On the Road, On the Trail (Weeknotes

Doing

🏡 I drove to Cleveland to visit my mother for a couple nights. Since I work remotely anyway it was easy to work a day and a half from her house. I stayed an extra night so we could go out for Mexican food (and margaritas!) She’s been going out and walking every morning since my dad died, and I’m glad that she’s getting some exercise and gradually extending her distance. We walked together two mornings for about 1.75 miles each time, including a stop to look out over Lake Erie.

🧠 My wife and I enrolled in the Cleveland Clinic Brain Study, a longitudinal study of people 50 and older lasting up to 20 years. Once a year, we’ll need to spend a day undergoing a battery of tests in exchange for a small stipend. For science!

⚽️ The family and some friends attended the FC Series exhibition match between Manchester City and Chelsea at Ohio Stadium. The quality of play was not great (as expected) but it’s fun to see English teams in person. It was weird to see Ohio Stadium decked in blue rather than red.

🚲 My wife and I, along with a couple of old friends, took advantage of the beautiful sunny (and hot!) weather on Sunday to put in 22 miles on our bikes along the Alum Creek Trail. It was our first opportunity to test the new Sena M1 helmets with Bluetooth. What a cool thing, to be able to be in constant contact with your riding companions without having to stop or shout. The kind of thing you didn’t know you needed. Game changing! We followed up our ride with a meal and beers at North High Brewing.

News of the Weird

🦶 Where did all these severed human feet come from?

🍊 Since Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee, people are beginning to notice how weird Trump and his campaign really are.

📣 Just for the heck of it, I created a Truth Social account. The nonsense out there would be comical if not for the fact that there is a huge number of people who are just lapping this shit up. All tweets truths^[1] fall into one of a few categories: pandering, wish making, mindless parroting, and Sino-Soviet-style propaganda.

This Week’s Blog Posts

• Jobs I don't put on my resume: Even thought these jobs aren’t on my resume today, they gave me loads of valuable experience.
• AI Outside the Bubble: There is an atmosphere of irrational exuberance surrounding artificial intelligence, driven from inside the tech bubble.
• New York (2024): Four random snaps across four days spent in the Greatest City on Earth
• Mentor Marsh: These beautiful hibiscus flowers dot the marsh in pink, white, and red. It wasn’t always that way.
• Yellow and Red collections. More to come soon
• The American Taliban: I think about this quote a lot these days.

Finds

• Kamala Holding Vinyls is just the thing we need right now.
• This portable scanner looks like fun. Don’t I need something like this?
• An online ASCII art conversion tool
• I’m not sure public.work is something I need but it looks like a good resource.
• Friend.com is an AI “service” that is at best sad and at worst sadistically predatory. Gross.

Watching

• As usual, the Olympics provide an opportunity to enjoy sports I don’t know anything about. This week’s curiosity was canoe/kayak slalom. I can’t imaging the upper body strength it must require!
• Mrs. Winterbourne is an old rom-com that holds up fairly well. Good, not great.
• I’m still working my way through The Bear.

Listening

• I started listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast as an accompaniment to my Project One Hundred.

Reading

• “The Weird Intellectual Roots of J.D. Vance’s Hatred for ‘Cat Ladies’” by Katherine Stewart (The New Republic)
• “British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read” by Nate White (London Daily)
• The SBL Study Bible by Society of Biblical Literature