This evening I’m trying to maintain motivation to keep going with Chapter By Chapter by looking at how far I’ve come.
There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible, which is daunting, but I’ve already written about 405 of them, which is 34%, more than a third.
Back to it!
I don’t think Paul Simon was thinking of Psalm 88:18 when he wrote “The Sound of Silence”, but the NIV translation sure sounds like it:
You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
darkness is my closest friend.
We designed New Year’s cards today (because we’re too late for reliable Christmas cards). I am very happy with them.
We’re trying something new this year: having them addressed and shipped for us, because the next two weeks are way too chaotic this year to add that activity. Totally worth it.
Took a few days off to stay at a Postcard Cabins cabin, which is a (very) tiny house with a campfire and some chairs. It’s almost secluded enough to feel alone in the hill country. We had a great time, burned a lot of wood, made smores, and talked a lot about our plans and hopes for 2025.
Spent the last afternoon of this mini-vacation writing summaries of psalms; I’ve finally crossed the halfway point (all the way to Psalm 77). I might finish by New Year’s after all.
My primary desk for the last twenty years or so has been a door that I stained and added a fir border and collapsible legs. It gives me a huge workspace, and it reminds me of my grandfather, who helped me make it before I left for college. However, its surface is not perfectly even, so when I added a nice aluminum-frame mechanical keyboard a couple of weeks ago, the keyboard rocked.
Today it occurred to me to ask my wife for some help, and she suggested a piece of felt under one of the legs. I put the felt under the whole thing, and it worked perfectly. Plus it looks kind of cool against the coiled cable.
Yes, I know they make desk mats, but this solution was already sitting in our house.
Finished reading: Cursed by Benedict Jacka
These books are always recommended for folks who keep re-reading the Dresden novels because nothing compares.
Indeed, nothing compares. The feel is mostly the same—urban wizard who has a day job sucked into shenanigans with mind-numbingly powerful creatures and/or artifacts alongside an ingénue apprentice—but despite Butcher’s ham-handed early novels, Jacka has work to do. I’ll probably keep reading, because if Jacka’s series improves at the rate Butcher did, it’ll be spectactular soon enough.
📚
Finished reading: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
I read this book to try to understand why it’s so popular, and I failed. It has all the trappings of a rollicking fantasy: a poor girl from the north is kidnapped by an evil magical being from a land she kind of thought was a fairy tale, where she discovers that not only does the villain have a heart of gold, but he’s not actually a villain, he’s the good guy in his own struggle of good versus an evil she can’t even contemplate.
But she’s a thoroughly unlikable character who is somehow nonetheless a Mary Sue, and the writing is mediocre at best. I would encourage a high school girl who wrote like this, but this author’s editor is clearly not interested in helping her out.
Not recommended for anybody. Go pick something by Naomi Novik instead.
📚
Finished reading: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
What an absolute mess of a book. But it’s clearly fantasy for somebody, and the world is definitely interesting. A better author could tell some great stories in this universe; this author needed to simplify and tell one excellent story instead of trying to set up a thousand future plotlines.
Recommended if you need some mindless airplane reading and don’t mind tropey fantasy.
📚
Finished reading: The Magicians by Lev Grossman.
It was not at all what I expected. Quentin is an unlikable main character; Penny and Eliot are hardly fleshed out; and Alice… well, I like Alice a lot. I really get the feeling Alice is the true main character and we’re just seeing it from Quentin’s point of view.
That said, it’s a welcome take on magical university being as hard or harder than an engineering degree instead of the floofy unconsidered mess that is Hogwarts.
📚
The Hokies and the Mustangs both won yesterday (even if the Mustangs win was maybe the ugliest I’ve ever seen), and we hiked a few miles together this morning. Can’t ask much more out of a weekend.
Europeans who feel superior about social welfare programs should be reminded that every European city inescapably assaults visitors with secondhand smoke. So gross. Please fix.
Beer and cold cuts by the Duomo Milano is a great way to start this trip.
Perfection?!
Conlextions #394 🟪🟦🟨🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨
Solve Time: 1 minute, 27 seconds
It was bound to happen; today it did.
Six Appeal #191
I solved Six Appeal #191 in 7 seconds!
Real words guessed: 1 × 100 = 100 Remaining guesses: 6 × 200 = 1200 Time bonus: 293
Total score: 1593
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✔️ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⭐
A list of beers we tasted during this year’s start-of-Fall Oktoberfest/pumpkin beer tasting, sponsored (not really) by H-E-B.
Today my morning pages led me to sermon notes I took in 2018.
That’s the whole point of PKM/Obsidian, but it’s not often that I get that kind of serendipity, so it’s delightful when it happens.
Our traditional Oktoberfest pumpkin beer tasting has begun!
I have been using a wireless keyboard at work and at home for years because I hate all the wires all over my desk. But since I got a new keyboard for my home office, I’ve left it wired as an experiment, and the additional responsiveness is spectacular, although the cable still drives me nuts.
All the times I have read Esther, and today I realized for the first time that she was an orphan. Somehow the fact that Mordecai was raising her didn’t clue me in on that obvious implication until today.
It’s not hidden! I’m just blind.
Re-read your Bible. There’s treasure you haven’t seen.
Finished reading: Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb
I cannot express my despair at the end of this book. As soon as I saw where the ending was headed, I didn’t want to keep reading and nearly put the book down. Kudos to the author, I guess, but it is endlessly sad, and I am pretty angry. 📚
A few weeks ago, I published Why Does Daniel Go By His Hebrew Name, But His Friends Go By Their Chaldean Names?.
Tonight, I was looking through old Twitter threads (as you do), and found the original: I first tweeted that thought on March 27, 2018.
Only took me six and a half years to write.
I do not enjoy playing sysadmin for VerseNotes. On the other hand, I do enjoy paying very little for my hosting plan. This is a conundrum.
(Context: certbot renew failed. I had to manually restart nginx and re-run. I don’t know why.)
Latest travel saga over. Spent more than two hours on the tarmac in Charlotte waiting for them to figure out a water issue. They even tried power cycling the entire aircraft. Eventually they gave up and loaded on more water and hand sanitizer.
So we are home, only eight hours later than expected. ✈️
The current plan for the maintenance problem for the airplane I am in is literally “turn it off and back on again.”
Amazing.
Eventually I will get home. ✈️
Our flight from Dayton back to San Antonio was delayed from 12:30 to 3:30, then 5, then 7. We rebooked and drove to Cincinnati to catch a route through Charlotte instead of our original layover in Dallas.
Our flight to Charlotte left 20 minutes late and has now spent 25 minutes taxiing. So fun! ✈️
Finished reading: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.
I went into this book thinking it was more YA fantasy. And it is! A special girl goes to school where her mom is in charge, and she learns she’s even more special than she thought! The small-town boy-next-door she grew up with turns out to be a giant jerk, and the dark, brooding, phenomenally attractive arch-enemy-with-a-heart-of-gold becomes the love of her life. And obviously they save the world together, or whatever.
But about two-thirds of the way through, there was an explicit, hardcore sex scene. And a few chapters later, there was another one—more abbreviated but no less hardcore. Not poorly written or ineffective, just shocking to me, the unprepared reader thinking this was basically Hunger Games with dragons.
Still a YA novel by genre, just aimed at not-so-YAs.
The fantasy world also gets routinely interrupted by Earth conventions like giving people the finger or naming the months “October”, “November”, etc. What are the chances this fantasy society developed the same Latin-derived month names and insulting hand gestures?
Despite it all, the story is intriguing enough and the writing light enough for me to check out the sequel. 📚
Finished watching: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).
Super fun homage to the original. Keaton is surprisingly adept, Catherine O’Hara is just about perfect, and Jenna Ortega continues to do Jenna Ortega things.
Not a perfect movie, but hilarious and interesting and definitely worth watching. 🍿
Book nine of nine is ready to go!
The work doesn’t stop here, but it’s a good milestone on which to end the weekend. Back at it tomorrow.
Book eight of nine is ready to go!
I might actually make it through all of them this weekend. One left… it’s not the longest, but it’s definitely the most difficult.
Book seven of nine is ready to go!
Throughout this editing process, I’ve had a lot of work to do. But this one required almost no updates; for some reason, my penultimate draft was already pretty dang good.
Book number six of nine ready to go!
As always, a bit slower than hoped-for, but other things are getting done today. And now it’s time to be lazy and watch football.
Book number five of nine ready to go!
I’m getting faster as I get into the rhythm of editing. (And yes, obviously, these books are short; book five is 3,200 words without frontmatter or backmatter. But there are a lot of them…)
Book number four of nine ready to go!
My stretch goal is to get them all ready by Monday, but there’s football this afternoon, so I may not quite get there…
In the rolls of the families that first returned to Judah from Babylon, Nehemiah lists “the men of the other Nebo” (v33) and “the sons of the other Elam” (v34).
The weird part is that there is no first Nebo or first Elam in Nehemiah.
Now, there’s a nearly identical list in Ezra 2 that sheds a little bit of light, but raises its own question.
Ezra 2:7 refers to “the sons of Elam” and numbers them 1,254. Then Ezra 2:31 refers to “the sons of the other Elam” and numbers them… 1,254.
Ezra 2 refers to only one Nebo and counts merely, “the sons of Nebo” (v29).
First, what happened? How many Elams were there? How many Nebos? Did the two Elams really have the same number of enrolled descendants? What happened to the first Elam and the first Nebo between Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7?
Second, how would it feel to be the family of “the other Nebo”—especially when the first Nebo is nowhere to be found?
It took more time than I wanted tonight, but book 3 is edited and ready to go. Even has a fun cover image made from a photograph I took in Montserrat, Spain.
Six more books to go in this first batch.
Five more chapters tonight; progress meter up from 25.2% to 25.7%.
I’m working on Judges, one of the most frustrating—and yet relatable—books. Every time Israel descends again into apostasy, you want to scream, “Not again!” And then you look at your own life, and you understand.
Meera and I were talking about the definition of ska on the last trip to the lake, and today I randomly had a brief clip of a Mighty Mighty Bosstones song jump into my head.
I couldn’t quite place it, but I searched my library for likely songs and came up with “You Gotta Go” from 2002.
Turns out it was exactly the opposite: “Where’d You Go” from 1991.
Enjoyed them both for the first time in years.
“Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people.” Nehemiah 5:19 ESV
Nehemiah could not have known how spectacularly God would answer his prayer. The good he did is remembered in his own words throughout time and around the world.
To be fair, this undying remembrance is not “for his good,” but it is for ours, and we glorify God because of Nehemiah, so perhaps it is for his good after all.
Today is the first time I’ve been on top of the leaderboard for any of the Lex.games, however briefly. I’m not signed in so you have to trust me, but I’m the “Undisclosed Strategist” with a time of 26 seconds.
Which will inevitably be beaten, and probably soon.
That was an exhausting study/writing session, but I’ve completed chapter 300 of 1189 (25.2%).
Only 54 more sessions that hard to go, and I’ll be done!
(Writing. I’ll be done writing. Editing and publishing are another matter.)
Since I now have an actual chapter-count target (1,189), I feel like I should build a Brandon Sanderson-esque completion meter somewhere. But that would entail more procrastination and less writing, and I’m trying to write more.
So I’ll just write here that I’m at 283/1189 (23.8%).
Things I never noticed: the night of the transfiguration is the first time we see Moses in the Promised Land. He finally made it!
(Via a post on r/Bible this morning)
After a hard weekend of drinking beer at the lakewriting and editing, I’m reasonably confident I have two books ready to go, of the nine whose contents are done.
But every little step makes the next one easier.
Writing an About the Author page is surprisingly challenging. How do you distill yourself into a hundred words that simultaneously introduce you, provide bona fides, amuse the reader, and point them toward your other works?
I’m pretty sure I sweated more over that page than any other in this book.
I am editing a series of books I am writing, and despite the fact that I typed every word of it, it’s helping me see and understand new things in the Bible.
Tonight’s example: the repetition of the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 12) to his son Isaac (Genesis 26) and to his grandson Jacob (Genesis 28).
Finished reading: Royal Assassin (The Illustrated Edition) by Robin Hobb
The world continues to intrigue me, and Fitz continues to be a great conflicted character. I do think Hobb delights just a bit too much in hurting him, and the ending was even less satisfying than the first book.
I’ll probably still read the third book just to see how it ends. Nobody tell me if it doesn’t conclude this story.
📚
Could hardly ask for a more perfect Saturday: football and beer with Meera at the lake.
Headed up to the lake today for some big weekend plans: food and football. And pumpkin beers.
Meera and I also finished the Harry Potter series, pretty much entirely this week. It’s part of the ritual of oncoming fall, which will continue this weekend with the first of the pumpkin beers (this year, they are Sam Adams and Dogfish Head).
Feel very accomplished tonight after wrestling with Python, pandoc, and make. I can now produce Jekyll posts and well-formatted PDF ebooks from the same source.
A Friday night well spent?
Tuck has found a new spot to sit while I’m working from home or writing for myself.
Tried to go out to dinner with Meera tonight. Unfortunately, San Antonio.
This ramen—from JY Ramen—was nearly inedible; Meera’s actually was, and therefore remains unphotographed.
Experiment failed.
Anybody have suggestions for actually good ramen in this city?
Finished writing chapter notes on Deuteronomy last night, completing the Torah.
Today’s goal: editing. Then I can get them cleaned up for publishing.
Unfortunately, I had to change my YAML scheme recently to make Pandoc happy, so it’s no longer as easy as just running gmake.
The mornings have been blessedly cooler the past few days (although the humidity has remained in the high 80s) so I’ve been more willing to walk the whole neighborhood with the dog.
I’m amused daily by the variation in tempo he chooses, whether I want a quick walk or not.
Finished reading: 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron.
Picked this up off a Reddit thread. Good thing it was cheap, because it contains little advice a thinking writer doesn’t know (you should do some planning before you start writing!), and it needs editing very badly. Ironically, it has a chapter on editing and an acknowledgment of the editor of the second edition.
This author is successfully published in fantasy and sci-fi; I hope those books are much better-written than this one.
📚
I now have a new category, VerseNotes, to hold microblog-sized comments on the Bible.
I used to do this all the time on Twitter, but I don’t have a public place for it anymore. One day I’ll figure out how to get them all to appear on VerseNotes itself.
My Bible reading plan today started three new books: 1 Timothy, Proverbs, and Ezra. It feels like they should be more connected, but I think that’s just how the timing worked out.
One observation is that they’re from three very different eras: Rome, David/Solomon, and Babylon.
📖
Finished watching: Alien: Romulus. I’m not exactly a huge fan of the Alien franchise, but neither was this a particularly good installment. Parts of it were beautifully done, but most of it was unmotivated horror.
And the last conflict in the waning minutes was gruesome and wholly unnecessary.
Some incredible visuals, though. 🍿
My daily exercise minutes reflects the season and the temperature somewhat cleanly.
The tall spikes are all ski trips—yes, even into April—except the most recent, which was a backpacking trip.
Relatedly, we’re less than a hundred days from the start of ski season!
Watched Borderlands last Friday thanks to the Alamo Drafthouse pass. Not remotely worth seeing otherwise. Kind of a fun bubblegum summer action movie though. 🍿
The saddest widget
And speaking of backpacking, I can now add a 🏕️ next to Wyoming for having spent the night outside (three nights, really), and I can justify moving Idaho to “visited” since we spent the night in Soda Springs on the way back (in a hotel).
First day back at yoga 🧘 after a few days of backpacking 🎒 and camping 🏕️ was instructive.
I almost wrote “demoralizing,” but it’s good to know which muscles work just fine (legs) and which ones need more work (core).
Maybe “trail yoga” should be a thing.
Stopped in Snake River Brewing in Jackson on our way up to the campsite. I can now check off two more states on my record of Where Have I Been.
Dinner and drinks tonight at Wasatch and Hopkins with Salt Lake City friends; the real adventure starts tomorrow.
Heading out on my first backpacking trip since before COVID. It’s only a few days on the trail despite needing to take a plane to get there.
I’m a little bit nervous, but that’s what packing lists are for.
So far this week I’m in a cycle of not sleeping enough, then drinking too much caffeine so I can stay awake, and as a result not sleeping enough.
Today is a good day to try something different.
My crew is about to start a new adventure, ironically immediately after @TSindelar@zeppelin.flights and the TPK crew just finished it, seventy-four episodes and a thousand years later…
I finally took the time to write a few more VerseNotes newsletters. Each one takes a surprising amount of time considering that I’ve had dozens of drafts written for ages. (ConvertKit’s refusal to let me paste Markdown properly doesn’t help.)
Finished watching: Deadpool and Wolverine.
Exactly as irreverent as you expect. Gratuitous violence, fourth wall breaks, some fantastic cameos of both actors and characters. All kinds of in-jokes. Unfortunately, a criminal paucity of Morena Baccarin.
Not gonna win any Oscars, but tons of fun. 🍿
Finished reading: Assassin’s Apprentice (The Illustrated Edition) by Robin Hobb.
I know I’m late to the Farseer trilogy/universe, but I really enjoyed this first installment. An unexplained Skill, a Wit, a Fool, more than one father figure, and a pretty classic fantasy setting.
I can’t wait to get started on the next one. 📚
Somehow I managed to avoid almost all of the CrowdStrike travel chaos on Friday but get caught in weather yesterday. My original flight was delayed four hours before it was canceled, and my would-be connection was delayed almost two hours (but apparently flew).
Let’s do better today, shall we?
I love renting a car out of DCA. Within minutes of leaving the airport, you see the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Potomac, the Pentagon… I’m sure residents are bored, but I’m always filled with a sense of power and history.
In summer 2023, we couldn’t bear the heat in Texas, so we took two huge escape trips: one to Santiago, Chile, and one to Queenstown, New Zealand. As a result, I have snow skiing🎿 pictures like this one dated in August and September.
Unfortunately, we stayed in the northern hemisphere this year, and I don’t think we will see any more snow in 2024 until winter.
📸
I just learned today that Weird Al had released a Hamilton Polka. And this amazing soul edited the show to match the polka.
Enjoy.
Just realized I didn’t update Where Have I Been after my recent trip. Got to add three countries! Luxembourg 🇱🇺, Netherlands 🇳🇱, and Belgium 🇧🇪.
(I also spent a night in Paris, but France 🇫🇷 was already on the list.)
The Atomium in Brussels is another one of those World’s Fair buildings (like the Eiffel Tower, but 69 years later) that looks cooler than it has any right to be.
The inside is apparently some sort of digital art museum and cultural archive, but Meera and I didn’t have the time or the energy to tour it in between chocolate and beer tastings while we were in Brussels (July 2024). We almost always enjoy a good museum, but we really didn’t want to spend another day walking around inside when the outside looked like it did in the picture.
So we took the metro out there, observed a super-cool building, then took the metro right back to Grand Place and sat down for a drink and a snack.
I converted my microblog to be my primary home page.
First, I converted my microblog to the Alpine theme. I love the aesthetics of the Tufte theme (GitHub) I was using by @pimoore, but it hasn’t been updated in a while and Micro.blog has been adding features rapidly.
I briefly flirted with @mtt’s Tiny Theme for its flexibility, but I like the out-of-the-box behavior of Alpine better.
But if it was going to be my home page, I wanted it to be a little richer. @manton’s home page is quite stark, which is probably what he wants: it drastically centers the microblog.
But I wanted more.
So I dug into the theme and made a few changes: I added a second column for photos posts (based on a category)1, which meant I had to add a little more space. By default, the column of posts is only 700px wide; mine is 55em wide.
The attached picture is my previous home page, made using Jekyll’s Compass theme, for posterity.
Two down.
Of course, I’m now loading two copies of every photo post because I haven’t yet figured out how to exclude them from the main list. ↩︎
Took a little longer than I expected, but Meera now has a proper website with a nice headshot (photo by yours truly), a professional timeline, and contact info.
Based on Kirby Turner’s timeline-jekyll-theme with a new color scheme, a little more space, and deployment tooling.
Next!
Feeling dangerously productive today. Let’s see how long I can get it to last.
I have three targets for the afternoon: two quick ones and one big thorny one. So naturally my brain wants to focus on the thorny one instead of letting me get the quick wins out of the way.
“What is a TikTok dance mash up if not a digital Dorito?”
The hierarchy Newport builds up here seems to make sense, but I’m reminded of this Dilbert strip, which makes the point that the medium may encourage certain content, but doesn’t necessarily determine it.
The previous post courtesy of Alamo Drafthouse’s season pass, which we just signed up for yesterday because for the next couple of weeks the second month is free.
Gonna try to get out of the house a bit more this summer, and into somewhere else with AC.
And it’ll be nice to see more movies. 🎥
Finished watching: Fly Me to the Moon.
I was worried this would be another summer “comedy” that would leave me cringing, but it was actually a fun, fast-paced comedy/heist with a good performance by Scarlett Johansson, a hilarious Woody Harrelson in his element, Ray Romano doing work I didn’t know he could do, a fun cameo by Colin Jost, and a totally useless Channing Tatum with too much makeup.
Several excellent laughs, lots of fun, and the space race! Absolutely recommended.🍿
By far my favorite part of Flighty is the Home Screen widget that tells you when your next flight is.
We just got home yesterday from a week in Europe, and it tells me I only have to wait thirteen days until I’m back on the road.
Finished reading: Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree.
Fun prequel to Legends and Lattes, but missing some of the magic of the original. Still worth reading. Would be a great children’s/YA book with some light inessential cleaning up. 📚
The food and beer selection at CDG past immigration is criminally weak for a city that prides itself on food.
Maybe they’re just upset I’m leaving?
Finished reading: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Awesome investigation of evolution from a totally different (sci-fi) perspective. Made me think fun thoughts. Excellent up until the last couple of pages, which were totally disappointing, like the author didn’t know how to finish it.
📚
Vianden Castle is a short but steep hike from the bus stop, but the views are excellent even before you get to tour the inside.
All public transportation in the entire country of Luxembourg is free of charge to all riders. And it’s mostly on time. This is a miracle.
This morning, I was leaving Luxembourg City to visit Vianden Castle (still en route) and asked how to buy a ticket out here, since it’s half an hour of train and half an hour of bus and mostly outside the city. A kind employee gently told me, no ticket needed.
A miracle.
I have apparently arrived in Luxembourg 🇱🇺 on the Grand Duke’s official birthday. Unfortunately, all that was left when I arrived on the TGV from Paris was the aftermath.
Finished reading: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
A critical reminder that being the kind of person you feel you ought to be is impossible, and that’s okay—perhaps even freeing, when considered rightly.
Burkeman spends a lot of time repeating himself, but perhaps that’s part of the point: by repeatedly learning another way in which we can never “spend” time optimally, he maybe hopes to get just one ounce of understanding through.
That said, I found the nihilism offputting, even though I suspect he would argue that it’s not nihilism but realism. 📚
Finished reading: The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher.
More swashbuckling! And spies! And a very weird planet. And cats. A good follow-up.
Now, Mr. Butcher, please get back to writing Twelve Months…📚
Today, I’m headed back to Japan 🇯🇵 for the first time since October 2022! Nineteen months is too long between visits.
I’m looking forward to sushi 🍣 and trains 🚅 and lots and lots of robots 🤖.
A first for me: a plane at a nearby gate is having a part flown in for maintenance. (Fortunately the origin city is very close, so that flight isn’t delayed by too much.)
Third Space Coffee in Colorado Springs serves artisanal coffeeee flights. We had to get one… okay, we got three. ☕️
Today was the last day of the ski season for us. We didn’t track every day, but we tracked most of them, and for a pair of engineers who live in Texas, we had a pretty good year. 🎿
I think we found our wall photo for this trip! 🎿
Sometimes the naming of ski runs is a delicate matter, full of nuance and wordplay and even history.
And sometimes a black diamond from the top of the mountain is just called KABOOM. 🎿
Meera skis like a girl. By which I mean, she had 2,000 feet more vert than we did today.🎿
Our first day this trip at Copper was exactly as beautiful as expected, if a bit warm. We spent all day on the eastern side of the mountain, taking the Super Bee lift over and over.
We even did a couple of double blacks off the back side of the mountain. I love being able to tackle harder slopes.
Today’s the first day of the last (planned) ski trip of the season. The sun is bright, although the sky is partially clouded, and it snowed last night.
It’s going to be a good week. 🎿
Finished reading: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.
What a spectacular book for post-pandemic white-collar knowledge work. Partly philosophical and partly actionable, Newport says maybe we should step back from the cliff of minute-to-minute “pseudo-productivity” and consider the contribution of our entire lives or careers.
The hardest part for me is that I recognize everything he says in my workplace but I’m concerned about how radical even the lightweight suggestions he gives would be. I guess that’s an indication I should start implementing. 📚
Expanded the photo wall today to include our trips to Munich, Zermatt, Big Sky (Montana), and Solitude (Utah). I love seeing all our big trips together at a glance.
Finished reading: Hangman’s Gate (War of the Archons 2) by R.S. Ford
This world of forgotten gods where prayer and worship actually affect their powers continues to fascinate me, but unfortunately the writing doesn’t measure up to the story. Too many threads opened without closure, as if the author assumes you can just open the next book. It’s possible to do this well in a series, and many authors have—just not this one.
Enjoyed the read, and I’ll probably pick up the next one, but I wish it had a better editor.
📚
Had to renew my driver’s license in person today. Texas allows one renewal online, but today I had to brave the DMV. Or as Texas inexplicably calls it, DPS.
It wasn’t Kafkaesque—it was actually quite easy once I found an office with an appointment—but the wait was worse than a doctor’s office. My 3:40 appointment wasn’t called until nearly 5pm, at which point it took less than ten minutes to complete.
Oh well, I don’t need to do that again for a long time.
Last Saturday, I judged a First Tech Challenge for the first time. In fact, despite having been a professional roboticist since 2009, this event was my first interaction with any First competition.
I shouldn’t have waited.
The kids are excited and shockingly capable; the audience is wild; the challenge is fun; and I had an amazing time.
I’m helping out with another one in two weeks—the awkwardly named “Semi-Area” competition. I’m looking forward to it.
This one went by quickly.
Conlextions #138 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 Solve Time: 28 seconds
Finished reading: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson
Apparently Sanderson’s fiftieth novel, and the last of the four Kickstarter books. Directly impacts the Cosmere, and the first of these weird ones where having read everything Cosmere really helps enrich the story.
A swashbuckling adventure—seriously. But of course with magic and mystery you expect.
My only complaint is that so much of the mystery of the early books is gone—we know so much now about Investiture and such that I’m no longer dazzled by it.
Still, a fun read. 📚
Finished reading: A Demon in Silver (War of the Archons) by R.S. Ford
Magic is creeping back into the world. Some parts think they’re ready; others have no idea; almost nobody’s prepared for what actually happens.
A fun read, with disparate threads that you just know have to fit somehow, but I wished for a little more sense of purpose rather than piling on more worldbuilding. 📚
Last night, I entered all my upcoming trips into my Obsidian trips database. The year is getting crowded, and we haven’t made it out of January yet. (I also haven’t entered some known trips for the back half of the year; at least August, October, and December will all have at least one trip.)
One day I’ll post something more interesting. Today, it’s another puzzle.
Conlextions #132 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 Solve Time: 1 minute, 6 seconds
Posting NYT instead of @lex because the purples today are hilarious.
Connections Puzzle #219 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪
Also I initially made a silly mistake with the blues in Conlextions today, but I fixed it.
Conlextions #129 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 Solve Time: 33 seconds
This puzzle continues to bring a little joy (and sometimes frustration) to my day.
Conlextions #128 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 Solve Time: 1 minute, 24 seconds
I found this one took a little more patience than some.
Conlextions #127 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟩🟩🟩🟩 Solve Time: 2 minutes, 59 seconds
Conlextions #119 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟩🟩🟩🟩 Solve Time: 1 minute, 59 seconds
I discovered @lex‘s Conlextions puzzles through Dr. Drang at the end of December and immediately ripped through the archives. It has just now occurred to me I can post results here.
Obviously, I will cherry-pick the good ones where I made no mistakes.
Conlextions #116 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟪🟪🟪🟪 Solve Time: 5 minutes, 33 seconds
Conlextions #117 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 Solve Time: 2 minutes, 55 seconds
Finished reading: The Law by Jim Butcher.
A fairly weak entry in the series, maybe intended as a palate cleanser after Battle Ground. We see a little of Dresden’s psyche, but not much. A short return to the early novels’ PI theme, but with Dresden as a far more powerful, and more broken, wizard. 📚
Finished reading: Heroes by Stephen Fry.
A fantastic addition to Mythos. Fry picks some of the best-known Greek heros (and one not-so-well-known) and brings them and their complete stories to life. He tells complete stories, bringing in all the crazy background and mythological history and real history. You get modern geography and philosophy and demography alongside Theseus and Perseus.
I have no nits to pick, except that again the audiobook, while delivered excellently by Fry himself, is mastered poorly, so keep your volume knob handy. 📚
Here are the books I finished reading in 2023. I also keep a running log throughout the year.
Finished reading: Mythos by Stephen Fry.
Excellent retelling of the classic Greek myths. Plus some I’ve never heard. If you ever read (or refused to read) Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, you owe it to yourself to read this one. Fry brings the characters and stories to dramatic life, truly retelling rather than just reciting.
The audiobook was absolutely worth it—Stephen Fry reads it himself and is engaging and hilarious as always—although the dynamic range is incredibly high, so be careful with your volume. 📚
Two more fall beers tonight:
🎃🍻
Every year, my wife and I grab as many pumpkin/yam/märzen/oktoberfests as we can and do a little home tasting. The selection at our local H-E-B this year is shockingly good, so I have a lot to post. I’ll make it a full page later; for now, just a picture from night one. 🎃 🍻
Not a good day for football in our house. Nice of Apple News to sum up the day so conveniently though… 🏈
Finished reading: Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie. An epic end to an epic trilogy. Disappointing in all the best ways. One smidge darker than I’d hoped, but you have to be realistic about these things. 📚
Got off a plane from New Zealand Thursday night, back on a plane (to Atlanta this time) this afternoon. I often can’t decide whether I love this life of travel or wish I could spend some more time in my own bed. Today it’s the former.
Finished reading: Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie. Even better than the first. Characters you want to know better, mysteries abound, swords and sorcery and sex and what else do you want from a book? 📚
I’m a day late to the cycle photo @challenges but I’m going to post this anyway since I’m enjoying these photo challenges and it’s actually a nice shot of Melbourne from across the lake in Albert Park.
I wanted to make a joke about “divided by a common language”, but “this escalator is being rested” is such a great replacement for “down for maintenance” that I’ll just leave it at that.
I missed the first Virginia Tech football game last week (against ODU) because we were in New Zealand. An acceptable tradeoff, of course, but it’s nice to be back in the US this weekend and watch the Hokies take on Purdue. 🏈📺🦃
UPDATE: Having said that, of course there’s a multi-hour rain delay.
Leaving Queenstown yesterday, Meera snapped one of the best sea-earth-sky yonder photos I’ve ever seen. Plane-window photos never work, but New Zealand is so picturesque it didn’t matter. 📸
Finished reading: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Dirty, but not dark. Cynical, but leavened with hard work. Clichés and anti-clichés. Excellent, not stereotypical fantasy. 📚
During our stop in Glenorchy yesterday, we encountered some surprisingly well-dressed travelers on the shore of Lake Wakatipu.
We assume they were there for wedding pictures or something similar, because Glenorchy’s not exactly a formalwear kind of town. 📸
We are flying back from Queenstown today, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why.
It’s a day late, but on our adventures this afternoon we found the actual forest used for Lothlórien, between Glenorchy and Paradise. 👋 @jean
Visiting Rhyme x Reason brewery in Wanaka, New Zealand, tonight, they had some spectacular murals on the walls. Apparently painted by employees, who are allegedly paid entirely in beer.
Driving around Lake Wanaka, New Zealand, this morning, it just screamed Lord of the Rings. Here you have the forest of Lothlórien, the Misty Mountains, and everywhere a hobbit could go (and back again).
(Not pictured: we climbed a waterfall.)
Skied Coronet Peak today. That obviously calls for an après-ski New Zealand-native Ginger Bear in an orange can.
Okay, it’s orange and maroon, but as a Hokie, I approve anyway.
In 2019, we went to the Outer Banks for Meera’s birthday. We visited from Corolla all the way down to Okracoke, taking in beaches and lighthouses and sand and sun.
Meera and I are not good at relaxing vacations. We’re always skiing or hiking or visiting museums or monuments. But on this trip, we spent an entire day at the beach, and I was able to be still long enough to take some great photos, including this one of a pelican above a crashing wave.
We should go back. If only RDU weren’t so far from the beach…
We flew from Melbourne to Queenstown today, so I had to dig into days past for something precious for today’s challenge photo. My time alone each morning with coffee and words is indeed precious to me; this one occurred on Melbourne’s South Wharf last Monday morning.
Finished reading: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson. Fun as usual; kind of a fantasy/mystery/romance. I didn’t love the storytelling device, but the story itself, the world, and the magic were all top-notch Sanderson. 📚
On the way back from visiting Westside Ale Works in South Melbourne today, we saw these three huge cranes on the same apartment complex. Coming from Texas, it’s refreshing to see rapid high-density housing buildup.
In 2019, we hosted Christmas at our house in San Antonio. My family flew or drove from the east coast (yes, it’s a 24-hour drive), and Meera’s drove down from the lake (a much-more-sensible one-hour drive).
The day after Christmas for us is always a chance to get outside. December 23 is often a travel day; Christmas Eve is full of cooking and wrapping and worship; and Christmas is full of eating and unwrapping and family. At that point, everybody needs a break and some fresh air.
So of course we had to take them down to the Riverwalk, where we apparently convinced them to take this very nice picture of just the two of us.
On a wine-and-penguins tour on Phillip Island, we found this abstract tiling of Australian little penguins near the jetty in Cowes. Looking forward to seeing real ones later today!
Finished reading: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree. Spectacular, sweet fairy tale in fantasy clothing. Deserves its accolades. Highly recommended. 📚
In September 2021, we spent a couple of days in Barcelona on our way back from Minorca and Mallorca. We had read that a favorite local breakfast spot was Granja M. Viader. Usually, that means there’s a line of tourists out the door, and Meera and I are almost always unwilling to wait in a line like that.
However, this day, the line was practically nonexistent (probably because tourists hadn’t yet come back after COVID), and we slipped in for a breakfast of hot chocolate and churros.
Two things stood out from this visit:
When we travel, I’m always torn between visiting the famous spots and being too much of a tourist. In this case, we threaded the needle perfectly and got an amazing unexpected breakfast. ✈️ 🗺️ 🇪🇸
Flying west across the international date line always screws with my “streaks.” Games, fitness—anything that automatically tracks daily continuity breaks.
All of these apps need to build in grace days. Either occasional true penalty-free skip days or, like Knotwords, ways to rebuild the streak.
I’m reminded of a conversation in the Apple sphere a few years ago about preserving fitness streaks on rest days or across the Sabbath for observant Jews. Did that ever get addressed?
Shawn Blanc offered a solution, and here’s a fitness app with a graceful (they call it “self-compassionate”) third-party approach, but first-party apps should really support this kind of thing too.
Finished reading: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Fun, quick romp through a particular many-worlds hypothesis. A little too cute in places, and far too embedded in the real-world time (including soon-to-be-obscure Trump jokes), but a very enjoyable read. 📚
Finally in our hotel in Melbourne. Quick recap:
It’s been quite a ridiculous 34 hours, but we are excited to be here. Now for that nap…
✈️ 🗺️ 🏨 🇦🇺
Leaving tonight to add a fifth continent to my skiing conquests ⛷️.
It was just a few weeks ago I got to update my Where Have I Been page with skiing in South America (Chile 🇨🇱), and I’m super-excited to bag another in Queenstown, New Zealand 🇳🇿.
Remaining: Africa and Antarctica. The hard ones.
In November 2021, Meera and I were itching to get traveling again. We had had our shots, waited past all the international quarantines, and it was time to go again.
We chose to visit Minorca and Mallorca because we had enjoyed Barcelona so much a few years prior, and we wanted to go back but experience something new.
While we stayed in Sóller for our time on Mallorca, one of our favorite days was driving up the coast to Port d’Andratx to visit the lighthouses and see the sailboats at the port.
The wealthy neighborhoods didn’t make it easy, but we did manage to park the car and do some hiking on the hills overlooking the port before going down for dinner and a closer look.
We were lucky enough to catch a class of sailors out training, and they kindly passed in front of the lighthouse like ducklings following their mother so I could catch this photo from the docks. ✈️⛵️🇪🇸
What if you went to Versailles as part of your honeymoon, but it absolutely poured that day in November 2017, and all of your pictures were of you and your brand new spouse soaking wet?
On the plus side, I snuck this jacket into my luggage as a surprise gift for Meera when we got there, so she was both cuter and more comfortable than I was.
Note, as usual, the red backpack straps over the sport coat; I am the essence of class. ✈️ 🇫🇷
I really hate that the best experience of micro.blog is on the web. The Mac app is flaky uploading photos, and while you can write alt text, there’s no way to position them in the post. The iOS apps don’t really believe in the share sheet (sharing to Sunlit loses my post 100% of the time), and scrolling in the official micro.blog app routinely breaks, making scrolling to the bottom of the post to continue writing impossible. I’d switch to Drafts, but I still need to handle photo uploading. (To be fair, Epilogue continues to be awesome, and I’ve never tried Wavelength.)
In June 2013, I was on a business trip to Mountain View. I had never been to California before, so I spent as much of my free time exploring as I could.
I drove down to Santa Cruz, and I saw the Breakwater Lighthouse.
Then I went west to Pigeon Point Light Station near Pescadero.
But despite my love of lighthouses, the vast majority of the photos I took that week—with my disappointing-in-retrospect iPhone 4 camera—were from the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, which is a thing that exists. Some of them even turned out pretty good!
In 2017, we camped in Garner State Park with some friends and took a brief hike the next day.
You’re not permitted to use local “found” firewood, so one of the people with us brought a truck bed full of huge branches we spent a long time chopping into firewood on which to cook a very nice pot of camp chili.
Food you work for is supposed to taste better, but I mostly remember the work and the time, not so much the food. Even as I type I wonder if maybe the food was fajitas… 🏕️
In August 2016, I was in Adelaide for a business trip. Okay, I was in Woomera for a business trip, but I had taken a week of vacation on the end of the trip to explore Adelaide.
One day I decided to hike up Mount Lofty. Okay, I decided to walk to Mount Lofty from Adelaide and then climb up it.
The trek took me past a place called Waterfall Gully, which is a… gully… with a waterfall. Australians have the best names: Mount Lofty, Waterfall Gully.
The hike up was quite challenging: 1,000m up in a 5,000m hike. But I kept getting passed by trailrunners getting their vertical 5k in. It was embarrassing. (It didn’t help that the only boots I had with me were steel-toe safety boots.)
After reaching the top, I tried to walk back to Adelaide, but I was exhausted, so I stopped for a pizza and called an Uber. ✈️ 🍕
Back in 2018, I had a business trip to Thun, Switzerland. Meera and I decided to make a vacation of it. Over the course of a week, we visited Thun, Interlaken, Gimmelwald, Zermatt, St. Moritz, and Zurich.
In Zurich, we were unwilling to pay for a chocolate tour, so we found a review online that listed the places they went and did the tour on our own. One of the places was of course the Sprüngli shop, where we learned about Luxemburgerli, which are basically colorful mini-macarons.
Finally, the requisite selfie where I’m wearing the same Osprey Daylite Plus I’m wearing in nearly every travel photo taken of me in the last ten years. ✈️🌍
Just published Four Gospels, Five Great Commissions. It has been fourteen months since I wrote a new article, and I can’t tell you how relieved I feel to get going again. ✍️
In 2019, my wife and I joined another couple for a backpacking trip in the San Juan Mountains of south-central Colorado. On the way back, we stopped for a day at my in-law’s condo in Ruidoso, New Mexico to recover a bit. But instead of resting and recuperating from a challenging hike, we decided to go for another hike in the nearby Lincoln National Forest.
Okay, this one is entirely my fault.
I thought, hey, without 30–40 pounds on our backs, how hard could it be?
But the day was hot and the trail had depressingly little shade, so halfway through, I snapped this picture of us in front of Grindstone Lake, and we turned around and went home.
As I remember, dinner that night was pizza from Cafe Rio Pizza and beer from Lost Hiker Brewing Company. As it should be. 🏕️🍺🍕
I came across this March 2022 post about having control over your day by @ChrisHannah, where they advocate for flexible working hours:
Personally, I think the best solution for people and companies (where the job allows), is if your entire working hours were flexible. For example, you could be contracted to work 8 hours a day, but you are free to fulfil those 8 hours between the hours of 7 am and 9 pm. Maybe one day you have plans later on in the day, so you choose to start at 7 am, and have a short lunch. But another day, you want to go have brunch with friends, so you could start later, or perhaps you just take a long break?
My employer has had for many years exactly such a model: we are expected to be “online”—that is, generally available and working, not necessarily actually logged into Teams—from 9am–3pm Monday–Friday, and we are expected to log 80 hours every two weeks (we’re a research consultancy, so we take both “log” and “80 hours” both seriously and literally). We’re also expected to “work from site” Tuesday–Thursday, with Mondays and Fridays being optional work-from-home days. Beyond those constraints, we’re free to flex our schedule in the way that lets us do our best work.
As a manager, I often field questions about why our policies are not even more flexible, and even I think of us as stuck in the past in many ways. So I appreciated seeing a proposal for improvement that we have already engaged, suggesting that perhaps things are not always better everywhere else.
Some friends and I were talking about The Picture—the one you’re proudest of, the one you always want to show people, the one that makes you wonder if maybe you’re actually a photographer after all.
I’ve taken some pretty pictures, but I think the best one I’ve ever taken is of a couple I don’t know and never met, on the beach of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, New Zealand. I hope they don’t mind, and I hope if they ever come across this post, they’ll appreciate how perfect their moment was (and say hi!). ✈️ 🗺️ 🇳🇿
Even though I went to the office on Friday after landing from Chile 🇨🇱, the first Monday back always feels like the “real” return to work.
Feels good to get back into habits of reading, journaling, and morning pages—all those practices that I’m happy to ignore while checking out on vacation.
I’ve lived in San Antonio for twelve years, and today I got my first library card.
(I’ve read dozens of books on Libby over the years with what was apparently a “temporary” card, and I finally had to go get a real one to keep reading.) 📚
We realized on day 3 of skiing that our skis were conveniently RGB-colored and of graduated lengths, so we posed them for a group shot.
Then I took a candid going up one of the lifts.
And of course we couldn’t let the boots feel left out, even though they’re less colorful. 🎿
Went to bed excited for overnight snowfall to improve skiing conditions. Woke up to exactly half my wish granted: almost 7” of accumulation, but whiteout conditions this morning. ⛷️
Achievement unlocked: snow skiing 🎿 in August. To be fair, we cheated by flying to Chile 🇨🇱 to do it.
It’s also many other firsts:
And finally, it’s the fourth continent I’ve skied on (North America, Europe, and Asia were my first three).
Time to update that post. ✈️
Since the ongoing implosion of X, née Twitter, began, I’ve been combing through my archive of 15,000-ish tweets across 15 years since April 20, 2008.
It’s the longest record of anything in my life, stretching back further than my oldest Day One entry1 2.
I remember almost all of it. Sometimes that’s good: starting in 2017, I published almost 90,000 words of Bible analysis to Twitter. Sometimes that’s bad: I spent a lot of days over the years angry about American politics—left and right—screaming impotently into the void instead of building something valuable.
I’m trying to change that; moving here is helping. I find that here I write with more intentionality. The sense of presence, permanence, and possession encourages me to think more—not too much more, I hope—before hitting “Post.”
I suppose there is a longer photographic record of me, but since I didn’t get my first camera until high school, many of those photos reflect my physical evolution, not my intellectual, emotional, or spiritual evolution. Important, but incomplete. ↩︎
I should have guessed dpreview has a 14-page review of that camera. Its 1.9 megapixels and 32MB of Compact Flash were precious to me; I’m glad the Internet remembers. ↩︎
Finished reading: Thirty Questions by Timothy C. Tennent. Structured like a catechism but with answers far too long to memorize. Not a bad introduction to Christian doctrine, but fits better as a study: Tennent clearly expects you to do some of the work on your own. Fortunately, he gives chapter-and-verse starting points. 📚
Information architecture update complete! Almost everything’s a river, which gives me two huge wins:
Finished watching: Tetris. Tons of fun, and filled in the hard-to-believe story of which I knew only the outline—who knew a movie about IP rights and the KGB could be so enjoyable? Lots of clever little nods to 80s video games. And of course I had to follow it with The Complete History of the Soviet Union. 🍿
Made some good progress today redesigning information architecture for VerseNotes.
Current theory: only standalone articles are dated; everything else is a Jekyll collection.
New theory: (almost) everything in one river of dated posts with judicious use of categories for archive organization.
Just dropped off our skis to get waxed. Starting to get excited for Santiago next week!
I do feel a bit silly waxing snow skis in Texas in July. 🎿 🇨🇱
Finished watching: Oppenheimer. Superb acting from a cast I didn’t expect tells a story I of which only knew a small fraction. Fun sound design, although parts were noisier than they needed to be. Only real complaint is that it did not need all 180 minutes, and some bits dragged unnecessarily. 🍿
Finished reading: The One Hour Bible by SPCK. Edited by Philip Law. A great idea—not paraphrasing or summarizing but eliding: using the actual words of the New Living Translation to tell the story of God in fewer words.
Unfortunately, while this treatment works well for the Old Testament and most of the Gospels, they abridge Acts too much, and the rest of the New Testament disappears until Revelation 22. I know it doesn’t fit the format, but ironically one of the elided verses (2 Timothy 3:16) says, “all Scripture is useful.” 📚
My yoga app introduced me to a new pose tonight: locust pose. I’m reasonably certain you can see it in my heart rate just after the two-thirds mark. 🧘♂️
We have tried a bunch of non-alcoholic (n/a) beers lately, looking for something that satisfies the desire for something bubbly and refreshing but doesn’t have the associated buzz, drowsiness, lack of focus, terrible sleep, and other downsides of the high-ABV beverages we’ve come to enjoy.
This is an unordered list of the ones we’ve tried with comments where applicable. All drinks with the same name as alcoholic beers are the non-alcoholic versions.
We still love great beers and ciders, and I’m sure you’ll see us at The Dooryard this weekend, but this kind of variety is a wonderful change from the previous alcohol-or-nothing regime.
Finished reading: For the Body by Timothy C. Tennent. A critical exposition of the need for the modern church to develop and espouse a positive theology of the body rather than the decades of pure negative theology: “don’t do that; that’s wrong.”
A great starter book on the topic, although the last two chapters are aimed squarely at pastors, not laypeople (they still have value, but not as much).
My primary takeaway is that developing a positive, holistic theology of the body allows us to see our sexuality, our bodies, and ourselves in the context of the complete gospel, not by the light of a few specific verses that mostly just make people angry regardless of what they believe. 📚
Finished watching: Silo (2023). Incredibly slow start, but every episode was better than the last, and the final scene is worth all ten episodes. I’m not sure if it was better that I’d read the books first, or worse because I didn’t have any suspense. 🍿
I had forgotten how much getting a car serviced costs. My 2014 Altima has been solid since I got it in 2016, modulo oil changes and tire changes, but today it needed some (expensive) help.
It was a lot of time and a lot of money, but I guess I can’t complain about one expensive trip in seven years.
Finished reading: Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft. Tremendously dissatisfying. A chaotic run through a fascinating world, but the plot was so contrived to prevent progress as to frustrate me with every page turn.
Not recommended. If you want a weird world, go read Piranesi instead. 📚
Today, Phil Schiller celebrated the 15th anniversary of the iOS App Store, and many people posted the first apps they downloaded. Here are mine.
Beer Judge Certification Program, all about different styles of beers and how to evaluate them. Inspired by my undergrad courses in fermented beverages. ↩︎
I don’t even remember this Bible app. I’ve used the YouVersion app almost every day since October 27, 2008. ↩︎
I’m sensing a theme. ↩︎
I’m sensing another theme. ↩︎
I have used this app more than any other, with the possible exception of Apple’s Messages app. ↩︎
Back in 2014, there was a Twitter account, or maybe a Tumblr account, that published pop songs as sonnets1. I loved the spin on genre, but I noticed that they were all Petrarchan (Italian) sonnets, which go ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, or Shakespearean (English) sonnets, which go ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
I complained on Twitter that we needed Spenserian ones, which have a harder rhyme scheme: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. But you shouldn’t complain without offering a solution, so I give you my offering:
Tho' oft my speech ere uttering seem mad,
Fair Helios signals end of labor’s reign
O’er you and I, who, lightened, upward gad—
Ascend beyond the heav’ns' celestial plane
Lo, trumpets sound our doom, and promise pain:
Your harbinger I welcome, arms ope’d wide
For I, clothèd in joy, will be not slain
Let not your countenance be hurt, nor pride
Know I, and I alone, yield to no tide
No force of earth, nor beast, nor god could quell
The rise and rise unstoppable inside
Of happiness whose bounds no man can tell
—Now strike! your hands together, join the din
A roofless room, a bonafide boon, within.
Finished watching: Ted Lasso. Three seasons and only two clunkers. Amazing record. It’s not common that we get a mostly wholesome high-quality smash hit show, and I’m so glad to have seen it. Believe! 🍿
I’ve been obsessed with Demonin’s Array Game since Andy Baio linked to it a month ago.
After getting effectively to the current endgame (there’s no real end, but at some point there’s no “next upgrade”), it occurred to me that the simplicity of the game was ideal for me to try learning Swift again.
I dove all the way into Swift and SwiftUI, first using Swift Playgrounds and then Xcode directly. It’s amazing how quickly a simple app can come together using all these tools and the crazy-fast REPL that is Playgrounds.
Here’s a video of the first level as of today.
I just accidentally used the Universal Control feature built into macOS Ventura. I had set up my work MacBook Pro next to the monitor for my personal Mac mini, where I used to keep my laptop when it was connected to this monitor. So I naturally just hauled the cursor beyond the side of the screen, and it magically kept going onto the laptop screen!
It took me several seconds to figure out that something special had happened and that my cursor had jumped from one machine to the other.
Something weird: how did it know which side of my monitor the laptop was on? It could guess by choosing the direction you try to move your cursor, exactly like I did, but it’s still absolutely delightful.
Gave a bunch of stuff back to Apple today. These computers got both Meera and me through college and grad school, and it’s time to let go.
The white iPod (3rd gen, I think) was a birthday present when I turned 17 or 18; the iPods Touch tided me over until Verizon got the iPhone, and that iPhone 5s is still the best design ever made.
Makeshift parfait at the BOS (Logan) Admiral’s Club this morning waiting for our flight back to Austin. 📸
Brunch at In A Pickle in Waltham ahead of a wedding yesterday afternoon. Hot honey chicken and waffles, pumpkin bread French toast, and coffee. Perfect.
Today I discovered Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project, and it’s the kind of thing at least part of my Micro.blog should aspire to be.
Little snippets that are helpful to me now and might be helpful to me or others later.
Some of them are very #wisdom:
Like it or not, you’re always practicing something. Put another way, whichever muscle you exercise the most can’t help but strengthen. Often to the detriment of others.
And some are pure Merlin:
Your calendar represents a portfolio of promises to your future self. Treat it that way.
Mostly final desk setup, shown here during a video conference we were both attending (on the iPad). The room looks mostly the same, except it has real curtains now and more stuff on the shelves. And we don’t use it nearly as often—we’re in the office more often than not.
Our other early-COVID desk, set up not in the office but the guest bedroom. Like everyone else, my wife and I spent too much time on videoconferences to sit in the same room, so we were fortunate to have space to spread out like this. Same monitor, different laptop and stand. No K’nex.
Standing desk evolution, a few weeks in COVID. At this point, we still had the blinds open to remind us what “outside” looked like. It still kind of felt like vacation, not yet like the terrifying pandemic it turned out to be. (It did, and still does, make me wish I were indie.)
Our home office desk before COVID. Made of an old kitchen table and K’nex, naturally. 📸
Day three of desk pictures. This one is an actual working desk of mine from my first apartment in San Antonio after grad school. It looks so much like my grad school desk in my Blackburg apartment I first guessed that’s what it was before looking at the location info.
Almost every element in this photo tells a story, at least to me. Maybe that would also make a good series of posts.
Yesterday’s desk post made me think of other interesting writing desks I’ve encountered.
This one is from our house in Sóller, Majorca, Spain, from November 2021.
An iPad instead of a MacBook because this was a vacation, not a business trip.
My workspace at Hotel Bellevue in Cazaubon, France, a few weeks ago. I love the aesthetic, but it made me feel like I should be writing a novel instead of PowerPoint slides. 📸
Cleaning out and backing up my college/grad school MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2008), and the nostalgia is strong in this one.
Sure, its 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo isn’t that impressive, and neither is its 4GB of DDR2 or 256GB GeForce 8600M, but it is weirdly performant on OS X 10.8.3, and the aesthetic is arguably more beautiful and indisputably more fun than current macOS.
The old-school 3D icons for Twitter, TextWrangler, and others are elegant, and maybe we should go back to them.
I did all of grad school on this computer, including tons of Matlab and hundreds of pages of LaTeX, and it’s kind of sad to see it go.
In Corpus Christi for Rio Texas Annual Conference. Tried out Railroad Brewing Company right by the convention center. 📸
Felt bad that I didn’t get much done yesterday, so this picture is to remind me of what I did finish this weekend. Let’s get the short week started strong. 📸
Finished reading: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Slow start for an amazing ending. Fun wordplay and enough mystery to hunt down the sequel. 📚
Pro tip: when the sky looks like this, the best time to leave work was half an hour ago. 📸
Finished reading: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson. A fun, quick read. Pretty un-Sanderson. Seems like he was experimenting with style, similar to Tress, just not in the Cosmere. 📚
Finished reading: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. Like “Pyramids”, an excuse for Pratchett to make a billion pop culture jokes in a row. Tons of fun. 📚
Finished watching: Hidden Figures. I’m so glad this movie exists. Epic women I’ve looked up to forever, especially Katherine Johnson, and now other people will know about them too. Not a movie for nerds—it’s about people and society and space, not technology—but awesome anyway.🍿
Finished reading: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Wow, what a fun novel. I had no idea what was going on or what was going to happen. Definitely better than her Uprooted. Thanks to @jsonbecker for saying exactly that and giving me the recommendation. 📚
Finished reading: The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. I’ve never read a book so full of hints but so devoid of answers. Also with such a powerful, but dumb, protagonist. I want Denna’s story so badly… which I guess puts me in good company. A book practically made for Reddit. 📚
Finished reading: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Late to the party on this one. One of the most beautiful fantasy books I’ve ever read. Incredible command of language and myth and character. Also frustrating; I knew that going in, but I didn’t know just quite how. 📚
Finished reading: Eric by Terry Pratchett. Just fun. Less effort than previous books, but more entertaining. Plus: Rincewind! Only problem is it’s very very short. 📚
Finished reading: League of Dragons by Naomi Novik. Probably my favorite of these, which is nice because it’s last. Pacing worked out, some growth arcs concluded, and the inevitable future is hinted but not written. 📚
Finished reading: Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik. I will never get used to the pacing of these books; and especially the ridiculously abrupt endings. Not even cliffhangers, just endings. 📚
Finished reading: Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik. Fantastic adventure in the Andes devolves to more boring British politics by the end. Novik loves the history of the Napoleonic wars too much, and it weakens the stories. 📚
Finished reading: Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik. Unexpectedly appropriate for my long layover in Sydney. I like Laurence better as an explorer than soldier. More adventure, less British politics. 📚
Finished reading: Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik. Pacing finally feels good, and as a result I enjoyed this one more than the previous four. Feels like the world is changing, which is fun to watch. 📚
Finished reading: Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. Tremendous effort and tons of fun. Lots of Cosmere elements together, and the joy of Hoid everywhere. I just wish he hadn’t tried so hard to sound like Terry Pratchett. (Recommended by @manton) 📚
Finished reading: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. Probably my least favorite of the series so far. So many moving parts, and the jokes didn’t land for me. 📚
Finished reading: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson. I absolutely tore through this book. As usual, Sanderson’s organization awes me, although I couldn’t help but feel he tossed a little too much Cosmere lore at us in one book to prepare us for what’s coming. 📚
Finished reading: Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik. More like a log of adventure than a novel. Temeraire and Laurence finally have a hard decision to make, although their expressed value system removes the tension entirely for the reader. Still a fun adventure though. 📚
Finished reading: Black Powder War by Naomi Novik 📚
Finished reading: Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik. Seemingly totally independent from the first novel except the characters, another exploration into a world where dragons are rare but natural. The pacing is again weird, but the world entertaining enough to make up for it. 📚
Finished reading: His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik. Learning a new world is always fun, and Novik launches in as if England and France have always used dragon fleets in their wars. The climax is too long in coming though, and too short; similarly, the denouement is precipitous. 📚
Finished reading: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden 📚
Finished reading: Pyramids by Terry Pratchett. Long train rides make these books fly by. Another one, like Wyrd Sisters, where Pratchett clearly enjoyed himself with puns and satire and camels. 📚
Finished reading: Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. The first Discworld novel that actually made me laugh out loud. The Discworld is the same glorious place, but the words—powerful things—tickled me just right. I suspect I missed a lot more literature references than I got. 📚
Finished reading: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Takes a long time to get going, but spellbinding once there. Another winter fairy tale. Recommended by @hollyhoneychurch as a follow-up to Uprooted; good recommendation. 📚
Finished reading: Sourcery by Terry Pratchett. The self-consistency of Discworld, despite the total lack of logic, amazes me every time. All of its legends and myths and prophecies are true, just never in ways the reader expects, yet somehow always in ways that blend comfortably with the overall chaos. 📚
Finished reading: Mort by Terry Pratchett. Death hires an apprentice so he can take some time off and experience life, and maybe find a husband for his daughter. All of those things happen, but as is common on Discworld, not exactly in the expected fashion. Rincewind cameo. 📚
Finished reading: Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Starts as a twist on a fairy tale, ends as high fantasy. The finale is a bit more chaotic than you’d wish, but the whole thing is a good time. 95% for children, but very much meant for grown-ups. 📚
Finished reading: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik. I absolutely devoured this book. It pays off the first book’s cliffhanger better than the second even tried to, and while the writing got a little cheaper the story exploded into awesome. 📚
Finished reading: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik. More fun in the Scholomance. Cliffhanger from the previous novel doesn’t pay off, but a great read anyway. 📚
Finished reading: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. Clearly written for the Harry Potter set, but profoundly different and exciting and, helpfully, well-written. Immediately a favorite young adult novel. 📚
Finished reading: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson. Concludes as expected, a surprisingly similar scene to Hero of Ages. I wish we’d seen Hoid more, but the tease of Kelsier at the end was worth it.📚
Finished reading: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson. Beautiful, tragic, ending. Harsh cliffhanger, but didn’t leave me desperate for more Cosmere like most of this series does. 📚
Finished reading: Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett. As fine a primer on headology as one could hope for. 📚
Finished reading: The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett 📚
Finished reading: The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett 📚