lee.ourand.me: Posts

📝 Post August 24, 2025

Weeknotes 47

Continued the gym streak. And tacked on a bonus exercise-related streak of running at least 1 mile every day this week. Yes, a mile. The bar is low, but this bar is mine.
Listed my old espresso machine on eBay, and people are actually bidding. Which means this espresso machine swaparoo might end with me ahead financially. Rarely in life do you replace a complicated hobby with a slightly less complicated hobby and make money. Feels like I’ve figured out adulthood.
Had another farm / food pantry assistin’ day. We harvested and donated 130lbs of veggies. This haul was mostly tomatoes, but also basil, and bell peppers.
Finished reading Tiny Experiments. I loved it. I’ll be putting some of its hot tips to use. It just happens to line up nicely with where I’m at in life. Not sure I’d generally recommend it. But if you have an abundance of free time, and you’re in the right headspace to enjoy it, it’s a good read.
Cyn and I went to the Richmonder Taiwanese summer event, and ate some Baobing (刨冰)—a chaotic mound of shaved ice, fruit, beans, tofu, taro, and whatever fits in the bowl. It’s like a dessert version of a flea market. Saw some familiar faces, met some new faces, and once again, got to impress people whose exceptionally low expectations match perfectly with my very limited Mandarin skills.

📝 Post August 17, 2025

Weeknotes 46

Last week I failed my 3-times-a-week gym goal, but this week, I succeeded. To the doubters, the haters, and the so-called “friends” who doubted me: eat it.
For no particular reason, I watched Civil War. Nothing like relaxing with a fun, lighthearted dystopia about America tearing itself apart.
Finished reading Project Hail Mary. It’s like The Martian, but with aliens. Andy Weir knows how to write a fun book. I think think one will translate to film a lot better.
After manually pulling espresso shots on my Flair espresso machine(s) about every day for about the last 5 years, I’ve decided to become slightly lazier, and acquired a Gaggia Classic Pro. Going to sell all my Flair-related gadgets, and think it’ll be about a wash, financially speaking. But ridding myself of the early morning stress of managing a potential pressure cooker bomb that is my milk steamer feels like a very zen decision.
Didn’t renew Claude Code. According to ccusage, I burned through $1,041 worth of tokens, paid $100. Pretty sure Anthropic is subsidizing my lattes at this point.
Volunteered at the food pantry again. It’s a mostly Taiwanese group that runs this thing, so it’s a nice chance to practice my Mandarin. By “practice” I mean “butcher their language while they politely smile.”
Our pumpkin patch is going bananas. There are vines creeping in every direction, and a billion flowers blooming and subsequently falling off. After conducting some research trying to understand what’s happening, I learned that they’re apparently all male flowers. So right now I’ve got the pumpkin equivalent of a men’s rights rally hosted in my backyard.

📝 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.

📝 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.

📝 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.

📝 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!

📝 Post June 01, 2025

Weeknotes 35

Took a little hiking trip out to Shenandoah National Park for the first time since Cynthia’s knee started having issues. Overheard some random dude there explaining to his ~5 year old son that “actually, if a baby fell from this cliff, they might just survive. See, they’d reach terminal velocity pretty quickly, then probably fall into a tree. There was a story about a baby falling 15 stories in NYC, and…”. Who among us hasn’t bonded with our fathers over what scenarios would and would not kill an infant?
A few short months since the last Richmond water crisis, we had another one this week. Fortunately, this one only lasted 3 days. This is, of course, ignoring the whole “oops, we forgot to fluorinate the water” and the “oops, we accidentally dramatically over-fluorinated the water” fiascos.
Speaking of Richmond water projects: the construction project on the sewer line on our block officially goes into its 4th month.
Speaking of slow Richmond government projects: the work of fixing the single missing “0” on the VIN number on my pending motorcycle’s title continues into its 6th week.
Acquired the first of my motorcycle gear: got a helmet and some glovies.
Yanked our dehumidifier out of the crawlspace (pain in the neck) and tested it out a bit with some breathing room. Confirmed it’s dead. Think all the refrigerant leaked out somehow. Of course, it’s just out of warranty, so we need to get a new one. Ordered a relatively cheap guy that seems to be well-regarded. Seems like lots of folks have problems with the model we have now.
🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month to all you Pride Month celebrators. Know that this particular mediocre cishet white dude is in your corner. ❤️

📝 Post May 25, 2025

Weeknotes 34

Our crawlspace dehumidifier seems to have kicked the bucket. I first thought maybe the filter was too clogged, and that was causing the coils to freeze. But after replacing the filter, giving it a couple hours to rest, and re-starting the thing, it still ran at full tilt, doing precisely nothing. It’s far too cramped down there to do any real troubleshooting, so next step is to yank it out, and see if I can figure out what’s wrong.
Our three-year wedding anniversary was on Tuesday. ❤️ Did our traditional Mexican lunch feast at our new favorite local Mexican joint.
More farm work this week. This time we put down a bunch of lime to try to boost the soil’s pH from its current ridiculous three-point-something level.
The motorcycle titling fix wait continues. Going on week 5 now… It’s one missing zero, Michael, how long could it take?
Went ahead and acquired a helmet and gloves for this still-anticipitory motorcycle.
Silverstone GP weekend 🇬🇧. Wild races all around. Poor Quartararo’s ride height device giving out while he had a ~5 second lead is one of the crueller outcomes we’ve seen.
Dan Sinker’s latest The Who Cares Era is so good.

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

Go give it a read if you haven’t already.

📝 Post May 18, 2025

Weeknotes 33

Started the week off with a bang by going to the dentist. My cavity-free streak continues, and my tongue has some smoother surfaces to rub against.
Hosted a little game night, and played some good old fashioned Pictionary. Few inconsequential things in life demonstrate how poorly most people’s brains function under pressure than Pictionary. I repeatedly failed to guess the most obvious drawings imagineable. And I wasn’t exactly unique.
Got an update on the DMV title fixing situation for the motorcycle I’m buying. We got off to a real rough start, with the USPS apparently taking 9 days to deliver the paperwork from Charlottesville, VA to Richmond, VA. The wait continues. In the mean time, I bought some Zenni glasses, which were delivered, presumably from China, in about 5 days. We live in incredible times!
Went to our first Flying Squirrels game of the year, which was Squirreltoberfest themed for some reason. Drank a beer. Ate some squirrely-fries. Had a real nice time.
Raced in the second annual Gaycathlon as the formidable “green team”. Results-wise, let’s just say we got neither first nor last. But we raised a little money for a good cause and had a silly time doing it.
Got a bunch of rain this week, which thankfully topped off our empty rain barrel. Free water for the garden is once again plentiful!

📝 Post May 11, 2025

Weeknotes 32

More pickleballin’ this week. Won 3 of the 7 games I played. I’m getting better, slowly, apparently!
After spending way too much time thinking about motorcycle helmets, think I’ve landed on what I’m going to get: the LS2 Advant X. It’s one of only a handful of helmets sold in the U.S. with both DOT and ECE 22.06 safety standards.
And now I’ve moved onto overthinking other motorcycle safety gear: gloves, jacket, pants, boots, and learning about CE ratings for motorcycle garments.
Did some more farm working this week. Primarily helped till up the soil where the rows will soon go.
Our magnolia tree has begun its spring time leaf dropping. Magnolia trees go onto my list of things to avoid whenever our next housing search happens.
Le Mans MotoGP week. I did some French baking for the occasion, making some baguettes and some macarons. Baguettes are comparatively easy peasy. Those macarons were about a 7/10 pain in the neck. The French gods apparently saw fit to reward my dedication with the first French MotoGP race winner since 1974!

📝 Post May 04, 2025

Weeknotes 31

Started motorcycle helmet shopping / researching. This is another one of those areas where the U.S. regulations seem comically inadequate when compared to most other developed counties. Europe’s ECE certification seems much more legit than the U.S.’s self-certified DOT rating. The U.K. even publishes how every helmet fared in their testing. One nice thing about these ratings is that in dispels the common “knowledge” that more $$$ = more safety. Some of the safest helmets on this list cost ~10% of their Shoei and Arai counterparts. Unfortunately, this seems almost unknowable for the U.S. market.
Did a little more farm work this week. We put up a fence. And I only cut myself on the freshly-cut garden fencing once. That stuff is as sharp as it is unwieldy.
New driver’s license arrived in the mail. Everything looks good this time. 🎉
Downloaded and played through the new Raptor Cliff’s course in Walkabout Mini Golf. Enjoyed this one a lot more than their last installment. It’d been long enough since I last played, my VR nasuea returned toward the end of the course.
The running progress continues. It’s getting warm enough, that it doesn’t feel like I’m actually progressing much. My Apple Watch VO2 max calculation assures me I’m getting slightly better.
Voted in the Democratic Primary for VA’s next Lt. Governor, Attorney General, and all that. It’s remarkable how little information lots of these candidates put on their election websites. Most of the sites I visited basically were just lists of kind of braggy personal accomplishments, and absolutely no mention of policy positions or priorities they’d like to tackle in the jobs they’re ostensibly trying to get.
Watched my first F1 race in a long time at Väsen. As it always seems to do, it reminds me how much more enjoyable MotoGP is in virtually every way. I just don’t understand the popularity discrepancy.

📝 Post April 27, 2025

Weeknotes 30

Went to the DMV on Monday to fix up the litany of mistakes they made the last time I renewed my license. Address fixed, organ donation status restored, and class M motorcycle license is back, baby!
I (kind of) bought a bike! Found an NX500 for sale in Charlottesville. Went to check it out, and it’s, indeed, sweet. Continuing my DMV issues, we noticed the VIN on the title is missing a digit. (Aside: my inner computer programmer is screaming. How are there no validations on VIN numbers at the DMV, which are always 17 digits long?) So, I put a deposit down, and the seller’s working on getting that mess straightened out.
Spent some time re-organizing our shed to make room for this impending motorcycle ownership. It’s downright roomy now!
Our fence is beginning to show some signs of aging. So thought it’d be a good idea to stain it to protect it from the elements a bit. Just winged it, and bought a couple gallons of stain, and went to work. Burned through those 2 gallons after staining about 10% of the fence. Did some math to figure out how much stain I’d need to complete the whole thing, and it’d cost more than replacing all the fence pickets with better quality pickets. New strategy: let it go! I’ll just replace it after it looks sufficiently horrible.
MotoGP race at Jerez this weekend. Quartararo got pole position, and managed an incredible 2nd place finish in the race today. More of this, please. Having 6 Ducatis in the top 6 is getting very old.

📝 Post April 20, 2025

Weeknotes 29

Spent a little time playing around with the MASH stack. Still very much learning the basics of Axum (and everything else in the stack, for that matter). It’s obviously very less “batteries included” than Rails. But it’s got some neat features that suit Rust quite nicely. The with_state function pairs up with Extractors in such a simple way. I’m impressed!
Upping my running mileage somewhat. Up to ~10k distance this week. Progress is slow, but these legs are returning to form bit by bit.
Finally completed my porch renovation project with a hefty dose of help from my dad. It’s comically over-engineered, but if a tornado ever strikes, our porch is going nowhere. This is the sturdiest porch east of the Mississippi.
Speaking of my dad, he just acquired a new motorcycle, which I gave a spin. For whatever reason, it re-ignited my need to have a bike. I haven’t owned a motorcycle since ~2011. So this coming week’s projects include: fixing a DMV snafu that resulted in my class “M” motorcycle license vanishing from my license on my last renewal, and potentially acquiring a bike. Currently eyeballing the Honda NX500.

📝 Post April 13, 2025

Weeknotes 28

Did the White Lotus binge watch catchup this week. It was my least favorite season thus far. The “big twist” was very predictable. The Chekov’s gun situation with the poisonous fruit felt overly goofy. It was all just fine.
Watched Eddie Burback’s I hate my phone so I got rid of it. It’s a tale you’ve probably heard a thousand times: person stops using their cellphone so much, and is happier. But, the video’s well done, and inspired at least a temporary reduction in my phone staring behavior this week.
Stumbled upon Manet music app—a really well done iOS (and Mac) app for streaming music from a Jellyfin server. I’ve been increasingly trying to self-host as much SaaS type junk as I can. Spotify / Apple Music had been kind of hard to replace, at least on iOS. Manet seems to do the trick—it even has CarPlay support! Only thing missing now is an Apple Watch app, so I can listen to music without my phone again.
Been helping out on some spring cleaning at the little community farm down the street from me. Met some other dilettante gardeners, young and old. Nice way to get in a little exercise, learn some things, meet some folks, and if I’m lucky, do a little good for somebody.
More plant transplantations: all our lettuce is out livin’ full time in the raised beds.

📝 Post April 06, 2025

Weeknotes 27

Stove Minivan

Happy April
My daily double squirt of Flonase is completely outgunned by the rolling hills of pollen outside. This—among other current events—sucks, man.
Taxes: filed! I’d been putting this task off because of all the what have you. But turns out, I apparently way overpaid federal taxes last year. Who’da guessed overpaying income taxes would be the best investment returns goin’ right now?
Trying to get back into some semblance of running shape. Ran a few 5K’s this week at an easy party pace. It’s always surprising to rediscover how much easier runs feel when it’s 60 degrees than when it’s over 80.
I caved and paid our ridiculously over-appraised property taxes.
Biru decided to give anorexia a brief try. After a couple days of her basically eating nothing, we took her to the vet to get checked out. Got blood tests, poop tests, urine tests done. Surprise surprise, the very next day she’s back to normal, and all the tests come back fine.
Stumbled upon this excellent essay by A.R. Moxon: One About The Atmosphere. After recently ending conversations with a few “Stove Minivans” from my life, this really hit home. I wish I’d read it earlier.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier. He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance; a group of people who leapt at that invitation, and cling to it to this day, no matter what happens, immune to proof; a constituency who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning in which they demand to sit, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And, crucially, when you discover that somebody isn’t open to persuasion, leave them. Leave it. Engaging with that elevates them into the sphere of people who deserve to be taken seriously, and their ideas into the sphere of things that merit debate. Even worse, it sharpens their dull knives for them. Worst of all, it wastes your precious time.

📝 Post March 30, 2025

Weeknotes 26

Mai mai

The city is apparently replacing the sewer lines on our street. It’s been a noisy week. Looks like work continues into, at least, next week as well.
I got landsharked for the first time in a long time. I joined a couple neighbors to help clean up our 90-year-old neighbor’s yard. While slingin’ grass seed, a suited gentleman approached, and started talking about how Jesus’s death day is his favorite holiday, and that 60% of the information on the internet is false, actually! Fascinating stuff. I stood there like an idiot and let him do his thing for entirely too long. Hardly the first time I’ve had such an interaction, but they happen infrequently enough that I can’t help but be dumbfounded that it’s actually happening.
Speaking of lawncare and sewer line construction: one of the construction workers—while on his lunch break—randomly walked over, picked up a rake, and started helping us clean up our neighbor’s yard. There’s some good eggs out there!
Finished binge watching Severance Season 2. Really excellent overall. It got a little Lost-like there in the middle, which worried me a bit about how it’d progress from there. But they did a solid job focusing things back up for the last few episodes. Hoping we don’t have to wait another 3 years for the next installment.
On the topic of potatoing, we also watched the classic: Being John Malkovich. What an incredibly funny premise for a movie. And John Malkovich might just be the best sport of all time for going along with a movie that just relentlessly mocks him. 10/10
Hosted my biggest pizza party to date. Cranked out 10 pizzas on my little 12” Ooni Koda. That’s probably about the limit for me. The last couple pizzas I made were entering overproof territory, and were a little cumbersome to work with.
Mandarin learning complaint: I actually learned this one a couple weeks ago, but what the hell: I’ll complain about it now. 賣(Mài) means “to sell”. 買(Mǎi) means “to buy”. So like… not only do these words sound almost exactly the same, their hanzi characters look very similar, and they mean the opposite things, and they’re used in the same contexts. Brutal!
Stumbled upon the MASH stack this week. Checks a lot of boxes for me. Will have to come up with a dumb project to build to gently kick the tires.

📝 Post March 23, 2025

Weeknotes 25

We rewatched Season 1 of Severance in preparation of binging Season 2. I’d forgotten a bunch over that 3 year span.
Finished reading Shop Class as Soulcraft. It started out promising, and a lot of the talk about physical work being more satisfying than “thought work” resonated with me. Crawford’s description of office politics and white collar office work processes and bureaucracy was as hilarious as it was apt. But the book just went on way too long, and he gave himself a bit too much rope to hang himself with, really devolving into that gross grey tribe politics. Lots of misogyny, “both sides bad”, and self-indulgent rationalizations for why his life choices were good, actually. If you’re going to read it, just do yourself a favor, and drop it at the halfway point.
I’ve been spending far too much time emailing some cog-in-the-machine of Virginia’s property tax department, trying to understand how they’re valuing my car $5,000 more than what I paid for it. They claim to use J.D. Power estimates, and I’ve shown the J.D. Power estimate for the car is almost exactly what I paid for the car. Still they insist, without evidence, it’s actually worth $5,000 more. The fight will go on, but I suspect I will somehow lose. This is double annoying because in Virginia, you’re also taxed extra for having a fuel-efficient or EV vehicle. You try to do the right thing, and…
Played a bunch more pickleball this week. Tried out the courts at Forest Hill park, which are a heck of a lot closer, but also significatly more crowded (and maybe less friendly?).
I walk by this park all the time, but somehow had missed the gigantic Michael Jordan portrait on the basketball court until this week. Check out this bad-boy from space
Went to Stone Brewing for a little afternoon warm day boozin’. They have a PB&J Berliner Weisse that tastes like you’re drinking a PB&J. It’s as weird as it sounds, and ‘round about delicious as it is weird. Will get again.
The U.S. MotoGP race is next week (in Austin), so folks will start tricklin’ into the states over the next couple days. Wonder if they’ll even hold a U.S. race next year, given the risky travel it now requires.

📝 Post March 16, 2025

Famed Pincher

Finished reading The Courage To Be Disliked per a Justin Searls recommendation. It’s a very odd format, where the whole book is basically the dialogue between a student and a adlerian philosopher. This was my first exposure to Adler. Much of it feels dismissive of people’s problems—unempathetic, maybe?! But it’s an interesting angle, nonetheless. It caused me to do a little reflection on my own thought-patterns. Too early to tell if any lasting good will come from it.
Once again obliterated my feet attempting to not get killed—and failing–in pickleball. I’ve acquired new shoes, so hopefully we can put this painful saga behind us.
Made a new bud at the pickle ball courts. He’s from China originally, so I utilized a few of my recently learned Chinese words to tell him: 我會説中文一點點 (“I can speak a little Chinese!”). He (very generously) said I pronounced it perfectly. I left the Chinese speaking there, so as to not embarrass myself any further.
Neat week for the stock market, eh? It looks like I’ve pretty much nailed the worst possible timing for quitting work. This retirement thing may be rather short lived.
Hosted a little pizza party for Pi Day. Cooked up 6 pizzas on the Ooni. Used my 50/50 bread flour/00 flour @ 70% hydration recipe, and it came out just perfectly. Won’t change a thing next time.
Celebrated St. Patrick—famed pincher and drinker of green beer—at Jess’s. He cooked up a meddley of Irish-themed fare, plus a couple Irish Coffees (or, as they call them in Ireland: coffees).
MotoGP round 2 is in the books. Another Marquez brothers demolition job. I know it’s probably going to get old quick if it’s anything like many of Marc’s pre-2020 seasons. But for now, I’m happily cheering it on.

📝 Post March 09, 2025

Pickly Feet

Marc Marquez is undisputedly back! Unfortunately, that probably means a boring 2025 MotoGP season awaits us. But what an incredible comeback story this could be.
Foolishly played a couple hours of Pickle Ball on Thursday in my old beat up Vans Authentic shoes, resulting in some gnarly foot blisters. Oops. Lesson learned there! Proper footwear: important.
While we’re on the topic of pickle ball, I acquired my very own set of pickle ball ~~racquets~~ paddles. Sad to report, I still absolutely suck. But I did win two games (of probably 30) this week. So you could say things are improving.
National Pancake Day: the second round.
Some days, it feels like learning Mandarin to a useful degree is just unrealistic. Other days, it really feels like things are clicking. Yesterday—after finally understanding how to use 了—felt like the latter. 真在我學中文很好.
Remade the same eggplant dish I made a couple weeks back, but cut out all the funny business: no pre-salting, no deep frying. About a bajillion times easier, and it came out every bit as good.
Migrated our onion sets out to the raised bed garden. Fingers cross’t for no more frost. 🤞

📝 Post March 02, 2025

Pickle Points

Feels like approximately the 3rd most cliché activity to pick up, but I started playing pickleball this week. Out of the roughly 72 games I’ve played, I’ve won one (playing doubles where I may or may not have been carried). Fun little goofy game, though. I’m enjoyin’ it.
In our last installment, I incorrectly stated the date of National Pancake Day. It’s actually this Tuesday. Oops!
This week I learned the Chinese word for “movie” is 電影(diànyǐng), which literally means “electric shadow”. I don’t know about you, but I think that is one badass way to describe a movie.
I put my long-neglected bicycle to use this week, and went on a nice (slow) ride up to Bryan Park and around the Bellevue neighborhood.
I have no idea what I’ve done wrong, but the huge majority of my plant babies are struuuuuuuuggling. I think only maybe like 5% of them are going to make it. Arugula: rough. Jalapenos: rough. Tomatoes: rough. Bell peppers… lookin’ good!
First MotoGP race of the season! Haven’t seen the race as of writing this, but thus far, Marquez looks like he’s back to his old completely-destroy-everyone-else ways. Usually I’m an underdog fan, but after all the shit this dude’s been through the past 6 years, I couldn’t be happier to see him back to his winning ways.
Trying to avoid too much political commentary here, but I can’t believe how embarrassed I feel after seeing how those clowns spoke to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦

📝 Post February 23, 2025

Extremely Clean

I’ve gotten a bit spoiled already, and pretty much can’t stand going anywhere during peak hours when John Q. Public is off work. I forgot Monday was a federal holiday, and went to a local cafe to get a little afternoon coffee with Cynthia until we saw the crowd. We noped out of there, and I made some fancy coffees at home instead. <insert some pithy line about voters’ economic anxiety>
I migrated the bell pepper seeds to sit on top of the refrigerator, thinking some heat may help ‘em sprout. It worked! Looks like we’ll be swimming in bell peppers by the summer as planned.
Went to a freshly constructed library near us just to get out of the house. I tinkered around with Loco for a bit while there.
More snow! I’m really just over it, man.
I’ve been using *nix systems of some type or another since the aughts. And I just learned that you can do string substitution in parameter expansion. I used this the other day to rename a bunch of files. It looks like this:
```
for file in some*.files
do
  mv $file ${file//replace_me/with_this}
done
```
Very handy!
My relationship with the HelloChinese app has reached the state where it’s comfortable straight lying to me:
Important reminder: 🗓️Pancake Day is Tuesday. Don’t forget to… well, you know the drill 🥞
Finally paid my dues for Jess’s 2024 MotoGP Video Game championship dinner + drinks deal. He doesn’t read this blog, so I can be honest: he whipped my ass this year. If you are reading this, Jess: fuck you.
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there have been an upsetting number of sieg heils flying about lately…

📝 Post February 16, 2025

Sprouting

Duolingo’s out. Hello Chinese is in. Duolingo is fine. But after trying out the free version of Hello Chinese for a bit, it’s very clearly a superior product. They have actual audio (and video) of native speakers as opposed to the standard robot Duolingo voices. They support Traditional Hanzi, Duolingo doesn’t. They have a lot more explanations (e.g., Chinese speakers don’t actually say 你好嗎 (Nǐ hǎo ma / roughly “how are you?”), which is a phrase Duolingo generically teaches). And Hello Chinese quickly gets you reading stories / testing your comprehension, which has been cool. I’m reading like preschool-level “Peter likes coffee. Susan doesn’t like coffee. Peter doesn’t like bread. Susan likes fruit juice.” stories, but at least it’s something!
The veggie seeds have sprouted! Well, most of ‘em. The bell peppers are pretty stubborn. Everything else is off to the races.
Cooked up this eggplant parm recipe for Valentines Day din din. The salt / dehydration step along with deep frying made it 7/10 on the pain-in-hindquarters scale, but I’d be lying if I said those ‘plants didn’t come out real tasty. Made tiramisu for dessert. Cynthia’s an honorary Italian—those are her fav foods. Which, for what it’s worth, ‘Italian’ is one of the approximately 14 Mandarin words I can speak with any confidence. 她是義大利人!
Week of crappy weather… I guess it got to me. Slow week. Not much else to report.

📝 Post February 09, 2025

Tones

Making me say dumb shit more frequently than usual!

Learning Mandarin is hard, man:

是一点（shì yī diǎn): it’s one o’clock
十一点（shí yī diǎn): eleven o’clock

Understanding these tones is not coming easily.
Started growing some veggies indoors in preparation for the Spring. We’ve got some onions, bell peppers, arugula, two types of tomatoes, and jalapenos going for now.
The boards on our front porch have been getting a bit gnarled and wobbly. Most of the nails have totally rusted out, so they’re held together by approximately nothing. My dad came and helped me disassemble it. In doing so, we discovered: 1. there’s another porch under our porch, made of concrete. It’s in extremely awful shape, and is crumbling apart. I assume it’s probably made of reinforced concrete, and all the steel inside is rusting and falling apart and 2. the “new” porch is some fairly shoddy worksmanship. Anyway—the next house project is to figure out how to securely fasten our “new” wood porch joists to the slab of concrete underneath. We did successfully remove all the rusty nails, and replace ‘em with a handful of screws until we figure out how to do phase 2 reasonably well.
Speaking of Rust, I’m resuming my Rust (we’re talking the programming language this time) education, a bit. I cruised through the rustlings exercises, which were an excellent intro to all the things that make Rust a bit unusual. I feel like I can move forward moderately confidently with all borrow checking, lifetiming, and Arc<Box<dyn Thing>>ing now.
Trying to pay less attention to political news. But holy moly, what a week. The “this is fine” meme feels woefully insufficient to describe our situation.

📝 Post February 02, 2025

Groundhog

Even he's not feelin' too optimistic about this year

Welcome back. And Happy Groundhog Day
We’ve officially expanded our gardening operation by a whopping 50% (went from 2 to 3 raised beds). I carved up our Christmas tree and tossed it in the bottom of the raised bed to make a Hügelkultur type thing. Emptied out one side of our compost tumbler to fill out most of the rest, and topped it off with some top soil we had layin’ around.
Went on a not-quite-a-hike around Maymont yesterday, and enjoyed the relatively lovely weather.
We attempted to begin a Star Wars movie extravaganza this weekend. But the Mandarin subtitles I was able to find from OpenSubtitles are all kinds of a mess. George Lucas’s fascination with adding random cut scenes to the various editions of his movies really goofs up one’s ability to find decent subtitles. After the 7th adjustment, where we had to offset the subtitles by over 2 minutes, we just gave up.
Speaking of Mandarin, I’ve resumed my Duolingo Mandarin practice. I just got to the first section where I practice writing Hanzi. It’s damn hard to remember the direction / order to draw each stroke of each character. I can’t figure out the “rule” beyond ~roughly: left → right / top → bottom. Hoping it eventually sinks in, but at this still early moment, it feels like a borderline hopeless exercise.
I made Taiwanese Sticky Rice(油飯) for dinner on Thursday as a belated Lunar New Year treat. It came out decently well for a first attempt. The recipe I followed had you make fried shallots, then add them to the rice, then steam the rice. So it completely destroyed the delicate delicious little crunchy onion bastards. That seems like a mistake. Will make some adjustments next time.
To deal with the whole Prius battery dilemma, I just bought a new AGM battery from Costco. Popped that thing in (again, what a pain in the butt, Toyota!), it just worked. Good as new. I had my dad pop the old battery on his trickle charger for a day to see if it would still hold a charge. It appears it does! So now I’ve got a spare 12V battery I need to find a use for. Solar powered rain barrel pump project? Powered fence gate opener mechanism? The possibilities are endless!

📝 Post January 26, 2025

Double Zero

I declared victory too early for the battery dingus. That 12V battery seems to be toast now. I can get the car running, but the main display panel–which includes the speedometer–doesn’t turn on.
The pizza dorks on the /r/pizza subreddit seem to mostly use 00 flour for their pizza dough. I’d avoided buying that mess beacuse I’m cheap and it’s way more expensive than regular bread flour or all-purpose flour. I expected (hoped) there to be no noticeable difference. But I finally got around to giving it a try, and made “proper” 00 flour pizzas last night. It made a big difference. Best pizza I’ve ever made. Sonofa…
Not even one full week into whatever the hell this is, and I’m tired, boss.
I learned about the
Details & Summary HTML Tags
No idea how long these've been a thing. But pretty cool.
Lunar New Year this week. 新年快樂, y’all.

📝 Post January 19, 2025

Detour

Week 1 of unemployment is in the books! I (kind of?) stuck to my exercise regimen and signed up for my first Habitat for Humanity gig this week (there’s shockingly little need for volunteers right now).
In a surprise to no one, Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities Director has “resigned” after that whole water debacle.
My YMCAing idea didn’t quite go to plan. Between the random dude hanging out in the locker room singing about Jesus, the lone squat rack, and how crowded it still was at 10:30am, I just couldn’t be bothered to return after the first day. Instead, I picked up a set of adjustable dumbbells, and will just work with those until I’m in shape enough to need to lift something more substantial.
All this cold weather has apparently gotten to our mostly neglected Prius. The 12V battery has crapped out. Even if we had jumper cables (we don’t), apparently you’re not supposed to jump cars from the Bolt. So I picked up a portable battery jumper dingus. No thanks to Toyota’s extremely annoying design decisions*, it did ultimately do the trick, and the Prius runs once again.

* 1. You cannot open the trunk from outside the car if the battery is dead. So you have to climb into the trunk, remove the carpet, spare tire compartment, etc., stick your finger into a little hole to access a tiny lever to manually pop the trunk. 2. The battery is then inside a little compartment that also requires entirely too much fiddling to expose. And 3., the positive terminal is covered by this extremely fiddly red plastic shield that took like 10 minutes to figure out how to remove without breaking it. Most things on most Toyotas are usually very easy to work on. They must’ve outsourced the 12V battery system to a BMW engineer or something. Not a pleasant experience!
Hold onto your butts. Gonna be a hell of a week ahead.

📝 Post January 12, 2025

Well that about does 'er

Wraps 'er all up

After last week’s snow, Richmond’s water system was knocked completely out. Water utilities are one of those things that receive zero fanfare, and are just kind of taken for granted. Looks like, Richmond’s had been neglected for a long time, including being headed by a wholly unqualitified University of Phoenix grad with zero engineering background. Wild. Hoping this kickstarts some much needed infrastructure investment in this city (and removing lots of past nepotism hires).
Friday was my last day of work. We made it. Wrapping up this 13 year early retirement project feels less significant than I’d expected.
Signed up for the YMCA in preparation for gym session #1 tomorrow
Cynthia and I were pushing the limits of our 200GB Family iCloud storage plan. I took that as a challenge to figure out an alternative to paying Apple a relatively absurd $11per month for the next storage tier. I wound up installing Immich on our NAS. It’s an aboslute delight so far! Really, it’s a nice piece of software. The web app is much more feature-rich and faster than Apple’s own iCloud Photos web app. The mobile app is roughly equivalent to Apple’s.

Hot tip for anyone attempting something similar: the Immich iOS app allows you to set an internal server address when your phone is on the same network as the server. Do this. It makes photo uploads much faster than having to go out over the internet.
We went to watch the VCU women’s basketball game. Close game and VCU came out the victors.

📝 Post January 05, 2025

Callin' It Quits

As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve got a big life change taking place this week. Tomorrow I’ll quit my (hopefully) last job ever. I’m dippin’ my toes into this early retirement thing I’ve been working towards over the past ~13 years or so. Right now, it feels a bit anticlimactic, if I’m being honest. Hopefully the significance sinks in in a good way in the coming weeks.

As of now, my plans are to take 3 months, and do 3 things:
1. Sign up for the YMCA, and make going to the gym my new job.
2. Volunteer a bunch at Habitat for Humanity.
3. Otherwise, Peter Gibbons it up (in the “do nothing” sense, not the back-dooring my previous employer sense). Massively-reduced screen time is the goal here.
After that, I’ve got a million things I want to do, and I trust my curiosity will take me somewhere fun. We’ll figure all that out when the time comes. For now: a little bit of a reset is in order.
IT’S SNOWING, IT’S SNOWING…
Squid Games season 2 is straight traaaaaash. The whole premise borders on idiotic. And the rapper character is insufferably corny. Then on the final episode, it… kind of just ends in the middle of things. Not like a cliffhanger ending, really. Just a “wait. What?” type of ending. Bizarre.
What’s the “Happy New Year” statute of limitations? I think we’re still safe. Happy New Year
I forget how I even stumbled upon it, but this LiveViewNative platform seems super-neat. Instead of the typical web view style (a la Turbo Native), this is actually rendering SwiftUI components from a Phoenix server. There are obviously tradeoffs in doing things this way (e.g., you still have to write separate views for each client: web, iOS, android, watch, etc.) But it’s a totally valid option for “easy” native mobile apps that I didn’t know existed.

📝 Post December 15, 2024

Goofy Gravity Golfing

I got a notification that the coffee for The Decaf Project was delivered successfully to a P.O. box. I don’t have a P.O. box, so that was odd. After reaching out to the fine folks at Reserva, they confirmed they’d shipped it to my actual address, so it was a USPS mistake, but they decided to ship out a second set super-quickly. Just got the coffee this weekend, and it’s fantastic. Also really cool to try side-by-side coffees that have been decaffeinated using different processes. Cynthia and I both enjoyed the one decaffeinated via CO2 Subcritical Decaffeination. Our least favorite, sadly, was the Swiss Water process, which I was kind of hoping to like, since it seemed the simplest. But the taste buds felt differently.
Walkabout Mini Golf is just a treasure. I’ve been playing a decent bit, and my first pass through any course, I just have a dumb smile plastered on my face. I just wrapped up playing the Upside Town course vs Jess, and it was nonstop laughs. Some really clever design, fully taking advantage of the VR medium.
Spent some time battling a super-slow MySQL query at work. Turns out (at least in this case?), MySQL sucks at ORing things, and can handle UNIONing things just fine. So… there you go. Hot tip du jour.
Made some big decisions that I’m not quite ready to share yet, but I’m nonetheless excited about.
Baked my first sourdough in a while. My scoring could use some work, but otherwise, it came out pretty great.

📝 Post December 08, 2024

Preparing to Chug a Bunch of Decaf

For Science!

Remembered I had a handful of smart plugs I wasn’t using, so plugged the new Christmas tree lights into one of those bad-boys, and we’re now scheduled.
As predicted, I fell off the Advent of Code exercises pretty quick. But I got through ~5 of ‘em, including this masterpiece of ugliness! Don’t judge me, I’m just embracing that whole worse is better idea.
My comfort in the Metaverse has increased substantially this week! Upgraded the Quest with some shiny new Zenni lenses so I can see spectacle-free and a new head strap that’s miles better than the cheap dingus Meta sells the thing with.
Met up with some friends for brunch and boozin’ on Saturday. The brewery we wound up at happens to also stock Uncool non-alcoholic beers. It was my first exposure to them, and I gotta say: I like the branding. And the beer was actually pretty decent too, as far as N/A beers go, anyway.
Ordered up my tasting kit for the The Decaf Project and ready to compare the results from these decaffeination methods.

📝 Post December 01, 2024

Giving Thanks

I read on Reddit that Target had printed some incorrect discount codes on the Meta Quest3. I asked Cynthia to go check it out. Our local Target had apparently already corrected the error. But somehow, Cynthia still walked out of there with a 30% discounted Quest3. So, say hello to a new citizen of the metaverse or whatever.
This KTM fiasco just keeps looking more grim by the day. Hard to take anything they officially say seriously, either, given their long history of being extremely dishonest.
Advent of Code has begun. Sticking to my Go theme, I’m attempting at least some of ‘em in Go. Working in other languages always makes me realize how spoiled us Rubyists really are. Example I found today: in Go, the absolute value function only works on Floats. So if you want to get the absolute value of an integer, you either have to write your own function (no biggie, but.. y’know) or convert your int to a float, call the function, then convert it back to an int again. Little things like this can sometimes make Go feel borderline anemic.
Black Friday shoppers spent a record $10.8 Billion. Isn’t that crazy? Because less than a month ago, we were all unable to feed our families because inflation was out of control, groceries were too expensive, etc. Wild how quickly that whole conundrum got resolved. Must be some of that good old fashioned American exceptionalism. USA! USA!
My digestive tract handled the Thanksgiving Day hot pot fiesta just fine! Thanks for askin’.
Jess had a birthday. We had some beers at the always-lovely Penny Lane Pub.
We grabbed a ~~Christmas~~ Holiday Tree! It’s my first time buying a tree, I think, ever in my adult life. We’ve got it decked out in some decorative mushrooms (thanks mom).

📝 Post November 24, 2024

Monkeying Around

...with Go

I picked up Thorsten Ball’s Writing an Interpreter in Go book, and have been slowly working my way through it. You can follow along on my journey to implement Monkeylang.
Speaking of Go, I’m planning on attempting this year’s Advent of Code in Go this year. Before I get overwhelmed and or tired of it, like I do every year, anyway.
I finally stopped procrastinating the installation of my new POE cameras, and spelunked into the crawlspace to do some drilling. It didn’t go great, so project has once again been suspended. Just ordered a flexible drillbit, some fishing tape, and an oscillating multitool to help this go a bit more smoothly. We’ll try again next week!
Jess acquired a Quest3, which he let us all tinker around with. I hadn’t tried VR anything in probably 10 years. It’s seriously impressive how far that technology has progressed. Playing iRacing in VR made me feel uneasy within literal seconds of pushing the gas pedal. I was full-on motion sick within 2 laps. Pretty brutal. Less motiony stuff—like the paddle golf game—was really cool, though. I’m contemplating picking one up for myself just to try my hand at the whole “spatial computing” idea without forking over the cash for an Apple Vision Pro.
Time to start mentally preparing my digestive tract for the annual Ourand Thanksgiving Day Hot Pot Feast of Feasts.

📝 Post November 17, 2024

Cruising

Three in a row, here we go

Went to watch Jess run the Richmond (half) Marathon on Saturday. We were able to walk over to Bellevue, which was a rather happenin’ segment of the race. That neighborhood goes all out for the race, with all manner of booze, candy, and pickles for the runners.
Had my first “range anxiety” experience with the Bolt. Drove up to have lunch with for family friend’s surprise birthday celebration, and didn’t take into account the range estimation being based on our usual city driving and not so much for highway driving. We still made it there and back with a whopping 15 miles left on the battery, so no big deal!
Well, the 2024 MotoGP season has ended, and we’ve got a new champ! Congrats to Jorge. And also congrats to Cynthia for whippin’ everyone’s ass in the fantasy GP again this year.

📝 Post November 10, 2024

Weekly Notes?

Check out this streak

After some schmucks stole our car’s catalytic converter I took the car to a local mechanic to see what it’d cost to fix. They quoted me over $4k. I’m much too cheap for that nonsense. So I bought the parts myself, and just completed the work tonight. All in, it cost me about $400 and a couple hours wrenchin’ with my dad. Not a bad deal!
Relatedly, I’ll be installing a couple security cameras outside the house. Just acquired a spool of cat 6 cable, some reolink cameras, and will be trying a proper PoE setup after my current wifi cameras failed spectacularly.
Oh yea. An election happened. And… what an indictment that is of us Americans. We are a stupid, angry, hateful bunch of people. We need help.
We binge watched Disclaimer this week. It was really good. My only gripe is that it was maybe a bit too graphic at times. It took me a bit to recognize Kevin Kline, who’s less hilarious than in his usual roles.
I went to a bar that had live music. The artist started singing a song with the lyrics “who put PCP in the lobster chowder?”. It was a catchy little tune, so I had to look it up, and was shocked to discover that this was a real story that happened while filming The Titanic in 1999.

📝 Post November 01, 2024

Biannual Notes?

This is the best I can do, I guess

Ah, yes. Continuing my trend of very infrequent updates, I see.
Some life updates: we bought a house in the suburbs. We (well, I) hated it. We sold that house. We bought a new house in Richmond and are much happier. I got a new job, back workin’ as a lowly individual contributor, and that also makes me much happier. Management ain’t for me, it turns out. New gig’s at Ride with GPS. We visited Taiwan. I met my in-laws, two nieces and one nephew for the first time.
Been watching a bunch of Halloweeny movies. Standouts: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Oddity, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe.
Speaking of frightening… this damn election is in 4 days. Hold onto your butts…
Some schmucks stole our Prius’s catalytic converter. We had been just sharing that one car, and I’m committed to fixing it myself, so we needed a functional set of wheels. I’d been wanting to acquire a Chevy Bolt for a while, so this gave me an excuse. So.. we now own a sweet-ass Chevy Bolt, and I could’nt be happier with the thing. It’s a massive upgrade over the Prius, plus there’s no risk of catalytic converter theft!
Jess and I ran in a goofy Halloween 10 Mile race on the Capital Trail last week. I’m still recovering from a rough go of bronchitis, so it was a slow one. But one of those “in hindsight it was fun” things.

📝 Post December 01, 2022

Lifenotes 6

Changes

It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond. Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we wanted.
We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.

📝 Post December 05, 2021

Lifenotes 5

Adios Valencia

Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs, enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.

📝 Post September 04, 2021

Lifenotes 4

Roam

August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical, frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.

After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen. We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.

We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.

📝 Post May 24, 2021

Lifenotes 3

Big Business

HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company. I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made all those years ago: This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple, fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame about its whole relation to Basecamp…
After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I have much practice to do.
Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this weekend and enjoyed the scenery.

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📝 Post March 21, 2021

Lifenotes 2

Type-O

New joke who dis? Ready?

A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his setup look excellent.

📝 Post March 14, 2021

Lifenotes 1

Let’s Begin

I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a ~~weekly~~ occasional set of notes. So, let’s embrace the opportunity to start anew.
I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is More. It’s is an excellent read about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book. Definitely recommend it.
Gall’s Law came up at work this week. It states:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
I’ve been playing Dead by Daylight with some buds for a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as they’re found by the killer.