watching doubles we made our way back to Louis Armstrong stadium to take in Stephens vs Kerber. Like most of the attendees, we cheered on our fellow countrywoman, Stephens.

Kerber started off slow, giving Sloane the first set. But she found her game in the second and third sets, beating Sloane without much difficulty. It was sad to see an American lose. Though, I don't feel too bad for Sloane, as Kerber hadn't won a set from Sloane in their last 5 meetings.

At this point, Shira ducked out to pick up snacks and came back with a couple of eggplant topped Chinese buns and a bubble tea. The food was OK, but it lost points when I learned how much the "meal" had cost us: $25.00. I get that stadium food is going to be overpriced, but seriously? I'm so over this.

At least the US Open bag policy allows you to bring in food. Between the fresh bakery items we picked up during our walk to the stadium in the morning and the mystery snacks from yesterday, we were essentially all set for provisions. So that's my unsolicited advice to future US Open attendees: bring in food and have low expectations for the vendors in the stadium.

Felix Auger-Aliassime vs Roberto Bautista Agut

Our final match of the day was FAA vs Agut. Felix is another player we watched recently at the Western & Southern Open. We get the sense that we're watching a player break through and that this season will be a major part of his career. Felix continued that trend by triumphing in a five setter against Bautista Agut.

And we're done. Exhausted. I feel like I've more than made up for any tennis debt I may have had from the previous year. And yet, we'll be back in line at 9:00am sharp tomorrow morning to do this all over again.