Weeknotes III
🍁 I expect I’ll keep mentioning autumn in these roundups for the foreseeable future. Today being the autumn equinox? One hundred percent, talking about fall. We haven’t dipped below about 50º F yet, but it’s consistently cool enough that some of the neighborhood trees are already showing quite a bit of red or orange. I’m excited to see what our own trees do; they’re all still quite green.
📺 We’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, at suggestion of kiddo. It has some monster fights, but it’s mostly a really gentle, thoughtful story about an ageless mage re-tracing the steps she took on a ten-year journey with her adventuring companions who are now aged or passed.
🦵🏻 I had a pretty good spike of ankle pain this week from an injury a couple of years ago. Having old joints sucks, sometimes. It’s improved after a day, but persistently wondering how it’s going to feel day to day is pretty fatiguing.
I got a pretty good chicken sandwich this weekend!
☕️ I’ve become incrementally more insufferable about my espresso preparation, having adopted the Weiss Distribution Technique using this little wire tool. Verdict? I think it’s improving my coffee! More sip research sip is needed.
📚 I’m reading and really enjoying The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. So far it’s fun, interesting, and really engaging.
🎧 Don’t do the math, but Blues Traveler’s Four was released in September, 1994. It’s been reissued on vinyl for the first time in many years, and it’s a treat. (I bought this album originally on CD, from Hot Poop on Walla Walla’s main street.)
A couple more good things to read this week:
- I like this work in process from Hadley Wickham about R in Prod. The chapter outline suggests a lot of really good content to come.
- Dead Internet Souls by Vicki Boykis. Generative LLMs are filling the internet with garbage, resulting in the poignant shutdown of wordfreq. Vicki encourages us to continue to be live people on the world wide web, and I appreciate that. (Vicki is a brilliant machine learning and data engineer and you should be reading her!)
Happy week, gang.
I mentioned The Big Door Prize in my weeks’ notes. We finished the season last night, and I would like many more people to watch this show, for all the reasons I previously mentioned and because it has a delightful set of John Prine Easter eggs that I want to appreciate together.
Living room is put together enough to sit and listen to some music while having a coffee. Priorities.
Having nursed a finicky NUC as my Roon server for four years and been this close to picking up a Mac Mini to do the job but unsure if I really wanted another whole computer, I’m finding the new Nucleus One to be pretty appealing.
Well this is disappointing. I’ve been enjoying making a 365 for 2024 playlist, cheerfully adding a song a day. And Apple Music hasn’t actually kept the additions I’ve been making for nearly a month!
I really enjoy John Moreland’s lyricism and performance style. This spare, live album is heartfelt and shows off both nicely. Great for a quiet early holiday afternoon.
I spent an unseemly portion of today getting Suse to work on my finicky NUC to run my Roon server. If it’s still unstable then I think it must be a hardware issue, and I’ll just replace the whole thing with a Mac Mini.
I’m getting my last.fm stats toy updated early this year. Look out, Spotify Wrapped! I’m also using this as an opportunity to try out the very exciting new Quarto dashboards capability.
Whoa, roon-tui lets you control Roon from a terminal! This is very cool and makes me want to learn just a little Rust to be able to tinker with it.