I am writing this post after last night's kerfuffle, just another day of trying to help Windows home users. I happen to be writing this while installing ProSeries on a new computer for one of my clients, which somehow has an installation process that is even worse than Adobe. Thanks Intuit, good job.The timeline as I sent to my friend last night:ChatGPT not loading. Turned into the internet basically doesn't load. Turned out 21H1, so that's prob the issue. Downloads ISO through UUP dump. Can't…
My quote tonight was seen on as a thread comment on an article about the people who climbed the empire state building to hang a flag that said, “When the power of love beats the lover of power, the world knows peace.” And I had to because it was SO FUNNY:“It’s July 1, and Batman just proposed to Catwoman on the Empire State Building. The bar is high.”You have to take it in when you can, right? It’s definitely hot here, and things are exploding, but I had the day off, and my body is feeling so…
Lots of news, some sad, about America’s final cruiser class. The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70) returned to her homeport at San Diego on 27 June, following 11-months of sustained operations at sea in the U.S. 4th Fleet area of operations. Yup, 11 months in SOUTHCOM. That’s a lot of low-intensity ops. NAVAL BASE SAN DIEGO (June 27, 2026) – The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70) returns to its homeport of Naval Base San Diego following…
In the Newsletter this weekAnalysis: Praha - Berlin - København: well at least the carriages can complete the entire journeyBullshit Meter, retrospective: Lisboa-Madrid to be a bit less painfulGood week: Andorra to get a railway (well, a tram, maybe)Also a good week: New France - Italy agreement for the Ventimiglia - Breil s/ Roya - Cuneo lineShrug of the week: LFP Perthus sets new record, but it's still abysmalBad week: Talgo submits documents too late to bid for new Spanish high speed train…
One of the most aggressively American images I have seen in a long time. It is beautiful. Official caption: “U.S. National Guardsmen join service members from Croatia and nine other countries for Combat Power in Slunj, Croatia, June 27, 2026. The exercise was designed to bring partners together to conduct joint operations in land, air and sea domains.” U.S. Army Photo 260627-Z-DY230-9221 by Army Staff Sgt. Mahsima Alkamooneh Of note, elements of the 2nd Combined Arms Battalion, 136th Infantry…
On this day before Independence Day, let's see if we can find some fireworks in the world of classic television.One of the hallmarks of this country is, at least in theory, free speech, so it's appropriate that we begin at Cult TV Blog, where John looks at the Play for Today, and "Speech Day," a story which, as John says, explores "who benefits and how the structures of society and state aren’t quite real." Very appropriate for today.Free speech is also a key component of CBS's Lou Grant, with…
I am so behind on these! Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam, by Brian VanDeMark, published 2018, history, 763 pages. Really liked it. It’s a history of Vietnam up until LBJ leaves office, including a bit at the beginning on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis (useful context for the early decisions both Kennedy and McNamara were making), looking in particular at the various cognitive blind spots that led smart people to make poor decisions throughout the…
Everyone talking about coding models fixates on the same number: how fast the thing generates code. This misses the point by a lot. The story isn't about how fast the model writes code I would have written anyway. It's that the model lets me do things that I might have done before but were expensive enough that I didn’t bother. I had three separate interactions this week that led to this blog post.We had a production problem on an instance and no clear idea what was going on. What we did have…
With all of this, there’s been plenty of uncertainty and plenty to learn from. Through it all, I feel like I’m learning more about keeping things in perspective and getting marginally better at finding balance. Still, there’s plenty to do, but I’m making progress. The trick, I think, is understanding that uncertainty is relentless. Because of that, it is best embraced, or at least not seen as a negative. Stoicism teaches us not just to tolerate but to embrace what happens in our lives,…
Another small update from me today. I have news! It's small news, but still, I hope the Bear Blog community can take this and use it. I finally have a theme based on my blog in Bear Blog's theme directory! It's called Low Vision Reader. Of course, it was made with low vision readers in mind by having large text by default, a relatively high contrast base, and more accessibility goodies. Herman, the creator of Bear, had to make some tweaks to it so it would work best with Bear Blog, but it's up…
The first book printed in Hebrew with a date on it was printed in Italy and dated 18 February 1475. It was a commentary by Rashi on the Chumash (the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, as distinguished from a Torah scroll, which was made by hand on special parchment).This commentary was completed late in his life (1040 - 1105), and may be a compilation of the lectures he offered at the yeshiva (college) he founded in Troyes. There is a recent phrase in social media: ELI5, which means…
og-image.png (Default OpenGraph preview image for the site.) In the biggest clean-up to this site since back 2020 when I took the photo gallery down and static’d the wiki, I’ve cobbled together a new theme and logo, made a bunch of under-the-hood changes, and went waaaay down the rabbit hole automated content cleanup (fixing broken links, missing images, etc). One of the biggest irritations I had with the previous theme, Period, is that it didn’t have great support for code blocks and never…
The difference in our perception of people we love is that we assume good intent. Every quirk, every friction — we interpret it charitably. The wider we expand that circle of assumed good intent, the more likely we are to find community wherever we choose to spend time. And it’s why love is a verb. Especially in relationships that have lasted a long time, it’s easy to forget to choose it. To fall into patterns where all we see are the quirks, all we feel is the friction. Reminding ourselves of…
Tomorrow is July 4, 2026, and if you’re a student of American history, you know what that means: It means I’ll be trying to recover from celebrating my 79th birthday, which is today.But it also means that tomorrow the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday, the anniversary of that fateful day in 1776 when the Founding Fathers adopted the Declaration of Independence, an act for which they could have been hanged. Imagine being that brave. Granted, you and I routinely accept “Terms of…
I could pull pretty much any random passage from a Boyle video and strike gold, but this one in particular caught my attention.The first story was told by the Leave campaign, who drove a large red bus around the UK with the words, "We send the UK £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead."The pitch was that Britain was hemorrhaging money to Brussels, money that was being wasted, and that leaving would let the country reclaim its borders, slash bureaucracy, revitalize the health service,…
(The painter) makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory." "By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable." From Baudelaire from The Painter of Modern Life
A festival. A wedding. A moment. A sudden death. Collective grieving. 3,632km driving on the left. Hiking and empty beaches, a fairy forest, a missing lake monster. Spontaneous car rental. A funeral. 40 degrees. 40 degrees again. Laying on the floor. Too hot to sleep. I need to buy toothpaste. Hello again. Hello Again is a 1987 film starring Shelley Long, not Shelley Duvall. Shelley Duvall was the host (and producer apparently) of Faerie Tale Theatre, which I loved as a child. She was also…
Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where we wish our fellow Americans a happy 250th birthday!The unveiling of the Victoria Cross.A handy reminder that Robin Hood was no hero.One really freaking long tennis match.The motivations of Richard, Duke of York."Somebody's father" at the battle of Gettysburg.Why we call it a "honeymoon."The dog who loved trains.Now that all other problems on Earth have been solved, scientists are busy building diving suits for cyborg cockroaches.Life on 19th century…
It was nice to have Alicia back this week. The combination of rising temperatures and adjusting to a new family routine meant we had our fair share of grumpy evenings at home. I think the short tempers and exhaustion were fairly evenly distributed across the family. The hot nights saw people sleeping all over the house in search of cooler temperatures or a breeze. I made some progress on a new iteration and structure to my blog. I want to keep using Hugo but my current layout isn’t working for…
The US Supreme Court’s decision this week in Trump v. Slaughter, giving the US president the power to control supposed-to-be independent agencies set up and funded by Congress, may be as profound internationally as it is domestically. In his newsletter, the economist Paul Krugman calls the president’s new power “dictatorial”, and notes the Court’s exception for the Federal Reserve. Krugman highlights the importance to average citizens of the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees consumer…
Pitt peregrine ‘Red’ near the snapcam on 5 June 2026, 2:37pm (photo from the National Aviary snapcam at Univ of Pittsburgh) 3 July 2026 In early June I routinely saw only one juvenile peregrine at the Cathedral of Learning. This was puzzling because young peregrines usually hang out at home for a couple of weeks, chasing their parents and playing in the sky with their siblings. Where were the other three? Puzzle solved for one of them: “Red” was rescued in early June and is on his way to rehab.…
I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons. I often go back to re-read old blog posts--by often, I mean at least two or three times a week. I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about. This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called "The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday"; I haven't finished the poem, now, a…
Nota bene: This post is my next installment of my multi-part review of Adam Smith’s 1784 pamphlet Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. After exploring the markets for tobacco, textiles, and wine (see here), Smith devotes the next three “Additions and Corrections” (#7, #8, and #9) of his pamphlet to the market for wheat. More specifically, what was the cause of the gradual fall in the average…
In the morning coolness, a groundhog lies on its belly on a flat rock beside the porch, where the soapwort is in bloom. Up in the woods, the thrush sings a few bars and falls silent.
Wow! Doesn’t time fly when you’re hypothetically living off the notional income from a model portfolio? This article can be read by selected Monevator members. Please see our membership plans and consider joining! Already a member? Sign in here. The post The Living is Yield-y model portfolio: one year update [Members] appeared first on Monevator.
Everybody loves an Underdog story, and hearing about Cape Verde's journey to the World Cup, absolutely fits into this mold, perfectly. I relate to Cape Verde. I live a small area in upstate New York. Always having to prove myself to make sure people understand I deserve to in the room. Watching them play in the World Cup. They shouldn't have made it through the group stage. They did with zero goal difference. Unreal. Thats a win in the my book. BUT THEY MOVED ON! Into the knock out stage. Of…
Francesca Gino’s lawsuit against Harvard is still ongoing. (The trial, if it gets to that, is scheduled for December 2026) While the case drags on, both sides keep filing documents with the court, and most of those documents are publicly available (htm). This post is about a recent filing: Document #222 (pdf). (this post is...
Our last pre-revolution building, for the last day before July 4, 2026, is one that just made it before the construction cut-off date of July 4, 1776: 273 Water Street was constructed in 1773. This is a house, built for Joseph Rose, used by him and his family until 1807, and with many owners, uses, and alterations after that. The original house was mostly wood-frame, with a brick front facade and a gable roof. The biggest alteration was after a fire in 1904, when the gable was removed and two…
Every judge of your work can be escaped or fooled except one. The advice was go collect your nos. Send so many asks that rejection stops costing anything, and the yeses fall out of the pile. It works, where the asks are cheap. But it smuggles an assumption past you: that a no is a verdict worth collecting in the first place — a single, honest instrument that means the same thing every time it fires. It isn’t. There are four parties who can tell you no, and they are four different instruments…
