Thought Bricks

Since we moved to Charlottesville, I’ve been riding with the Charlottesville Bicycle Club. It’s very motivational to have a group to ride with and they schedule rides for different lengths and speeds on Saturday and Sunday. I’m certainly more inclined to do a longer ride with other people than I’ll do by myself. I get out with the club every weekend I can. The best thing about the club is the people involved.

After about 5 years with my Apple Watch 3, I upgraded to the Apple Watch Ultra. The old watch was still functional but I was intrigued by the longer battery life and the bigger face. The Watch 3 is just about out of support so that was a reason as well. The battery life is noticeably better. With the old watch, I had to make sure I charged it to full daily or else it would run out within 24 hours.

This article on alcohol consumption trends is really interesting. My take away from it is that people used to be drunk all the time. According to some of the data cited in the article, people in Northern Europe used to drink about a liter of beer a day and about a liter of wine a day in Southern Europe. That is a ton of drinking. Of course, water was basically poison, so it makes sense.

I found this section to be useful today: Concentrate every minute like a Roman - like a man - on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can - if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

Earlier this year, I bought a new gravel bike. YT was having a very good sale and I was really coveting a new bike. I ended up buying a Szepter Core 3. Although I was a little on the fence about suspension on a gravel bike, I was very curious about SRAM eTap AXS and the reviews of the bike were solid so I went for it. I ordered it in mid February and it took about ten days to arrive at my door.

I took a learn to row class with the Rivanna Rowing Club in July. When we moved to Charlottesville, Kate and I committed to learning some new things and rowing looked interesting. I’m glad we did it. Based on workouts at the gym, I always thought of rowing as more or less an intense cardio workout that used a lot of muscles. Sort of like cycling on the water. Instead, it is very technique and, in boats with more than one person, team focused.

I recently finished reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. I came across it after reading Meditations and looking at some more books from the same reading list since I liked Meditations so much. It was very well written and researched. The use of a variety of historical people and situations made it quite interesting. If nothing else, it made me much more interested in reading up on my ancient Greek and Chinese history.

This article tries to explain what Elon Musk is trying to do with Twitter - I mean X. It seems he wants to go back to the future and re-establish an internet bank he started in 1999 called X.com with the idea that this app would have “the ability to conduct your entire financial world.” Who wants this? Why would anyone want to combine social media with banking? The article points out that WeChat in China has this sort of platform, but why would this be successful in the West?

AI is all over the news these days. It’s even inspired a pretty awesome stock market rally. I’ve been doing some exploration of what is out there and one of the more interesting things I ran across was MusicGen. It does what’s on the tin: generates music using a Language Model (LM). It’s interesting even if the music isn’t great, it does fit with the description used to generate it. I haven’t played around with it yet, but I plan to see if I can generate some cool theme songs for my dogs.

I’ve not been doing much bash scripting recently. So, when the need arose to create some simple scripts, I did some quick refresh on some things that make scripting better/faster/easier. A nice resource I found had some opinionated advice on bash and a really nice template that I’m going to use as a starting point for my scripts. It looks like this: #!/usr/bin/env bash set -o errexit set -o nounset set -o pipefail if [[ "${TRACE-0}" == "1" ]]; then set -o xtrace fi if [[ "${1-}" =~ ^-*h(elp)?