Finally feeling better and getting Maui cuddles. Selfie a day for a year, day 48: Oct 15, 2026 edition.

A few weeks ago, one of my professors sent out an announcement that our university has positions open for an internship that's relevant to my major. I sent in an email application and was interviewed a few days later. 30 minutes after the interview, I was accepted! It will start next semester, and I will be paid $19/hr! This will be about $2 more than my previous job (if you can even call it that) lol. What's even better is that after my interview, my invitation said that they need more people…

⌾ : Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.⚲ : ///mock.brings.shops I travelled to watch an NRL match in Sydney last night. Australia vs New Zealand. The first time I have been to see rugby league played in such a large stadium. The thing that impressed me the most was the visceral wall of sound that was pumped into place. Thumping bass beats and an over-caffeinated announcer encouraging mass sing-alongs (Sweet Caroline is apparently the anthem for this) and kick-off countdowns. As soon as there was any break…

ChipmunkLen PetersonToronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949299 pagesClaude Widgewood specializies in buns at Toronto's Modern Baker. He's an expert at adding just the right amount of cinnamon. The other bun-makers aren't so exacting. They don't care. There's no better employee than Claude, and yet he's afraid of being dismissed. Proulx is the problem. Claude considers this co-worker a Communist intent on spreading the Red Octopus's tentacles into his workplace. Leaving for home at the end of his…

Thinking of moves again. Avec kitty, PNW or Mountain States. Somewhere rural, on some acreage, but a reasonable drive from proper amenities. Maybe near a university town. Occasionally work as an adjunct, if I work at all. Sans kitty, the options open up. SEA and East Asia are top. Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam. Japan, but their visa options suck. Already lived in the UK and wandered all over Europe. I’d be poor there, and honestly, I’m over it. Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia are…

It's been four months since I posted here. Nothing of note has happened to cause this long pause, except I've been busy with life, making YouTube videos, repairing typewriters for people here in ABQ, et cetara. In the meanwhile, I continue my daily walks, which I enjoy for the experience and also as continued therapy from my two hip replacement surgeries. I'm walking from 3-5 miles every day along the suburban streets of northeast ABQ. I also like to take photos. Or "make" photos, perhaps a…

Bill really wants us all to believe that he's not hiding behind those boarded-up windows and doors; that no lights are on and no-one is home. And who knows? Maybe that's true. Maybe Treasure Island just has a poltergeist. Yeah, that's probably it. Trailers moving around, a jumbo-sized US flag hung in the one un-boarded opening on the main floor, and most recently, a heavy chain and a long yellow electrical cord spanning the width of the driveway and fresh "NO TRESPASSING" signs. Definitely a…

We have this sign painted on a wall in our office in Johannesburg. Every time I walk past it, my inner radio sings “brings people together” in the voice of George Michael, adding “…it’s just a matter of tiiiiime.” After getting home from Cairo on Thursday night, I had just two nights at home before heading back to Heathrow on Saturday afternoon for a trip to Johannesburg. The last time I was there was at the end of June in the middle of winter; October is a much better time to visit, with the…

Last week, which looked like this, I concluded with ominous music, because I knew: Last week's rolling 90 day average spending This week things look substantially worse: This week's rolling 90 day average spending And the reason is, as much as I am trying to be a stinge, I also value generosity. AccountTotal Charity1770.00 Electric216.46 Coffee Roasting101.54 Health Insurance78.60 Subscriptions43.87 Groceries43.30 Bars and alcohol42.50 Dining36.69 Clothes35.00 Bank Service Charge0.50…

The fact this movie tanked at the box office just makes the ride all the more enjoyable. I had a bad headache and had to call off the screening with a friend yesterday. Thursday is when the movies rotate in our part of the world where we use the un-American units, so I thought I'd missed yet another great cinematic experience. Luckily they still showed it in a small neighboring town, to the two of us and two other people, with an introduction by a charming young person. I don't remember…

I watched the Social Reckoning. I thought it was pretty good, but it quadrupled my dislike of Meta, which was pretty freakin’ high on the dislike scale already.Historians will look back on the social media age with horror.

Over the past year or so my fatigue has been getting significantly worse. It’s almost always brought about by post-exertional malaise, which is one of the keystone symptoms of ME/CFS, which has no known treatment, just mitigations at best. And the core mitigation is to not overexert oneself.This presents a problem, as there are so many things I’d like to be doing, and even taking care of my basic day-to-day needs already puts me right up at my limit most of the time, and often pushes me over.It…

The rogue artificial intelligences swarming the interwebs amidst the pre-collapse of the job market, can they give us clues on how to survive or even better thrive in the upcoming economics? I still have clear views on what wealth is for me as a person, but I still obviously feel tense and unsure about having not the right token to claim a sense of abundance and freedom in the upcoming revolution. It's almost as if the upcoming thread of reality that's unravelling is heavily susceptible to…

Being offline is currently an online trend, or something. As you may have noticed, and as I realised this morning, I haven't written anything in over a month. The internet, what a place with lots of things in it. Imperfects we are cartographers reminded me of an idea I had while watching Toy Story 5. In the film, the main child that most of the toys belong to plays with toys and uses her imagination, this is a juxtaposition to litterally every other child that spends every waking second staring…

I’d forgotten we were even going to this until the day before (and then forgot again, at one point, on the day of). Sam booked this on the strength of a recommendation from Vito from Northern Ireland + a £15 ticket price + an aggressive anti-self-promotion stance from Daniel Kitson himself.Kitson came out wearily, riffing on his own discomfort and the low energy of the crowd. I got the sense that this was both true but also part of his act. He clearly had an act prepared but I guess his style…

For all my bluster about the evils of consumerism and the meaninglessness of it all, I’m just as much a dopamine addict as the next guy. The Ring goes off, and there I am with the hobby knife, eager to carve out my reward. A capitalist caesarian. First, a new wallet from a leather shop in Alabama. Initials subtly embossed on full-grain. The smells. Definitely an old man thing to be excited about. Then I attacked a box from Japan to find a pristine Olympus 35 RC. As usual, it was beautifully and…

I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search results for coding topics went from being useless to useful. Absence of results indicating a “you are holding it wrong” moment.

First aha! My morning reading (Day 3 of no daily morning pages) from Sophie Strand includes: 'A written story becomes fixed, but a spoken question invites a response.' I'm treating the question in this post https://jila.bearblog.dev/i-am-so-afraid-of-starting-small/ in the trending feed as 'spoken' since it spoke to my heart. The question posed was 'why am i so afraid to start small?' It got me thinking about measurement. Second aha? Turning 'randomly' to Rumi to read: 'I am a tambourine. Don't…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who has made appearances here before, e.g. in 2014) has a most interesting New Yorker piece “How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough” (archived) that starts with bears used as product testers for bear-resistant containers and goes in all sorts of directions. Here’s the passage that brings it to LH: For as long as humans have flown, humans have flown into birds. Wilbur Wright survived the first avian strike; another early pilot, who might have thought it would be…

Roll a d20, rounding down for repeats if the catch is no longer available.1. Nothing bites2. Trout3. Mackerel4. Carp5. Old branch6. Salmon7. Old boot8. Giant Catfish. Take 1d6 damage or get pulled into the water. If you hold strong, take another 1d6 damage to drag it onto the bank.9. Doppelschwimmer. Seems like a prize bass, but then goes pale, grows legs, and attacks. Stats as doppelganger, but can only do aquatic forms.10. Electric eel! Has a deadly shock that can show your skeleton11.…

I've just spent an hour re-singing four of the songs because I could hear the difference between vocal edits through headphones. The sound in the kitchen has changed because there are tiles there now instead of linoleum, and I've got no idea if the new vocals are any better than what's there or not. I'll listen tomorrow. I just thought it would be good to sing them in the spirit of Sunday, because Sunday was good- and spirited.Arfur was barking wildly when I started, but I think his owners have…

I love this bench. I've taken quite a lot of pictures of it.54 words · 2 images

Link: Design Your One-on-Ones, by Corey Ford at Point CI like this approach to 1:1s. Although some very high-profile founders have said that they don’t do or even like them, I think it’s a vital way to maintain a relationship with your team, make sure they’re well-served, and keep things running smoothly. But it’s also very easy to get caught into a reactive pattern — or, worse, just turn them into tactical status reports.The trick, like all meetings, is to take the time to design them and have…

Journal Mostly a rest day today. After posting last night I was overcome with brain fog, which hopefully explains any dullness in my prose and the fact that I didn’t correct typos til this afternoon. Visibility has a cost. Wally was off his food today, hiding in the corners of the run like a sad little sack. As I’ve said many times before, we know not to panic at a change in behaviour but to monitor and be ready for an intervention if it continues. So we carried him out to the garden to force…

I recently bought a couple of bare root Stinking Iris (Iris foetidissima). They were good healthy clumps of thick rhizomes. Very suitable for dividing so two became nine. And the eight pounds I paid for the pair became less than a pound per pot!

Joint pain is back, it was a good run. It’s manageable for now, I’m happy with a “peppercorn” CVS-branded foldable cane by Michael Graves Design for situations like this. I predict the pain will subside by about this time next week. Stay tuned for more. BB sat in the pillow corner this morning for a while in his PJs watching the sunrise.

At around seventy thousand feet, a U-2 pilot flies with a handful of knots between the speed below which the wing stops working and the speed above which the wing stops obeying. Both walls are made of air. Both are fatal. The men who flew it named the place where those walls converge the coffin corner, which tells you roughly everything about how test pilots handle branding. Scaling companies live there too, and unlike the pilots, most of them do not know the number. The physics, briefly and…

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #127, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed. You can reach out to me by replying to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon. Week in bed,Felt great to step out.Strong wind blows. There is still a niggle in my throat.…

Some things are easier to change than others, that’s for sure. It’s easy to change the channel on TV or to change underwear. But when it comes to decisions in life, changes are much harder. We need more time and more energy to talk ourselves into change. At least I am like that. It takes me so much time to change something. Even buying something can take me weeks of thinking and ruminating. But on the other hand, when I make this kind of decision, everything else just goes smoothly. It feels…