1. I’ve worked on enough site launches with scattered teams and crazy clients/leadership to know how wrong things can go–so I’ve been following tech news of the healthcare.gov portal. Whatever you think of the politics behind it, the original teams and the Google, Oracle, and Red Hat engineers being sent in to fix it have my sympathy.

2. Guys, it’s November 1. Thanksgiving is three weeks from yesterday. I turn 34 in two months. Where did the year (and my early 30s) go?