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.
2024-11-14 06:36:00
When our kids were young, we went to a lot of birthday parties. I mean a lot. School birthday parties. Family birthday parties. Skating parties. Bouncy house parties. Whew. And then there were the cakes. I often made them myself. I wanted my kids to know that I cared enough about their birthdays to put in some effort, even if the results weren’t always the prettiest things in the world. I have always referred to them as my “fail cakes” although I suppose they could have been a lot worse. I take a lot of satisfaction in knowing that my daughters will always be able to say confidently that “he was there” and “he tried.” Here are a few of the fail cakes over the years.
I tried.
2024-11-12 09:27:00
We spent the week to exploring Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was another stop on our “places we might want to live in retirement” tour, and gave me a new state for my “Where have I been?” page. We rented small house in the northeast part of the city, worked during the day, and explored the city in the afternoons and evenings.
It was unusually cold while we were there and several inches of snow fell. Although the city’s best experiences all seem to be outside, the weather didn’t stop us completely. We managed a few excursions, including
🌵 A short hike in the Sandia foothills, while it snowed
🚡 A ride up the Sandia Peak Aerial tramway to an elevation of over 10,000 feet
🌶️ A visit to historic Old Town
🎨 A day trip to Santa Fe
We ate at some really good restaurants, including
🌮 Church Street Cafe made me a Chili Relleno convert.
🌶️ El Pinto served up some amazing ribs marinated in Hatch chilis.
🧄 The Shed was good, but not worth the long wait. And they serve garlic bread with everything, which is just weird.
🌯 Garcia’s Kitchen is like Mexican Denny’s. Not trying to be anything fancy, just good food.
It was time well spent.
In her November 8 edition of “Letters from an American”, Heather Cox Richardson finds the “profound ignorance” of many American voters echos a similar situation from the 19th century.
The cross-country plane rides gave me a chance to read a few more volumes of The Drops of God by Tadashi Agi.
A short post about why I write these weekly updates.
Some immediate thoughts following the presidential election.
Excited for season 2 of The Diplomat!
Finally put season 4 of Only Murders in the Building out of my misery.
Went to the cinema to see Conclave. Stanley Tucci could read the phone book to me and that’d be okay. This movie works pretty well, and smooths out some of the book‘s rough spots.
Started watching The Santa Clauses. The writing is sloppy, but I need some early Christmas comfort this year so I’ll probably be back for more.
Another favorite from last year, Shrinking returns for a second season.
Stay strong, friends.
2024-11-08 22:15:00
Inspired by Marco and others who were taking up the weeknotes practice, I started posting weekly updates under the #weeknotes hashtag last year. Since then, I’ve published 85 posts. According to my analytics service, the most popular of these posts gets maybe a few dozen hits. So if hardly anyone is reading them, what’s the point of writing them?
I’ve been thinking about this, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
Reflection. Taking time each week to reflect on the week’s events is a kind of meditative practice. It gives me a chance to take a break from the constant go, go, go of the week and to slow down for a little while. (Writing in general does this, but I am not a prolific writer.)
Memory. This blog is as close as I have to a diary or journal. I hope that at some point in the future it’ll help me remember things that I would otherwise have forgotten.
Reminders. Reviewing the (sometimes very fragmented) notes I make throughout the week, I often find there are things that I wanted to spend some time with—an article, a book, a topic to dig into—that I just didn’t have time for in the moment. If something I missed is still interesting at the week’s end I put it on my to-do list.
Specialness. There have been times when I pull up my notes on Sunday or Monday and find just one or two bullets and I think, nothing happened this week. But as I circle back, day by day, I invariably realize that things did indeed happen and I’m always able to find something worthy of attention. My life is not boring after all.
Preciousness. The idea of specialness is important because it serves as an important reminder that time is finite and I need to cherish every moment—trite and saccharine as that sounds—even the seemingly dull ones.
Looking back helps me to live in and appreciate the moment, and that’s why I weeknote.
2024-11-06 20:20:00
Who are we, the people known collectively as Americans?
Are we white supremacists? No, but we have a few.
Are we misogynists? No, but we have a few.
Are we anti-immigrant xenophobes? No, but we have a few.
Are we jingoists? No, but we have a few.
Are we Christian nationalists? No, but we have a few.
Are we wealthy aristocrats? No, but we have a few.
Are we disengaged, gullible fools? No, but we have a few.
We are a diverse nation comprising many different views. But we have enough white supremacists, misogynists, xenophobes, jingoists, Christian Nationalists, aristocrats, and fools that together with well-meaning conservative voters, we just elected president—for the second time—a man who is
a brazen liar,
a failed businessman,
a self-admitted authoritarian,
a convicted felon,
a sexist and likely rapist.
As if all of that isn’t bad enough, Donald Trump is a simple-minded man who, after four years of experience, never grew to understand how to effectively use his office. Even worse, he remains a useful idiot for those—both at home and abroad—who do.
May whatever god or gods you believe in help us all.
