September was another big month for my life, mostly for me offline. Another good month for bicycle riding, seeing more of the trails on Randalls and Wards Islands.The New York area has taught me a few things about islands and one of them is that they're very fungible. On a map, Randalls and Wards Islands look one one island because they're "conjoined". They were conjoined on purpose: they used to be two, with a bridge and everything. But then in 1955 the government announced they wanted to join…

The Blue Boy (1994) is a co-production between the BBC and the American public television station WGBH and was broadcast in the UK as part of the BBC’s Screen Two (1985-1998) anthology drama series but due to it being produced by the BBC, its supernatural dread filled themes and it being set at Christmas, albeit it was first broadcast in the UK on the 2nd of January 1994, it could be seen as an unofficial latter-day counterpart to the BBC’s original A Ghost Story for Christmas annual anthology…

I wanted to try audio books again this month, and I ended up finishing two of them. And I read the two Hench series books by Natalie Zina Walschots because my local bookclub wanted to discuss them as an extra meetup. The main book was The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown, Audio 8h29m: This book was recommended in the Bullet Journal community and I was curious about it. It is like a guide to…

Here comes October, bringing new LEGO® sets, gifts with purchase (GwP) and Pick a Brick! Read on for a quick look at what's available.Continue reading »

Since 2019 I've used various language models (from the large to the very tiny) to generate drawing prompts for what has become an annual October tradition. (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and my personal favorite is 2022, when the GPTs were small enough to be absolutely bonkers.)After a failed attempt to get Gemma 3 to be as interesting as the early GPT3's (I gave up after it suggested "The Autumnal Autumning" twice in one list), I decided to go very old-school.Specifically I'm using…

For AI Weirdness supporters - a list of rejected racehorse names, generated by a very small neural network.

Whew, what a month! It’s been a very busy one for me. Work has honestly taken up a lot of my mental capacity, so not as many outside-of-work projects to report this month. Mobius won the rvatech/ “Team Excellence” award this year, which is an honor; it’s great working with a dedicated team of folks who are all pulling in the same direction. Outside of that, I’m delighted that the weather is turning colder; my walks into the office have been great, as well as evening walks with the family as…

Some days, you write for yourself. Other days, you write for everyone. Most days, the world writes for you. 🤓

waiting for 1RG community dinner to start.

This blog has moved from WordPress.com to self-hosting. If you were following it via WordPress, you should use an RSS reader pointed at nolanlawson.com/feed instead. WordPress has served me faithfully for 15 years, but I think it’s time to move on. A few things have nudged me in that direction: The recent drama surrounding WordPress has left a bad taste in my mouth and eroded my confidence that it’s a good long-term bet. The WordPress interface keeps nudging me away from the old-school…

Original airdate: September 27, 2026 The premise: In order to save the school, Homer is tasked with transporting reclusive children’s book author Constance Clavinger to the book fair so she can read the long-awaited sequel to her hit book. But then he discovers that Constance’s follow-up story involves violently killing off her own creation, as she has become bitter and disgruntled in life, wanting to pass down her pessimism to a new generation of kids. The reaction: Does a season premiere…

Glenn Ligon, Condition Report, 2000, screenprint on iris print, sheet: 31 7/8 x 21 5/8, the Bon à tirer for the edition of 20, plus one AP [plus 6 more AP and 2PP -g.o], selling at Christie’s London 20 Oct 2026 A while back I tried to track down all the editions of one of Glenn Ligon’s greatest prints—one of his greatest works to date—the 2000 diptych, Condition Report. It really felt like they were all in museums or otherwise as unobtainable as the 1988 painting they’re based on, Untitled (I…

My workout is done. Now I’m waiting for my son to finish swim practice. Selfie a day for a year, day 39: Sep 30, 2026 edition.

★★½☆☆ Pocket Gopher (not to be confused with the JavaME app of the same name) is even simpler than DeBurrow or DiggieDog, but it’s more usable than either because it follows UI conventions more closely. You can type in a full URL or fix a typo. You can download files. It has bookmarks, history and dark mode. (Actually it only has dark mode.) The main thing missing is that it won’t pick up Gopher links from other apps. The last release started accepting Gopher links, but broke the app. F-Droid…

I've been sick, with the kind of respiratory illness that was both objectively mild and still feels like it punched a hole through the middle of the month, makes it difficult to talk about "what happened."Before that I was taking evening walks in the park again, and making photographs around the edge of summer.It doesn't yet feel like it's conclusively autumn yet. For every cool day there's a warm, wet one. The leaves are turning, but there are still flowers. I expect that feeling to turn soon,…

The first recording today starts with the end of The Story of Tracy Beaker. Then it’s a repeat of What’s New Scooby-Doo? – Uncle Scooby and Antarctica. Media Centre Description: Children’s animated series about a group of teenage sleuths and their cowardly dog. The gang accompanies a penguin back to its home in Antarctica and find a finned creature from the sea dragging victims to an icy fate. Recorded from CBBC Channel on Tuesday 17th August 2010 07:58 BBC Genome: CBBC Channel Tuesday 17th…

Shipped a new look for the site with new themes Cappuccino and Mocha for light and dark mode.

"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë - good writing, but the protagonists are quite something. There's barely a likable character in the whole story - they are all either crazy, evil, stupid or a combination of these. It's also remarkable to consider how small the world of some people in those times was (pre-Victorian England); whole lives spent within a tiny area, interacting with a handful of other people. And that's for members of the nobility, not some bumpkin on a remote farm. "The Pickled…

Here is an old puzzle that I have used in my classes for years. Puzzle. Two people take turns placing quarters on a round table so that the quarters fit on the table and no two quarters overlap. The person who can’t move loses. Who has a winning strategy? It is easy to see that the first player always wins by using the symmetry of the table. On the first move, the first player puts the first coin directly in the center of the table. For each subsequent move, the first player places a coin in…

Some weeks ago, an article alerted me to a new academic novel, Lords of Serendipity, by an English prof named Randy Boyagoda. He works now in Canada but originally came from Sri Lanka, where a good deal of the novel takes place. Spoilers ahead! The main characters are: Jack Bayern, a middle-aged widower who teaches Introduction of Statistics for Non-Majors at the mythical Arcadia Tech University, which might be MIT, but I can't tell. Jack has a daughter Katrina who is a freshman at Haven, one…

At the end of lunch, the big bag of potato chips was nearly emptied. When I got up to clear the table, I took the empty bag, lifted it a little above my head, angled its opening towards my mouth, then tilted the bag so the remaining crumbled chips at the bottom rushed into my mouth. It's a satisfying final crunch that I enjoy.I have a memory of seeing someone do this back when I was in high school. We were in a small store and a classmate was finishing up some chips from a smaller snack-sized…

Picking up where we last left off, I had identified another possible source of Ronald Coase’s counter-intuitive reciprocal-harm model at the end of my previous post: what economists and historians of economic thought call the “LSE tradition in cost theory,” an approach to economics that was developed by Lionel Robbins and F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. What is this LSE tradition, and how did it influence Coase’s own thinking? In brief, both Robbins and Hayek had…

Here’s something I shoulda, coulda seen coming, but didn’t. A cool collaboration between dance floor subversives, namely Belfast’s Black Bones and Bradford’s Miles J. Paralysis. Both delivering 2 tracks a piece, 1 uptempo, 1 down, for Miles’ own imprint, Crying Outcast. The Bones boys, Aaron Black and Timmy Stewart, get kinda Cut Hands on the opening “Psychic Rain Dance”. A hypnotic ceremony of conga complexity, with African chants cheering on those caught up in the ensuing delirium. Their “Low…

It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t written anything on this blog that wasn’t a run report or birding-related since September 3 and wondered, why is it? Ennui? Lack of interest? Just plain laziness? Questioning the value of putting my thoughts out onto this weird, hollow shell we call the internet? I’m still not sure, but one thing also rolled into my mind shortly after: That I survived cancer. A year ago I didn’t even know I had cancer. In fact, it wasn’t until after my surgery in…

This summer has been full of “renovations”, and there’s still a lot of stuff to take care of down the road. If you haven’t read “A New Start” yet, I really suggest you catch up before reading this article. Reason is, this blog is currently in a sequential phase (as I like to call it). This means every article could touch upon topics I’ve already covered, and which I don’t want to delve into again. Something looks different… I remade the whole website, did you notice? In case you’re new around…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Johann Henrich Schade, day laborer, probably son of Johann Friedrich and Anna Adelheid (Vennenbernd) Schade, was born probably in Ochtrup about 1770 and died there 27 April 1821.1 He married in Ochtrup 5 May 1789, Anna Maria Elisabetha Storms/Störmens.2 She was born about 1756 and died in Ochtrup 7 April 1826.3 There is no baptismal entry for Henrich in the Ochtrup church book for the period 1749-1774.4 There is a Gerhardus Berndus, son of Friderich…

Here’s some stuff I’ve experienced lately (and not necessarily only new releases)...

Every four years, certain odd traditions happen. The Olympics. Leap Days. Vancouverites attempting to pick their top 10 Council candidates out of 56 randomly sorted names, 20 of whom are for parties that never previously existed. Yes, it’s true: this October, Vancouver votes. From Sat Oct 3 to Sat Oct 17, Vancouverites will to pick a Mayor and Council. And, yes, there’s a BC provincial election the week later, so things are even noisier than usual. Time for another election guide. Okay, so…

Where has the year gone? How is it October already? Although I’m actually writing this in September, so it isn’t. But the point still stands, I think. Man, I’m getting good at these intros. They just flow right off the page, right? … Right? Website updates A couple of new posts appeared in September. Lego, ACME DNS-01, and negatively-cached surprises is a rather snappily titled post about debugging an issue a friend had with Centauri, my reverse proxy. Turns out a combination of default…

If you squint, it looks like I turned a corner this week. That light blue line is going down at last. Still quite a way from where I want to be though... Last week's rolling 90 day spending averages This week's rolling 90 day spending averages ... but this week is definitely better than last week. I spent over $100 less, despite some arguable extravagances. Where did it all go? AccountTotal Charity155.30 Groceries113.10 Garden Supplies98.10 Health Insurance78.60 Medical Expenses61.20…