Wednesday, December 24, 2025 →
🎶 II by Voices from the Lake is good for getting focused
Microposts
🎶 Great version of A Dawning at 9:34
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 9: Baking
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 8: Grinch
Finished reading: Seemed inevitable that The Last Town by Blake Crouch would become a mostly straightforward action plot with lots of shooting. Still entertaining, though not nearly as good as the first book in the series. 📚
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 7: Solstice
Finished reading: Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe continues a great series. I can’t understand how I lasted this long without reading these books. So many elements that are what I look for in a book: sci-fi, fantasy, and an unreliable narrator 📚
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 6: Sparkle
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 5: Beard
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 4: Evergreen
Came home to a mess of needles, ornaments, and water. Our Christmas tree fell over! George looked very nervous, as if I would blame him for it. The tree is back up and tied to the wall with some rope. Hopefully that fixes it
Wednesday, December 17, 2025 →
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 3: Firelight
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 2: Cozy
❄️ 12 Days of Winter Wonder Photo Challenge - Day 1: Frost
🖖 Star Trek: Khan was better than I expected with a nice character arc for Khan. The Vulcan Hello podcast has a nice review too
🏃♂️ I might regret this
🐶 George is a good pillow
And yet, despite being everywhere, RSS is somehow invisible. It’s the plumbing of the web: essential, reliable, and routinely underestimated. Most people who consume news this way don’t know they’re using RSS, and a surprising number of people who work in media don’t know they’re dependent on it for much of their reach and many of their partnerships.
Inspired by Ben Werdmuller‘s post, I’ve recommitted to Reeder. I’ve moved all of my feeds, newsletters, YouTube subscriptions, and podcasts into the app to have one place to get everything. Reeder has a great, clean interface that integrates all of these sources well.
🏃♂️ Ice and snow on today’s run made for a good ankle workout
Finished reading: I enjoyed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. An imaginative mix of ecology, evolution, and sociology📚
🎶 David Byrne’s Tiny Desk Concert is great fun
🍕 Cooking pizza while it snows
Finished reading: Medieval Horizons by Ian Mortimer makes a good case that the Middle Ages were a dynamic period that made many contributions to our modern world 📚
🐶 Bacon please
🏃♂️ Although the novelty will wear off quickly, fun to have a proper winter run
Wednesday, November 26, 2025 →
Been a while since I did a Spartan race. I’ve got some training to do
💰 We’re integrating the Q3 forecast for an infrastructure project. A clear sign of inadequate forecasting is missing seasonality. We expect 10–20% reduction through December, given holidays. So, when we get a forecast showing flat or increasing costs in the month, a closer look is required.
Finished reading: Wayward by Blake Crouch does what a second book in a trilogy needs to do. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read the third book to see if it pays off. 📚
Uh oh
🏃♂️ I’ve been using the new Workout Buddy on my recent runs, including letting it select my music. Every kilometre, I receive updates on my pace and heart rate, along with contextual information like recent elevation gains or total distance. While I can easily see most of this on my watch, the regular updates are helpful, especially now that I’m wearing long sleeves and gloves.
The Workout Buddy’s voice is quite natural, encouraging without being annoying.
The music choices were all good, well-aligned with my tastes and suitable for running.
Overall, this is promising, except for the hallucinations. My watch kept announcing songs that it definitely wasn’t playing. These were good songs, mind you, just not what I was actually hearing. Furthermore, there was a perplexing inability to read the watch display. For example, it cheerfully congratulated me on having run for 50 minutes when the watch actually showed 73. Then, it got increasingly inaccurate, repeatedly congratulating me for a 50-minute run over the next 15 minutes.
There’s potential here, but it needs to be more accurate. I’ll continue letting it pick music, but I’ll keep a skeptical ear out for its announcements.