The Old DiariesI recently unearthed two of my mother’s diaries, one from 1976 and one from 1981. She is gone now, and the diaries are what remain of her daily attention: who came, who left, what was said, where I was.Between them, they recorded two events that stopped me in my tracks.She was precise by nature, a detailed person who wrote things down because she meant them to stay put. I have little reason to doubt her. But I’ll note that a diary is not a camera. It is my mother’s record, shaped…

Sailor has a Steel nib fountain pen problem, and that issue has come home to roost in the Sailor Pro Gear Regular Lucky Charm Fountain Pen. While there is nothing technically wrong with how this pen performs, which I will get into below, the combination of feel and price has me regretting spending $200 (minus a 10% discount,) on this pen. That is a feeling I rarely have, so let’s dig into why. With the price of Gold nibs ramping up quickly over the past few years, most fountain pen companies…

For some of us, our very first fossil found in the field was a belemnite. Smooth, elongated and rather pleasing to the eye and to hold, these little treasures have a way of turning a casual beach walk into a lifelong fascination.For Dallin Young, that first find started his fossil obsession—and I know exactly how he feels!Imagine picking one up without knowing what it was. A slender stone finger.

Cakes, the final affront here.These are the continuing ravages of the Bakeshop Wrecksurprise.Cakeman's Log: The shop is back to normal now, after a mysterious ailment afflicted my crew.It started when we were accidentally exposed to corigrAtUIAt ions. Maybe the big sign should have tipped us off. Anyway, we didn't realize the danger until our handwriting started to devolve.I mean, what do you call this?! "It's red, Tim.""That was a rhetorical question, Leonard.""Oh. Sorry, boss." I thought the…

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example, we created Slack channels where we tasked Claude with being obsessively focused on the health of a single component. We call these Claudes “superfans.” We have a scion-daemon superfan, a…

Doughnuts For Breakfast This morning I woke up feeling tired. I thought I slept well and even enough, but my body just wants to stay in bed and do nothing. Regardless I got up and drank my coffee. I was anxious to get out into the garage and do something as soon as it warmed up enough outside that I could take the plants back outside. We will do something else with them later but with the potential frost I brought our spider plant and palm in and put them just inside the door. That is right…

2026-10-19Hello!During my walk from top to bottom of Central Park, I visited one of the most iconic tourist destinations in the area: Bethesda Terrace. The circular fountain in the distance is under construction, but the area was open to visitors and I ran up the stairs to get this shot from above.Temperature was dropping, so I quickened my pace to keep energy up. I feel like I spooked a horse who was hauling a carriage of tourists, because the smell of fresh poop lingered for a while. None of…

I feel somethin' so right doin' the wrong thing And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing Everything that kills me makes me feel alive And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing conting stars | onerepublic

I’ve been discovering quite a few bands thanks to David Chalé’s Youtube channel. The latest is one from Spain, his homecountry, so that is definitely more exciting. The name of the band is Smoking Room and it was active between 2002-2004, the years when I got into indiepop. I notice that they had released during those years a few CDRs and a tape on a label called Afeite el Perro. I remember this label. I had bought a Bicicross mini CD back then, which actually inspired Cloudberry Records. How…

Updated September 2026 After spending more than six years cooking every one of Ina Garten’s 1,300-plus recipes, I thought ranking her 13 cookbooks would be the easy part, but, of course, I was wrong. Initially, I planned to rank the books by simply averaging my recipe ratings from each one. But I quickly realized the numbers only tell part of the story. Memories, nostalgia, a book’s structure and theme, and those little things you can’t quite put your finger on all influence why you reach for…

READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)LISTENING: DRINK: Autumn being here means I made a cherry Negroni for herself and a Godfather with orange and cinnamon bitters for myself last night. MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

London is the greatest show on Earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together at one place. Here, in a day, you see the world. Laurie Lee (1914-1997)

[In Europe, anyway, where regulators do this funny thing called “regulating”.] I’ve previously noted that Tesla’s claimed “Full Self-Driving” isn’t, and that the name ought to be illegal. Over in Europe, the name is no more. Tesla’s driver-assistance package is now called “Tesla Assisted Driving” in Europe. The company’s German website no longer mentions “Full Self-Driving,” and the old address now redirects to a new “Tesla Assisted Driving” page. As Electrek noted in their piece, this should…

My eldest son is 7 and is a lot of different things, but one thing he especially is, possibly above all else, is noisy. Even amongst his peers (and 7-year-old boys is quite the peer group), he stands out as an order of magnitude or two more noisy. It’s not just talking - he walks noisily, he eats noisily, he plays noisily. If there’s a way of doing something, you better believe he’ll be doing it with the decibels turned up. He didn’t speak for a long time as a small child, but then when he…

There is a Finnish folk song called “Ievan polkka“. Exhibit a, where you first heard it as a weird looping internet site from twenty years ago, then referred to as “Leekspin”. Exhibit b, the band that is the source of the audio, Louituma, who perform it here. Exhibit c, a delightful (to me, at least) folk punk live rendering by Finnish band Slack Bird. Carry on.

Yesterday was the first day of the heating season for me. The temp dropped down to freezing (0C) overnight and I set the thermostat at 70F. I don't play with it and I'll leave it set at that until I shut off the heat in may/april next year. I struggled taking the radiator covers off and stowing for the season. Coughed a lot and got short of breath quick too. Got it done albeit at an ninety year old man's pace.need a good cleaningI've been thinking a lot lately about a post by CS at Lost Art…

Woolly alder aphids (photo by Bob Lepak, Bugwood.org) 19 October 2026 Until the first killing frost woolly alder aphids (Prociphilus tessellatus) actively coat alder branches like fluffy white socks. I found some in late September 2020 but didn’t know what they were. This month a group of birders found them at Yellow Creek State Park and Ed Donley shared the bug’s identity with the group at Buckeye Yard & Garden Online: Woolly Alder Aphid. Named for their host tree, woolly alder aphids…

Wallners Movie Stars I saw the Strokes perform at the O2 in London recently. During their set they performed the track The Adults Are Talking, which throbs with a kind of stringy krautrock-influenced thrill. Sharp percussion and fuzzy bass propel the song as a pair of guitars create a kind of aloof yearning unique to the Strokes. Julian Casablancas retains his cool even as his vocal nears a kind glasslike fragility more familiar to Thom Yorke. I’ve listened to that song about 40 times since…

I wish I could defy age and time but as it is, age and time are always going to be undefeated.Therefore, I had to take a look into my past so that I can spring ahead and move forward.And I get it. I do.This is a contradiction of terms if not a contradiction of what I say to myself when I say, “the past is gone and you and I don’t live there anymore.”But dig it . . .Today is another day above the dirt and therefore, so long as I am above the dirt, I reserve the right to update my thinking. At…

📷 275/365 - Amsterdam marathon finisher medal.

🏃‍♂️ About yesterday. I wasn’t feeling great but I'm happy I tried and how it turned out. Number 6 completed ✅

Breaking up with cold emails: part 2 of 3: A breakdown of compliance issues, deliverability challenges, and the real costs of cold emailing today, by Nout Boctor-Smith and Erin Andress, who have graciously consented to allow the series, originally published in 2024, to be republished on Spam Resource. Why? Because I think it's very important that we offer options to those asking the question: If not cold emails and bulk outreach, then what? Their guidance is particularly valuable, and timely,…

When you want to tell your players about your unique setting for fantasy medieval campaigns, you need to be able to answer some basic questions. There are other versions of this questionnaire. This one is mine. These questions are centered on the players' experience. Because I am who I am, these questions have tarot theming. These questions were crowdsourced through Gygaxian democracy. Many thanks to Patchwork Paladin, Luke Murkdice, Valeria Loves, Gus L., Joao, Lyme, Warren D., Warren F.…

We have reached the "lawns" unit in the Master Gardener certification class I am taking, and I am only half joking when I say I should ask if I can skip this unit on religious grounds. My religious/spiritual beliefs are pretty amorphous, but I have one opinion approaching dogma, and it is: Turfgrass lawns are an affront to God. If God wanted us to have monoculture turfgrass lawns, monoculture turfgrass lawns would exist in Nature. They do not. Prairies and other grasslands do, but they're…

The garden in front of the Tekisuian tea house at Okochi Sanso, in the hills of Arashiyama. 嵐山の丘に建つ大河内山荘、茶室「適水庵」の前に広がる苔庭。

How a slow dependency becomes an outage, and how deadlines, concurrency limits, retry budgets, and jitter protect useful work. A practical deep dive with PHP examples and a controlled overload test design. Read more

★★★★: It's one thing to make a great, high-concept thriller. But to do it again? With an identical premise?? Amazing. Sets itself apart from the original while keeping close to what worked. I liked the ensemble and how much they explored the rules of everything. Leaned more funny than tense, but it was a great ride top to bottom. FYI: My reviews are scored out of 4. Also, thanks for subscribing to my RSS feed and supporting the indie web!

I was invited to take part in a project about songs that describe America, and, well, if you look up “paradox of choice” in the dictionary, it’s really just a picture of my invitation email. I’m pretty sure I’ve finally figured out what I’m going with, but my Google Docs folder is a graveyard of drafts started and stopped. When you’re asked to be part of something as cool as this, you want to do it right, you know? At any rate, two of the records/artists I had in mind were both released this…

Anthropic published a piece recently on how they are redesigning source control at their company. It starts with this: “At Anthropic, coding is no longer the bottleneck to building systems or doing research. Claude is able to autonomously iterate on research loops, micro-optimize complex programs, and build new services from the ground up at a … Continue reading Some thoughts on Anthopic’s approach to DevOps

We’re looking at recaps from the Jealous Patrons Book Club’s read of Tyra Banks’s Modelland. We read this in 2023, so some references to current events might not be as current anymore. [Ed. After several delays due to health issues, I began this recap by asking if the universe could give me a “small break.”] A small break like the sequel to Modelland coming out even though it’s been over a decade since the last one? Look, I’m waiting on The Winds of Winter, I can wait on Modelland 2. You know…