And in the most tragic way.

I had been with her a few times, by chance. Back then, she would show me her work and explain a little about art. I pretended to understand; she pretended I did, and the conversation flowed well enough. Every now and then, if it wasn’t my father, it was them — that strange couple who kept the town’s gossip alive. But that was no trouble.

Small towns are like that, after all.

But today, Simone said goodbye.

So goodbye, Simone. Until some other time, in whatever time may come.

And when they all were seated there,
a service like a drum
began to beat, and beat, until
my mind grew cold and numb.

Then I heard them lift the lid,
and scrape across my soul
with boots of lead, again, again—
and space began to fold.

As if the heavens were a bell,
and being but an ear,
and I and silence, strange and wrecked,
were stranded alone here.

Then broke a plank within my mind,
and down through floors I fell;
and every floor became a world—
then knowing ended well.

But some things require practicality, and books are definitely one of them.

For years, I enjoyed taking physical books to work. There’s something nice about carrying a real book around — until, after a while, I’d lose focus. Then I’d want variety. And, inconveniently enough, I couldn’t carry my entire personal library in my bag like some kind of literary pack mule.

That’s what got me interested in eReaders in the first place, starting — as I’ve written before — with the Kindle.

But every day it was the same little circus: laptop into the bag, laptop out of the bag, Kindle in, Kindle out, papers everywhere, repeat until spiritually exhausted. At some point, it stopped being charming and started being just plain impractical.

So I decided to try the Xteink, and honestly, it surprised me. Whenever possible, I kept it attached to my phone, and it helped me get a surprising amount of reading done during those tiny, almost mythical pockets of free time.

And for a while, that seemed like the ultimate solution.

Well — it was.

Until I met the BigMe.

I still remember the first time I worked with this kind of setup — and the headache it gave me. I had to build a dashboard for a company handling more than 5 million records per day, crossing data from several different sources. Power BI simply couldn’t keep up with that scale. That’s when I discovered ClickHouse and Airbyte — and, just as importantly, Metabase.

Hope you like.