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Pretty Good Hat

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.

A messy chicken sandwich on a white paper wrapper. It has spilled red hot sauce on the paper and look absolutely delicious. In the background is a glass of medium-dark beer.

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.