lee.ourand.me: Posts

🔗 Link August 15, 2025

Means of Production

Intel and the Trump administration are discussing the possibility of the U.S. government taking a financial stake in the troubled chip maker, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that could advance President Trump’s America-first manufacturing agenda while relieving political pressure on Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan.

Thank God we stopped that socialist menace, Kamala Harris, and picked a free-market hero who will now patriotically seize Intel for the Motherland.

📝 Post August 10, 2025

Weeknotes 45

Fired up the Ooni and cranked out ten pizzas for the neighborhood block party. People seemed to love them. Got a couple requests to do it again in a few weeks, which is flattering.
Rejoined the gym. My lofty goal: three times a week. My actual performance: one for three. Why?
Because I managed to catch some kind of cold. Not bad enough to stay in bed, but just bad enough to make everything feel like I was living inside a mildly foggy NyQuil ad.
Picked up Wingspan, a board game where you attract birds to your wildlife preserve. Brilliant design, stunning artwork, and you get to roll dice by dropping them into a tiny birdhouse. I don’t know why more games don’t let you weaponize adorable architecture.
Took another father–son motorcycle ride with my dad and brother. Found some legitimately fun twisty roads, then doubled and tripled back to ride them again.

📝 Post August 03, 2025

Weeknotes 44

Happy August, everybody.
I made two pretty apps this week. Not for work. Not for profit. Not sure what my problem is, to be honest.

App 1 is a pizza dough calculator. It handles hydration percentages, lets you use poolish or biga if you’re feeling fancy, and even understands the difference between sourdough and active dry yeast. Honestly, it knows more about fermentation than I do. I’ll be using it Tuesday for our neighborhood block party, where I will be slinging pizzas

App 2 is a motorcycle route planner. I pulled some knowledge from my time at Ride with GPS and duct-taped together something that actually works. No turn-by-turn navigation, no voice prompts, just dumb GPX exports. I load the route into OsmAnd Maps and hit the road, fully aware I’ll probably ignore my own directions halfway through because “this road looks fun.”
Ran a couple super-slow 5K’s. Not proud. Not ashamed. Just aggressively average.
The green beans I planted into the end of our new pumpkin patch bed just no call no showed. So I planted a few zucchini in there instead.

📝 Post July 27, 2025

Weeknotes 43

Helped setup some solar panels at the farm. They’ll be harnessing the power of the sun to hydrate all our various plant buddies.
Went on a few exploratory motorcycle rides, trying to find some fun roads around Richmond. Haven’t exactly been successful in finding any particularly good ones, but have stumbled upon some scenic routes, at the very least. I later learned one such scenic sites was actually a prison. Lovely. The corn seemed unimpressed by my engine’s roar. Tough crowd.
I “vibe coded” this dumb little subtitle hunter app this week. Background: Cyn likes watching things with Traditional Chinese subtitles. But finding them is a multi-step ritual that takes like 5-10 minutes each. Find and download English subs. Translate them. Re-download. Upload through the Jellyfind UI that only works on your second try for reasons no one quite understands. So I built a one-click tool to do it all. It’s still dumb, but efficiently dumb.
Went to Cyn’s hot yoga class as a student for the first time since she started teaching. She teaches one mean yoga class. I don’t think I’ve ever been sweatier while technically standing still.
這週我們一直在嘗在家裡多說中文。我不能聽好。 (We’ve been trying to speak more Mandarin at home this week. My skills are somewhere between “disappointing” and “that didn’t make any sense.”)

📝 Post July 20, 2025

Weeknotes 42

Cyn and I volunteered at the food pantry this week. We picked up donations from a couple local grocery stores and restocked the shelves and fridges. Feels nice to help, even if it turns out heavy crates of bananas are nature’s way of reminding you that you’re old, and back pain is forever now.
We’re officially eating homegrown tomatoes and peppers. They taste like victory and smell like we may have gone slightly overboard with the compost.
Pumpkins are growing. They seem happy. Which is a weird sentence to type about baby gourds, but I swear, they’re vibing.
I installed the iOS developer beta, and now half my Apple Home automations are just… decorative. That one’s on me. Should’ve known better than to install the developer beta. Oops. Hopefully the public beta restores the sanctity of our home.
I discovered Apple Maps lets you save and share custom routes now from their “Library” view. But, like, only for walking. Because saving cycling and driving directions is still just a bit too complicated, apparently.
In MotoGP news, Joan Mir must’ve tripped and fallen face-first into every mirror in the mirror factory. Dude has just the worst luck. After that calamity of a weekend, the poor guy’s flight home was canceled too.

Annnnnnd Republicans just unanimously voted to block the release of the Epstein files. Apparently, “save the children” had an asterisk: *only if it hurts Democrats.

July 15, 2025

📝 Post July 13, 2025

Weeknotes 41

Cyn picked up some horchata ice cream from Trader Joe’s. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.
Volunteered at the farm once again. This week we harvested a bunch of swiss chard, basil, and cucumbers to donate to the local food pantry. Helping others while drenched in sweat, small collection of bug bites. Summer volunteering: feel good, smell terrible.
Changed the oil on the bike. The bike itself is a marvel of Honda engineering. Decades of refinement, thoughtful layout, and attention to detail. Except for the part where the oil filter sits directly above the exhaust pipes. So, by design, the second you remove the filter, oil dribbles onto the exhaust. And the next time you start it, it cooks itself into an unfortunate incense. Nothing says “I take care of my machinery” like riding around smelling like a tire fire.
Cyn also harvested basil at home, and now we are in pesto mode until further notice. The house smells like an Italian grandmother’s.
Dug a new garden bed next to our existing raised beds. Bold move, considering I chose the hottest day of the year to dig holes in the sun for fun. I planted pumpkins, which require about eight feet of space each, because pumpkins are apparently introverts. We’ll be growing two, maybe three. Enough for a very small, very sincere pumpkin patch. Linus would approve.
We’re into Season 2 of Stranger Things now. Still excellent
Giving this vibe coding thing another shot, this time after reading Justin Searls’ essay. This go around, I’m trying Claude Code, and to my surprise, it’s going… better. I’m regularly running into token limits on the lowly $20 plan, but the 5-hour cooldown is not a bad way to get me to go do something else. That said, Claude still has strong “intern on their first day” energy. Example: while trying to better understand how much hand holding it needed, I gave it a big to-do list and ran it in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode. Bold of me. Seeing the tests were slow, it concluded: “Tests are taking too long. Pretty sure my code is fine. Ship it!”. Reader, you’ll be shocked to hear: it broke every test and none of the features I asked it to add actually worked.

🔗 Link July 08, 2025

‘Round Them Up’: Grok Praises Hitler as Elon Musk’s AI Tool Goes Full Nazi

I, for one, am utterly blindsided that the guy who didn’t technically do a Nazi salute and only theoretically entertains eugenics ended up “fixing” his AI into one that’s basically Mein Kampf with a silicon chip.

📝 Post July 06, 2025

Weeknotes 40

Installed some quality-of-life upgrades on the bike this week. We’ve now got a phone charger courtesy of the OEM cigarette port charger. Technically, this means I’m also prepared for all those times I need to light up a Marlboro inside my melon bucket. Also added a center stand, and a top box. I’m nearing 40 years old, my motorcycle now has a trunk, and I’m emotionally at peace with that.
Did a little more farm volunteering. Jess joined for this one. We put up a wooden picket fence at the back of the farm. The weather has gotten to the point where, after about 20 minutes of modest work, the charming fantasy of working a farm for a living quickly dissolves into, “Ok, air conditioning is among humanity’s finest achievements.” Desk jobs don’t seem so bad, afterall.
After farm work, we met up with Cyn, and went to Pho Tay Do for lunch. Still undefeated.
Met up with the guy I was trying to buy the used NX500 from. He was a total gentleman, and returned my deposit while the DMV continues holding his title hostage somewhere in the seventh circle of bureaucracy. Sure hope someone might someday get to own that bike.
Had a low-key Fourth get-together. Burgers, beers, and nobody lost a single appendage.
Did a tiny, slow Capital Trail bike ride with the gang Saturday morning, then followed it up with a trip to one of Richmond’s finest public pools. The pool was 95% good vibes and 5% genuine public health concern. Nothing like a quick dip punctuated by: “Hey, is that person overdosing?”
Really locking in that peak summer nostalgia, we re-watched Season 1 of Stranger Things

📝 Post June 29, 2025

Weeknotes 39

On Tuesday, we were invited to go watch the live filming of a local PBS gardening show, Virginia Home Grown, that our neighbor cohosts. It was really neat to see behind the scenes how a live tv production is made.
We’re close to ticking over 600 miles on the new bike, so preparing to do the first oil change. We rode down to Williamsburg today, and on the return trip got caught in a monster of a thunderstorm. Cyn and I both would’ve been less wet after jumping into a swimming pool. It kind of sucks riding in the rain, but once totally soaked, it sucks slightly less than you’d think.
Had a fun spousal cheese-related communication mishap. Context: Cynthia was making pesto.

Her: “Can you grate 3 or 4 cups of parmesan cheese?”
Me: “Dang! That’s a lot of cheese. You sure?”
Her: “Yup! I’m making a lot of pesto”
Me: “Ok then” <grates 3 cups of cheese>
Her: “Whoa! That’s a lot of cheese, man!”
Me: “Uh. Yea? You said 3 or 4 cups”
Her: “No! I said 3 of 4. Like 3 slash 4. How do you say that?”
We watched Squid Games S3. I don’t understand how the writing is so bad. I know it’s originally in Korean, and grant some room for translation silliness. But even the English-speaking characters’ lines are just so unbelievably cheesy. Like the Saw movies, it feels like so much of the success of Squid Games came from the initial shock factor. Then they just didn’t know what to do from then on, but plowed ahead anyway. Don’t recommend.
Edward Zitron’s essay titled Make Fun of Them is well worth a read.

A few gems:

“But Ed!” you cry. “You can’t just call Sam Altman an idiot! He isn’t stupid! He runs a big company, and he’s super successful!”

My counter to that is, first, yes I can, I’m doing it right now. Second, if Altman didn’t want to be called stupid, he wouldn’t say stupid shit with a straight face to a massive global audience.

Few things are more irritating than insisting Sam Altman is anything but a grifter. He’s a slightly less incoherent version of Donald Trump. It’s clear as day, he has no clue what he’s talking about. He is a con man, through and through.

[…] the reason the powerful sound like idiots is because, well, they’re idiots. They sound like Business Idiots and create products to sell to Business Idiots, because Business Idiots run most companies and buy solutions based on what the last Business Idiot told them.”

Ed goes on a bit from here, describing the monkey-see-monkey-do behavior anyone who’s worked in the tech industry has no doubt noticed. Fads must be followed. Why? Well… everyone else is doing it, and I want to look smart among my peers of business idiots, too!

The reality is far simpler: we have an industry that has spent nearly half a trillion dollars between its capital expenditures and venture capital funding to create another industry with the combined revenue of the fucking smartwatch industry. What I’m writing isn’t inflammatory — in fact, it’s far more deeply rooted in reality than those claiming that OpenAI is building the future.

Brutal.

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