Thought Bricks

A Zen-like tidbit from Meditations today: Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one. Yep. I couldn’t agree more. It’s all related. That’s difficult to see when you are mired in the day to day.

I rode up to the Pond Mountain Game Lands on Saturday. It was a brutal ride with the last couple of miles involving a bit of hike-a-bike due to the steep road and very loose gravel. I’d get some momentum off a switchback and then hit loose gravel and spin out. I might have been able to do it on a mountain bike with the wider tires but the 12 mile ride out there from Lansing would have been tough.

An article in Governing highlighted some of the benefits of sidewalks to an area’s social life and interconnectedness. I remember when we bought our house in Roanoke over 20 years ago, I wouldn’t even consider neighborhoods without sidewalks. I grew up with sidewalks everywhere and they were great for us kids to be able to play on and for the adults to get around to see each other and maybe even walk over to the grocery or community pool.

One of the best things I’ve added to my bike gear collection (in addition to some great bikes) is a Garmin Varia radar. I’ve never been that successful riding with mirrors. When I’ve tried to use them on my bar ends, they just seem to vibrate too much for me to see approaching traffic clearly. If I watch the mirror intently, I’m not looking ahead at the road, which is a recipe for disaster car or no.

The French government is spending €200 million to destroy wine due to lack of demand. That is interesting in and of itself but the most astounding figure in the article is the drop in European wine consumption: European Commission data for the year to June shows that wine consumption has fallen 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal… That’s a big year over year drop.

I found some loose change under a couch cushion and decided to get myself a new mountain bike. After a lot of deliberation, I went with a Trek Top Fuel 8. Although I got it on sale, it was still quite a lot of change but the reviews were very solid and I loved the red color when I saw it in person at Blue Ridge Cyclery. I took it for a test ride and pretty much knew I was going home with it.

I like the idea of labeling things as written by humans or AI so you know the origins of what you are reading on the internet. Not By AI has some nice badges that I’ve added to my site because, it is written by my primitive human brain. I thought about adding it to each post that I write, but since I don’t use AI to write the articles (except some small parts when I’ve written about AI and want to show some example output) that seemed like too much overhead on each article.

Python in Excel looks interesting. It’s only in public preview now and will go Windows first so I won’t see it for a while. Python has some really awesome tools for analytics and plots. Although it probably won’t ever be a mainstream tool, many data analysts are going to be all over this. I’ll definitely take a look when it’s out there. I played around with openpyxl a few times and it has some usefulness but is not as tightly integrated as the new =py() function.

I’ve been using Hugo for this blog for a few years now. It works well for me and I’ve not done much customization to the theme at all. Earlier this year, I took at look Mermaid to produce some charts for inclusion in the blog. The way that worked was by using a link to content hosted on another site. That was really easy to do, but I’d rather have the content inside my blog content.

On flipping through Meditations this morning, came across this: A rock thrown in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up. That’s a very Zen quote. The rock is impervious to the state imposed on it from outside forces. Thinking about it from a lens of stoicism, we are (or should be) rocks. Ignore the forces outside of our control. Very existential. I wonder, does the rock get chipped by striking the ground?