Sam's L33t Journal

New Year's this year was pretty good. We got into town in time to have dinner at The Independent, which will always be a bit of a special place for me. The bar's a neighborhood fixture, and it's where Erica had her first meal out, in a sense, it was where we went for lunch on our way back from the hospital when she was a newborn. It's definitely a place with those cozy vibes, so very nice for returning from a trip.

New Year's Day I'd made actual, "we're not arriving on a plane today" plans. We had brunch at Puritan and Co., featuring possibly the best pancakes I've ever eaten. Ultra fluffy, with a sweet blueberry sauce and a salty whipped ricotta topping (which was a little unusual but worked brilliantly in the combination).

The following day was Erica's birthday, and I took the day off to hang out with Erica. We went to the Mapparium, which was on the list of Boston landmarks I'd had yet to visit. It's an unusual and beautiful structure, a room in the form of a giant stained-glass globe, it sits within the Mary Baker Eddy Library, which is a very beautiful building with some very unusual historical roots. After that, we wandered around the Prudential Center and Copley Place for a while before coming home for a sushi dinner at Ebi.

The half-week at work went very well. Pretty productive.

Julie is off at a conference next week, and move her flight early to avoid this weekend's bad weather. So I'm on solo parenting already. I made avocado toast for breakfast, Erica's been watching some "A For Adley" this morning and then I'm taking her to the Children's Museum after lunch.

It's definitely festive this week.

Last weekend I went to see "The Boy and the Heron" with Julie. Definitely beautiful, the plot and setting definitely lean into surreal dream logic so it's not as tightly constructed as, say, the fairy-tale structure of Spirited Away. It was good, though. We saw it at the new Alamo Drafthouse in the seaport and man I am stoked to have an Alamo in town. It's fun.

This evening we're flying to San Diego where Julie's brother lives for Christmas. Julie's parents and her sister's family are meeting us there. It's a bit of a chaotic plan, her brother's family is out of town for Christmas Day and will be joining us a few days after, but I'm glad to get everyone together, Boston / Dallas / San Diego is a big spread.

I've been on the tail end of a chain of colds for some time now. I feel pretty well today, but the last bit of residual congestion is still really annoying.

Thanksgiving break went well. The travel was pleasant, and it was great to see my parents and siblings. My nephew, Simon, is two now and talking quite a bit and seemed excited to see us. We all went to the children's museum and he had a blast.

I've been so, so busy at work and on the home-front, both with condo logistics (hassling people about getting snow removal figured out as winter disaster impends) and with the usual cleaning / organizing / planning for the household.

I know I had more to write but I'm too tired to recall.

I did get a post written on my essay blog (complexmeme_feed) the other week, about Effective Altruism. Maybe I'll get around to updating that more than once a year, or maybe not.

Summer isn't done with us yet.

I've got this Nest thermostat, and if you're not familiar with that sort of "smart" thermostat, it does two things re AC in the summer:

1. Try to learn what temperature you like it.

2. Set it to much warmer than that temperature to save you money.

The feature that sets it warmer when you're actually not in the house is fine, but the "rush hour" feature that sets it a little warmer at "peak" times (i.e. when you, too, most want your air well conditioned) is a bit more aggravating. This year especially. It seems to me like in past years it would set things a few degrees higher, but when my schedule says 73 and the thermostat is like "how about 79?" that seems a bit much.

Actually, there are a lot of ways I wish Nest was a bit smarter. There's no way for it to look at my calendar and pre-cool/warm the house when I get back from a vacation. Or even have me tell it when I'm getting back manually and have it take that into account. It doesn't adjust the schedule to my preferences that well. It supports multiple temperature sensors, but only supports looking at one at a time and only can switch between on a fixed schedule. It can't do anything based on the difference in temperatures (in particular, I'd like it to run the fan if only some of the sensors are as cool as I want). The fan can be run automatically if it wouldn't otherwise be on, but only on a fixed schedule.

All right, enough rambling on that topic. Summer is coming to an end one way or another. My mom brought Erica back to town, had a wonderful time doing stuff together, she got to go to school dropoff for Erica's first day of second grade. Then she got COVID after returning home. At least she's feeling better after a prompt course of Paxlovid. We haven't gotten sick yet, but school year's started and stuff is going around.

Had a good long weekend with some extra climbing and a trip to the Science Museum. Also took Erica to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum (touristy, but educational, hadn't been in ages). Erica -acted very closed-off and shy, but then said she enjoyed it.

This week, some of the computer systems are down at kid's school after some sort of security issue (a ransomware attack, maybe, they haven't been real forthcoming with the details).

I had one of Erica's friends over on Tuesday and Erica's at his house today. Nice to have a break, but sometimes I get stressed out when I have a break. So much to do, so little time. (And yet I manage to get to some things, like hammering some words onto the virtual page here. It's good.)

I'm enjoying the new Magic set, though I feel like I haven't figured out a deck to do well in new Standard. Want to play some limited of the new set, haven't had the time.

Also been really enjoying the Netflix One Piece. I'm not real familiar with the anime or manga, but people more familiar seem to think it's a good adaptation in addition to being generally good. Amazing how well you can do with that sort of thing when the people doing the adapting clearly like the source material and understand why it's good.

I was up a bit late with Erica last night after Julie ducked out for early bed, and Erica was very upset about something about a game; big feelings about little problems. But eventually she helped me finish cooking a batch of beans (which I enjoy because I'm finally figuring out how to get those really good in the Instant Pot). I appreciate her help on that, she's the #1 fan of beans in this household, so I really want to be able to make them up to her standards. We had some good conversation about all sorts of things, including how to describe different kinds of spices and computer security.

Just got back from a weekend in Baltimore. Was great to see Melissa and Elliott and Simon (that baby was G R O M P Y, at least some of the time, but his communication skills are really coming along and that stage of development is really amazing to see). My parents were also visiting there before heading off with Erica on second grandparent trip of the summer. On Sunday, Erica and I took a day-trip via train to DC with my dad and Melissa. We saw the sights Erica most wanted to see (views of the Washington Monument, a visit to the Lincoln Memorial, and the National Children's Museum) and made it back to Baltimore for a sushi dinner. We had a great breakfast Monday at Golden West (wanted to go to Paper Moon, but that's closed Mondays, another time). Then saw Erica off on a trip with my parents. They're going to Cascade of Music and Dance and then back to Cleveland for the end of the summer. I hear Erica is already having a great time.

The trip to Baltimore was smooth, and generally Erica was a great traveler and good company. Was traveling on Southwest this time for the first time in a while, and they really do so many things differently. The trip back, on the other hand, was plagued by delays. I managed to switch to an earlier (also delayed) flight that was just before departure when I arrived at the airport (again, yay Southwest for being so nice about same-day changes). But the flight was delayed on the tarmac by weather for almost an hour, then had to return to gate to get more fuel after their route was changed. Then the flight was turbulent and they couldn't serve beverages or snacks. I arrived still at least an hour-and-a-half earlier than I would have on my original flight, and somehow not too hungry. But my bag didn't make the last-minute transfer. I went home for dinner and bed and swung by the airport this morning to retrieve that from the baggage office.

The last two weeks, Erica's been on an epic road trip with her Grammy and Grumpy (Scott and Heather, Julie's parents) and her cousin Emilia. They took quite the journey up to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, back down along the Saint Lawrence to Quebec City, on to visit some extended family in Toronto, stopped at Niagara Falls, swung down to Cleveland for a consulting job for Scott and some tourism with all four grandparents. Then back to Boston. She just got back today. Two weeks out of town for Erica, and her first journey away from parents. (And I still didn't write the whole time.)

The two weeks were pretty uneventful work-weeks on the home-front, though did have quite an eventful weekend with Julie, we saw a play (Evita at the ART) and a movie (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, for the second time for me and I did not at all regret the rewatch) and got in line early for a delve into a high-concept cocktail bar (Hecate, not an everyday thing and the concept done possibly to the point of silliness, but still very interesting drinks). And some quiet time and cooking, too.

I've mostly fallen out of the habit of playing Magic Arena with the last set, a "Universes Beyond" set themed after Lord of the Rings, since that set doesn't go into the N-most-recent-normal-sets format, Standard, which is the one I mostly play. Instead, it's in Alchemy, which is Arena's Standard plus "rebalancing" (having slightly different versions of cards) plus whatever the opposite of rebalancing is (having wild digital-only-mechanics nonsense). And, of course, Limited, with the set just by itself. Which has been fun, but not enough to keep up the play-every-day (well, most days) sort of habit I had before. With longer before the next Standard set in (and even longer before the next out, with Wizards having widened the window for "rotation" just recently), that's started to feel more same-y, too.

I feel like I can't organize my thoughts about anything. The week's been so busy and I feel not recovered enough to enjoy the little alone time I have. I keep meaning to write and never writing.

I managed to see Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, which was amazing, earned its cliffhanger ending, can't wait for the third installment.

Erica finished first grade, and we're on to the summer.

My parents are in town this weekend and this coming week, then we're going up to Sandy Island Camp. The past week, Erica was at Steve & Kate's Camp, a sort of freeform, no-set-schedule day camp. Erica enjoyed it a lot.

Tears of the Kingdom continues to be very fun. It's just wild what you can do with the game's physics system. There's a bit where Link builds a hydrofoil to ferry a band across a river. (At least that's how I read that puzzle, I'm sure there are a half-a-dozen equally crazy ways to solve it.)

I haven't posted in so long. I've been tired. Julie's been very busy. What else is new.

A concrete wall around my condo complex is crumbling, and it's gotten to the point where one of the fences on top of the wall has collapsed. So some of my time has been spent embarking on the organization of another major renovation project.

Generative AI stuff has me feeling the most like I'm not keeping up with technological developments that I've felt in my career. Feel like I'm in the wrong subfield. So often feel like I don't have the energy to learn things. At least I am excited to use the stuff. A whole lot of UI stuff is going to get real interesting over the next five years. And as a maintenance coder, I'm sure there will be a lot of incomprehensible stuff for me to debug for at least a few years.

This week, I'm visiting my parents and working from Cleveland over Erica's school break, while she gets some grandparent time.

I have had a little time to play some games. Did a playthrough of Omori, a little indie RPG that might be described as "Earthbound-esque surrealism crossed with devastating childhood trauma". It is quite a game, despite some flaws, and one where any spoilers really do mar the experience. I also played One Shot, a top-down puzzle game with some clever puzzles, a pretty fun bite-sized game. Most recently, started playing Citizen Sleeper, a text-heavy cyberpunk RPG that's really drawn me in.

Erica has the week off, so we're visiting family.

For the first weekend, Julie arranged a last minute to visit her parents and sister's family in Dallas while her brother Sean was also visiting with his oldest, Owen. It was great to see everybody, we hadn't seen Sean and Owen in person in a long interval. Travel went reasonably well. Erica was a pretty good traveler, and I've managed to get together a reasonable setup where we can watch movies together on my phone on the plane. We watched Arietty on the way there (Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers is as charming as anything can be) and Belle on the way back (the pacing is inconsistent, and it probably could've been edited as short as the Disney adaptation it frequently references, but there's a lot that's compelling about it, so I see why Erica wanted to see it again).

On Saturday, we went out to brunch, then went to an all-you-can-play retro arcade in the afternoon. Was pretty fun, but definitely I enjoyed the DDR most of all (which, I guess, stood out as one of the less retro titles). Was glad that I hadn't totally lost my ability to read the charts. I really miss the MIT Arcade days.

Julie's dad was also showing off his new car, a Tesla Model Y, which was pretty cool, and a bit of a surreal experience. Seems like the beta version of some technology from the future. Very sleek and cutting-edge, but also rough around the edges in some surprising ways and suffused with Musk-esque humor.

I played some cribbage with Julie's dad, losing three close games in a row. And got in a little time to read and to play Magic on Arena, too, during the trip.

(Speaking of Magic, and something I should've mentioned in my last post, now that Erica's achieved enough sophistication about games to start getting interested in playing that for real, we've been playing some games together with decks from a Magic Game Night set I picked up a long while back with the thought of eventually using it for that purpose.)

We got home on Monday, and I had one day to look after Erica, get a bunch of laundry and household stuff done, and repack, before we head off tomorrow to visit Melissa and family in Baltimore. Should be fun. (The weather for that trip will range between 30 and 78 degrees. What a month.)

I'm writing this post on my new computer, a System 76 (again) Lemur Pro light-weight. My last laptop was seven years old at this point, and I'd basically stopped using it since I was more often on my work laptop. But figured my personal one was due for an update.

I'm tired. Tomorrow we're going to Cleveland before Thanksgiving, assuming nothing last-minute derails our plan.

Last weekend I took kid to the ICA, which was fun. They have a youth membership now, where one adult gets in free.

It's been a quiet week at work with many people out. And I took off today because Erica has a half-day before Thanksgiving break.

I've joined the Better Boston Mastodon. Will see if that turns out to be fun. I don't know if more or less of a focus on a specific community-of-interest makes for a better Mastodon server (for me in particular or in general).

Twitter chaos continues. Not that the site will necessarily fall over immediately, but it sounds like the company is very much in trouble revenue-wise and it's hard for me to imagine just how bad the effect of ~75% attrition would be at a company doing large-scale software infrastructure. And this is with the context of just how bad much smaller levels of churn can be for complex software projects. It's possible that Musk is a good front-man (or maybe "con-"), but the sort of rocket-engine-like CEO where there needs to be a layer of middle-management bureaucracy very focused on directing that energy and shielding the rest of the company. And, in some cases, misdirecting the CEO into thinking that's not what's going on. Musk's Twitter doesn't have that, obviously.

Much other news remains terrible. I'm sure I had some coherent thoughts at some point.

The essays in the first edition of Asterisk are very interesting. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (and formerly Slate Star Codex) fame did one on the science and psychology of wine expertise. But I was most interested by this article on the history of nuclear (de)escalation.