Read the full post at - Flying over Bay Area Suburbia One of my favorite parts of flying is getting a true birds-eye view of the pattern of a large metro area. I found Northern California’s land use to be absolutely fascinating. The City of San Francisco is famously dense. But I was taken aback by how Sunbelt-level suburban the Bay Area is. I was also surprised at how un-buildable so much land appears to be. It truly is a situation where all the buildable land was filled up by the 1970s…and…
When Sean McCoy proposed the Dungeon23 project, I couldn't help but join in. I wrote two dungeons--one for His Majesty the Worm and one for Under Hill, By Water. This effort eventually went on to become the 100+ room, Metroidvania-inspired dungeon...The Castle AutomaticThe premise of The Castle Automatic is that there is a mechanical castle with a self-contained sun, moon, and seasons. It was once ruled by a cruel giant emperor, but has since fallen into ruin and become haunted by vampires and…
We started Sunday with an almost-20 km cycle over to Stratford, through Fullerton’s Marsh, Mount Herbert, and back home via Bunbury.It was exposure, yet again, of the Town of Stratford’s committment to active transportation: from getting on the cycle path on Water Street near HMCS Queen Charlotte, we were on a separated pathway all the way to the Mount Herbert Road intersection with the Fullerton’s Marsh Trail, 10 km later.Once we got to Mount Herbert things got (mildly) hilly; a gentle rain…
Costco is like taking the trash out but in reverse. You hate to do it, but it feels satisfying once done.
Lorin Hochstein writes about generative AI in the context of incident reports, but the points are more broadly applicable. I have seen a big wave of “don’t let AI do your thinking for you” posts recently[^1], so I think lots of folks are pulling back a little bit on the “just let AI do everything” rhetoric (a good thing in my opinion!). As to why Lorin isn’t a fan: In my view, LLM-generated incident write-ups are more dangerous than using LLM for coding or for AI SRE style tasks. For coding…
Photos from a few days in Paris and a short stay in Épernay: great food and fine fizz, record shop cats, showcase sumo, la Coupe du monde on the TV, and stifling heat. I didn’t put much effort into taking photos on this trip, but I’ve recently dusted off my old Canon Ixus 105 and enjoyed bouncing between it and my tired iPhone 13. The Ixus is obviously digital, but in the right situations it gives me far more control than the phone and offers a film-like feeling. I love the depth of shadow and…
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades. Two items this week. One is this simple yet charming video of someone who made a crank organ (festooned with plush parrots and a decorative octopus) and configured it to play the ending music, titled simply “Staff Roll,” to Super Mario 64. It’s very nice to listen to, and it’s only about three minutes long. Please enjoy! The other thing? Oh, the final episode of The Amazing…
UpdatesWe flew back to Dublin last night - four weeks in Spain has been perfect to recharging a little bit as I move into the last phase of the consultation process for my role at Meta. The heatwave over Western Europe looks like it will really take shape over the next few days, and my apartment in Spain is expecting temperatures of 37/38c so we picked a reasonable time to come back to a bright, sunny Dublin. On the flight back, I started watching the 'Star City' a new series on Apple TV that…
While I’m side-questing into health stuff I might as well link this one that I’ve been sitting on as well. Gavin Francis writes about mental health diagnoses from the perspective of a GP. This one is likely even more controversial than the “enhanced self” post from earlier, but also worth the time to get another perspective[^1]: The subject is important, because according to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness. The line between health and…
In this dream, I was in the Reticulum network, like I was inside that MeshChatX app nodes visualizer. It was amazing. I can’t explain the dream, but I was in those nodes. It was a short dream. I got another dream, but this time I was in an I2P network, and again I can’t explain it. I can’t write it in words. I got many more dreams, like in one dream I said this crazy line, but then I woke up. I thought of writing that line in my notes app for later writing in this blog, but then I slept again…
§ Hello there. Happy summer solstice, Father’s Day, Juneteenth, etc. § In the vegetable garden our bush beans have started flowering and the tomato plants are all fruiting happily. Did you know that saffron comes from a crocus that is perennial in zone 6? Well I didn’t until a few days ago. It is now near the top of the list of plants I want to track down for our garden. § The trip to Chicago for a family wedding went considerably better than I expected with our two month old in tow. The six…
Noël Coward is the perfect frothy summer theatrical entertainment, with his clever dialogue, ridiculous characters, and silly situations ripe for comedy, all in a British accent. The Guthrie is doing Private Lives later this summer (which they last did in 2007), but first up is Blithe Spirit at Theatre in the Round to conclude their 74th season. This is the one that features a love triangle between a husband, his wife, and the spirit of his deceased wife whom he accidentally materializes. It's…
I’m a big fan of John Lennon (the American author, not the English musician, but, sure, I’m a fan of the musician too). I’ve read most of his books, and it saddens me that literature is such a niche interest that even a versatile, talented, and accessible novelist such as Lennon can’t make a living out of it. OK, I understand the economics: if there were more money to be made from writing fiction, more people would be doing it, there’d be more competition, so it’s not clear that Lennon himself…
Rough week in the health department but the brain juices have held up against all odds. Also games! Personal I woke up on Monday with a lot of pain in my neck and decided to take the day off for some rest and relaxation. In the midst of aforementioned R&R Yash asked me if I wanted to meet up with his girlfriend and him for breakfast at Toit, where we got some pancakes and waffles. Not the typical idea of resting an injury, but it was nice to be out and about in the sun. From there we walked the…
What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks: “How are you enjoying your drive so far?” Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic. A minute later it does it again. “Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.” It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial…
I’ve been enjoying Derek Thompson’s newsletter lately. His latest is an essay on some of the unintended consequences of a health-obsessed society. This is the Internet so I’m sure everyone will find things to disagree with in a post like this, but it gave me lots of food for thought so I wanted to share. For instance: Research by Sandra Weintraub of Northwestern University has found that "super-agers" (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in…
I quite lke this piece The Last Quiet Thing by Terry Goodier about the weight of expectation your own posessions now put on you. I don't wear a watch. I found this via Matthew Bogart's review of the small e-ink reader the Xteink X4 Pocket eReader which has also had decent reviews in places like Lifehacker although I'll also note that part of the review from the New York Times includes this incredible line: Unlike a Kindle or Kobo e-reader, which are essentially ready to use out of the box,…
The other week I was the MC for day 2 of CSS Day conference. It was my first time ever being an MC for a conference! I was so excited and, honestly, very nervous at the start. My hands were shaking a lot, and it's no wonder, as Bruce Lawson had been the MC of the previous day, and that's a tough act to follow. And if I can’t be funny on the spot, I will try to make up for it in other ways. I ended the day with the following: Throughout the day, when introducing our wonderful speakers, I've…
Most of my time this week went into goal-setting and on learning Japanese. On goal-setting: This was both attending training, and writing/reviewing goals for my department. Nearly there. On learning Japanese: I have been trying new tools and routine to see what works well, did orientation for my new classes, and have formally verified out that I am now somewhere between N5 and N4! And unexpectedly I played the role of translator on Friday. It felt like every day this week I got a different bit…
From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-131: The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number…
I should stop eating junk...My social battery is exhausted. I went out one too many times, I need some time to recover 🪫 #Life & People My girlfriend (J) and I went swimming on Monday which was a lot of fun since the pool was surprisingly empty. One of the items on my bucket list is to learn swimming properly, I want to do more water sports! Swapnil and I completed our 2nd 5K run 🎉 It feels nice to finally hit one of the milestones we’d set for ourselves. Onwards to 10K now 🏃🏻 I also had to buy…
This morning, I read a couple of posts on Reddit that I liked and wanted to reply to the community. Mistake, as usual: No big deal, it’s only 10 minutes down the drain. My account is several years old and has a lot of “karma.” I am not behind a VPN this time. There was no bad language or any adult content in my post. Yes, I know I’m not telling you anything new, and it’s my fault for trying to entertain myself to actually use Reddit for - gasp - posting something. But this is still where most…
Summer puzzles (all about sums, i.e. addition) 1) Use addition signs and as few '4's as possible to total 500. 2) 143+528=731 One digit in this sum is wrong. Correct it. 3) 9 + 8 + 7 + 65 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 99 Keeping the digits in that order, and using only addition signs, find another way to total 99. 4) [6 12 15 20 21 33 44 45 66] Select numbers from this list to make a total of 100. 5) Substitute digits for letters so that ONE + ONE + ONE + ONE = TEN. 6) How many solutions are there to TWO +…
There really isn't a question that we work more today than we did 30 or 50 years ago. Heck the average farmer in the 1300s worked around 1500 hours a year to get food on the table, and today we work more than double that amount to scrape by1. I suppose the question is why we work so much more now. We work more now, in large part, because we continually choose consumption of goods over leisure2. That raise could either buy you someone to do some stuff around the house that you don't want to do,…
Luckily it was too warm to sleep last night, as I'm not sure I would have made the effort to go see these storms otherwise. These are distant thunderstorms near Lille in France. That's at least 150 miles to my South East, so I'm quite amazed the skies were clear enough to capture some distant lightning. I was actually hoping to photograph some sprites, but out of 550 shots, I got precisely zero!
I spent yesterday morning with a cup of coffee at the local marina, staring at the boats and the light and breathing it in, my deep pleasure at doing nothing at all spoiled only by an apple croissant that was, in fact, filled with marzipan. A nice surprise if you like marzipan, but I think it tastes like the inside of a goat. Still, the quiet was good for me. I drove home to find an email from a friend which included a link to this video about JW Turner, Ernst Haas, and Venice, and that kicked…
A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound. They were asking if they could use some of my recorded music for the dance. Here's a lightly edited and linkified copy of what I sent them: This is a tricky situation, and I'm sorry you've ended up here. This is probably not what you want to hear, but I would not hold a dance with recorded music. Instead I'd: Have musicians play…
All my dreams come true ✒️ Written by: Abbie Caversham Wildlife Park is just north of Perth, and home to many RBFJs (round brown fluffy jobbies) (aka, my favourite type of animal). The day we spent there will forever be a big day in my life, because it was the first time I ever saw an animal I have always been desperate to see... The wombat. To make things better, we got a photo with one! And if that wasn't enough, it gets even better when koalas are added to the mix. The day started out with…
