Out and about for some errands. I always like the intersecting lines and angles on this corner.
- 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!)
My wife got me a special Christmas gift: Espresso class at Anchorhead! This was so fun and educational for me. We started with a tasting exercise and then dug into the mechanics of espresso extraction, and I got to practice on the Big Kid Machine in the lab. I have lots to practice on my own (but not today; I am absolutely blitzed with caffeine). Gifts of neat experiences are the best!
Just a couple of coffee photos. This was a tasty cup.
The “Christmas ships” tour stopped by the neighborhood beach tonight. I love that there’s a neighborhood beach here.
Tuesday’s sunset was lovely.
Went out with the X100VI in a break between rain storms yesterday.
The view from my desk is pretty great, sometimes.
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:
Happy week, gang.
Wow, nine years since I went out for this fun nighttime sky photography class at the foot of Mt Elden. These photos and short story still hold a ton of fond memories.
