Tag: uspol

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Last week, I talked about how the four-day work week felt so long. Sad to say, this week’s 5-day week didn’t feel any better. I am off next week, so I’ve got that going for me.

The new song I mentioned last week is starting to come together in this week’s session. We managed to all play in the same key and got through most of it. The drummer is really the standout here, perfect time, they never miss. For the rest of us, it’s just a matter of playing it a few times together. I think it has the potential to be one of our better songs.

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Photo of a sign in an apartment window. The text is "President are temporary. Wu Tang is Forever".
President are indeed temporary.

This week’s random photo comes from an apartment window in Windsor Terrace. While the subject and the verb might not agree, personally, I agree with the sentiment.

I read Deep Work a couple months ago and have since put some of his recommendations into practice. For the most part, it’s been about taking control of my calendar, which–combined with some other practices–has carved out a fair amount of time for me to get more meaningful work done. I also (re)subscribed to Cal Newport’s blog, hence the trio of links below.

We had a particularly good jam session this Friday. I attribute part of that to the fact that I’ve been good about picking up the bass (almost) every day, even if it is just to run scales for a few minutes. The lead singer having sampled some cava prior to the session may have had something to do with it as well. None of these sessions would happen without Jamulus, such an amazing piece of software.

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The July 4th holiday, and the number on this weeknote post provide a potent realization: “Crap, halfway through another year…”

Yeah. Time really flies.

Due in part to that realization, I was thinking of a way to remind myself of things–goal oriented things, not a todo list things. Perhaps a personal, daily newsletter will do the trick. I do check my email in the morning, so that’s a good place to get something in front of me. There are myriad ways to do this; I chose to create a little Python personal newsletter mailer script, mostly for fun. A very basic version is getting sent to my inbox every morning. I’ll see if it helps…

This also gave me a chance to try out Codeberg as a replacement for github. So far, so good on that front. I don’t notice much difference since Codeberg seems to have the github features I use most often (git repos and issues).

In US Political news, congress passed a spending and policy bill this week that seems destined to drive this country off a fiscal cliff so that the most wealthy among us can become more wealthy while the rest lose what meager benefits they have. Also, they opened a concentration camp in the Florida everglades and gave it a cute name to distract people from the fact that they are warehousing people in cages, in tents, in a swamp. I really hope the hurricane resistance of those tents aren’t put to the test.

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What a week. It’s difficult to watch the current administration turn the National Guard and Marines on people exercising their first amendment rights in Los Angeles. Heather Cox Richardson’s post from June 8th outlines the events that led up to this escalation. That escalation seems designed more to fan the flames than protect anyone.

Later in the week, Senator Padilla was shoved to the ground and handcuffed by agents for daring to ask a question at a press conference. Once again, Cox Richardson’s summarizes the events and points out that Noem’s comments about “liberating” Los Angeles from the democratically elected government are as shocking as a US Senator being roughed up by someone’s security detail for asking a question.

Then, early Saturday morning, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were assassinated in their home and another lawmaker and his wife were shot several times in their home. If the President denounced this political violence, I certainly haven’t heard it. The President denounced the shootings. Then, staying true to his character, he called the Governor “grossly incompetent”.

This is just a bit of what happened in the US. Meanwhile, things are far from peaceful abroad. Yet the President seemed most focused on his birthday military parade.

On a somewhat brighter note. Thousands of people all over the country took to the streets on Saturday in an overwhelmingly peaceful protest of this administration’s many encroachments on our freedom.

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SailGP is on this weekend. We were fortunate to have a view of Saturday’s racing action from the (covered) comfort of the Adrenaline Lounge. Light winds, heavy rain and a strong current made for challenging racing conditions. It seems like those boats spread out a lot more when the wind is light, perhaps because falling off the foils kills their momentum and it takes time to start flying again. When the boats are all over the course, there aren’t as many contentious mark roundings and finishes, which are the crowd favorites. Even with the rain, it was a great time. I hope today’s race sees better conditions though.

There are another handful of AI related links below. One of which is an example of a corporation using these tools the right way (AI documents the legacy system, humans write the new system). Denis Defreyne writes, more eloquently, about some of the same AI thoughts I did last week. He mentions his employer’s mandate to use AI, which doesn’t seem uncommon these days. These mandates seem like an effort to force the x% savings their tech leadership promised AI would bring.

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