- 1/31/2021:
- 1/30/2021:
- 1/29/2021:
- 1/28/2021:
- 1/27/2021: Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters by David J. Hand
- 1/26/2021: Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark
- 1/25/2021: Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark
- 1/24/2021:
- MN Hardcore: The Binge Episode by TPT [1:46:58
- Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark
- 1/23/2021:
- Near and Far - Game Play 1 by Watch It Played [13:06]
- Near and Far - Game Play 2 by Watch It Played [13:39]
- Near and Far - Game Play 3 by Watch It Played [14:16]
- Near and Far - Game Play 4 by Watch It Played [18:43]
- 1/22/2021: Near and Far: Games Modes [12:32]
- 1/21/2021: Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark - he wrote The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington which was excellent.
1/20/2021: Near and Far: How to Play [38:36]- 1/19/2021: The Churn by James S.A. Corey [audio via Hoopa, 118:00]
- 1/18/2021: The World is Full of Monsters by Jeff Vandermeer [audio via Hoopla, 60:00]
- 1/17/2021: Why Sleep Matters, Google Talk by Matthew Walker [57:00, but watched twice, once with my team]
- 1/16/2021: Episode 1: A premeditated lie lit the fire - Axios, by Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu
- 1/15/2021: La Jatee', roughly 30 minutes - influenced 12 Monkeys.
- 1/14/2021: At This Banana Farm, the Bunches Grow in 430 Shapes and Sizes - Atlas Obscura
- Republicans Still Don’t Get It: Even after almost dying, they are screaming about their right to blather while in the act of blathering.
- "We have come to a moment in which one half of the country is fighting to be free of crippling, life-ending acts of stochastic terror, while another half of the same country is chillingly preoccupied with their right to just talk shit. These harms are not the same."
1/13/2021: I Was Raised On the Lie of the Reluctant, Rural Insurrection by Emily Alford- 1/12/2021: Microservices [humor, 3:09]
- 1/11/2021: A Plague of Madness: Twenty-five years ago, Terry Gilliam and the other outsider : creators of ‘12 Monkeys’ gave humanity a warning about our pandemic-filled future, whether they meant to or not
- 1/10/2021:
- The state of America’s division produces little hope that ‘we can work it out’: By Mary Stanik
- Engaging With Trump’s Die-Hard Supporters Isn’t Productive: The loyalists who still cling to conspiracy theories should be deprived of the attention they seek. By Tom Nicols
- The Conservative Cult of Victimhood: Trump was a perpetrator who thought himself a victim, and American society has indulged that same illusion among Trump supporters. By David Frum
- 1/9/2021: How To Do Anomaly Detection in Tableau
- "Unfortunately, just because something may pique interest, it is not always relevant to the conversation."
- I think this focuses more on the specific data points and doesn't account for trend.
- 1/8/2021: Outlier Detection and Treatment: A Beginner's Guide by Swetha Lakshmanan on Medium.com
- Impacts mean, variance, and correlation.
- Identify: Extreme value analysis, z-score method, k means clustering, visualize.
- Pre-process: Mean/median or random imputation, trimming, top/bottom/zero coding, discretization [intervals or binning].
- "There is no rigid mathematical definition of what constitutes an outlier"
- +/- 3x STDev >> there are "levels" of outliers [upper limit and extreme upper limit]
- Z-score uses +/-3. Has a specific formula.
- Kmeans for groups of data?
- 1/7/2021: What is Anomaly Detection? Examining the Essentials by Ira Cohen at Anodot
- Generally a hybrid of structured and unstructured data.
- Global, contextual, and collective outliers.
- 1/6/2021: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 1/5/2021: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 1/4/2021: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson B
ennett - 1/3/2021: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 1/2/2021: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 1/1/2021: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
A Nod to Nothing
Pretty much as it says, a lot of nothing about nothing
Saturday, January 16, 2021
January 2021 Reading List
Saturday, December 05, 2020
December 2020 Reading
- 12/31/2020: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
12/30/2020: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett- 12/29/2020: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/28/2020: Shorefall: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/27/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/26/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/25/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/24/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/23/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/22/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/21/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/20/2020: LinkedIn Microservices Overview - kind of basic. [60:00]
- 12/19/2020: Testing overview [work related, 15:00]
- 12/18/2020: Arch overview [work related, 57:37]
- 12/17/2020: Enrollment overview [work related, 25:00]
- 12/16/2020: AWS This week [33:00 inc re:Invent]
12/15/2020: Admin site overview [work related, 34:41]- 12/14/2020: Admin site overview [work related, 20:00]
- 12/13/2020: Arch overview [work related, 18:14]
- 12/12/2020: Arch overview, team specific [work related, 60:00]
- 12/11/2020: Arch overview [work related, 30:00]
- 12/10/2020: Arch overview [work related, 30:00]
- 12/9/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/8/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/7/2020: Foundryside: A Novel [The Founders Trilogy] by Robert Jackson Bennett
- 12/6/2020: AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate 2020, IAM [25:00]
- 12/5/2020: AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate 2020, IAM [25:00]
- 12/4/2020: AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate 2020, IAM [25:00]
- 12/3/2020: Funkin on the Northside, Minnesota Historical Society [60:00]
- 12/2/2020: AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate 2020, IAM [25:00]
- 12/1/2020: AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate 2020, Overview [25:00]
Sleeping and Brick Gollums
I think I've been sleeping too much. I know, if you sleep, then it's probably not too much, but it's considerably more than pre-covid. Doom scrolling and other behaviors seem to have an impact on my hours of shut eye. I noticed the difference this week when I got up at my old commute time for several days and had several hours of pre-work time to myself to...well, work, and read, and watch some television, and walk...I definitely felt more productive.
This morning I overslept - imo - but I got to enjoy a weird dream on the tail end of those hours. In some run down factory that had been semi-gentrified, I was hosting a D and D game. But I'd lost all my notes from previous games and had fifteen players participating I couldn't remember a thing about. So I looked out the window, took note of all the broken brick and trash in the neighborhood where they/we were trying to repurpose an old factory, and decided I'd have to do a hack and slash that was challenging regardless of the number of players and/or their level. The result...a brick and garbage gollum the size of a factory that had fists, hands, mouth, but could also form tree sized pseudo appendages that would slam into a player, enveloping them, suffusing their lungs and stomach - unless they made their save - and possessing them as a gollum zombie under the gollum's control that would start to ooze and collect trash, ala the Japanese movie Tetsuo, the Iron Man. I remember thinking in my dream that it was clever to have a gollum, traditionally under control, be the one controlling. It's less clever when I'm awake because gollums don't work that way, so it was likely more of an elemental, or the zombie players were under the control of the gollum's owner.
I suspect all that is related to helping E with D and D lately, as well as playing it myself with my old crew. When E and I were talking I pointed out I have a few standard scenarios I pull out when I need to buy some time for future ideation, or want the party to enjoy a bit more hack and slash than usual. Crippled beholder with fewer stalks, weird spells, and a tribe off worshippers, like bullywugs or kobalds, plus associated pets [maybe the beholder has a tame spell it uses on behalf of it's worshippers, so anything is fair game]. I also like rando nemesis. Maybe you trespass, maybe you find a small abandoned temple and loot it, maybe you ruin something that seems innocuous like a nest or a colony of bugs, and the local wood demon/deity decides to make an example out of you and keeps upping the challenge until something "works".
Friday, November 13, 2020
Not a Reading Post
Every once in a while I feel like getting back into not-reading posts. Bare with me. Hmm...I bet it's bear with me. Otherwise we're going to have to shed some clothes, right?
So what did I do for my birthday this year? Celebrated it a day early for one. We headed up to the cabin to see my folks and took a bunch of steak, porkchops, and potatoes with us. And some games. My wife and kid took crokinole. We learned to play it at a gaming day with friends last weekend and they loved it. Then discovered that the board I'd had forever because it was the same board I'd had as a kid in the old farmstead home when I farmed in the summers, was a crokinole board on the flip side. So there was a bunch of cribbage and crokinole pre-steak.
You can tell we're in heavy covid concern because of the masks. I literally used my mask between bites of dinner. I was pretty sure we were all safe, but my kid bags groceries, and we talked to the neighbor to get Luna - the dog - watched, and the meat store in Osseo was off the hook with people. Better safe than sick with all the hospital beds pretty much full.

I got this game

Tuesday, November 03, 2020
November 2020 Reading
- 11/30/2020: How To Play Choose Your Own Adventure - Roll for Crit [4:54]
- Bought at Target on black Friday sale.
- 11/29/2020: History of Cycling in 100 Objects by Suze Clemitson
- 11/28/2020: History of Cycling in 100 Objects by Suze Clemitson
11/27/2020: I Learned to Make a Lip-Syncing Deepfake in Just a Few Hours [and you can, too]- I tried this, used me lipsyncing Space Oddity. A few quirks and I used the zero code version, not the Jupyter notebook version, but editing the video/audio was the tough part.
- 11/26/2020: You're Ruining the Dystopia for Everyone by Frank Conniff
- 11/25/2020: You're Ruining the Dystopia for Everyone by Frank Conniff
- 11/24/2020: You're Ruining the Dystopia for Everyone by Frank Conniff
- 11/23/2020: Saga - Compendium [it was over 1300 pages]
- 11/22/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/21/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/20/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/19/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/18/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/17/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/16/2020: Saga - Compendium
- 11/15/2020: Paper Girls: Book Six - time traveling paper girls
- 11/14/2020: Paper Girls: Book Five
- 11/13/2020: Paper Girls: Book Four
- 11/12/2020: Paper Girls: Book Three
- 11/11/2020: Paper Girls: Book Two
11/10/2020: Paper Girls: Book One- 11/9/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma
- 11/8/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma
- 11/7/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma
- 11/6/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma
- 11/5/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma
- 11/4/2020:
- The future of DevOps - https://sdtimes.com/devops/
the-future-of-devops/ - Re: value streams as the way to drive business value in devops.
- Improve DevOps with Octopus Deploy - https://sdtimes.com/devops/
improve-devops-with-octopus- deploy/ - Tool chasm / runbook automation
- “They think the way around it is teaching ops people how to code. Then, the ops people start thinking like developers and forget about why the software fails.”
- Debug anything, anytime, anywhere - https://sdtimes.com/devops/
debug-anything-anytime- anywhere/ - Rookout tool for production level performance insight and testing. Production-first approach.
- Why value stream matters to DevOps and the business - https://sdtimes.com/devops/
why-value-stream-matters-to- devops-and-the-business/ - Value stream map
- Load, security, how it’s being used, what features are being used.
- The SD Times DevOps Showcase - https://sdtimes.com/devops/
the-sd-times-devops-showcase/ - Tooling, including Liquibase, New Relic, Selenium/Appium (and umbrella tooling), scaled agile (SAFe).
- Many have a focus on creating more tests (using AI/ML) to give more insight and create in production breakpoints and, of course, to automate everything (and capture it as code deploying code).
11/3/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma- 11/2/2020: The Rollout: A Novel about Leadership and Building a Lean-Agile Enterprise with SAFe 1st Edition by Alex Yakyma
- 11/1/2020: Fossil Discoveries Challenge Ideas About Earth’s Start
Saturday, October 03, 2020
October 2020 Reading
- 10/31/2020:
- Steve: In R&D, Generalists Are More Valuable Than You Think
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Mouth of the Whale"
- 10/30/2020:
- Go Beyond Traditional Optical Character Recognition [OCR] and Extract Text for Financial, Healthcare, and Legal Documents Quickly [60:00]
- Focus was on claims processing framework that AWS has in their samples on Gitlab.
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "The Yaw"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Eight Little Lies"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "It Should be Raining"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "The Last First Date of Bear Bloomfield"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Friday Night Seance"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Silence"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Consumed"
- 10/29/2020:
- Steve; 3 Tips to Avoid WFH Burnout
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "A Letter to My Husband, Jack"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Nap_Town"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "The Unicorn"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - Iceolation"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Our Love Burns"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Mr. Flip"
- Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "The Last Chance Diner"
- 10/28/2020: What if AI could manage better than your manager?
- Ugh, new strategies and mentoring employees is < 20 percent of the average manager's time?
- ego depletion / decision fatigue.
- leadership: extroversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness.
- 10/27/2020: Learn How to Accurate Forecast Demand with Amazon Forecast [60:00]
- 10/26/2020: Demystifying Data Lakes for Healthcare and Life Sciences [60:00]
- Really good section on deploy stack for Glue frameworks. Shared it with one of my coworkers so she can ponder implementing it for quick POC / spike work.
- 10/25/2020: Podcast 279: Making Kubernetes Work Like it's 1999 with Kelsey Hightower [30:00].
- Discussed the issues with trying to run everything with each team when you own microservices.
- 10/24/2020: Steve: A Company’s Workforce Is Its Most Strategic Asset. Investors Deserve Clarity About It. [Human Capital]
- 10/23/2020: Anxiety, Calm - Over/Under Function Brene Brown podcast for article lunch and learn at work. [30:00 plus an hour of discussion]
- Enjoyed this. Could see the context of good attention/bad attention that were discussed in terms of characters in books.
- These were recommended
- Daring Greatly and Dare to Lead – both by Brene Brown
- The Call to Courage – Brene’s Netflix special
- Why Won’t You Apologize by Harriet Lerner
- 10/22/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "My Ex-Husband is Still an Asshole"
- 10/21/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Complete Me"
- 10/20/2020:
- Chester County History Center in PA: Dark History. [60:00] - all sorts of fun stories about the use of bodies in medicine/etc. The online nature of events during Covid is a nice side-effect.
- Create a QnA Bot with Amazon Lex and Amazon Kendra [60:00] - I'd like to try this if I ever get the time.
- Accelerating Microservice-based Application Delivery with AWS [60:00] - focus on containers.
- 10/19/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "The Woman with the Comb"
- 10/18/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Moonshine"
- 10/17/2020: How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally May Have Spread Coronavirus Across the Upper Midwest - Washington Post.
- Good read as we bypassed SD entirely on our way back from Yellowstone given the map of the hotspots and the fact that Sturgis had happened regardless of health concerns.
- 10/16/2020: A Radical New Technique Lets AI Learn with Practically No Data - MIT Technology Review
- Less Than One shot learning.
- Basically blending images so that the computer can intuit multiple items from a single image with many tags.
- Two points, ten thousand separate classes and up to a million. Still have to go from huge dataset to distilled data set.
- Has implications for data privacy.
- 10/15/2020: Ten Best Science Fiction Podcasts by Polygon
- Try A World Where, Murmurs, Null/Void, The Great Chameleon War. Added to my list.
- 10/14/2020:
- Raised by Wolves Podcast: Can Robots Make Moral Decisions - September 3, 2020 [47 min]
- Raised by Wolves Podcast: Should We Start Over On Another Planet - September 10, 2020 [42 min]
- Raised by Wolves Podcast: Can Artificial Intelligence Have Emotions? - September 17, 2020 [47 min]
- 10/13/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Curios and More"
- 10/12/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "The Miracle of Life"
- 10/11/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Dear Jane"
- 10/10/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Aggressive Mimicry"
- 10/9/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "Daddy's Girl"
- 10/8/2020: Black Rainbow Vol 1: LGBTQIA Horror - "My Ex-Husband is Still an Asshole"
- 10/7/2020: Raised by Wolves: The Podcast
- Can Robots Make More Decisions? [47:00] - September 3, 2020
- Should We Start Over on Another Planet [42:00] - September 10, 2020
- Can Artificial Intelligence Have Emotions? [46:00] - September 17, 2020
- 10/6/2020: David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Elisabeth Moss [54:00] - 5 October 2020
- 10/5/2020: Two Tools Every Data Scientist Should Use for Their Next ML Project
- Weights and Biases and Manifold. Both for visualizing your models.
- 10/4/2020:
- Trust me, there is reading going on as well, but I'm getting in a LOT of walking, so now that I've really figured out podcasts and have the headphones working right, I'm getting in a lot of listening. Added Savage Love Podcast as well, although I haven't listened to any yet to be sure. And I listened to three Lore podcast episodes, but I'm not including those because I'm not going to add them. I really prefer the multi-person conversational style. Rabbit Hole wasn't quite like that, but there were two interviewers/reporters involved and a lot of back and forth discussion.
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Brian Cox [45:00] - 28 September 2020
- The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - the Popular Science Podcast - Debunking Hymen Myths, Moving Corpses, Birth Control to Please the Pope [41:07] - 2 October 2019
- The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - the Popular Science Podcast - Exploding Underwater Mountains, Board Sex and Celery [51:41] - 30 September 2020
- The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - the Popular Science Podcast - Hot Dog Sports, Sexy Pseudoscience, Intestinal Power Walking [41:06] - 16 September 2020
- The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - the Popular Science Podcast - Giant Sloths, Caged Babies, Spicy Horse Butts [38:07] - 2 May 2018
- 10/3/2020:
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Seven: Where We Go One. [30:00]
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Eight: We Go All. [36:00]
- 10/2/2020:
- Your First Day With Notion - A Beginner's Guide [14:01] - personal wiki, knowledge management system.
- Roam Research: Our First Look [11:07] - newer personal wiki/research tool. Interesting as it leverages nodes, which is why I was looking at Neo4j, but eventually overkill for almost anything I do unless I'm building a complete universe and there are writing specific tools for that.
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Four: Headquarters. [40:00]
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Five: The Accidental Emperor. [36:00]
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Six: Impasse. [25:00]
- 10/1/2020:
- Lady Eboshi is Wrong - Lessons We Learned from Anime [9:40]
- SAFe meetup meeting on kinds of large scale agile including SAFe, DaD, LeSS, Nexus, and Scrum at Scale. Good meeting [90:00].
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. One: Wonderland. [28:00]
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Two: Looking Down. [38:00]
- New York Times, Rabbit Hole podcast - about internet radicalization and recommendations and conspiracy. Three: Mirror Image. [29:00]
Friday, September 04, 2020
September 2020 Reading
- 9/30/2020: Nerdist Book Club - Lovecraft Country Part 2 [59:08]
- 9/29/2020: Nerdist Book Club - Lovecraft Country Part 1 [81:13]
- 9/28/2020: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
- 9/27/2020: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
9/26/2020: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff- 9/25/2020: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
- 9/24/2020: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
- 9/23/2020: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
- 9/22/2020: oh nos - I'm all caught up in the David Tennant podcast series. Have to find a new one. Kind of hard. Tried Lore, didn't like it. The Facts of the day one is fun, but more frivolous. I'm going to go with one from the Times re: internet radicalization, but it's a limited three hour series. Obviously didn't listen to all of these on the same day, but I do get in at least 45 minutes of walking a day, so I keep up a good flow of information. Should maybe try a history one, but I seem to be fairly particular when it comes to topic flow, voice. Fake doctors is good, but sooo long in some way. There's a Dead Eyes podcast similar to Tennant about Holywood rejection stories. That might be good, but less educational. I'd try a machine learning one, but I worry about mentally checking out while I walk and multitask doing Litterati/etc.
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Tim Minchin [45:00] - 22 September 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Cush Jumbo [45:00] - 15 September 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Dan Levy [45:00] - 8 September 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Judi Dench [45:00] - 1 September 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...George Takei {45:00] - 25 August 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Stacey Abrams [45:00] - 18 August 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Jim Parson [45:00] - 11 August 2020
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Everyone - season outtakes - 21 May 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Michael Sheen [45:00] 23 April 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Tina Fey [45:00] - 16 April 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Samantha Bee [45:00] - 9 April 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...James Cordon [45:00] - 2 April 2019
- 9/21/2020: The English and Their History - Robert Tombs
- Recording fifty page chunks...made it to roughly page 100 the second half of the month. It's my bedside, read a few pages before sleep book which tends to run a little meatier than what I'm reading otherwise.
- 9/20/2020: The English and Their History - Robert Tombs
- 9/19/2020: Piles and piles of articles on geographically dispersed teams. See my inbox for "How to Make Location-Independent Agile Work", "6 Tools to Help you Manage Geographically Dispersed Teams", and about a dozen others. Some nice images I captured to my history.
9/18/2020: New AI Tool GPT-3 Ascends to New Peaks, But Proves How Far We Still Need to Travel- 9/17/2020: A Robot Wrote this Entire Article. Are you Scared Yet, Human? Gpt-3
- 9/16/2020: Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [64:40]. Rewatched with my team for a lunch event, so I saw it twice.
- 9/15/2020: Gender Equality in the Workplace Debunking the Myths. Online hour seminar with Lisa Thomas, Joeli Brearley, and Scarlett Curtis - this was on the 9th maybe.
- 9/14/2020:
- How to Set Up An AI Center of Excellence
- Ceremonies: Kickoff and Planning
- Brands that Hyper-Personalize Will Win the Next Decade
- Why Conversational AI Should not be an IT Project (Evan Kohn)
- Should You Build or Buy AI? That's the Wrong Question
- After all, what we’re talking about here is becoming AI-capable. Notice that I don’t say “AI-centric.”
- If You Think GPT-3 Makes Coders Obsolete, You Probably Do Not Write Code
- Stack Overflow GPT-3 Podcast [27:09]
- 9/13/2020:
- Undead Stenches - Betrayal at House on the Hill (Pt 2) - Let's Play [68:45]
- Tour de France 2020 - Stage 1 (Highlights) [19:40]
- Tour de France 2020 - Stage 2 (Highlights) [19:28]
- Tour de France 2020 - Stage 3 (Highlights) [15:54]
- Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
- 9/12/2020: David Tennant Podcast - https://www.david-tennant.com/podcast - listen to these while I'm running or getting in a walk to the grocery store / Target / etc.
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Olivia Colman [45:00] - January 28, 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Whoopi Goldberg [45:00] - 5 February 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Jodie Whittaker [45:00] - 12 February 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Sir Ian McKellen [45:00] - 19 February 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Jon Hamm [45:00] - 26 February 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Gordon Brown [45:00] - 5 March 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Jennifer Garner [45:00] - 12 March 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Catherine Tate [45:00] - 19 March 2019
- David Tennant Does a Podcast With...Krysten Ritter [45:00] - 26 March 2019
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal E-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- 9/11/2020:
- Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
- Flatulent Frights - Betrayal at House on the Hill (Pt 1) - Let's Play [44:59]
- 9/10/2020:
- We Make Great Barbecue - Hellapagos - Let's Roll [39:30]
- We're On the Precipice - The Red Dragon Inn 2 (Part 2) - Let's Roll [48:46]
- The Poison's Secret - The Red Dragon Inn 2 (Part 1) - Let's Roll [44:53]
- 9/9/2020:
- Gulps & Gerki - The Red Dragon Inn (Pt 1) - Let's Roll [35:52]
- Gerki, Lord of Coin - The Red Dragon Inn (Pt 2) - Let's Roll [25:28]
- 9/8/2020: Nerdist Book Club - Black Leopard, Red Wolf Video 4 [63:44]
- 9/7/2020: Nerdist Book Club - Black Leopard, Red Wolf Video 3 [77:48]
- 9/6/2020: Nerdist Book Club - Black Leopard, Red Wolf Video 2 [74:56]
- 9/5/2020: Nerdist Book Club - Black Leopard, Red Wolf Video 1 [71:52]
- 9/4/2020 Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
- 9/3/2020: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
- 9/2/2020: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
9/1/2020: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Postcards in the Coronavirus Days - Part VI
Larry and Janine, Mt Rushmore National Memorial, Black Hills. Folding Line on the back to append another president into the mountain. Big ugly.
Matt Z, Spruce Tree Ruin, Mesa Verde National Park
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Banning State Park Ride
On Friday I pedaled from Eagan up to Banning State Park near Sandstone, MN. Good trip, although not particularly exciting.
It was mostly on trails: from Eagan into St. Paul, catch the Gateway/Vento, Sunrise, Willard Munger, and a spur. Total was 107.55 miles.
It was more overgrown (on the sides) then when we were up there 10 years ago or so, so a bit more shade. But still pretty flat with a slight grade because you're headed north in Minnesota (there's a reason most folks go north to south), and lots of sun. I started at 6:00 a.m. to avoid the bulk of the heat, but I still stopped twice to buy more water, three 16+ oz bottles each time. The second time I panicked a bit as the gas station was locked up tight due to an electrical outage, but there was another not too far down the road also out of electricity, but taking cash. Still, it was still almost not enough.
I did not like the shoulders on 61 where they simply fell apart and hadn't been cleaned in....ever? I hit a small spot of gravel at one point and there was a loud twang as a sizable chunk of metal went flying. I thought I had avoided a flat....for about another 60 seconds. Fortunately, it was easy to fix and despite the size of the shard of metal, hadn't shredded my actual tire. Simple puncture. After that I trended more toward the road despite the cars.
Other highlights? An idiot in a truck with a large Confederate Flag flying high above several US flags. Hampton Umbrella rides. Pictured below. Sort of sketchy looking in this context. I didn't get a picture of the Scooter ride entrance which was pretty terrifying; a tunnel full of pieces of metal sticking into the center. It was like it was beckoning specifically to me with my nickname.


My wife met me at Banning State Park with the convertible for a picnic (abbreviated because of the mosquitoes, but still appreciated - I'd had mostly nuts and fruit snacks and goldfish crackers at that point) and for a tour of the park (abbreviated; we saw the rapids, but the falls were a four mile round trip that she wasn't up for). Here are a number of pictures of the rapids. Pretty area, particularly if you want to hike. I heard on the news that in Taylors Falls, 50 miles from us, a guy fell off the cliffs and landed on the rocks while we were at Banning. This didn't seem to get as high over the river as that, but there were some bouldering type areas that went higher than we were willing to hike.





All in all, a great ride, although I'm feeling it in the saddle some today. I keep thinking my modifications to my bike seat will pan out, but I can find the right level. Still, close enough and getting new brake pads on is priority one.
Closing with the soothing sounds of the rapids.

Postcards in the Coronavirus Days - Part V
This particular postcard was so very many postcards...
Bit of duplication there with the photos, but I wanted to catch them all...
Thursday, August 20, 2020
The Incident
My wife and I watched The Incident the other night. I really enjoyed it. My take is that it's about tragedy and how someone reacts to (maybe dwells upon, or dwells within is a better turn of phrase) tragedy whether they're old or young and whether they persevere in the face of that tragedy or succumb to it emotionally. In the case of The Incident whether one thrives or shrivels seems to be based on age.
For a while I really hoped it was a dystopia in the vein of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. e.g. the noise was a machine of some sort splitting off a very bad dimension/possibility and screwing over some version of yourself, so that an individual could enjoy a probable good turn in the timeline that had the technology. Personally, I think that's a creepier take on the whole thing. Confining some version of yourself to hell so that you can enjoy a less painful reality. How many alternate yous would you be willing to banish to hell to be happy? Would you justify it with "it's me, so they'd be happy for the happy me?"Inventive and well worth watching and I agree with Variety, that it's got a smattering of Borges, enough so that when it tries to explain things at the end, it almost screws up the movie.
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Postcards in the Coronavirus Days - Part IV
Sent to the Boss on 8/11: Geocaching Whitehouse.
Monday, August 17, 2020
Hot Summer Nights
My new neighbor trades beer with me. Between him and Kyle and myself, I may never have to drink the same beer more than twice unless I really want to. I've taken to buying warm beer and storing it under the steps and I'm developing quite the esoteric collection.
This was one of the incoming trades. I had it while playing D&D on Sunday. I'm generally against fruity beer, but this had a seriously light taste (and light alcohol at 4.4%). The lower alcohol level was a bonus because anything above 6% tends to make me a bit fuzzy for playing my character.
Speaking of Warbear the Invincible, Warlock, here's his character sheet. https://www.dndbeyond.com/profile/Dexter_Scootarus_I/characters/27038034. E, Kyle, Chris, his son, and I have been playing for about two months on most weekends with a few skips. Last time I played consistently was in the Richfield house maybe 25 years ago. We're having a good time, although I have a theme. Fire my biggest spell, Scorching Ray. Take a hit, and "blow up" with Hellish Rebuke. Either go down, or get in an Eldritch Blast and then go down. It's not 100%, but I think it's at least a 60% go to strategy. Mostly I'm waiting for my patron (a fiend, in this case Demogorgon) to decide he's going to chew on my brain and spit it back into my skull. I hear that's how he makes friends.

Sunday, August 16, 2020
Finnish Bistro Bike Ride
Yesterday I pedaled up to the Finnish Bistro in the Como neighborhood of St. Paul. Very close to the State Fair. Given the Fair is going to be shut down this year due to Covid concerns (rightly so), it's about as close to my bike ride to an Americano at the Farmer's Union there that I'm going to get. Kind of a bummer - I'm usually there earlier enough to see some interesting sights. Last year it was Governor Walz stopping by my table to say hello. I'm still getting a little bit of rub on the back tire even after my deep cleaning during a streaming Sarah Morris concert We'll see if new brake pads will take care of it. I may have to bite the bullet and do a little bit of truing. I did take a trip later in the day to find tires for the other bicycle (which has a bald back wheel), but Gateway and Strauss didn't have anything with tread due to Coronavirus stocking issues. The wait is like 4 weeks at the moment. I bit the bullet and ordered a pair of tires off Amazon. They seem upscale compared to what's on the bike after a bit of research.
Some cool animal sightings as I was out at 6:00 a.m. A bunch of turkeys wandering around near the river. And when I went past Fort Snelling a deer in the parking lot was close enough for petting for a thirty seconds. Not that I'd pet him. Deer ticks make me nervous (after two rounds of Lyme's).
Here's my bike nearby (the old one) while I eat Oat Cakes with cardamom, reindeer sausage, and an Americano on the bus bench. I think my biggest issue was lack of a metal fork. I should put one in my pack so I always have one. It would have made the meal much better. Not that it wasn't delicious, albeit a bit too much.


As I neared home, I pedaled past a bunch of guys packing up their bicycles after a morning ride near Hwy 13. I was amused that there one guy explaining that his bicycle was "not a road bike" and he could move to a road bike if he wanted to in order to be more efficient. His definition of "not a road bike" had treadless, razor thin tires, and a light frame. I wanted to yell, "THIS IS NOT A ROAD BIKE." But I refrained.
Overall, it reminded me of the Craft Beer Drinkers Be Like series that Kyle forwarded me: