Friday Notes (Jun 26, 2026)

Apparently, I’ve been on my own form of spring break. It has been over a month since my last post here (or anywhere). And there was a three-week stretch between previous posts and the single gap-filling Friday Notes post on May 15th.

Getting from the last paragraph to this one took over an hour due to a number of self-induced distractions. For a variety of reasons, I’m just not feeling it lately. Some of it is blog blahs, but most of it is… I just don’t want to.

Yet there is much to write about…

[It took a liter of tea and over an hour to write the lede. (But the blank page is often the biggest challenge.) One hopes the rest of the post goes faster and doesn’t require as much fuel!]

The summer solstice, which often inspires a post, passed unremarked here last Sunday. I didn’t commemorate it — in fact barely noticed it — but, while I do usually observe the solstices and equinoxes, the summer solstice is a bittersweet one. It may mark the official start of summer, but I also see it as the harbinger of winter. It’s the milestone where the daylight starts to wane.

Slowly, at first, but dying full speed by the autumnal equinox (which would seriously bum me out if I didn’t love the fall so much).

§

Part of what pulled me away from posting is how nice the spring weather has been. May was very pleasant:

An average high of 70° with an average low of 50°: not too warm; not too cool; Goldilocks weather. The dew point has been low, which makes even the warmer temps comfortable.

June — nearly over — has also been quite nice (note vertical scale difference):

Average high and low up 10 degrees but still mostly nice and dry. Cooling off at night for good open-window sleeping weather. The reason I love the spring and the fall is that I can have open windows. Summers I’m locked in with the A/C, and winters it’s the furnace.

So, I’ve been mostly hanging out enjoying my days. Sitting at the computer — my “desktop” (laptop + big monitor + keyboard + mouse) — hasn’t appealed. For the same reason, I haven’t been doing any coding, either (and no posts on my programming blog since April 13).

§

A bigger aspect is that I’m experiencing a backreaction to my two years posting on Substack (which ended this past March). Those two years got me back into blogging — to the point of having an unvoiced commitment to produce ten posts per month.

Which I more-or-less pulled off:

Just the one post this May, though. I’ve been recalling how, before that two-year stretch, I’d been cutting back on posting — only posting when I had something to write about. The last two years, it has felt more an obligation, and that is something I try to avoid in my retirement.

There is also that technology has moved beyond blogging. Why read when you can watch a video? (And why watch a long video when you can watch a short one?) On top of that, we’re way past saturation when it comes to content. Blogging has increasingly felt to me like ever smaller drops in a mind-bogglingly big sea.

All-in-all, it makes for a severe case of blogging ennui. I’ve been here before. It usually goes away eventually (it lasted for a whole year in 2017). I am at heart a creator, so I doubt I’ll ever completely stop writing posts and code. (Indeed, the tagline for my programming blog is “I can’t stop writing code!”)

§

To be honest (tbh, as they say now), the bigger part of my spring break is due to being burned out on doing things. I’m more a dreamer than a doer, and a pretty severe introvert to boot (plus very likely somewhere on the spectrum). As such, I tend to stay home (and write blog posts and program and read and watch movies and shows).

However, as mentioned last time, I turned 70 last fall and have taken it as an inspiration to remove long-standing items from my TODO list. I hibernated through winter but March and April were getting-stuff-done months, and while I did get tons done, I think my get-up-and-go got up and went.

Bottom line, I just didn’t feel like writing.

But I have done a lot of reading and watching (too much to get into in this post).

§

One little spring highlight was dog-sitting my pal Bentley for a few days in May:

Above she’s enjoying a special treat after suffering through her annual bath.

My black lab Sam joyfully jumped in any large enough body of water — definitely a water dog — but acted as if being tortured when given a bath. A usually very mellow dog, she’d actively try to escape being bathed.

Bentley won’t go out in the rain, no matter how light it is. One drop of water on her head, and she’s had enough. As with any house dog, she loves going out, but not if it’s raining. Yet she puts up with bath time with good grace (because she’s such an adorable gal).

§

Speaking of critters, every morning I put out raw nuts for my local squirrels:

I spend an hour or more every morning just watching them.

The unspecified “other” day I saw this little red-haired cutey:

The only other time I’ve seen him or her was next to a nearby tree and not since. A baby, obviously. Adorable.

Some are getting bold enough to come near me to get nuts on the ground, but so far they’re all too timid for handfeeding.

§

Also mentioned last time, I’ve lost interest in quantum computing. Raise that to some large power with regard to Ai (with a side of No Thankyou). It’s a very useful tool for some things, but I’m put off by how fervently it seems nearly everyone has embraced it.

I don’t have any moral outrage about how Ai is going to be the end of us (though it certainly will change us), but I have seen this sort of tech bubble before, and it always ends in tears.

More to the point, the sheer amount of Ai content has caused an allergic reaction.

§

A thing making this post hard to write today: the condo management hired people to power wash the siding of a number of units. Since just after 8:00 AM (it’s almost 3:00 PM now), their 100-gallon supply tank (and pump) has been sitting at the curb outside about 50 yards away.

The irritant is the pump, which kicks out a fairly consistent 60 dB of fairly broad-spectrum noise (with just enough variation to be hard to tune out):

Spectrograms are cool. They’re 3D graphs in that the vertical axis is frequency, the horizontal axis is time, and the color indicates intensity at that frequency at that time.

The good news is that they just turned off the pump and a blessèd reasonable silence has descended upon the neighborhood.

§

I saw a post title recently, It’s time to stop complaining about the extra inning runner, which, yeah, probably it is (if for no other reason than that it won’t change anything and it annoys others).

Not the point of this note, but the “extra”, “free”, or “ghost” runner is a baseball rule added in 2020 that starts any regular game extra inning (i.e. those after nine) with a runner already on second base. This is part of the push for shorter games and mainly serves to eliminate tie games that go on and on. It does happen that ties run to 18+ innings, which is effectively playing two+ games in a row without a break. It exhausts the players, it exhausts the bullpen, and it exhausts the fans.

That said, many think the rule goes too far. They (and I agree) propose that the tenth and eleventh innings are played with no ghost runner and innings thereafter start with a runner on second.

Because a few extra innings is exciting. Eighteen is not.

But as I said, not the point of this note. What struck me was the post’s title. It’s not a statement about the author’s opinions (though that’s exactly what the post was), but a prescription for what others should do. I found it an interesting emphasis.

A better title might have been: How I learned to stop complaining and love the extra runner. But maybe it’s just me.

§

Earlier this month a storm blew through in the early evening. There was clear sky behind it, so there was a point where it was backlit by the setting sun.

Resulting in actual “red rain”:

It’s not easy to discern in the photo, but all that red glow on the horizon is falling rain.

Which is cool because Peter Gabriel has a tune called Red Rain (from his 1986 album So), and it’s a favorite for one of my friends (who’s a big Gabriel fan).

At his last concert [see Gabriel Lights Up the Room], when he performed Red Rain, there was a very cool stage effect using red LEDs to simulate a red rain falling from above the stage. (It’s so impressive what technology has done for stage lighting. I just wish I had these things when I was doing it way back when.)

In any event, actual red rain. As is so often the case, the photo doesn’t at all capture the vividness of the colors.

I missed an interesting photo several minutes earlier. Note the red edging on the bottom of the clouds on the left. There was a point where the whole sky above me was filled with red-edged clouds that looked like a bed of dark coals with glowing embers under them shining through the cracks.

§

I bought a new couch:

Part of my getting-stuff-done months. The springs in my old black leather couch were totally shot, and people sank down so low that it was hard to get up from. This is much nicer (and easier).

I got rid of the bass amp I bought back in the early 1980s (when I had some aspirations of being a bass player):

Through a friend (the Gabriel fan), I offered it free on Craigslist. It has been sitting in my garage since 2003, and it doesn’t work anymore. Likely the power supply filter caps are shot. I opened it up and found two internal fuses, one of which was blown. After ordering new fuses from Amazon (don’t you just hate how handy they are), I found that it blew both of them immediately upon turning it on.

So, we offered it free for the taking with the caveat it didn’t work (the speaker was in good shape, though). A young guy learning the bass snapped it up the same day my friend placed the ad (surprised us both). The guy apparently has some electronics background, so he may be able to fix it up and have a pretty nice amp for free.

Which seems appropriate since years ago I donated my Fender J-Bass to a company charity auction. I’ve reached the point in life where a lot of stuff I just want gone. Ideally to someone who will value it as I have, but the older I get, the less important that is.

Along those lines, I donated a large fraction of my (remaining) DVDs to Goodwill last month. Four shopping bags full plus a large moving box full. I used to have thousands of DVDs, but I’m down 100 or so that I might actually watch again. Those that went, I realized there was zero chance I’d ever want to watch them again. A hard call for some belovèd old shows but I’ve reached the point of ruthlessness.

I do (mostly) agree with Kylo Ren: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

I’m not big on nostalgia. No time for the rearview mirror. It takes all my energy dealing with the present. Anything left over is for the future. The past is history (not just literally but tautologically).

I’m not saying don’t learn from the past. Learn its lessons but then let it go.

§

WordPress seems to be getting a little silly with its achievements:

Color me amused.

§

As a baseball fan, I’ve long been curious about cricket. Twice I’ve tried to figure it out from its many Wikipedia articles but been left utterly confused. In my defense, certain aspects of it are a bit of a challenge — its terminology topping that list (e.g. the pitcher is called the bowler and the catcher is called the wicket-keeper).

Amazon Prime has a boatload of “live” TV channels though what channels you get seems to depend on your platform. On my iPad, there’s a channel that shows only (old) Doctor Who episodes and another that shows only Twilight Zone episodes. There are quite a few channels dedicated to a single TV series. OTOH, the Amazon Prime app for my LG TV doesn’t have any of those. (WTF Amazon? Also: WTF WRT separate seasons of TV series? A number of cases where one season of a series isn’t available.)

But the Prime app on my TV does have lots of offbeat sports channels, including the cricket channel Willow. Turns out being able to see the game played makes all the difference (um… duh).

Now the Wiki articles make sense. I get it now. Cool game. Like baseball in some regards but mostly not. It’s a bat-and-ball game, so it’s in the same general class of games, but I’d say it has more differences than similarities.

But that’s a topic for another day.

§

I meant to write a series of Mandelbrot May posts exploring the wonderous Mandelbrot set, but the month slipped past while I enjoyed spring (and recovered from doing stuff). I do have a prerequisite for the intended posts that I haven’t so much as started on it, so it looks like those posts will happen when they happen.

A lot depends on how much blogging I do going forward. My 13-year retirement anniversary is in a few days, and this blog’s 15-year anniversary is July 4th.

[“My! How the time does fly.” In fact, as they say, time flies like an arrow, … but fruit flies like a banana.]

The blog anniversary especially suggests a possible stopping point. Or something.

§

I’ll leave you with yet another observation on the weirdness of English:

We have “do” and “to”, which both rhyme with “boo” and “moo”, but then we have “co”, “go”, “no”, “so”, and others which all rhyme with buffalo. So, where did “do” and “to” get their “oo”?

And note that adding an ‘e’ gives us “doe” and “toe”, which (along with “coe”, “hoe”, “moe”, and “roe”) rhyme with the other buffalo.

§ §

Stay springing, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

∇