I didn't decide overnight to back off the teaching gig. After sharing my concerns with the instructor who hired me, we redefined the role a bit and I decided to let it cruise in a probationary state before I made a final decision, remaining for the rest of the semester in any case. But then, within days of each other, two things happened that all but made my decision for me.

First, the excellent podcast Freakonomics Radio published the episode "The Upside of Quitting", about the solid but often obscure benefits of bailing as quickly as possible from a job (or career, or lifestyle) once it starts to fit badly. I remember exactly where I was walking once I heard the episode's topic, over my headphones; it meshed uncannily with my teaching situation, and gave me something to think about.

I was still thinking when Steve Jobs died. And all across my RSS feeds and my little corner of Twitter, countless very smart people eulogized him not merely by reflecting on his technological legacy, but by linking to his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, and quoting in particular this excerpt:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary.

(Full transcript of the address here.)

My outlook on life might be slightly less adversarial than Steve's was; I don't really see people actively trying to yoke me to their own dogmas, per se. But I do know of my own proclivity to enter into agreements and responsibilities that carry me away from what my heart knows is my right path, just because they're something new or — much worse — something less scary than what I ought to be doing. The quote resonated so deeply with me and my situation that its contemplation, with its great psychic weight from Jobs' own transformative death, brought me to tears.

That one photograph of Jobs — you know the one I'm talking about — is going to gel over the years into a real icon, and it won't represent Apple or iPads or whatnot so much as the attitude and philosophy that drove him, the most positive aspects of which he expressed in that address. Over time, you will see the photograph about as often as you'll see the photographs you think of when I say "Marilyn" or "Che", and it will carry the same level or power, the same amount of compressed symbolic payload.

The day of his passing, I pinned a printout of that photograph to the corkboard over my desk, and I expect it will stay there for a long time; perhaps one day I'll wish to replace it with something a little more permanent, more fitting for an object of meditation. I find the image's gaze and pose an irresistible invitation to consider what I'm doing, and weigh whether I'm really spending my limited time as well as I could be. And when the answer is "No", to find the courage to take the next step.

And, yes, it's happened once already.

The teaching job ended up a bad fit, and I decided several weeks ago that I'd wrap it at the end of this semester. I treasure the experience I have gained, and I leave the door open for future opportunities in this sphere, but this position in particular doesn't work well for me.

Some of this is general shock at re-entering the salaried life, even part-time, and finding surprise at how much I've grown apart from it since 2005. To read this makes me sound a little like a sniffing prima donna, but it's more an effect of how I've defining my own pace and attitude about work over the last several years. I don't fit so well anymore in the compartmentalized schedule that salaried work requires, something that seems obvious in retrospect but which I didn't consider beforehand. It would be a different story were I switching careers entirely, but I attempted this instead as a balancing act, and I find it doesn't work how I hoped it would.

For one thing, I hadn't foreseen how much I'd dislike commuting again, but I do. Reading and podcasts help take the edge off, but that's still two and a half hours a day burned up, like it or not. (The trip to campus takes between 45 and 60 minutes, but after a couple of harried early days, I find myself compelled to leave super-early as a buffer against unexpected subway failure, because showing up late for class is not an option.)

More to the point, I perform poorly with mixing my own work-pace with an externally enforced schedule. I find that I can't do much in the way of creative work (including Appleseed work) when I know that my time from noon through 6 is spoken for. Sometimes I can sneak some work in, but more often the entire work-day goes into supporting that day's 100-minute class meeting, and then I don't want to do anything else. As a bad side-effect, the two weekdays I have free therefore feel like days off, rather than days to cram full of Appleseed catch-up. I do my best at that just the same, but under a sort of internal protest that it's the weekend and I really should be decompressing with video games or something. Even though it's Thursday.

In balance, doing my best at the teaching job leaves scarce little time to run my business, and exactly zero time to pursue any other creative projects. This is why I have not made a single Gameshelf post since the semester began, and why I have attended almost no gatherings of the local game-studies and game-development groups. I balm any frustration about this by looking at the teaching as filling my creative-project slot, which does make sense — but that also provides an even stronger argument to draw the project to a close, rather than continue doing it indefinitely. (In this light, I do look forward to writing up my experience next month, including all the written class materials I developed; a contribution both to my successor in this position and to the world at large.)

Other problems are specific to this class, and the largest struck on day one. After I agreed to lead three weekly sections of 20 students each, the school decided to increase the cap of the popular class, so that I ended up with section sizes closer to 40. This makes for a very different, and I'd argue lesser, experience for both student and teacher, especially for a class that was supposed to be a highly interactive games lab. Once the honeymoon ended and the reality of the scaling problems I now faced dawned on me, I became upset enough to write a resignation letter before September ended, though I was willing to ride out the semester. So that's what I've been doing.

Before September, when I was very excited to start this job, I often said to friends "If I'm not terrible at it and I don't hate it, I'd consider a new career." Well, I don't think I'm terrible at teaching — the right proportion of students seem to be digging it, one teacher-pal who visited thought I was doing just fine, and the program is already inviting me to return to teach other classes. But it is a terrible fit. And while I certainly wouldn't say I hate the job, one close friend suggests that I do hate the fact of being wrong about how much I'd love it, which I'll allow.

So: all that. I've six more class meetings spread over the next three weeks, and then back to life. The last three months have felt like nine, just from the sheer amount of novel challenges they've held, and there ain't nuthin wrong with that.

Someone stole my laptop two weeks ago. With the help of the BackBlaze data backup service and some friends, I located it last week, after the thief had sold it to someone else. I told the police all this. I have it again. The thief remains at large, as far as I know.

The theft occurred the Wednesday before last at the Panera Bread on Huntington Avenue, near Northeastern University, while I was lunching before the class I teach there. I did all the stuff one is supposed to do in this situation, bought a replacement laptop (and bag), then carried on. I skip many details here so that I can get to the more interesting story of its recovery. (The fact of the theft is differently interesting, since I believe it to be the first blatant crime of this sort committed against me, and it deserves documenting. I hope to dedicate a separate post to it, later.)

To that end, I note here that I subscribe to the BackBlaze online backup service. While I took a financial hit from the laptop's loss, I did not suffer the devastation that would have come with losing years of work and data, because I pay BackBlaze a few dozen dollars per year to back all that stuff up elsewhere. A day after the theft, I had all my old working environment all set up on my brand new laptop. Weirdly, I found it hard to shake the feeling that I simply upgraded my computer on an impulse, and here I sat enjoying the results.

I hadn't considered the anti-theft implications of BackBlaze until the theft happened. To its credit, BackBlaze doesn't hide them; when you log in to recover your data, it presents you with obvious links to web pages on the topic of theft, and the ways that a victim might best use the tools now in front of them. For one thing, I could see the IP address that the thief was at when they popped the laptop open most recently -- the BackBlaze software connects to its remote servers several times a day in order to perform its backups, and that means it phones home the moment a laptop connects to the internet for the first time in a while, as was the case here.

That led to a spate of excitement. It was easy to see that the the IP belonged to a Comcast router somewhere in Boston. I asked Twitter for advice, and when some friends suggested I call Comcast and ask for the physical address associated with the router, a Comcast CSR (and Twitter trawler) politely let us know that they would only divulge this information to search-warranted police, so perhaps I should go talk to law first. I passed it along to the BPD detective on the case, who said that a single IP wasn't enough to write up a warrant, but invited me to keep watching and let him know about any future pings.

Then, nothing for nearly a week. I resigned myself to accepting that the laptop was lost, and hoped that the lack of any further pings meant that the thief had wiped the hard drive prior to flipping the machine on Craig's List or whatnot. I had changed all my passwords days before, of course, and had my clients change theirs as appropriate, but I knew that it was most likely that the thief hadn't bothered to dig through my data anyway; selling hardware is a much easier task for a typical street-crook than identity theft and other informational black-hattery. So, I felt safe enough, and was ready to move on.

The turnaround came when I sat down last week to write the original draft of this post. I wanted to brain-dump about the theft, which I suspected was bothering me more than I was allowing myself to let on. After writing a couple of sentences, I decided to check with BackBlaze one last time just to confirm that the machine hadn't emitted a peep since that one yelp, the day after the theft. Had I found what I expected, I would have started the process of shutting down that BackBlaze account and setting up a new one for my new machine.

Surprise: the most recent ping had come just the evening before. I swore, then, because it meant that the thief had not simply wiped my hard drive, as I had hoped he had. Taking the advice of that BackBlaze webpage about theft, though, I took a look at the most recently backed-up files, and gasped. There was a new user directory named "leo", and it was full of documents. Judging by the filenames, they looked like college admission forms and homework.

I immediately started crowing about this on Twitter and a couple of chat rooms I hang out in. My friends all agreed that was something else, all right, now could I please hurry up and download the files so that we could start to dig through them?

Looking through documents and sifting through web-history files, I teased out the user's name, email address, and other stuff, and my friends helped confirm and corroborate this information by scouring the web while I worked. Quickly, a profile of the user emerged. A Boston resident, she is an 18-year-old mother of an infant son. Perhaps just married, since her Gmail address has a different surname, but her current name came up on new-mother web forums. She plans to raise her son while starting down the path towards a college degree, and the laptop clearly played an important role in this plan.

(We knew her age because one of us found a 2007 feature photo of her from a local news website. The caption used her old name and said she was 14. And I know her combined academic and parenting plans because she wrote about them as a homework assignment.)

You can see how, at this point, I started feeling bad in entirely new ways about the theft. This young woman clearly wasn't a thief (though perhaps she was a bit dopey to buy hot merchandise), and wanted to use the laptop to help improve her station in life, as well as her tiny son's. Part of me just wanted to let it go entirely at this point, but it seemed objectively incorrect to just sit on this information. I also thought of that laptop thief on the large, and how I'd like to see him caught.

When I updated the detective the next morning with the results of our research, and he said "don't worry, we'll charge her with acquiring stolen property unless she surrenders it," I felt kind of heartbroken. With my nice new computer, I didn't really care about the old computer anymore, and I hated the thought of the police showing up at this woman's door to take away her computer -- a totem of a more hopeful future -- under threat of arrest. I felt like I'd made an infernal compact, and started up something beyond my control that was now going to go out and hurt people in my name. But I didn't make any effort to reverse it, because the other options didn't seem much better.

The student had a helpfully unique name (which did not resemble "leo" in any way), and within hours the cops had repossessed the laptop. According to the police report, the student's mother told of how she herself had bought the laptop from some dude at a local pizzeria, thinking it a well-timed gift for her ambitious daughter. The detective also found it funny how quickly the mom handed over the laptop as soon as two officers visited -- in all likelihood, she was under no illusions as to its likely origin, but (just like the police and me) hadn't expected it to call home for help.

When I visited the police station on Saturday to pick the laptop up, I gave the detective, at his request, a demonstration as to what BackBlaze was and how it had helped us recover the machine. At this point, I discovered that the thief had erased my user account, but had not wiped the system. This had allowed BackBlaze, which installs itself at the system level, to continue running.

The detective assured me that the investigation to the thief's identity would continue -- they still had some security-camera footage from the Panera Bread to go over -- though he was careful to not suggest that it would result in an arrest. He also passed along a message from the mother to me, a request that I please erase her kid's data once I got it back. And that was that. I don't expect to hear any more about this case… though further surprises, I suppose, wouldn't surprise me.

At this point, I had two laptops, one nicer and newer than the other. I liked the idea, which several friends also suggested, of offering to legitimately sell the laptop back to the poor student caught in the middle of this mess, once the dust had settled. But after a friend pointed out that I could return the new laptop to the Apple Store for a full refund -- Apple has a two-week return policy on this stuff -- I came to find that option irresistible, after sleeping on it and talking it over with others. It would peel the unexpected charge of $1,199 plus tax off my credit card, already suffering from a tough year. While I liked the idea of being magnanimous, it was just too hard to refuse this opportunity for personal recovery. So I visited the Apple Store Monday, and they took the laptop back with no hassle.

"Oh!" said the clerk at the store, when I told her why I was returning the machine. "Wow, that's great -- I'm really happy you got it back!"

"Thanks," I said.

Posting this here for the sake of future google-searchers; the discussions I found on the Apple support fora didn't help much.

TL;DR: Tether your phone to your iTunes machine. In iTunes, click your phone's icon. Click the 'Podcasts' tab. Note the "Include Episodes from Playlists" checkbox list, which I do not believe existed before iOS 5. Adjust its values needed, then hit 'Sync'. Boom.

Background: I use the "Music" (neé "iPod") functionality of my iPhone mainly to listen to the most recent episodes of my favorite podcasts while I commute, exercise, wash dishes, and so on. With iOS versions 2 through 4, I found that a great way to accomplish this involved creating a Smart Playlist in iTunes, instructing it to fill itself up with my most recent unplayed podcast episodes. I'd then ask it to always sync this playlist with my phone when it was able, et voila: a fresh batch of new podcasts after every sync.

This stopped working with iOS 5. I had noticed that while the playlist continued to show up on my phone, it was always empty after every sync, even if it was full of the correct new podcast files on my desktop machine's iTunes.

Solution: Unless I'm mistaken -- I didn't empirically document every step of my research, here -- the solution lies with a new checkbox list labeled "Include Episodes from Playlists". You can find this in iTunes, under the "Podcasts" tab, while your iPhone is connected to your computer and selected in iTunes.

If you were having the same problems as I, then you'll discover that your podcast playlist is unchecked. Check it, then sync again.

Everything should now work as you remember. Enjoy!