“You know what truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah – ain’t it the truth?”

  • A Reading List for Today

    I find these days to have little energy for hot takes, blaming or recriminations. Instead I will offer this list of some of the books I read or listened to over the last year that helped me understand where we are now and how we got here. YMMV. The Rise and Fall of the Third…

  • The most expensive spell check I can make

    I am really bad at spelling. I always have been and the older I get, my ability to spell things correctly only gets worse. Often my attempts are so bad that the spelling suggestions fail because I am not even close. I started playing around with seeing how well ChatGPT could guess what I meant…

  • How Good Can AI Get?

    After spending some time on this post I realized I’d already written a different version of it which is arguably better, but I’m going to press on to finish this since I need the writing practice. When thinking about what can we expect from AI in the future, I think its good to analyze it…

  • Ruta Del Cares

    I am afraid of heights. I have a dislike for glass elevators, I am unable to stand close to the edge of anything, and whenever I have attempted rock climbing, I have never made it more than 10 feet off the ground. I do like hiking though and I really wanted to do a route…

  • Cycling in Europe

    On a recent trip to Europe I got to try out some cycling in a couple of the most popular places for cycling vacations, Mallorca and Girona. The trip wasn’t a cycling vacation per se but I did select those two places to be able to get a few nice rides in. I also did…

  • Fire HD 10

    I’ve never really been a fan of tablet devices. When I want to actually do something I would much rather have a computer and my phone is good enough for mindlessly consuming garbage. This means I’ve never really wanted an iPad even though they are super slick devices. I often feel jealous of tablet owners…

  • Travel Items

    We just got back from a 6 week trip in Europe. Mostly in Spain with a couple days in Amsterdam and week in Scotland to make it more complicated. A couple of years ago we did 3 months which was great but also kind of too long but that’s another story. This is just a…

  • Money and Power

    In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.  – Tony Montana I don’t think Al Pacino’s character from Scarface is a good person to emulate but he does capture something about how we…

  • NicaPhoto

    I’ve lost count of how many trips I’ve made to Central America and I’ve seen many examples of programs that work to improve the lives of people there but none has impressed me more than NicaPhoto. The name comes from its beginning as an idea to teach photography classes to kids in the town of…

  • Using Prometheus and Grafana with Django

    For my web app project I wanted to add some monitoring and dashboards so I decided to try out prometheus. Since I am using django I also decided to use django-prometheus. It ended up fine but there was a bump or two along the way. The README tells you most of what you need to…