2024-12-25 15:38:00
🤧 I started the week still feeling pretty crappy. I decided to go for a halotherapy session on Tuesday in hopes that it'd get the sinuses moving and maybe get some relief. It was very relaxing, but relief would not be mine until Wednesday or Thursday.
📜 I renamed my “Projects” page to “Artifacts” and reorganized a bit. I did this because I wanted to add a copy of a presentation I gave at work on the topic of “Demystifying Generative Artificial Intelligence.”
📻 I hacked an Ikea cabinat and used it to reorganize my ham radio operating station, aka the shack. Now that it’s cold outside, I’ll be spending more time with this hobby.
🎄 My wife and elder daughter took a trip to France for Christmas, so it’s been quieter than usual around the house. On the plus side, my younger daughter and I took the opportunity to get dinner out and do some Christmas shopping.
🎺 On Friday I went with some friends to Natalie’s to see the Huntertones, a horn-driven jazz band that formed here in Columbus. They usually come back to town in December and put on a helluva a show. They played tracks from the new album, Motionation, as well as some old favorites.
😃 Maique sent me a very nice surprise, which I put immediately to work.
Norman Human Feelings EP by Little Suns
I’m happy to report that we finished watching the final season of Yellowstone. It’s been a great run, but the time has come for it to be over.
Writing for Foreign Affairs, Mitch McConnell gets it partly right in “The Price of American Retreat”—even if for some of the wrong reasons.
Christmas is coming. Have you been naughty or nice? Don’t worry, Santa knows.
2024-12-18 07:30:00
🤧 After spending nearly a week in Las Vegas, I was glad to get back to my normal routine this week. Unfortunately, I spent most of it fighting a cold—a souvenir from my trip to Las Vegas.
🧠 I delivered a short presentation on generative AI to my colleagues. I was worried that my audience would be bored out of their skulls but I received a lot of positive feedback so that was nice.
📜 I reorganized and updated my “Projets” page and renamed it “Artifacts”. It’s a list of stuff I’ve made over the years and that might be interesting to two or three people out there.
🛥️ I’m not sure I would have sought this out, but when I came across Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary my curiosity got the better of me. It turned out to be really interesting and of course full of great music.
💎 Logan's Run is not what we’d call a “good” movie, at least not by any modern standard. It remains one of my favorites so it was a lot of fun watching with my older daughter and laughing about all the gaping plot holes.
🛄 When I saw the teasers for Carry-On on social media I was immediately intrigued. I gave it one star for decent acting I guess. Other than that it’s 👏 just 👏 plain 👏 bad.
🎅🏻 No one else in the family was willing to sit through 12 episodes of The Santa Clauses so I’ve been watching them on my own. So it’s not as good as the first two movies, but it’s solid.
”AI Is the Black Mirror” by Philip Ball (Nautilus)
“Dave Eggers just opened a library of books written entirely by children” by Emily Dreyfuss (The San Francisco Standard)
Don’t be naughty, Santa’s AI is watching.
2024-12-09 06:45:00
I spent most of the week in Las Vegas for the annual AWS re:Invent conference. I was there with several work colleagues and I enjoyed spending time with them outside the office. The conference itself was a whirlwind of activity, and as an introvert being around 60,000 other attendees was a bit overwhelming at times. It was time well spent and on balance a positive experience, but I sure am glad to be back home. Here are a some highlights by day:
① Arrived in Las Vegas early Sunday morning. After checking into the hotel, I checked into the conference and did some of the fun activities before the really big crowds descended, including: drawing on the re:Invent chalk board, going down the slide, playing with AI-generated art from an old cigarette machine, and more. We finished the day with some Tijuana-style street tacos at Tacos El Gordo.
② On Monday the conference sessions got underway, but I carved out some time for a (free!) tattoo.
③ Tuesday was another full day of conference sessions from sunrise until dinner.
④ Started Wednesday with the 5k race I had been training for, followed by more conference going.
⑤ By Thursday my brain was mush so I went to see the actual flamingos at The Flamingo before wrapping up the week at re:Play, a chance to unwind with food, music, and games at the end of the conference. I’m very grateful to this group of most excellent colleagues and friends who made it a great week. (More pics)
📚 We started working our way through this year’s McSweeney’s Advent Calendar, which is a delightfully weird take on the countdown to Christmas. 10/10 highly recommend.
🎄 It’s official, the Christmas seasson is here now that the Christmas tree is up and fluffled and illuminated in full color (or white) LED glory. There are no ornaments yet, but that’s someone else’s department.
❤️ I added Adam’s People Pledge to my 88x31 board.
🔄 Daniel Middel first popped up on my TikTok feed a week or so ago and now I can’t seem to get enough of him hula hooping in drag.
Couple more episodes of Shrinking season 2. How is this show so good?
Fly Me to the Moon was WAY better than I expected it to be.
🏈 SMU rallied late to tie the ACC championship game, but couldn’t hold off Clemson in the final seconds. My Mustangs probably won’t make the College Football Playoff, but who knows?
🍷 The flights between Columbus and Las Vegas gave me a lot of time to knock out several more volumes of Drops of God by Tadashi Agi.
That’s all from this end. I hope you have a good week!
2024-12-02 22:30:00
💻 Since all my vacation time is gone for the year it was a work week for me, except for Thursday, which was a Thanksgiving holiday here in the states.
🏃 Finished a “Turkey Trot” 5k in under 40 minutes, so I earned my carbs for the day.
🍗 We had the usual huge chaotic family celebration on Thursday. On Friday I cooked another turkey breast and some sides for just us, mostly to have the leftovers.}
🎰 On Sunday I arrived in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent. I’m here with several colleagues and we started things off on Sunday by getting checked into the conference and doing some fun stuff before things get underway on Monday. I snapped a few pics too. I’ll probably be quieter than usual over on Mastodon but I’ll try to post a few pics every day.
🧩 Started playing Tatami, a puzzle game, on iOS Test Flight. It’s a fun way to pass a little time, but I admit to being a little confused at level 101.
Watched the first five episodes of A Man on the Inside. It’s good (I guess?) but it just isn’t doing anything for me.
Watched the entire first season of 3 Body Problem over on Netflix. Interesting premise, a little weird at times. Looking forward to wrapping things up in season 2.
I gave up 108 minutes of my life watching Wolfs on Apple TV+, and I won’t get them back. They’re obviously trying to recapture the magic of Ocean’s Eleven but it just 👏 does 👏 not 👏 work. Bleh.
“In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse” by Ed Simon (Literary Hub) is a really interesting piece. The author is right, but for the wrong reasons. Screens (or digital technology more generally) are not to blame. Rather, it is algorithmic scrolling that is the real culprit. Setting aside the tactile experience of reading a physical codex (something I still greatly enjoy) it is still quite possible to immerse oneself in other worlds while reading a book on a device such as a Kindle. Let’s keep our eyes on the ball, shall we?
“Mexican President’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Exposes an Ugly MAGA Scam” by Greg Sargent (The New Republic) suggests the relationship between Sheinbaum and Trump is going to be interesting to watch.
Enjoyed listening to Adam on episode 125 of Hemispheric Views. Looking forward to what Neato brings!
Welcome to December, friends. Have a great week!
2024-11-26 00:31:00
I updated the Lambda Function that scrapes my television/movie and book progress to announce additions to statuslog (status.lol). This has the side effect of publishing the announcement to Mastodon (which has the follow-on side effect of being echoed to Bluesky. Now I have it working though, it seems like it’s a little chatty. Maybe I need to make it so updates are limited to once a day instead of happening in real time? Does it matter?
I loaded the Vivaldi browser on my Mac and iPad. So far I’m really happy with it. Synchronizing bookmarks and tabs across devices works well without any fuss and performance seems good. I’m reading some scary things about battery usage so we’ll see what happens when I load in on my iPhone. More to come.
Wednesday was my Omglolliversary! It’s been two years since I joined OMG.lol with my first address. Since then I’ve added four more addresses and am now hosting five blogs/sites using weblog.lol. Most importantly, Adam has built a community that is really special. It’s a privilege to be part of it.
I realized that I have a lot of followers on Mastodon who I am not following back. Should I be? If I follow them all, I feel like there’ll be no way for me ever to keep up with my feed!
Partly because of the supposed mass exodus from X, but mostly because of the recently added support for it on Echofeed, I am again (somewhat) active on Bluesky. My Mastodon posts are mirrored and I’m checking my feed every few days. I’m still trying to figure out who to follow over there, but I’m trying to make more of it than following people I already follow on Mastodon. I still consider this an experiment, but I am curious to see if it builds into anything like what Twitter used to be.
🇪🇸 Mondly, a far less annoying alternative to Duolingo, is offering a limited Black Friday promotion in which I picked up a Lifetime Premium access subscription] for $90. I’m usually skeptical of such offers, but sometimes they work out so I took a chance. I’m using it as an opportunity to resume my foreign language study.
🎵 Hans Zimmer Live is coming to America next year and they’re making a stop in Columbus AND I scored tickets and I am so stoked I can’t even tell ya!
I’m still trying to prepare for my upcoming 5k run/walk in Las Vegas, but boy have I been slacking! When I do get on the treadmill I feel good, so I’m optimistic that when the day comes it’ll go smoothly.
Got out and played some pickleball at the weekend. Got my butt kicked as usual, but it was mostly fun. Every time I play for ratings, my rating goes down. Soon I’ll be relegated to the abject beginners section!
⛪️ I always enjoy reading Lou‘s stuff and his post this week entitled, “Living in the Bible Belt“ was no exception. Although our paths have been very different, I connected with his stories of “mental gymnastics” while also finding balance and acceptance in a world filled with (shall we say?) inconsistency.
If you haven’t read the US Army’s Orientation Fact Sheet #64, “Fascism!”, you really should. Written in 1944 and published in 1945, the 8-page pamphlet defines Fascism, how to identify it, where it inevitably leads, and how to stop it.
My wife, daughter, and I went to see Wicked at our local AMC. The book was great. The musical was a knockout. The film was simply magnificent! It hit on every cylinder: music, choreography, costumes, makeup, pace. I know the second act isn’t as great as the first, but I’m looking forward to part two all the same.
💋 Finished season one of Nobody Wants This and I really loved it. It was charming and quirky and above all funny! Looking forward to another season.
💙 Shrinking is another show with a lot of heart and a lot of humor. Season 2 was a little slow to get going, but seven episodes in and it’s got a head of steam.
🦼 Thelma is a cute film in the “good but not great” category.
🎅 I’ve been pushing through The Santa Clauses despite it having nowhere close to the same level of quality as the trio of films. I put it on mostly as background noise because I’m a sucker for Christmas movies.
It is Thanksgiving week here in the states, so in that spirit I wish you all a safe and happy week. Cheers!
2024-11-19 20:48:00
My Mastodon connections, visualized by the Cyber Circle Creator. [^humdrum]
📺 Fresh off of our weeklong stay in chilly Albuquerque, I was very happy to have been able to spend Monday doing absolutely nothing. It was a bank holiday here in the States, and my wife was traveling on business, so there was no one around to keep me from watching a lot of TV.
I started evaluating my subscriptions and the big one on the block is Adobe Creative Cloud. I love it, but it is very pricy. There seem to be decent alternatives to all the apps and features I use, but I need to take them all out for a test drive. It’ll take me some time.
⌨️ I broke down and replaced my cheap MacAlly keyboard with the (slightly more expensive) Keychron Q3 Max keyboard with Gateron Jupiter Brown switches. It is so much better!
🧠 I signed up for the Murmel free trial.[^maique] After only a few days, I’ve already had the experience of finding something that I might otherwise have missed: the “What vegetable are you?” personality test.[^annie] I’m not convinced this is something I’ll be willing to pay for, but we’ll see. In case you’re wondering, I am broccoli.
🦃 I created a new avatar to celebrate the Thanksgiving Day season on the socials.[^andy]
🇬🇧 Finished watching season 2 of The Diplomat, which is so wildly implausible it’s silly, but it’s fun to watch. Will definitely hang out for season 3.
✡️ I binge-watched season 1 of Nobody Wants This and what can I say? I’m a sucker for romantic comedy. And I was ROFL for episode 4!
Started watching the final half-season of Yellowstone. Now that they’ve killed off (REDACTED) they can get on with putting this show out to pasture for good. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great, but we’re just about done here.
“Early Hours (DJ Mix)” by OddKidOut (Apple Music)
🧠 In a recent issue of his e-mail newletter, Corey Quinn wrote that Amazon “Q is a perfect representation of Amazon’s severe case of GenAI Shiny Object Syndrome, which comes at the expense of distracting Amazon from the care and feeding of its other products.” This is happening all over. Everyone I talk to, both in tech and in other industries, are falling all over themselves with FOMO frenzy trying to figure out how to apply GenAI to, well, everything. It’s crazy.
👕 Side note: Corey’s 2024 fund raiser for 826 National is an “AI faux gras” t-shirt. I ordered one, which I plan to wear at re:Invent in a couple weeks.
☁️ There could be a silver lining to RFK's crazy. There are lots of drugs and treatments available in other countries that are bogged down in FDA bureaucracy. It’d be nice if some of those could be made available here.[^pos]
💀 “The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before AI.” by Joan Westenberg
🍷 Drops of God, Vol. 29 by Tadashi Agi
🧠 “OpenAI scientist Noam Brown stuns TED AI Conference: ’20 seconds of thinking worth 100,000x more data’” by Michael Nuñez (Venture Beat)
🔮 I get nervous when people say things like “We must prepare students for AI Future” because it reminds me of similar calls to action like “everyone should learn to code” and “STEM for all!” Maybe we need more engineers and mathematicians and computer scientists, but we DO NOT need every kid to become an engineer or mathematician or computer scientist. Now more than ever we also need poets and painters and historians and journalists. Yes, we all need to be conversant and skilled enough in using computers and in cybersecurity to survive in the modern world, just as we need basic numeracy and literacy.
Peace, y’all.
[^humdrum]: Thanks to @humdrum for sharing the fedilinks visualization tool.
[^maique]: Thanks to @maique for sharing Murmel.
[^annie]: Thanks to @anniegreens for sharing the vegetable test.
[^andy]: With apologies to @andycarolan
[^pos]: I’m trying to look for the positives. There probably won’t be too many coming from Washington in the next four years.
