lee.ourand.me: Posts

📝 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.

📝 Post June 22, 2025

Weeknotes 38

Fixed the busted washing machine. Here’s to hoping this pump lasts longer than the 10 months the last one made it.
Week 9 for the DMV title fixing process, and we finally heard back! Unfortunately, that message was one of rejection. The motorcycle was originally purchased in Michigan, and Michigan is where the title’s VIN was originally goofed up. So Virginia’s DMV requires Michigan to fix the title first, then re-submit the application.

So, this week, I officially bailed on trying to buy this bike. I’ve wasted 9 weeks of prime motorcyclin’ weather waiting for this, I’m not going to waste another 9.
So, relatedly, I bought a new motorcycle! Frustratingly, there aren’t many used NX500’s for sale, and I’m pretty much sold on acquiring one. So I bit the bullet, and got one new (2024 model) from a dealership a couple hours away. Got to put it to good use on a delayed Father’s Day ride with the whole fam’.
Mugello pizza + limoncello + affogato MotoGP party was a success. I tweaked the dough prep a little bit, and used a poolish I let ferment in the ‘fridge overnight. Not sure it made a noticeable difference flavor-wise. But it is maybe a bit more convenient timing-wise.
Guess that’s pretty much it. Not much else going on in the world this week, right?

📝 Post June 15, 2025

Weeknotes 37

What a week…
Cyn passed her real estate tests on her first try 🎉 I helped her study a bit, and the questions were written in some kind of bar-exam-meets James Joyce dialect, with quadruple negatives and the occasional logic trap. I can’t imagine sussing that mess out in a second language, but she managed to nail it. 我的老婆很聰明
Went to the No Kings march here in Richmond. Haven’t seen official numbers, but there must’ve been at least 12, maybe 13 billion people there. My favorite sign I saw:
You’re not going to believe it, but this week will be week 8 of waiting for the DMV to correct a motorcycle title with one missing 0. One of the things I was most looking forward to, when I bought this bike 8 weeks ago, was going on a Father’s Day motorcycle ride with my dad. Thanks for ruining that for us, DMV! If this new title isn’t hand-chiseled into a slab of granite, I’m going to be very upset.
Around 9 months ago, the pump on our washing machine died, and I got a new pump, and replaced it. That replacement pump just kicked the bucket, so I get to do it again.
Speaking of water-removal-apparatuses failing: our new dehumidifier arrived. I installed that bad-boy this week, and it hasn’t yet burst into flames or flooded the house. That feels like a small success! Considering how much cheaper it was than the last one, I’m now excited to find out whether I actually got a deal or a humbling betrayal awaits me.

🔗 Link June 09, 2025

Marines activated to deploy to Los Angeles amid ICE protests

Secretary of State Pete Hegseth said Saturday night he had placed Marines at Camp Pendleton — located south of Los Angeles — on “high alert,” and they would be sent into the city “if violence continues.”

Ah, yes. The classic “We’ll only crush dissent if they make us” play.

Fortunately for Hegseth (and his orange overlord), their base are the most gullible dipshits ever assembled. These are the people who think Seattle was burned to the ground and that Antifa has an HR department. Never mind that Trump and Company have been very open about their intent to manufacture an excuse to use The Insurrection Act. The only way this would’ve been more predictable is if it was a scheduled event.

📝 Post June 08, 2025

Weeknotes 36

Entering week 7 of waiting on the DMV to correct the single missing 0 on the title of the motorcycle I’m buying. An entire government agency stumped by a single digit.
After reading Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts, I figured it was time to give the ol’ “vibe coding” a try. I spent a couple hours just goofing around with Zed’s offering. While it’s impressive at times (e.g., it was dropping debug statements like it knew what was up), it pretty quickly painted itself into a corner. Maybe there’s a better order of operations for “prompt engineering” that would’ve avoided this outcome? I’m not sure. My belief remains: it was neat to watch, but I probably wouldn’t choose to build software this way today.
Played pickleball on Thursday. Played some doubles with a random older couple we bumped into there. They completely dusted us, 11-0. Very humbling!
Some schmuck has been digging up / stealing plants from the community garden I’ve been volunteering at. Going to help the owner get a security camera system up and running this week, hopefully. Imagine getting caught on tape committing plant theft.
Started the limoncello steepin’ process, so we’ll be properly ready for Mugello GP in a couple weeks.
Cruised out to Ashland to check out their strawberry festival. I hadn’t been to Ashland since college. Forgot what a cute little town it is, and the strawberry fest was a surprisingly big event.
I finally pulled up the lone carrot that’s been growing in our garden, and it looks like one of the space carrots from that one Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Still waiting on some full-throated Happy Gilmore style apologies from the very “moderate” Trump experts who confidently assured me none of what’s now happening would happen. Should be coming any moment now. I’m holding my breath in anticipation!

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