Week Notes for December 22-28, 2025

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Things this week

It's the final set of weeknotes for 2025! And in consequence the final set of weeknotes to appear on this website (https://srgower.com); I will be moving them over to my primary blog, at https://lwgrs.bearblog.dev. I won't go into the details - just that I have grand plans in my head for what writing will appear on this site (who knows if I'll follow through!).

2025 has been a whirlwind, that's for sure. I think I would have to read through every other 51 editions of my weeknotes to properly digest it all; as much as people lament LLMs I think that is a good use-case for giving me some kind of summary. I'm not sure I will do that, but I might get bored one day.

Week 52 saw Christmas and Boxing Day come and go; this was a strange one as it was marked with several hospital visits (don't worry, everyone is OK - long story/stories). But also some great fun! I didn't make as many notes for the week as I normally would, so this is a little sparse.

The biggest thing though - due to some of these circumstances my wife and I took it upon ourselves to cook Christmas dinner, something we knew we would eventually have to tackle. We did very well, cooking a very good turkey and my wife made a delicious stuffing. I was worried about the turkey - I've not even cooked a full chicken before. But it cooked all the way through and wasn't too dry. Big win.

Tech & Blog Stuff

My wife gifted me with a DJI Mini 4k (a drone), and I've taken it out for a couple of test flights. I'm still learning how to use it but I can tell it's going to be a lot of fun, and will add to my photography arsenal. I took & edited one photo and will share it on my photo blog a little later.

Other than that I didn't do a lot of tinkering last week. One thing I updated was my daily / weekly automated scripts to update the location of my Obsidian weekly notes, as I moved those folders to a PARA method structure. All this means is that I'm no longer manually moving files around.

Media

We didn't watch many different things as we usually do. One of the many channels in free preview this month went all-in on Gilmore Girls so we've been (re-)watching that. I don't think we watched any new movies; I did manage to watch a couple more episodes of Only Murders in the Building. I did a lot of reading but didn't finish anything.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• 22.00.0179 The two-tea-towel method • Johnny.Decimal

Things I Made This Week

• What's in store for 2026? | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for December 15-21, 2025

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Things this week

Second last week of the year! It feels like so much happened yet so little at the same time. We returned home from some travel and jumped straight into finishing our Christmas shopping. We did rather well, I think. At least, we finished what we needed to for my family's dinner - still some things to do for my in-laws, but we have another day and a half (including today as I write this) to take care of it! My wife loves wrapping gifts so she'll be doing that; I have to work today. But after today, I'm off until Monday! Yay. But that's for next week's final (!) set of weeknotes for 2025.

I had a day off on Thursday which was followed by a Christmas party for my wife's organization so I went for a haircut. I did something a little different - I didn't want to do my usual buzz cut, because I'm fine with the length - it was just unruly around the ears and back. I liked the way it turned out. On my wife's advice the stylist put gel in my hair for the first time...I found it weird how stiff the hair became (but glad that I didn't have to re-do the hair before the party).

Health Notes

We had two gym sessions this week and they both ended up tough on our bodies. I'm still feeling the after-effects a little bit today (Tuesday) - I suppose that's a sign that we worked hard. No more sessions until January.

Media

Not too much going on. I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in what seems like record time. Once again (as with Order of the Phoenix) I split between audio book and reading on my Kobo. I picked up Deathly Hallows next but haven't started that one.

One funny story: On a whim I picked up a used copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I book I've read before; by coincidence my brother got me a Hitchhiker's tote bag for Christmas (filled with used books) that very same day.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Digest 20251214 - The Wallflower Digest - Excellent write-up of someone sticking with a tool they like because it works for them.
• Niche Interests & You: How To Break Into A Gatekept Hobby - Sneer Campaign
• What Music Ownership Means to Me

Things I Made This Week

• Wednesday Thoughts 11 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Quick draft for a future post | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for December 8-14, 2025

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Things this week

What a wild week. There were some developments on the personal front that changed quite a few things but now is not the time to get into those. One of the really fun things that we did (read: crazy) was a fly-in, fly-out day where we took a small airline. We left at 6:30 in the morning and got back after 10pm. The flight itself was only an hour, and the plane itself was tiny. There were two rows of individual seats - I think 16 or 18 total seats; you could see into the cockpit, which made for a really cool view during landing at night. The whole experience felt like taking a bus trip in the air, because they were so casual about the process. On one end, we didn't even need to pass through security. I recommend the experience but not if your flight is longer than an hour.

Media

Books

• Finished "The Best Laid Plans" (2007, Terry Fallis); the short review is: it was fun to read but the humour felt forced a lot of the time.
• Continuing with "Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince" (2005, J.K. Rowling)
• Saw the trailer for the upcoming Supergirl - now want to check out the story it's based on, "Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow"
  Games
• NHL 26 is difficult enough for me to play (vs CPU), I realized it's nearly impossible via PS Remote Play. Timing is too important and I end up chasing the puck more often than not. I'm getting better when playing directly.
• I'm getting better with Star Wars Outlaws. I completed a few missions/quests without aid of walkthroughs, and I'm enjoying hopping around different systems completing various contracts. Keeping track of what I'm working on gets difficult though.
• Tried out Amazon Luna. Looking into the official controller, because the buttons don't quite match up with a PS5 controller.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• ill-advised by Bill Nighy - great "celebrity answers questions" podcast
• Em Dash, En Dash, Hyphen: You Are Using Them Wrong the Whole Time | James Zhan in real life. - I honestly did not know the difference between em and en dashes. Handy blog post.
• PTPL 171 · The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me - Ellane W via Michael

Things I Made This Week

• Updated my Library website to change game info to link to Backloggd
• Procrastination | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for December 1-8, 2025

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Things this week

I've been thinking a lot about my organization methods this week. zkbro started a series outlining his approach to GTD. In the first post - "capturing" - he mentions the PARA method; I've seen this making the rounds online many different times so I did a little bit of research into it and I'm trying to implement it in Obsidian.

On top of that, in thinking about my ongoing search for an A5 monthly calendar (seriously...these don't exist. The only A5 sized notebooks are monthly/weekly planners) I'm tinkering with the idea of trying a pre-printed planner for 2026. Either Moleskine or Leuchtturm; I like the bullet journal method but I think I could combine a pre-printed planner with a notebook for short notes and my journal for longform writing. Time for a trip to Staples - my wife will be happy.

Health Notes

My follow-up appointment with my doctor was this past Thursday; it was to discuss the results of the x-ray of my foot. Unfortunately nothing could be determined from the x-ray so I'll have to schedule another follow-up after I get my ultrasound done in January (apparently ultrasounds are extremely backed up in this city). For now my foot hasn't gotten worse and it's more annoying and a curiosity than a "problem", so I'm not concerned. I just want to know what it is and if there's anything I can do so my shoes fit properly again.

The only other note I can think of is that we slept through our alarm on Wednesday; this is rare, because the alarm is LOUD (we use the buzzer, not the radio). I guess it turns off after a while! I still got to work "on time", but that means we also haven't been getting enough sleep lately. It happens from time to time.

Media

This week I learned that Rich Terfy (aka Buck 65) was once scouted by the New York Yankees before a knee injury ended his baseball career at 16. I was listening to the CBC Radio 3 podcast for December 2, 2005 (courtesy Archive.org). That's what started a pretty varied week as far as media goes - for games, I had a complaint about NHL 26 - that the two PWHL expansion teams, Vancouver and Seattle, did not have their logos or uniforms in the game. I should have held back my vocal complaint because it was resolved with an update within a day. Woops!

Thursday night I watched a season 3 episode of Star Trek Enterprise, "Twilight". I listened to an episode commentary by Transporter Room 3 and this was an episode I hadn't seen; it can be boiled down to "Star Trek does 50 First Dates", but don't sleep on it - so many things happen in this episode and the VFX was really cool and well-done. I recommend it.

Lastly I found out about a video game tracking website, Backloggd, via Joel. It reminds me a lot of Letterboxd and I think that's the intent. I have been tracking my video games manually in Obsidian, and while that is kind of a fun project, this is a service that does what I'm doing better and more efficiently. I don't mind signing up for services if they do something really well, so take a gander at my profile - which is woefully incomplete.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Neatnik Calendar - really cool, flexible calendar.
• FXRant

Things I Made This Week

• LEGO poinsettia set
• Thursday Thoughts 02 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for November 24-30, 2025

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Things this week

Our condo corporation wanted to update the siding on all of the units, and since our house is an end unit on the first block of houses on the street we're up first. The work is incredibly noisy and there's lots of banging with such force that they knocked picture frames off the walls. I feel bad for our dog who has to endure it - we find it difficult to work from home with all the noise. "Luckily" I have to be in the office 4 days a week so I don't need to put up with it. Hopefully they finish up quickly but it looks like they're behind and they have a lot of work to do; I'm not sure how the weather affects them.

Speaking of which, we got a healthy amount of snow yesterday and temperatures are getting colder again after we had a few days of mild weather that melted all the snow we got a few weeks ago. My wife and I both think the snow is sticking around this time. I don't mind if the snowfall amounts we get are low like this, spread out over a few weeks/months; it's when we get dumped on all at once that it's worse.

Health Notes

This week was quiet on the health front, which is always a good thing. The only thing I'd mention is that we had a great workout at the gym on Saturday, and I pulled the heaviest weight so far on the sled - I think 340 pounds if I remember right. The hardest part wasn't the strain on my legs, but my cardio levels. I need to work on that (which is something I need to do anyway, to lower my cholesterol levels).

Tech Stuff

• When I have my "No Socials Sunday" routine active on my phone, it really does show: at the end of the day my phone was still at 40% battery life. Lately my battery runs down a lot lower when I'm accessing more apps, so this just shows I'm using my phone a little less on Sundays.

• I finally got around to playing with Quick Draft. With help from the developer I was able to point one of the "routes" to my weekly review note so that from the widget I can add notes for the current day.

  • wrinkle: the current week advances on Sunday, I'm not sure how to work around this other than to just not use the widget. It's not a problem I'm dying to solve.

• I spent a couple of days trying to figure out why I have such an easier time with the iOS keyboard vs. GBoard on Android when it comes to moving the comma and period keys off the main keyboard view. I thought I'd give it a longer try to use GBoard without those keys to see if I can get used to it (for a slightly larger layout for the keys, to reduce fat finger typos)

  • So far I've gotten used to it. It took a few days to get around the muscle memory and hitting the emoji key all the time when I went to input a comma.

Media

• music: listened to the new Aerosmith EP ("One More Time"), a collaboration with Yungblud. It's alright. I liked the lead single ("My Only Angel") when I first heard it played a few months ago, but overall there's not much to write home about.
• books: I finished reading Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix (mostly in audiobook form); started up Harry Potter & The Half-blood Prince (again will be mostly audiobook)
• video games: I started the levels on new planet Kijimi in Star Wars Outlaws. The planet map is tiny compared to where I just came from, Toshara. As far as I can tell the entire planet map is the same size as Mirogana City on the latter planet (which is a small portion of that planet).
  • Also upgraded to NHL 26. It was unplanned, but the game was on sale for ~half off, and I got $7.50 (wow!) trade-in value for NHL 25. I haven't played many games yet but so far I find the gameplay a tad easier / more forgiving, and the CPU isn't impossible to play against in Pro mode. Some neat visual changes but overall it's not a re-built game from last year. I hope they add the new Vancouver & Seattle team names + jerseys for the PWHL.
• movies: No new movies this week, we continued our Harry Potter mini-marathon with Goblet of Fire. This one was on DVD, not 4K; the upscale on the PS5 looked pretty good though!

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Personal Websites Aren’t Dead
• Narrative Podcasts Are Disappearing. What Happened? - referring primarily to longform investigative journalism. Sad to see another aspect of quality journalism disappearing.
• Linkdump No 83 - 82MHz - Completely agree with the tech angle to the intro write-up

Things I Made This Week

• LEGO Yoda - not entirely by choice, it fell on the floor. Didn't need to rebuild the entire figure, just pieces.
• "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for November 17-23, 2025

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Things this week

This week started with my last scheduled day off for a while. I have three days left to book, but I'm not sure when I'm taking them. Still, it was nice - I felt more "productive", and I didn't feel like I spent too much time doing any one thing. The best thing about my day off was the pleasant surprise that I wasn't dragging my feet to work Tuesday morning and didn't hit an afternoon wall.

Wednesday though...woof. It seemed like every time I went to put my headphones in to listen to a podcast, I would be interrupted minutes later. I'd take them out to interact with whomever needed my attention, and left them out. An extended period of time would elapse and I thought it safe to put them back in...only to be interrupted again minutes later. Must be some sort of rule or law about that.

Our condo corporation hired contractors to replace the siding on the units, and there's now scaffolding set up at both our front and back doors. Going out the front is kind of nice but needs more decoration. Would they be upset if we hung Christmas lights?

Health Notes

I got my blood work results back (the bruise on my arm is turning some funny colours a week later) and turns out my cholesterol levels are high, and higher than the last round of blood work. Something I need to work on.

We also received our COVID and flu shots this weekend. I had some flu-like symptoms on Saturday, which is normal, but a first for me.

Media

All the media happened this week. Best to break it up into little chunks.

Games

• Finished the main quests on Toshara in Star Wars Outlaws; the last mission, "The Wreck", was a lot of fun (especially exploring the titular wreck). I now have a functioning hyperdrive and headed to my first planet: Kijimi.

Movies

• My wife and I watched the first two Harry Potter movies, The Philosopher's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, on 4K. Both movies look incredible in 4K.

TV

• Finished Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 3; it was overall a let-down but there were some stand-out moments, like the episode "Terrarium".
• in contrast I started Andor season 2, and those first 3 episodes were better than SNW season 3 in its entirety.
• also watched the first episode of Only Murders in the Building - not sure what season we're in, but it's the latest one.

Books

• Finished "On Writing Well" - well worth the read if you're a writer. I wrote a first draft of my review, I need to revise it
• have been listening to the audiobook for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; the source material lends itself very well to the audio format

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• The Analogue 3D is the modern N64 fans have been waiting for - Ars Technica
• why self-host fonts (woff2 & variable) | mgx

Things I Made This Week

• 2024 Week 02

Week Notes for November 10-16, 2025

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Things this week

I started the week with a vacation day that was spent running around getting winter tires put on our vehicles. Naturally we did this the day after a major snowstorm; however we had these appointments scheduled in advance so there was no waiting around in long lineups.

I also had the house to myself for the week while my wife was away for work. That meant a lot of video games and a lot of movies. After going to bed past 1am Monday evening (technically, Tuesday morning) I needed to be more structured with my free time. I did pretty well, and I wrote about all of it.

Overall it was a good week and I'm starting week 47 with another day off.

Health Notes

• Got an X-ray of my foot, and was able to download a copy of the photos. I now have an X-ray of both my feet.

Media

• A week for movies. This week alone, I watched:
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
  • Sneakers (1992, dir. Phil Alden Robinson)
  • Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025, dir. Ruben Fleischer)
• I enjoyed all of them; Sneakers was the only one rated 5 stars
• Bought a digital copy of Star Wars Racer Revenge (PS2) - I owned this back when I had a PS2. Fun game. I think it holds up

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• RE: Reassess time spent enjoying luxury
• Resumability | Acts of Volition
• Interesting Words | goofpunk.com
• Daring Fireball: OpenAI Releases GPT-5.1, Along With Renamed and New Personalities
• World’s oldest RNA extracted from ice age woolly mammoth - Ars Technica
• Bear blog photo gallery | Robert Birming

Things I Made This Week

• Miniature baseball scorebook - field notes sized.
• The inside of the miniature scorebook.
• Reassess time spent enjoying luxury | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• How's that time reassessment going? | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• LEGO: Hedwig at 4 Privet Drive (total time 51:38.73)

Week Notes for November 3-9, 2025

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Things this week

This week was spent away from home, working remotely. It was good. There were some days I didn't want to get up in the morning, and some days I had some very nice naps. It was a slower pace and I didn't venture too far from the house.

We had decent weather, only two days with rain. And of course we returned home to the first big snow storm of the season; it remains to be seen if this snowfall sticks around or melts in a few days.

Tech

• I was able to get RoundCube up and running on my server. Nice to be able to view my emails in a browser. Used step-by-step instructions from Claude (AI)
• tried a new Obsidian app called Quick Draft; it's very interesting. It does what it says: allows you to write some quick text and it saves to your vault. Considering including it in my workflow; need to play around with settings.

Media

• Played a lot of Star Trek Resurgence using remote play this week. Now 3 hours in. Forgot how fun it is - even though it's more passive. Good break between games
• Learned that there is a 40th anniversary Back to the Future 4K box set. How did I not know this before?
• Yeah, I'd love to have this set...but it's way too expensive. Lego boldly goes into the Star Trek universe with $400, 3,600-piece Enterprise-D - Ars Technica

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Turning blog posts into zines | evdokimova's

Things I Made This Week

• Tuesday thoughts 07 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• When is the right time to write a review? | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for October 27 - November 2, 2025

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Things this week

5 of 7 days this week were consumed by the World Series. There were a lot of ups and downs, and ultimately the Dodgers won Game 7 in 11 innings to beat the Blue Jays. At the time of writing, I'm taking a sports hiatus. I no longer wish to be tied up in sports, I need a break. I should be okay in a week and then I can get back into hockey.

This week also marked the beginning of [Writing Month](https://writing month.org), a website created by the fantastic Amin. My project is to write a journal entry every day - of any length. This means I will have a minimum 30 entries; this also means I could end up with more if I write more than one in a day. Feel free to add me as a buddy (though I'm not sure how that works yet); my profile is here. One of the methods I'm going to use to make sure I write something is to focus on three things that happened or I felt during the day, inspired by jarunmb's daily recap (see links below).

We brought our old TV over to my parents' house while they were away so that we could set it up unencumbered. It's much bigger than the TV they had, but also has the benefit of not having dead, black pixels in the middle of their screen. It might be too big for them, but at least it will help them determine the right size for them.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• My new Obsidian review setup is working as intended. It's now one file, updated daily & weekly through an automated script. It needed a few tweaks but I was able to do that from my phone via Termius.
• I saw a link to a blog with a really neat column layout (from Thefoggiest.dev - link is below). I really like it and would like to implement something similar somewhere; I'm not sure where or to what but I like the newspaper/magazine style.
  • But that gave me an idea to modify some things for this website; in 2026 I'm moving the weeknotes to my main blog, but I want somewhere to feature some longer-form articles. I think that place is here, in a new page. Something I'm noodling about in the background.

Media

• I don't think I can write any more about sports. My weekly review is filled with Blue Jays stuff; the only thing I can add is that I scored games 6 and 7 on my iPad. I will share those along with game 1 in a final write-up sometime next week. While I was able to save last week's scorecards as images, I have yet to scan the handwritten scorecard.
• In Star Wars Outlaws news, I finally unlocked a spaceship mission and I'm excited. However I decided to put it off for a little bit while I finish some side missions on Toshara and get some much-needed upgrades (skill-enhancing clothes, an extra health bar, etc.).
  • There was one firefight I got into with a couple of smugglers where I was able to hide behind a rock, duck out from the side, and take some precision shots. It was like you see in a movie. It was a ton of fun and has given me some ideas for some of the other missions I've had trouble with.
• I started noting down books in my weekly review files, and they're starting to get lost in my archive folder. I need to create a list so I don't lose them. Most of these books are titles I might want to buy for myself, but also titles for others or my wife.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• you radiate knowledge | ava's blog
• More thoughts on alternative phone OSes |Thefoggiest.dev - The site design on this page is fantastic, love the magazine / newspaper layout.
• Why a Daily Recap? - jarunmb.com - I like this approach more than the two-sentence journal; the latter just isn't sticking for me.
• Word Gymnastics | Forking Mad+

Things I Made This Week

• A mixed world | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• C'est l'Halloween | Photos by Stephen Gower
• re: Why a Daily Recap? | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for October 20-26, 2025

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Things this week

Week 43 (9 weeks to go for 2025!) was exciting. Monday saw the Blue Jays win game 7 of the ALCS, propelling them to their first World Series appearance since 1993^[1]. We got our new TV set up just in time for the game and let me tell you, it looked fantastic. The week was also bookended with games 1 and 2 of the World Series - I watched game 1 with my friend and it was great, especially the 6th inning which saw the Jays bat around (Kirk went 2-for-2 with a home run in the same inning).

Our dog had her annual check up and we decided to get a full work-up to check her insides as well as her physical health. She's in great shape! Losing weight and no internal health issues.

Health Notes

I had my own doctor's appointment to look at a hard bump on the side of my foot. The doctor ordered an X-ray and ultrasound for now, and some updated bloodwork (unrelated to the foot). It's a busy time right now and ultrasound labs are booked up, so I may only be able to get the X-ray and bloodwork done. And even then probably not for another two weeks.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• reorganizing my Obsidian daily notes / Weeknotes setup. I wrote about it - link below
• I got a new TV and everything looks great on it.

Media

• I kept score of game 1 of the WS - I mean, I had to! First championship I'll be able to fully remember; I was 8 and 9 years old respectively for the 1992 and 1993 series, but I don't have strong memories of them. I will scan my scoresheets soon and share them
• I watched Nosferatu (2024) and reviewed it in Letterboxd
• picked up my personal copy of On Writing Well (Zinsser) so I could return the library copy I borrowed. It's a little strange reading such a pristine copy after reading a well-loved copy
  • I'm glad I noted page numbers when I copied quotes; I'm going to go back and highlight the passages
• I'm making progress in Star Wars Outlaws; I'm taking my time though, because I want to enjoy the game and atmosphere. I unlocked the ship, and there's a mission for it, but I found some helpful videos to do some more things on the first planet (Toshara)

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - no new links this week. In 2026 I'm going to convert this to a "rolloff" where I'll share the links I'm removing from the public list.

Things I Made This Week

• Final thoughts on my weight goal for September-October | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Reworking my Obsidian organization system | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• A quote from "On Writing Well" | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for October 13-19, 2025

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Things this week

I think I covered Monday October 13 in my notes last week because I wrote these on Tuesday (because last Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada), but nothing eventful happened, other than being caught in some of the worst traffic we've experienced in a long time. We try to avoid travelling on long weekends for this reason. Overall it was a quiet week except for finishing softball for the season and paying extra close attention to MLB's ALCS (featuring the Blue Jays). Game 7 goes tonight! Winner goes to the World Series, starting Friday.

Oh, unfortunately we lost our first softball playoff game Friday evening in a single-elimination tournament, so I think that means we placed 3rd overall. The game didn't go well either, so the season ended on a disappointing note (but we still had fun).

Health Notes

I'm going to write a post about this soon, but I gave up on my weight goal for the 30-day health challenge I started in September. I'm frustrated with the lack of progress and wild scale swings so I'm taking a break.

Tech & Blog Stuff

I spent time Wednesday deleting online accounts, prompted by news of a recent database breach at Canadian Tire. I changed my password there, and decided that I need to clear all the services I no longer use from my password manager. I recommend doing this often, especially if you re-use passwords (which you shouldn't do, but I am guilty of this as well).

Media

I borrowed On Writing Well by William Zinsser and Nosferatu (2024) from the library. I haven't watched the latter but I've been devouring the former. I can't remember when I placed the hold on this book, so I wasn't sure if it was still something I was interested in. Turns out, it's perfect for me. It is both helpful in improving my writing and inspiring to do more writing in different fields. I hope you notice some of the advice contained in the first part of the book while reading these notes.

Otherwise I am thoroughly enjoying Star Wars Outlaws (PS5); I haven't played it very much but the world they created is amazing - and I haven't travelled beyond the first planet. So far my preferred method to play missions is to utilize stealth, because I'm not a fan of all-out fire fights. My short-term goal is to gain influence (clout?) with all three criminal factions so that I don't get shot at on sight.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• You don't do piracy? Me neither. Here's why: | The Grizzly Gazette

Things I Made This Week

• Subtitles | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Quick update: two-sentence journal | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for .October 6-12, 2025

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Things this week

I posted on Mastodon that I have felt disconnected from the Fediverse and blogging community lately. I think it's mostly because I have been busy at work, combined with being in the office more often than not. I almost didn't want to bother putting up my Weeknotes but it's almost 7am as I type this and I've been awake for a couple of hours now so I'm killing some time.

Health Notes

• haven't made much progress getting to my weight goal but overall still feeling good

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Did a lot of work on my [media library vault] (https://library.srgower.com) this week; mostly cleaned up properties and set up some new pages
• backed up my Obsidian vaults onto a USB drive. Will try to do this on a regular basis

Media

• most of my media consumption has been split between MLB playoffs (Blue Jays have a hole to dig out of in the ALCS, down 2-0 vs Seattle) and playing Star Wars Outlaws

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Prompts for your two-sentence journal | De minimis non curat Lex - Interesting methodology re: two-sentence journal, which I read more about after reading this post. The prompts are helpful.
• Apparently modern DVD releases are worse than they were 20 years ago - Neat thing I hadn't read about before.

Things I Made This Week

• Re: The two-sentence journal | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for September 29 - October 5, 2025

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Things this week

This week saw the annual observance of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. For many people this was a statutory holiday, but it's one of those weird ones where not everyone gets it - so there wasn't much closed up for the day. I'm not sure how many people actually "observed" the day or recognized it's significance, but it was nonetheless a welcome day off. It certainly made for an odd week in terms of working days.

Overall the week was a mixed bag with a lot of things happening in all my usual categories. Read on...

Health Notes

I noticed what appears to be a bone spur on my right foot. I don't know why I hadn't seen it before, but I guess it's one of those things that build up gradually so that might explain it. It would also explain why I have such a hard time with shoes on my right foot, but they are fine on my left. I made an appointment to see my doctor about it, I'll see him in 2 weeks.

Tech & Blog Stuff

I experienced some technical difficulty with my Syncthing setup this past week, and ended up having to reset everything from scratch. Although - I may not have. After setting everything up fresh, my laptop kept showing that it was out of sync even though all the files were downloaded. I troubleshooter a bunch of things until I realized I could click on file details to see what's wrong.

In a moment deserving the Picard forehead meme, the problem turned out to be Windows not accepting file names with a trailing space. I had a folder called /Recipes / that was causing an issue. I went to my Android phone and corrected the folder and that fixed everything. It's the little things.

Media

Most of the week was spent listening to the "Rising Strong" (Brené Brown) audiobook I borrowed from the library. I'm enjoying this one, though Libby has some trouble with the chapters. I may need to switch to the Spotify version but I'm nearly 70% through the book, I will probably just finish it via Libby.

On the video game front, I borrowed Star Wars Outlaws from the library. I was promised an open world Star Wars game so was a little dismayed at how guided the opening story bits were; then I realized that this was a tutorial mission, and some cursory research told me that the open world parts were yet to come. I found the game on sale so I bit the bullet and bought my own copy. I feel like this is a game I'm going to come back to on an on-and-off basis for a long time that the library just won't handle for me.

For sports - it's an exciting time. The Blue Jays started their ALDS series vs the Yankees on Saturday and outscored them 23-8, taking a 2-0 lead. This is fun.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• https://www.404media.co/kodak-is-selling-its-own-film-again-for-the-first-time-in-a-decade/

Things I Made This Week

• Monday Thoughts 02 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Happenstance | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Being a better friend | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for September 22-28, 2025

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Things this week

Thankfully the start of the week did not dictate how the rest of the week would go. I took public transit to work Monday morning, which is something I'm beginning to get used to including into my weekly routine. It's not necessarily going to be always on a Monday, but as I'm back in the office 4 days (and eventually 5 days) a week I don't want to be driving every day. It's a pain, and expensive. Doing it in the summer combined with softball is bad enough.

But also on Monday I had another seizure. I forgot to take my medication in the morning, which I didn't realize until just before my nighttime dose. I remember taking my pills out of my bag and setting them down on the shelf, realizing that I had not taken my morning dose, and then the next thing I remember was my wife waking me up. I was very confused and felt sick the rest of the night until I fell asleep. Thankfully the rest of the week was rather uneventful. I'm trying to figure out some different ways to make sure I don't miss my pills; I have to call my neurologist. I wrote about the experience a little bit (link below). As a result I took Tuesday as a sick day and I'm happy I did. I played a lot of video games and generally relaxed.

Beyond that it was mostly a routine week, checking off a few boxes of things I needed to do in general.

Health Notes

• Seizure on Monday. Bit down on my tongue, I had a day where I had trouble enunciating and trying to avoid biting down on the swelling again.

Media

• We saw our first live soccer match; Atlético Ottawa vs. Calgary Calvary. The home team won 3-0 - it was very slow for the first...half hour? And then the rest of the game was really exciting. I'd go again.
• I heard a new track from Aerosmith featuring YUNGBLUD - "My Only Angel". Turns out they have a new EP coming out in 52 days, called "One More Time". If it's available on CD I might pick up a copy. In the meantime I pre-saved it in Spotify (whatever that means).

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - nothing added this week.

Things I Made This Week

• Backtracking on goodreads | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Breakthrough seizure | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• re: Hitting my weight goal | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for September 15-21, 2025

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Things this week

It was a second week of working in the office 4 days instead of 3; I bussed on Monday again as I want to give our car a break from a busy summer (driving into the office 3 days a week PLUS driving around the city for softball games). The walk/train/bus option continues to serve me well. It probably won't always be so but I'm a realist, so I'll be fine if there's the occasional snag.

My wife and I celebrated our 3-year wedding anniversary on Wednesday; we didn't do anything special - a nice dinner. I finally gave her the notebooks I made for her and she loved them. She got me a nice sweater and a watch, but even better a neat picture frame that has three frames on a hinge. In the centre are our wedding vows, and pictures of us on either side. It was a great gift.

To end the week I had two wasps in the house. One was mercifully at the front door, and I was able to let him fly out on his own. The other is still somewhere in the kitchen. I don't know where. I'm going to be paranoid about it first thing Monday morning.

Health Notes

• Started a new 30-day weight loss goal. I got so close to my goal at the end of my 75-day health reset, so I want to push to get the rest of the way.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• At the beginning of the week I had a mysterious problem with my Linux tower - it wouldn't connect to my home wifi network. It would connect to my phone's hotspot though. I had several rounds of troubleshooting but in the end it miraculously just...worked? I'm not touching a single setting again.
• Stupid Obsidian stuff: I found out about math/latex blocks. They're rather neat. I have no practical use for them but when has that stopped me?

Media

• Finished Fahrenheit 451 this week; picked out some new stuff to read
• Sloan's "Based on the Best Seller" CD arrived in the mail this week! There are even liner notes! A rarity. Haven't listened yet (but plan to Monday)
• Re-watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and it remains as good as ever. What helps is that the villain is not an outlandish cartoon figure, and the main story remains relevant. If you haven't seen it, watch it; and you don't need to have watched any of the other Marvel movies to enjoy it.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Resisting Self-Flanderization | The Grizzly Gazette
• Ollee Watch via Robb
• NingNarrative | My Life at a Glance Notebook: A Journal and Planner System for Seeing Life Clearly - Cool look at a different org system for notebooks / journalling
• Do Fewer Things | Yordi - A Lifelong Journey of Growth

Things I Made This Week

• Mission: Impossible - The Reckoning Reviews | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Hitting my weight goal | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Friday thoughts 07 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for September 8-14, 2025

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Things this week

I feel like this week flew by; I think because I was back in the office 4 days a week. It's a slower pace at home, even if the amount of work is the same. That, and you lose 1-2 hours a day commuting. I took the train + bus on Friday, to save a little bit on gas. I still have three more trips to and from work this week, as well as a trek out to a west-end field for softball, so I would like to prolong the life of the tank for a few more days. I used public transportation again today. I like the slower commute, gives me time to listen to podcasts or even just think for a bit when I listen to music.

Last week was my first full week of using my new Wanderings notebook and I enjoyed it. I wrote about my experience at the end of the week - you can find the link below.

Health Notes

I really thought my legs had recovered from 7 games of softball in 3 days Monday morning, but when I took my first run to 1st base Tuesday night for a double-header of Fall Ball, I realized that no, my hamstrings were not ready. Somehow I was able to make it to 2nd for a double. And then later in the week I did a 330-pound sled pull...I'm not sure what I'm doing.

I decided yesterday (Sunday) that I'm going to start another health challenge to get down to my goal weight. I have to noodle on it a bit more as to what I'm going to do, but I hope to have something in writing today.

Tech & Blog Stuff

Taking the bus on Friday really pushed me toward buying a power bank. When I got to work my phone was already down to 54% by 11am. I thought about it before, after our trip to the hospital last month, but at the time I didn't think I had any real need for it. This pushed me over the edge. I wound up getting this thing by Anker, and it was on sale for $30!

The bulk of the week was spent playing around with tech. Some highlights:

• Discovered that there is something called "remote play" for the PS5, so I set it up on my iPad. I was happy to discover you can even do it with disc games. Thanks Brandon!
• As I want to start rating things on a 20-80 grade scale, but still translate that to star ratings for the general public, I figured out how to do the conversion thanks to some help from LLMs. I created a formula in Obsidian Bases for future use but I wrote about it at length at the end of the week.
• Commented out the "book" section of my library vault, I'm moving my books primarily to my personal vault for internal use (combined with Goodreads / Booksidian). Will add books back as a showcase of what I own only.

Media

Also thanks to Brandon, he recommended a game called Star Trek Resurgance, and while I wanted to get it on disc, it was on sale for $15 as a digital download. I'd rather have the disc version so I know it's mine, but I'm not upset about a $15 purchase - if I lose access to it, I won't be heartbroken; but I'm not spending $50+ on a digital game. Anyway it's very enjoyable so far, and a bit of a slower paced game - which is great. It's more of an interactive episode of Star Trek. It reminds me a lot of Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way in the CYOA portion.

Also on Saturday, my wife and I finally watched Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, both of which I reviewed on the blog (should be posting later this morning). Short version: I enjoyed them both, the first part was better than the second. Also: a lot of knives!

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• A new approach to tracking reading with Obsidian Bases - The Wallflower Digest - This workflow might make me re-think using Goodreads.
• A Brief Primer On The 20-80 Scale | Carlos's Blog - Finally I understand the 20-80 scale in baseball.

Things I Made This Week

• I'm a traveller now | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Going back to Goodreads | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Grading media on a 20-80 scale | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• A week spent Wandering | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for September 1-7, 2025

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Things this week

I think I already wrote about Monday, it's been a bit of a whirlwind week so I'm not sure what's going on anymore. We played our annual end of year softball tournament this weekend, and we were hopping between two teams and various diamonds around the west end of the city. It was overall fun but some downer moments. Both teams lost out before reaching the finals, but fun was had along the way. I finally hit a home run for my Monday team, having hit one for our other two teams already (two each, actually). And on the last day I walked 3 times! I haven't walked much this year.

At any rate now it's time to recover and put my legs back together.

Health Notes

Since my 75 day health reset ended (end of day Sept 2) I've taken a bit of a breather from all of it. I was shy of my weight goal but did very well. I'm going to set up another short term goal plan soon.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• playing around with progress bars
  
  

Media

• Tried out The Paper. It's not for me. I like mockumentaries but this one just...didn't hit. I may try again. But reinforces for me that The Office is probably not a show I'm interested in
• got some great songs from the CBC R3 podcast from 2005 for the last two weeks
• among the first things Elliott reaches ET: war (with star wars figured) and money (with his peanut piggy bank)

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• https://actsofvolition.com/2025/09/youtube-is-making-money-on-scams/

Things I Made This Week

• Spice cake
• 75-day health reset results | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Tag cleanup | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for August 25-31, 2025

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Things this week

This is the week that according to everyone is the last week of summer. I guess technically if you revolve your summer season around going back to school, but currently we don't, so this was another fun week of summer. And a long weekend! We travelled mid-week and had to work remotely before starting the weekend but what a weekend. We went for a boat ride (with fishing; I caught the biggest), and had a bon fire. Monday we went on a photo shoot of sorts and I have a lot of photos to play with on my computer at home. Looking forward to creating a contact sheet (kudos Hiro for linking to that in his report this week).

Health Notes

The start of the week was tough, with my knee swelling like crazy and having to elevate and ice. It took almost to the end of the week before starting to feel normal. Overall a good week, though!

Tech & Blog Stuff

I discovered my Obsidian-related obsession is themes (for others it's plugins). The latest I'm trying out is called "Flexcyon" and I like the look of it a lot. Other than playing with themes I've also been playing with Lightroom presets. I found a neat AI-based tool that creates Lightroom presets based on descriptions. The latest I'm trying is one I asked for to make photos look like the colour grading of Asteroid City.

Media

The first of my Bandcamp packages arrived this week! It's a cassette tape and came in some neat packaging. I plan on writing a post about it later, with pictures. Haven't listened yet.
Also in media: I watched some more X-Files, specifically S2 episode "Aubrey". The thought that came across my mind at the end: it would be nice if occasionally the solution to the episode wasn't necessarily paranormal or alien.
And the last thing is that I discovered The Best Laid Plans is sort of laid out with daily diaries by one of the main characters and it happens to line up with the current date. I'm going to read it according to the matching date. So the next chapter I'm reading is Wednesday Sept 3rd.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please - The Ringer
• Web clock (Official times across Canada) - National Research Council Canada
• Shoelace techniques for different foot types
• Not Every Blog Post Needs To Be Epic :: Matt's Blog
• MOOD - Calvin and Hobbes - The Full Story
• Stitched Notebook Set | Stitched Notebooks | Saddle Stitched Notebooks – Coffeenotes

Things I Made This Week

• Keep going | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• I pay for this pain | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• New Obsidian plugin to try | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• re: Publish once, syndicate nowhere | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for August 18-24, 2025

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Things this week

We're in the last week of August and I already spotted some leaves turning colour. But that's looking ahead, and it's time to look at the week that was - #34.

The week started on a sour note; for the second week in a row our milk carton didn't open properly. That's annoying in itself, but then I discovered the carton had a small leak. Ugh. Usually when this happens I just pour in the previous carton, but as established, that one didn't open properly...at least the milk wasn't sour.

And Wednesday night our softball season ended - we were eliminated in the playoffs. Still have one more Monday (tonight) and Tuesday (tomorrow), and then tournament Sept 5-7; and Fall Ball after that. It's not over yet.

Oh, I made one of the notebooks for my wife's anniversary gift. It turned out well, but I was disappointed that I needed to reinforce the spine with additional cardstock. The needle work messed up the decorative cardstock a little bit, and I didn't want to leave it exposed like that. I felt like it might rip further. Luckily I had enough of the inside cover cardstock leftover so it still matches. For the last book I think I'm going to use elastic binding so the spine should be OK.

Health Notes

Tough week for the 75 day health reset. I logged either incomplete or nothing at all on Saturday & Sunday. Middle of the week was tough too, as my wife was in the hospital (she's OK! just needed stitches after taking a bad bounce during softball). I've been despondent through the week as my weight went up and got stuck at 247 until this morning. Not sure where I'm going to end up by the end of next week.

Tech & Blog Stuff

Obsidian "Bases" core plugin was officially released this week, and predictably reddit.com/r/ObsidianMd was turned into a celebration of the new feature, with people showing off all their uses and people asking the same questions over and over. Do they do sticky threads there? I don't know (except they actually don't work but let's not talk about that). It's fun to play with and my first impressions can be summed up with "I like it". I look forward to when Digital Garden supports the plugin, but at the moment it works internally for me and I'm enjoying testing it out.

As noted below I found a link to some really neat web applications for photo editing and one of my favourites was this AI-based tool to turn a description of the type of look you want into a Lightroom preset. I have a bunch that I edited quickly and I think that'll be my next photo blog post.

Media

I finished Lee Child's Die Trying, the second Jack Reacher novel. I rated it 2 stars, but it was enjoyable enough. It was a page-turner and a quick read, and a good break between books. I don't think I'd read another one. I also wanted to play some more MLB The Show 24 but since I also wanted to score the game (home opener) I didn't have enough time to devote to it. Another time.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• The Beauty of the Everyday | Notes by JCProbably
• Photographer Sick of Paying Subscription Fees Builds His Own Apps | PetaPixel via Darren

Things I Made This Week

• MLB The Show clip - YouTube
• Longevity and permanence of our work online | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Obsidian Bases first impressions | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Power banks | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for August 11-17, 2025

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Things this week

I don't know how to judge this week overall. It started off rough, feeling like I needed a mental health day on my way to work. What happened was - I forgot my pills at home and had to turn back around; so I added half an hour to my day. But once I got to work things improved. I had a lot of introspective writing (both offline and online) and shared some back and forth thoughts with Véronique, which I will blog about this week (I asked permission).

I didn't get to as much notebook making, as my wife was not away ;) But I did some prep work for the book I'm making for her.

Health Notes

I figured out the milestone dates for my health reset. The 60-day mark is tomorrow (August 19), and the last day is September 3rd. It's going well, or at least better than it feels day-to-day. I looked at it from a wider lens and it looks better that way.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I made a dumb countdown timer for my 75 day health reset (with help from Copilot): https://lwgrs.cloud/countdown/
  • Again with help from Copilot I added some styling this morning. It's a countdown for my 75-day health reset.
• I've heard from multiple sources about a Linux application called "Immich" - in conjunction with Tailscale to make photos available anywhere.
• Paid for Pagecord premium; playing around with it. I like being able to email posts.

Media

• I devoured Alec Guinness' A Commonplace Book. I really enjoyed it and wrote a little about it (see below).
  • By sheer luck, I found a copy of one of his books, A Positively Final Appearance, at Value Village (Savers in the US).
  • I think I want to pick up my own copy for my shelf; I found an inexpensive option, will take a look later.
• We saw Freakier Friday Saturday night; it was enjoyable. I'm not intimately familiar with the original so I didn't catch all the callbacks, but I feel that it stands on its own without falling back on the original (like "do you remember when this happened in the original movie?" type of thing).
• I finished the first adventure path in Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - managed to destroy the Cerritos on my first run
• Over the weekend had a very satisfying blowout win in MLB The Show 24
• On Sunday, I tried out digital scorekeeping on my iPad. Blogged about the results (below).

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Brad Sucks - Making Me Nervous (Animated Music Video) - YouTube

Things I Made This Week

• Week notes: are they worth it? | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Commonplace, bullet journal, or both? | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Baseball digital scoring | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for August 4-10, 2025

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Things this week

It was a short week because of the holiday Monday, and the first week at work without two people on my team who have been there for many years. My Tuesday started knowing that we were approved to add two people (1 in another department, 1 in mine) and ended with knowing that one person in the other department is shifted to me, meaning I'm not hiring anybody (I'm fine with that) and we're hiring two in the other. Whirlwind.

My weekend was dominated by crafting notebooks. By Sunday I created three notebooks as part of a pack for my wife's anniversary gift, in September. The next one I'm going to make (and I'm making one, for certain) is going to have a nice cover and will be the bigger of the four (so far).

Health Notes

I really haven't been keeping up with my 75-day challenge. I really don't even know how many days I'm at. I'm reviewing all of that information tonight.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Upgraded my MacBook Pro (13 inch, mid 2012) to MacOS Ventura; that's the most stable release that's reported to work well on that model. I have a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM, which seems to be the consensus for getting the most out of it. Unless the hardware dies I've got quite a few years left in this thing.
• Discovered that Lumo chats are only saved for 7 days with the free tier. That's a bummer.
• And for Obsidian I'm trying out the latest trendy theme: Baseline. It's opinionated design, that's for sure.

Media

• caught up with a bunch of things:
  • X-Files S2E11 (not very good)
  • Shot in the Dark E2 & 3 (really compelling and the second episode opens with a stringer saving someone's life)
• It was recommended to me to watch Star Trek Voyager episode "11:59" - it was really great, down to Earth (literally) and didn't involve "tech-ing the tech". Watch it!
• found a browser based web app to track TV watching. Source is available on GitHub: GitHub - tvshowtracker/tv
  • It's entirely browser-based and unique to the user, so even if I told someone the URL I'm using nobody would see my list
• Went to an Ottawa Titans game, and scored it; great game, the Titans won 8-3

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Indeed recruiter text scam: I responded to one of the “job” messages. It got weird quickly. via Clive Thompson (Mastodon)
• OTTAWA’S SECRET SOLSTICE PYRAMIDS? | OTTAWA REWIND
• Mer Bleue Bog 'filled with bombs' according to new drone scans | CBC News
• Start something of your own ☼ Vintage Versace ☼ Experimental restaurant design via Olly
• recent improvements | ava's blog

Things I Made This Week

• I already have the perfect smartwatch for me | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Wednesday Thoughts 10 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin – The Slow Reader (A re-post from last week to a different blog)
• Pagecord looks very appealing | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• CBC Radio 3 Mixtape #1 - Stephen Gower's Ko-fi Shop
• Overcoming being overwhelmed | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Sunday thoughts 03 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for July 28 - August 3, 2025

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Things this week

The week started with a heat warning and finished with an air quality warning due to forest fires out west. We still have an air quality warning and this morning (and this afternoon actually) it still smells heavily of smoke. Not good. We also haven't had rain in weeks; the grass is brown and brittle. As much as I want to play softball, I'm hoping we do get some rain. Thankfully the air quality is supposed to improve by tomorrow (Tuesday).

I finished up my CBC Radio 3 cassette mixtape (wrote out the track info on the label) and plan to post something about it soon; I want to get the audio uploaded and available, as well as take pictures of the finished cassette. Once I do that I'll write something about it.

Two of my employees had their last day with the company on Friday. It's not going to hit until Tuesday when they're not there at their usual desk.

Health Notes

• Very tired this week; all our softball games finished late (and we played 5 - two double-headers).

Tech Stuff

• I cleaned underneath the dial of my smartwatch this week; it was very dirty and gunky, and I've been meaning to for a while. Very easy to pop the dial off and clean underneath but as it turns out I'm missing a pair of springs & ball bearings. Turns out the parts from a Gear S3 will work, and my friend has my old dead Gear S3...so there's that. Hoping to fully refresh this watch (something I'm going to write about soon, too).

Media

• enjoying Lee Child's "Die Trying" - quick, pulpy read
• ordered from Bandcamp Friday. Mistakenly ordered digital only copy of Sloan's album. Not going to order the CD on top of it (no refund options it seems)
  • refunds are done directly through the band/record label. I contacted them and got a response right away. Will be getting a refund so I ordered the CD
• The Naked Gun (2025) was really good

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• How I use my Bullet Journal via Robb

Things I Made This Week

• Testing Lumo by Proton | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for July 21-27, 2025

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Things this week

This was a rough week in terms of being busy and being creative. I find it tough to do a lot of writing during the day (and yet, I still found some time to write). If I wasn't so busy with work this would probably bother me a lot more.

Speaking of work, I found out Thursday that they're mandating us back to the office 4 days a week by October, 5 by February. I shouldn't be too surprised.

Two more things: I made another notebook this weekend. This time I was testing binding it with thead. I made a B6 sized book that opens up to B5; but the trimming process really mucked it up.

I also had an idea for some cassette mixtapes based on edited CBC Radio 3 podcasts. I recorded my first one, I'll share them later. I hope to put physical tapes up for sale.

Health Notes

I haven't reviewed my week yet as far as the health reset goes. I feel good in general. I biked to the baseball game on Sunday - that went well!

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Trying out Lumo, a new LLM from Proton. Found it via Hiro
• While editing the cassette mixes I solved an audio problem I was having on my MacBook in relation to using Reaper that pitched audio down when playing over Bluetooth speakers. It was a sample rate problem.

Media

My top thing this week was attending two baseball games! Both were a lot of fun and had a lot of action. The Titans went 1-1 for the games I saw but won the series overall 2-1.

My 75-day health reset is proving helpful for finishing books. I finished The Wake this week, on Wednesday. I don't think I would have finished it for a while longer if I didn't push myself to read even a little bit every day. Next up for reading is Die Trying (the second Jack Teacher novel) and I'm doing the same thing - a little bit each day.

I watched a lot of movies and TV this weekend:

• What Lies Beneath (2000)
• Slow Horses season 1
• Star Trek First Contact (1996)

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - I didn't bookmark any new links this week, so check out some of my old ones!

Things I Made This Week

• A little stressed out | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• My phone was case-free for a day | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• 75 day challenge update | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Handmade notebook test #1 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for July 14-20, 2025

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Things this week

Last week was extremely busy at the start of the week (I wrote out some very abbreviated week notes because I felt I didn't have the time to write anything out) but quieted down as the week went on. I'm now a week away from losing half of my staff, and things are in motion. I'm also handing off some work to another department and there are only two weeks for that. I feel some stress to start the week, but I know I'll get through it.

On the weekend I had a nice bike ride to a little island in the city called Maple Island. It's tiny, and there's not much to it, but it was a nice ride. Somewhere I've never been before, and a bridge I've never seen before. Very cool. I also made a test notebook with regular lined looseleaf paper (Hilroy, if you're interested). The long-term plan is making a custom notebook for my wife, and based on timing I think I'll be able to do something for our wedding anniversary. Next notebook test will be something stitched with needle & thread.

Health Notes

I wrote about my progress with my 75-day health challenge - outlining a bit of frustration. Getting that out of my system was helpful, because as I wrote it I regained some level of commitment and a more positive outlook. I haven't reviewed how my week went yet but I will do that shortly after I publish this week note.

While I'm not seeing any physical progress myself (in terms of numbers, at least), it was nice to hear from my trainer on Friday that he thought I looked good.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• My work computer was upgraded to Windows 11. I made some tweaks to the taskbar to make it look more like Windows 10 (with the taskbar). It's working well, no issues.
  • I'm currently using Notepad to write out these notes, and even though on my personal computer I'm not using it for coding, it's pretty cool that the updated version of Notepad recognizes my document is in Markdown and I can click on the "Mark-down syntax" button and it gives me a decent preview of what this will look like.
• Inspired by Ross Brown's post about how he's customized his phone, I made some tweaks to my own phone to test some things out. A few things stuck, others I didn't bother with.
• I have a blog post for my photo blog sitting, ready for me to finish - about what I call "vibe photography". More on that when I get to uploading the photos.

Media

• I borrowed the DVD dual copy of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger from my mother-in-law's movie collection and watched those this weekend. I liked both, and CAPD was very clearly the better film of the two. Also - you can see how much Jared Harris looks like his father (Richard, in Patriot Games).
• Other things I watched - I started Shot in the Dark (Netflix), suggested by my friend after I told him I watched Nightcrawler. This show is basically the movie, except without the sociopath.
• Finally set up my MLB The Show franchise mode with the Blue Jays; I was waiting on an All-Star break roster update from the community. It's up and running at my Obsidian digital garden page. I nerded out by scoring the first game and those scorecards are posted for game 1.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Daily notes considered harmful | Literally the Void](https://literallythevoid.com/daily-notes-considered-harmful/)
• Thinking about the Nokia N95 | Whatever the Wind Brings

Things I Made This Week

• A little stressed out | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• My phone was case-free for a day | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• 75 day challenge update | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Handmade notebook test #1 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for .July 7-13, 2025

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Things this week

There definitely were "things" this week - I was on vacation! But I was too busy today to put anything together. I decided to skip the Weeknotes but still wanted to share some links.

Links

• Rice could be key to brewing better non-alcoholic beer - Ars Technica
• Dianne Skoll's Web Site - Your Personal Back-Story
• 'I decided to live my life': Man with epilepsy walking from Montreal to B.C. to raise awareness | CBC News
• The Death Generator (via Robb)

Things I Made This Week

• Creating a website from Obsidian | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Low resolution rockfaces | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Why am I creating a public database for my physical media? | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• https://lwgrs.bearblog.dev/microsoft-journal/

Week Notes for June 30 - July 6, 2025

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Things this week

At the beginning of this week, I realized that I forgot the end of last week marked the half-way point of the year. There are 52 weeks in the year, and 26 is half...that's bonkers! I'd say it feels like we've breezed through the year, but I think it always feels that way the older you get. Something about when you're younger, the time passed is a larger fraction of your life than when you're older. Or something. It makes sense in my head.

This week however marked Canada Day (🍁) on a Tuesday, which makes for an odd work week. We went downtown for a bit, but found that there wasn't a lot going on (for us). We watched fireworks at the Hard Rock Casino which was enjoyable because they had music going along with a great show. On the unfortunate side of fireworks, our dog has taken to hiding in the closet.

I started what is probably my last full week of vacation days for the year; we're losing two employees in my department - we'll call it "sudden retirement" - as of August 1st. My department was already four people (including myself) so you might imagine how extended vacation might be difficult. So far the weekend was good, Saturday we spent the morning cutting the grass - a big yard. Sunday was rainy, but that meant it was perfect for grocery shopping, laundry, and naps.

Health Notes

The 75 day challenge is going well. We're at my in-laws this week which is usually a challenge for calorie tracking. I'm doing my best with a lot of estimates. I brought my bike with me, and the plan is for a bike to the nearby island, which is about an hour. I looked at some of my previous bike rides around that length of time, so this should be no sweat. The main challenge is that it's on a long stretch of highway...so probably good I'm doing it during the week and not on the weekend when there are far more tourists.

Speaking of the bike...big woops. The rear back tire went flat, probably because I over-inflated it. Luckily I was able to get a replacement tube from a local bike shop. Good to go.

Tech & Blog Stuff

Not much to go on here. I've been getting a lot of spam messages to my self-hosted email so I thought I would try using the built-in spam filter for OpenBSD / Dovecot; I basically broke my email so I undid all the work and just made sure that default@example.com is not a valid email address.

Oh, I also figured out how to connect my network storage drive where I save my photos to my phone and iPad. Very cool to be able to upload to the drive on the go. (I also back them up to OneDrive...I think technically I'm supposed to have a 3rd backup source but I'm not there yet.)

Media

There's certainly a lot going on. The biggest thing that's been pleasing me is the Blue Jays' 8-game winning streak going back to Sunday June 29. They're finding ways to win with power, and with small ball. The concerning thing is that this week they used a lot of the bullpen, and they don't have an off-day until Thursday; I expect at least one loss. But they have "easy" opponents coming up in the White Sox & Athletics.

Other things:

• Found Nightcrawler on DVD - this after waiting so long for a copy from the library. It was only $7 so I bought it, happy to own it.
• I created a proof-of-concept website based on one of my Obsidian vaults; I'm tracking my franchise mode with MLB The Show 24 and wanted to set up a website to host it. I went through a lot of trouble but ended up with https://franchise.lwgrs.cloud. I'll write about the process this week.
  • I'm going to use this method to create a similar site for my "Library" vault.

Links

You can view my shared Links on Raindrop but I didn't add anything new this week.

Things I Made This Week

• re: Why I gave up my smartwatch | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• re: What's in my pocket Friday 2025-07-03 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Tasker and automating a video game tracker | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for June 23-29, 2025

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Things this week

There are some big changes at work coming up in the next month, and these changes mean I'll have less opportunity to take vacation days. I booked July 4-11 - and will do my best to take some one-off days where I can. We'll see. My company emphasizes using your vacation days but they can make it difficult to do so.

Tuesday I went down a short rabbit hole about making homemade notebooks, and I'm going to try it out - I wrote about it, link below.

This was a good week for softball - I hit two home runs in one game on Tuesday, and was part of a very smooth double-play on Wednesday: I fielded a ground ball to third, ran over to the bag and then made a perfect throw to our catcher at home plate. My wife told me it was really cool to watch the ball catch up to and sail by the runner going home. Wish I could have seen the play from that angle! Overall I played very well this week, and I think I had my best defensive games of the season so far.

And my car finally hit 100,000 kilometres! I'm a little miffed though, I missed both 99,999 and 100,000 and because I was driving when it hit 100k, I could not get a picture. Oh well. Speaking of driving, I found out that part of my drive home is going to be impacted by construction for two months, I am not looking forward to that.

Health Notes

I'm keeping on with my 75-day health challenge. It's going well. I'm trying to stay mindful with it and not just checking off boxes without thought but I can see myself falling into that territory.

One of the things affecting activity this week was the heat wave that started Sunday through Wednesday morning. Monday was the worst, with temperatures feeling like 45 degress C at the hottest. Those three days were not good days to be active. Nor would it have been safe!

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Switched my media server from Plex to Jellyfin. Much better results so far; streaming was so choppy over Plex. Plus Jellyfin is far less bloated.
• I've "finally" started receiving spam messages to my self-hosted email; I was going to try setting up a spam filter but they were just sending emails to my default address, which I didn't realize I had turned on. I deleted it from /etc/mail/aliases so that should be that.
• And lastly...I figured out how to connect to my network photo storage drive. That was fun!

Media

• We finished watching season one of High Potential; it was good, and ofc they ended on a cliffhanger. But season two is in production so we'll at least get a resolution for the cliffhanger.
• I also tried the game Pokemon Sleep. I thought it was going to be super passive and not require very much work on my end; turns out that yes, the sleep part is passive, but you need to log in and feed Snorlax or whatever. Not passive enough for me. I uninstalled it.
• A few days ago I started a new Franchise Mode on MLB The Show 24, picking the LA Angels. The idea is to build up a lower-ranked team. Surprisingly I am 7-2 in the first 9 games but that's not the point. I decided to track my franchise and write about it a little (not sure if I'm publishing yet). I've got a separate vault set up in Obsidian to keep tabs on stats, etc.
• I found some sequel books to Caves of Steel at a thrift store this weekend! Three books in total. Looking forward to reading them (and you should find Caves of Steel, I recommend it.
• I don't know if this is the right category or not...but I realized that my next creative project is going to be simple: compile all of my epilepsy essays together in chronological order and publish them that way. Don't worry about editing or revising, or that some material is too old...just put them all together.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Microsoft surprises MS-DOS fans with remake of ancient text editor that works on Linux - Ars Technica
• On Falls | Acts of Volition
• I Deleted My Second Brain

Things I Made This Week

• Homemade notebooks | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• re: friction with calorie tracking | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• About that 75-day challenge | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for June 16-22, 2025

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Things this week

Honestly...there's probably a lot I could type here about how my week went, but on Thursday the drive home was extended to about an hour because of a two-vehicle crash that sent someone to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. Everything else from my week that doesn't fit into neat categories doesn't seem important enough to type out.

The only other thing - starting today (Sunday) through to Wednesday morning we have a heat alert going on, with temperatures set to be at "dangerous" highs (according to Environment Canada). Looks like humidex values of 40-45. We're lucky to have some air conditioning, and I have an office to work from during the week. But it's going to be a long couple of days.

Health Notes

Picking up from the end of last week, I got news from my neurologist at the end of the day Monday that she wants to increase my nighttime dose of levetiracetam (Keppra) an extra 250mg at night, because my levels are lower than "therapeutic" in the morning. I started that Monday night, and I thought when I woke up a little dizzy one morning it might have been related to that; but it was only one morning and I don't think that's the case.

My back continued to bother me greatly and at one point, on Tuesday, it was very distracted on top of being tired. It was hard to get things done. But I persevered, and as I write this tonight (Sunday) it feels much better. Maybe 85-90% but still, better.

I also started a 75-day health challenge (link below - "Health reset"); the short of it is I have 5 rules that I must follow for 75 days to try to meet my short-term weight loss goal and improve related habits. I'm on day...4 today. I missed my calorie goal on Friday but I more than made up for that today and yesterday. It's not going to be this "easy" going forward.

Tech & Blog Stuff

Don't try to engineer a solution for something that already exists and does it well. Earlier this week I started to put together a music tracking database in Obsidian, and when I went searching for things that interacted with Discogs...I realized "I should just use Discogs".

Big disappointment for me: I went to watch Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country on 4K on my PS5. I was incredibly disappointed. At first it wouldn't play; I had to put the machine in rest mode, then start it up again. And then, it skipped at various points in the movie. I bought this machine primarily to watch 4K discs, and now it can't play them? Conversely, I put in Galaxy Quest another night, on DVD, and it played flawlessly. Go figure.

My Mac's Time Machine backup external HD reached its capacity, which is not surprising. It was a 700GB drive trying to back up a 1TB drive. I was going to run out of space eventually. So I bought a cheap 1TB external drive and moved my photo drive onto the new larger drive. Win-win.

Media

• Found The Loner on Archive.org. it's been mentioned twice now by two different people so I downloaded it. Plex doesn't recognize it though...also - rewatched Galaxy Quest. Can never get tired of it.
• stopped reading The Creative Act. Just got really repetitive and I found it to be boring.
• discovered a fun play mode in MLB The Show 24 - play as a specific player. Good way to get through a lot of games in franchise mode without having to play full games.

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Mysterious carving found in northern Ontario wilderness | CBC News

Things I Made This Week

• The similarities between Obsidian and Bullet Journal communities | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Stalled weight loss | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Health reset | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for June 9-15, 2025

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Things this week

My Lihit Lab pencil case arrived Monday, so I was able to start my new method of carrying my bullet journal - no folio, just the notebook and the pencil case. So far (a week into it) I love it. It's nice also to have multiple pens and pencils (well...just one pencil) at my disposal. This was a good purchase.

Also this week I looked into my mobile phone plans and made a small change that drastically increased my data (how much I get, and the speed) and was also cheaper than the current plans. I've been using older plans and just never looked into it. I should have done it sooner!

My wife and I were tourists this weekend and went on a boat tour on the Rideau Canal - I'll write something about that later I think.

And speaking of new things earlier, I found a new backback to replace my old one that was falling apart along with a new pair of sandals from the same brand that I have been getting for the past several years. Both of them were blue! What fun. I plan on getting another pair of sandals next week - a black pair. I find that replacing these shoes every 2 years or so gives them some good life. I eventually grind the soles down to flat nothingness after probably a year, so stretching them to 2 years seems like a lot as it is.

Health Notes

At the start of the week I started an experiment: wearing a stainless steel ring on my right hand as a test to see if I have some sort of metal allergy. For a long time now I've had this dry area on my left ring finger (where I wear my wedding ring) and it just won't go away. We are wondering if I've developped a metal or gold allergy. One of my nieces is allergic to gold, so it's possible. Just strange that it's only showing up now. Anyway my finger was fine all week, so the next test is to clean the inside of my wedding ring and wear it on my right hand, see what happens.

Unfortunately the week was not great for my back. The pain that started last weekend just didn't go away, fluctuating on the pain scale anywhere from 3-5 depending on the day. It was back down to a 3 at the end of the week though, and that's where I'm at today. I hope it goes away soon. On the plus side I was able to play softball on Tuesday, though running was a little difficult. I probably would have taken a pinch runner later in the game - tonight (Monday) is a double-header so that's still a possibility.

Beyond that - I had blood work done to test my medication levels and they came back virtually the same as last year. I'll have to follow up with my neurologist.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Added Subscribe Openly RSS links to all of my sites.
• trying out shared bookmarks folder for weekly links. Seeing how it goes (details below).

Media

• Unsubscribed from Writing Excuses podcast. Just not getting the same thing from them anymore. Other than Howard I don't relate well to the hosts.
• Found out about a new Bowling For Soup album and I really like it.
• Started listening to CBC Radio 3 podcast again, starting with Episode 2 from June 2005(!). Will try to listen by matching week. I'm a week ahead, so I have time to download and "prep" for upcoming weeks.
• saw How to Train Your Dragon Friday - faithful adaptation of the animated original. The live action and VFX meshed together very well. Solid movie experience, especially if you haven't seen the original.

Links

I created Shared Links on Raindrop - apparently you can follow an RSS feed for it? I think in order to keep it manageable I'm going to clear it out every now and then; I like Jedda's "postroll" method.

But for now here's what I added this week.

• Rewatch: The Fantastic Four – MacManX.com
• Focus on the small things, a journaling exercise | Sylvia's Studio Reminds me of the 5-4-3-2-1 method.Everyone says they want opinionated design until they get it - Agree with this post. I see it every time Samsung releases a OneUI update. Contrast issues abound there too.
• CBC Radio 3 Podcast Archive
• Netigen: The Unhurried Moment

Things I Made This Week

• Unread | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Epilepsy and language comprehension | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• The Dash-Plus system | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Friday thoughts 06 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for June 2-8, 2025

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Things this week

We came back from a trip to Newfounland & Labrador on Monday, and even though our trip was quick - just two & a half days in Happy Valley - Goose Bay - it felt like so much longer. It took so long to get back into our regular routine last week (and we would later shake it up some more by going on another quick weekend trip to my in-laws - but that's another thing entirely). The very first thing I did when we got back (after a long nap) was get our photos off the camera and downloaded to the photo hard drive.

The biggest barrier to doing anything with photos is getting them off the camera. My coworkers wanted to see my pictures so that pushed me even further to pick and choose shots to put into an album. So that's done, and that means not only do I know which photos to print for an album or frames, but I know which ones to pick for my photo blog.

Health Notes

The most significant thing that happened health-wise this week was that I had my yearly follow-up appointment with my neurologist to see how I'm doing with regard to my epilepsy diagnosis. Overall, things are good. I still have occasional bouts where I have difficulty with language comprehension (thankfully, not as often as it used to be), but I still have moments where it's difficult for me to focus and I lock in on a certain phrase and hear it everywhere, but can't pinpoint what the phrase is. It's hard to describe but some day, I will try.

Most importantly I have been seizure free for 2 years. As I write this today it's 2 years + 4 days. I am extraordinarily lucky to be doing this well and I don't take it for granted.

The only unexpected development was that I shocked my doctor when I told her I was taking a dose of lamotrigine higher than what was prescribed; it must have been a misunderstanding on my part. Still, I find it's been helping reduce the language comprehension issues and I haven't experienced side effects, so we're going to stick with the higher dose.

Tech & Blog Stuff

I read an interesting post about photography (link below) that got me thinking about how I shoot photos in relation to what I do with them after. I've known for a while that other than some straightening and cropping, I like how my photos turn out on my Sony a5000 on the default modes. Similarly when I use the priority settings, the photos turn out rather well. Do I need to save RAW photos for the most part? Probably not. The only occasion where I would want to at the moment might be shooting in Pro mode on my phone, because the camera and settings just aren't as good as the Sony.

Media

• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin became available from the library, so I borrowed the eBook. The sentences are short and punchy so I suspect it won't take my long to read. Is this book for me, though? Not sure yet.
• My wife and I started watching High Potential last night and it's a fun show! It's sort of like Sherlock Holmes...so not a new concept but they're bringing different story beats to the show. Apparently it's based on a French show with the same name.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• ongoing by Tim Bray · Perfectly Different Colors
• satisfying: Instagram
• I like the philosophy here: Making Bear Interactions Easier 📱 | gobino's bites
• Some good thoughts to be had here. I recognize a lot of tendencies in parts of this post. Rethinking my photography needs through an "X Half" experiment 📷 | gobino's bites
• How I use Obsidian — Steph Ango - found via Robb - but this particular methodology is not for me. Nevertheless I enjoyed reading it and following many of Steph Ango's other posts.
• Letting Go of the Fear of Losing Data - A Room of My Own

Things I Made This Week

• Re: Five Months of Journalling | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Unfiltered thoughts on Obsidian | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for May 28 - June 1, 2025

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Things this week

This week has felt very weird. It started off like any other - working in the office, softball the first three days. But then the whirlwind starts: Thursday I drove out dog to my wife's parents (about an 8 hour drive), so that the next day I could fly out to Halifax to meet my wife to fly together to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, in Labrador (of Newfoundland & Labrador).

This had the effect of splitting my week into two: the Ontario half, and the Labrador half. I'll have to write a blog post about the Labrador part, just too much in this space.

Our Tuesday softball game was streamed live over Facebook, so I downloaded the video and edited it down to our at-bats and a few plays in the field. I'm not quite done with it - I have the clips in place I'm just not sure about the sound yet. I'm using VN Video Editor on my Android; it seems they have iOS apps and maybe desktop software, so I'll have to look into these for easier editing.

Last thing: my over/under with Hyde is up today!

Health Notes

I was very tired the first few days of the week. Like unable to properly operate at work. All three days I worked, I went down for a nap when I got home. I'm not sure of the cause, but I know I got plenty of good sleep in Goose Bay.

My best guess is that it was the remnants of the cold I developed last week. Other than some final "leakiness" I've kicked that, thankfully it didn't last long.

Other than that, I took a food logging break and will get back to it on Tuesday.

Media

The number one piece of media I enjoyed this week was the radio station tuned in the rental car: Big Land - Labrador's FM. The station has a mix of several different kinds of music.

Beyond that I watched a lot of X-Files season 2 over the last four days. Travelling alone will do that to you.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• 92,000 Lego bricks later, this model of the Chi-Cheemaun was born in brick form | CBC News
• Good Internet Magazine launched this week. Thinking of purchasing a digital copy (would like a physical edition but shipping is too prohibitive for me).
• Indigenous community on Manitoulin Island gets a data centre to help preserve its cultural heritage | CBC News
• Veronique has a great idea to use Raindrop to share links instead of adding them to posts individually and losing to the sands of time. I like this idea!
• CFB Goose Bay - Wikipedia
• Potential game-changer: Use Obsidian in a Browser from Anywhere, Without Installation | Amerpie by Lou Plummer

Things I Made This Week

• Cool music delivery system | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Wednesday Thoughts 09 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Other Notes

Nothing consequential, but I decided to turn off notifications for Mastodon + Bluesky on my phone. I felt I was getting pulled into the apps everytime I saw a mention. I prefer opening them with intentionality, on my own terms.

Week Notes for May 19-25, 2025

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Things this week

This was, technically, the same length of week as any other. But because of the stat holiday (Victoria Day) the work week was shorter. I'm grateful for that - I needed a day off and it felt like a day off. I may have talked about this somewhere before.

On Thursday I felt very beat up from softball, only 4 weeks into the season. My thumb was still hurting, and on Thursday my foot was incredibly sore when I woke up. What happened to me? (I'm over 40, that's what.)

But as I write this I feel good, and my thumb is getting closer and closer to recovered. I can now carry weight with it, where a week ago I couldn't hold a simple tray of nachos.

The most exciting thing that happened this week was going to Game 2 of the PWHL Finals, Minnesota Frost vs Ottawa Charge. The game went into overtime and it was thrilling. The result wasn't ideal, but we still had a fun time.

I end with a final thought: does returning mail to sender for a previous occupant actually do anything? I pondered this as I almost threw out a piece of mail instead of marking it to RETURN and put it in the mailbox.

Health Notes

• been doing pretty well since Tuesday. Full blown cold this morning (Friday - mostly sore throat). Need to be careful at the gym, almost overdid it.

• we napped a LOT in the last 3 days. Clearly not sleeping enough + being sick

  • almost caved and didn't log yesterday. Went back and made best guess estimates based on what we ate.
    My scale weight dropped drastically two days ago and stayed there today. Is it real? I don't know yet.

  

Tech & Blog Stuff

I started the week completely breaking my server in many different ways. It started when I tried to link to a picture I uploaded to my htdocs folder in File Browser - the image below - and link to it in my daily note in Obsidian. The image was broken, so I investigated - my public-facing web page was down. What was going on? Anyway I made many attempts to fix it, and it ended up coming down to one extra line in my httpd.conf file that had to be removed, and everything worked again. And that was just Tuesday!

Other tech & blog things:

• created a Tasker task to sweep my daily notes into an archive folder. Will do something similar for Weeknotes and week review page but not in a hurry. Tested it this morning (26th) and it works flawlessly.
• I found my phone to be very sluggish this week, so I deleted some apps, and some files. Made my phone a little snappier. Now also trying out Brave Browser for a bit.
• blog: I think I'm going to create a "share" tag for Echofeed; I can tag specific blog posts that I want to share, rather than send my whole blog feed to Echofeed.
• I turned off Blueksy + Mastodon notifications on my phone. I realized that I was being drawn in too much. My preference is to choose to open the app instead of being pulled into it.
• I also deleted Threads & Twitter (X) from my phone. I wasn't using either of them.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Old software still has value - 82MHz
• crushmon.com and other updates
• SilverStone is back with a beige PC case that looks just like your crappy old 486 - Ars Technica - Would be cool if it actually had floppy disc bays.
• Don't @ Me Stickers • Robb Knight

Things I Made This Week

• Minnesota Frost @ Ottawa Charge (NHL 25 Gameplay)

Week Notes for May 12-18, 2025

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Things this week

There are few things greater than having a long weekend that truly feels like it's providing you with actual rest. That's the case for me as I've been doing 4 day in-office days for the past three weeks (instead of 3 in-office days), and by the time I get to Thursday it feels like it should be Friday. But it's not. With the day off Monday I feel like I can relax.

The week started of very warm, and patios around the office were in full season. It made for some very comfortable softball nights as well. In fact, we had to put in our window air conditioner unit in the bedroom over the weekend. However, it cooled down considerably by Saturday night so we (gratefully) took it out. As I type this on Sunday evening it's pretty cold. Wild weather swings for late May.

The biggest thing that happened to us was that we won tickets to see Game Four of the PWHL playoffs between Montreal and Ottawa! The place was loud. And after the game (which the Charge won, by the way) Bank Street - sorry, Charge Avenue - was in full celebration mode. It was amazing to witness. I don't think my luck will hold out for the Finals against Minnesota, but you never know!

Saturday was a very good day. No notes.

And to close off the week, we did some shopping on Sunday. The most significant investment was a new softball bat, but we also found some pretty bang-on birthday cards and gifts for my brothers and nephew tomorrow.

And once again, it's a great feeling to know I don't have to work tomorrow.

Health Notes

Overall my health has been good. The scale weight hasn't moved much but I generally feel good which is my true measure. Although earlier this week felt very sleepy during the day at work, despite getting at least 8 hours of sleep. This is a bad time of year for sleep for me though, as softball tends to have later nights. Will need to be careful here.

Beyond that I took a weekend break from food logging.

Tech & Blog Stuff

I don't have a lot to say about tech; I haven't done much tinkering. Here's as much as I wrote for the notes:

• still trying to puzzle out a self hosted webmail client.
• zkbro pointed me to Android app Automate, going to see what it can do
• Craft CMS - something to look into?
• Got Samsung's One UI7 this week; it's a lot better than most die-hard Samsung users would make you believe

Media

The week capped off with turning on my PS5 to play NHL 25 for the first time in over a week; I had forgotten earlier in the week there had been a brief power outage (no more than 10 seconds). When I booted up the game for the first time today, I found all my saved games and settings were gone. Ah well.

Other things this week:

• Some interesting podcasts I'm listening to:
  • Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World - Podcast
  • Understood - Season 5: Who Broke the Internet? Hosted by Cory Doctorow
• I recommend the cover of "The Waiting" by Marcus King

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• 20.19: Cooking as a Writing Metaphor - Writing Excuses - Apple Podcasts
• Something I want to try with my phone. Set custom fonts in OneUI
• The end of World War II - 80 years later - 82MHz

Things I Made This Week

• Don't Apologize | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Samsung OneUI 7 - First Impressions | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Pink and Blue Doors | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Fun video reviewing obscure DVDs. Inspires me to go through my collection and determine what's a "keep" and what stays. Hunting for Rare DVDs in My DVD Collection | David Chen
• What If We Let Ourselves Get Bored Again? — Noisy Deadlines

Week Notes for May 12-18, 2025

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Things this week

I'm not feeling particularly loquacious this time around so I think I'm sticking to tried and true bullet points.

• I reframed my to-do list this week to make sure I GTD. For example: "I get to play Spider-Man after I get through my list" vs "I have to complete my list before I can play Spider-Man"
• First softball game tonight! I hope I can hit the ball.
  • I can definitely hit. Massive home run, over the netting and onto the other field. Unfortunately it was the 2nd home run in the inning, so it was an out
• Parking lot repair at the office, and we were asked to work from home if possible. I opted to take the train - worked out very well. Got to enjoy It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton
  • The final train station, Tunney's Pasture, is a busy hive of people who seem to know exactly where they're going.
  • I got an idea for some narrative nonfiction from my trip. Started writing it to get my ideas out, I'll continue working on it a bit. Probably will want someone to read it.
• Mundane excitement for the week: they began street sweeping on Friday! Sure sign of summer
• Note to self for future notes: swap "Links" and "Things I Made" sections

Health Notes

• Stayed on top of my health this week. Until Friday stayed at or under my calorie goal.

Tech Stuff

• The only thing I really want to highlight is the script I wrote to expedite finishing my colour contrast page - see blog post below
• I upgraded my Linux tower RAM to 16GB. Next is an SSD upgrade but will switch to lower capacity to save $$

Media

• listened to Moist's 1996 album Creature. Really liked Disco Days.
• Finished the main story for Spider-Man (PS4) with days to spare before returning to the library.
  • taking a break from story driven games as I'm too busy to play them in the summer
• "I Want You (Fever)" by Momma is stuck in my head on loop. I don't mind.
• Photos: took a really nice photo with my phone, have edited it and will post it on the photo blog soon. Finally downloaded photos from April to post as well

Things I Made This Week

• Colour Contrasts - Complete | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Finished my entry for Hyde's Over/Under series - I'm up June 2nd
• Made a cool/silly video using clips from NHL 25, edited entirely on my phone. https://youtu.be/ZWfSSdnFbNY
  • my friend pointed me to "Capcut" so will check that out

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Death by a thousand substacks
• Rethinking Email
• New app developed in Sudbury aims to do for music what Instagram did for photos | CBC News
• Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy via Tim Bray
• Ugly business. Thankfully the band severed ties. The drummer for New Pornographers arrested | Alan Cross
• Markdown Optimizations <- ideas for optimizing how I write my posts for the photo blog (shortcodes specifically)

Week Notes for April 28 - May 4, 2025

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Things this week

It's best to describe this week as "up and down". There were highs (see what I wrote about the Senators below) and there were lows (again - Senators, but also my food logging). I didn't jot down many notes throughout the week outside of my "categories", I suppose that means overall the week could be considered "neutral" at best.

The wildest thing I experienced was a microburst. Tuesday night I was at dinner with my fellow managers. It was a rainy day overall, and it was fairly windy. As we were sitting I could see the wind really picking up out of the corner of my eye, and I could tell it was building up. But then it exploded into a massive burst of wind, blowing everything around. The door near the table must have been open a crack, because the wind forced it open and the curtains were being sucked out.

It was so quick, over as quick as it started. I was almost sure we were experiencing a tornado, but it was too short for that. I've never seen a microburst, that was a first.

Health Notes

Nothing to report, good or bad; I had what was supposed to be a temporary pause in food logging on Wednesday, but turned into a longer pause including today (Sunday). I've had a tough time getting back into it, telling myself, "restart today". But it hasn't set in. I'll try to get back on top of it Monday. Additionally I'm going to try to do better at meeting my targets and not exceeding them.

And I guess this best belongs in the "health" section: I had some bad timing during softball practice Sunday and while trying to catch a fly ball, my thumb got hit hard. It hurt a LOT and is currently still tender. The bruising is super evident. I iced it as often as possible and as of 10:35pm Sunday night it actually isn't as bad as it was earlier in the day.

Tech & Blog Stuff

Some fun things happening this week but I'll start off with an oddity: my iPod Touch (7th generation) received a software update. It's now running iOS 15.8.4. I'm reasonably sure that this was a security update, but that in itself surprises me because I thought it was an abandoned device.

An Obsidian plugin I found: Write Good I wrote a blog post using the plugin and I liked the way it identified various ways I could strengthen my writing. The downside: I don't like how it picks up my bullet-point notes. I have to turn it on/off as needed.

Blog stuff: I turned off EchoFeed for my Bear Blog posts, and left it on for this site and my photo blog. I just feel spammy sending my links everywhere, all the time, and I don't want to share all of my posts. I'll share the posts I want to manually; there is a way around this though. I could link my RSS feed for a specific tag (let's say, share) and EchoFeed will just share those posts. We'll see.

Other fun stuff:

• I found an old Belkin iPad Air bluetooth keyboard for $4. That's cheap enough to warrant testing my curiousity - and it works! The only problem is that the iPad needs to sit on the on/off button to work it, and it's too big for the keyboard...I'll have to find a workaround.
• I set up a NAS on my Linux tower, and mapped the hard drive containing my photos as a network drive in Windows.

Media

• We have another Liberal minority government. The craziest part about this election is probably opposition leader Pierre Polievre losing his seat; a close second would be how close many of the ridings were.
• The Ottawa Senators played strong in Game 5 and forced the series to a 6th game; unfortunately they couldn't keep it going and lost the series. They did well this year.
• This past Friday was Bandcamp Friday! I wrote about it in my Friday thoughts post so I'll move on.
• I found this website: One Album A Day - 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die It's exactly what the title sounds like. You get a new album every day, and once you've listened to it you can jot down some thoughts about it if you like.
  • Similar to this is Crucial Tracks music journal. You get one entry per day to write about anything you like. If you're stuck you can use a daily prompt.

Things I Made This Week

• Obsidian Library | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Friday Thoughts 05 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• No as a Service (NAAS)
• Nice wholesome blog post! Some things I enjoyed today | zkbro
• Bullying is never okay - 82MHz
• Getting a feeling for how much energy AI uses by running it on my laptop - 82MHz - This was a fascinating post and answers some questions I have about running my own LLM on my Linux tower.
  • Related: A clear-eyed look at LLM energy use - Miniflux
• Unpopular Opinions on Books - The Wallflower Digest - Yes, yes, yes, I agree with all of it. Found via 82MHz.
• Planning When You’re S.A.D. - Sneer Campaign

Week Notes for April 21-27

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Things this week

The week started out on a positive note - while the Senators lost the opening game against Toronto in big fashion (6-2 😝) as of Monday there were still 3 games to go. Little did I know that the Sens would have to wait until Saturday to get their first win...

Tuesday, when booking a doctor's appointment, I realized that I neglected to renew both my Driver's License and Health Card, both of which expired on my birthday in March. Woops! I did so as quickly as possible online, and now I'm good to go. I should be receiving new cards in the mail soon, but at least I won't be in trouble if pulled over (other than being pulled over).

On the writing front, I didn't do a lot this week (see Things I Made) but I was tagged for a Blog Questions challenge, and fellow blogger Hyde invited me to his Over/Under series; I have a set of topics to write about and hope to do that soon, but overall it's a nice honour to be included. I've been following along and it's a fun series.

Most of the rest of the week was devoted to some more tech tinkering and dominated by playoffs.

Health Notes

As mentioned I booked a doctor's appointment this week, years in the making. For a long time I've had frequent nosebleeds, usually coinciding with changes in air pressure. It doesn't matter if it's dry or humid, something will trigger a nosebleed. Most of the time it's not like...gushing blood. I'll blow my nose and discover some clotted blood in the tissue. Sometimes it will actually bleed until I stop it. There are other symptoms that make me think I have a deviated septum which probably dates back to high school maybe when I was hit hard in the nose with a soccer ball during gym class. But I don't want to self-diagnose, so - doctor's appointment.

I weigh myself daily to filter out noise on the scale, and it started off discouraging. My weight kept going up, but eventually it came back down to reality. That's why daily weigh-ins are important!

My back seems like it's returned to normal. Pain is still present, but it doesn't take a long time for me to be able to walk properly. I can get up and I just feel a stretch. If I place a pillow behind my back when I sit in an office chair it makes it better.

Tech Stuff

Oh boy, more tech tinkering this week. I started setting up a new Linux installation on a spare PC; the goal was to set up a Plex server. The installation went swimmingly, with problems only related to disc copy protection. I've worked around that and have an SSH tunnel set up so that I can transfer files over WiFi and not have to be at the Linux keyboard. I asked some Discord friends for suggestions on what else to add to the local server, and there were several good suggestions - including an NAS, which I think is a good idea considering I have 1TB hard drives lying around. I will probably move my photo storage there so I don't need to use an external HD enclosure.

Beyond that I've been doing more playing around with Obsidian. I installed a few plugins: Book Search, Movie Search, and Dataview. I'll write about what I'm doing with those in a blog post later this week, but the short version is that it's just a fun little thing I'm doing to avoid publically quantifying my media tracking.

Media

Oh, the Ottawa Senators. What a roller coaster ride. Did you know that they went to Overtime in three straight games? And lost two of them? The worst is that they had dreadful shot totals in the 2nd and 3rd periods in at least two of those games. It turns out that if you shoot the puck, you score goals. It would be nice if they could win more faceoffs (they did a better job of that Saturday night). Back to Toronto for game 5 Tuesday night.

I noticed for the first time this week the difference upscaling makes with DVDs on my PS5; I streamed some ReBoot episodes through Plex, which were ripped to DVD in 420p. I previously watched some of those episodes on the PS5. The quality difference is stunning. I am very glad I bought this machine for movies.

Things I Made This Week

• Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Struggling | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Callouts - Obsidian Help
• Cool thing on /r/movies: Throwback Discussion - Love & Basketball
• Neat idea: creating a movie database in Obsidian. Would be cool to save as a static website. Create a movie database - Minimal Documentation
• But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext
• You don't have to be famous to be great at your job | Matt Birchler

Week Notes for April 14 - 20, 2025

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Things this week

The week started on an absolutely positive note: all the snow from the previous Monday was gone. 6 straight days of sunshine did its work. The weather stayed nice all week, even if it cooled down a little bit.

Looking at my notes from last week, they are dominated by tech tinkering. I can't say I'm surprised, as my mind was focused on playing with Obsidian and setting up automations (blog posts below). Is my life "better" as a result of the automating and organizing of my Obsidian vault? Maybe not, but it's giving me a different way to review the past week and write about it. In that sense I found it a productive use of my time.

I have a few more notes on Obsidian but I'll put those in the technology section. Other than all that automation, we had Good Friday, a day that really felt more like a Saturday. It indeed was a Good Day, and spent a lot of it outdoors. My wife and I took our dog for an unleashed walk in a nice area we frequent a lot. Our dog loves running around and smelling all the smells; thankfully she did NOT roll around in deer poop or puddles. However, she gave us a scare when she decided to chase after some geese on the ice, and ran out nearly 200 metres on the ice. Thankfully it wasn't too thin and she did not fall through.

At the end of the week, before we drove back home from my wife's family, I started brainstorming some creative ideas. I wrote a little bit about it Friday evening.

And to cap off the week, I found a nice little note to tell me that I've been randomly selected to become a potential juror. I need to fill out a form, and I'll be notified if I am selected. Crossing my fingers that I'm not!

Health Notes

I noted early in the week that I haven't been logging food in Cronometer since March 31st. Since then I have had no way of knowing if I'm eating "well" (i.e. staying within my calorie budget) over the last 3 weeks. Overall I feel I have been doing just OK, but there have for sure been "write-off" days when I have blown my budget out of the water.

Officially as of Sunday (yesterday) I have restarted my health regimen:

• Proper food logging
• Proper flossing & brushing at night

I've gotten away from both of these things for a while now, and I need to do better. I originally wrote in my daily note that "I'm going to restart..." - No. I changed the wording to indicate that I already restarted it. A small change but it helps me get in the proper mindset.

Other notes:

• My 15-day walking total for the Cool Bloggers Walking Club: 86,505 steps / 64.51km

Technology

As I mentioned Obsidian consumed a huge chunk of my attention this past week. When I first got into Obsidian, I joined the /r/ObsidianMD subreddit, but quickly unsubscribed. I found that the bulk of the posts I came across were a mix between people arguing for or against plugins; people sharing their convoluted setups; generally unhelpful posts (to me) talking about all the great plugins they use. In short, I didn't find it very helpful.

This past week I re-subscribed to the subreddit because via the mobile app I was still seeing some suggested posts from the subreddit that I did find helpful or at least fun to read. I even contributed some comments to describe my setup (using SyncThing). There are useful posts there, but they tend to be "quieter" in the sense that the posts I mentioned above get more attention. I'll be selective to which posts I open up going forward.

One final thought on my setup: I have officially turned off all plugins. I've been treating my setup the same way I did when setting up Photos by srgower: put together the framework, and throw in components as I find the need for them. I've been able to accomplish everything I want so far with the core functionality of the app combined with some shell scripts running on my OpenBSD server. I'll cross the plugin bridge when necessary.

Other notes:

• I have wanted to install Linux Mint on a spare PC tower I have in the house for a while now, but didn't have any use in mind for it. I can't remember how I settled on this but I came up with one: setting up a Plex server. On Sunday I got it up and running, ripping disc 5 of my recently purchased ReBoot complete series box set. Working well!
• I found a new theme for Miniflux that I like: andymason / miniflux-css-theme (GitHub)
• Added Canadian Politics (whole word) to Mastodon filters.
  • I should share my full filter list. I wonder if I can export as .CSV?
• As it turns out, 2025 is my Year of Tech Tinkering

Media

• Played my first online vs game of NHL 25 in a while. Won 2-0 despite being outplayed. Videos: Pinto scores! | Tkachuk buries the rebound
• The week started off with establishing The Battle of Ontario (Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Ottawa Senators) for round 1 of the NHL playoffs. Buckle up! Unfortunately things didn't go so well in game 1 last night, but that's just one game. The rest of this week will be dominated by playoff watching.
  • I played two offline games of Ottawa vs. Toronto on NHL 25; I went 1-1, losing big in game 1 and winning big in game 2. Accurate prediction, perhaps?
• I started playing Mole Mania via the Delta emulator on my iPod Touch; it's a fun game and was recommended to me by a friend as on the same tier as Donkey Kong as one of the best Game Boy games. So far - it holds up. I will probably write a review of it for my gaming blog.
• I caught up on some Deep Space Nine episodes: "Move Along Home" is not as bad as I remember, or that people say; there is a fantastic Godfather homage scene in "The Nagus". I forgot that there was a great Ferengi episode in the first season. Of course there is! They need to do some character development episodes for all the characters.
• 3+ months into the year, I am feeling the itch to go back and log my reading. Not for the purpose of quantifying my reading, but I'd like to clean up my 'to read' list and keep a digital record. I'm still writing private notes and not really sharing things unless I feel like writing a review. Perhaps the solution is to start a spreadsheet.
• The trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps came out last week, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I've added at least one movie to my in-theatre experience list for 2025. There haven't been many in the last year+

Things I Made This Week

• Sunday Thoughts 02 | An Almost Anonymous Blog (technically I wrote this on Sunday of Week 15)
• Am I a Tastemaker? – Alternative Airwaves
• Automating Obsidian with OpenBSD | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Wednesday Thoughts 08 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Following up on Automating Obsidian | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Creative Pursuits | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Introducing Mochi — and thoughts on analytics and webmentions - Miniflux- neat project!
• Now THIS is some interesting audio from the era of the MP3. (I'd never heard this before!) | Alan Cross
• Want to feel a little depressed? Life Grid - Visualize Your Time (Stacked)

Week Notes for April 7 - 13 2025

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My week notes - a little bit early this time around.

I mentioned last week that I wanted to change up my Weeknotes format; I haven't quite figured out what that looks like yet, but I did change my method for putting them together this week. I created a "daily note" where I would record any and all thoughts and happenings through the week. This allowed me (the theory here) to review what I noted down and distill down to what I want to highlight from the week.

Things this week

This week started with a major snow dump on Monday followed by four straight days of nothing but sun. The snow was far too much to handle, and now with everything melting it's all muddy and gross. Still, I'll take it over snow.

I've been taking part in the "Cool Bloggers Walking Club" (Cool Bloggers Walking Club – The Optimistic Musings of a Pessimist); the simple goal is to walk 10 minutes every day in April. This is normally something "in the bag" for me because I walk my dog, but we're staying with my in-laws this week and sometimes it's easy to take the dog out far enough for her to do her business and come back, or just put her on the leash outside. So far - 100% with ten minute walks every day. I'm tracking my progress as a mini zine; I'll share pictures of it in May.

Saturday: all the time in the world to myself, and a bright sunny day. The only inkling of a plan is(was?) to take the camera out. But it was nice to spend a bit of the morning with a coffee and reading through my RSS feeds, lazily following rabbit holes as I click on links from the posts.

At the end of the week I had an internal debate: cut my crazy hair, or wait it out a few more weeks and get it done before softball season? I think I'll hold off until softball.

Health Notes

For most of the week I've been dealing with a cold: lots of congestion that seemed like it would never end. Near the end of the week it lightened up; and while I traded a cold for back pain, the swap came around again. Cruel.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I use the app Cashew to manage finances/budgets on the go; I thought I figured out this week how to effectively use CSV files to make it easier to enter data but I messed up some date formatting - work in progress.
• New Mastodon filters: Carney, Polievre, and updated my general politics filters to include #stocks and revised trump to not match exact case (to catch potential hashtags)
• I'm having trouble fixing my father-in-law's computer; he keeps getting one of those fake Windows Defender scam pop-ups and I'm having a hard time nailing down the source. It doesn't help that his solution to getting rid of it is turning off the power bar (which in turns powers off the Internet)
• Trying to get some more use out of my iPad; playing around with focus modes / different home screens. There's much more I can probably do, I'm just digging in!
• zkbro had an interesting link in his quick post earlier today - Bash Static Site Generator (BSSG). I can see myself making use of this with my OpenBSD server.

Media

• Finished Bad Cree, working on a review at the moment
• Also finished Star Trek Lower Decks volumes 1-3 from Hoopla
• Finally finished S1 of X-Files; it was very up-and-down but overall I enjoyed it.
• Also polished off some videos from my YouTube Watch Later list - happy to have it cleared.

Things I Made This Week

• Podcasting 101 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• You Don't Have to Monetize The Things You Love (via Jedda - I've expressed similar views myself, I'm always going to re-share content like this.)
• can someone explain why my anxiety brain turns to baseball trivia | TFP Writes Words
• Disconnecting from the internet feels impossible for me | Koffie's Plek
• Self-hosting at home with Ubuntu Server + Easypanel on Mac Mini (late 2014) | A parenthetical departure
• This made me chuckle. the armchair of great blogging | ava's blog
• My one principle for writing effective nonfiction | De minimis non curat Lex
• 3D “digital twin” of Titanic wreck yields fresh insights - Ars Technica

Week Notes for March 31-April 6

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I want to set up a different format for weeknotes. Not sure what that looks like yet. For now - here's the usual format.

Things this week

• Added #cdnpolli and #cdnpoli to my Mastodon politics filters.
• I spoke to some college students about my job! I've been speaking to students in the program I graduated from for several years now, but it seems this will be the last: the college has "suspended" the Radio Broadcasting program.

Health Notes

• I'm sick with a cold! Again! 3rd time this year. This time around it's a bit different in terms of symptoms. But I took a sick day on Tuesday because I didn't want to deal with work.
• I started tracking daily 10 minute walks as part of the Cool Bloggers Club, an unofficial challenge for the month of April. It's dead simple: walk at least 10 minutes daily for the whole month.

Media

• Hitting "pause" on Spider-Man (PS4). It's due back at the library and can't renew it (too many holds on it). I'll pick it back up at a later date.
• I want to like Haim's song "Relationships" but while I like the structure and music arrangement, I'm not a fan of the lyrics and what the song seems to be about.
• A teaser trailer for the new Naked Gun movie (starring Liam Neeson) came out; it looks fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8-N8IIq_8I
• This play right here - so many things went the right way. 1) I struck out, but the catcher dropped the ball; 2) the catcher overthrew to 1st; 3) I turned to run to 2nd but had to turn back. Forgot the button to do that and stood still while the second baseman approached. Still made it to 1st safely.

Things I Made This Week

• Favourite Numbers | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Updating an Outdated Macbook Pro | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• The Luxury of Analogue | Mike Grindle
• Video Game Backlog Zero – Tyler Sticka - Sounds similar to book backlogs! (Side note - this blog is neat, take a look at it in a browser)
• How to Install, Activate, and Update Obsidian Plugins | by Stephan Miller | Medium - I'm enjoying Obsidian and now finding plugins that will further enhance my experience. This was helpful for figuring out how to install them.

Week Notes for March 24-30

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Things this week

• I started work on the Harry Potter "Potions Class" LEGO set (number 76431). I'm timing my sessions this time - 1st session was about 26 minutes.
  • Second session, to complete: 45 minutes. Around an hour and ten minutes total.
• I had to add some new filters to Mastodon. For Canadian politics (an election was called for April 28th), CPC. For general politics and stuff I don't care about, capitalism and GDP. I'm sure there will be many more as posts crop up.
• Started a new "memories" file. Anytime something triggers a memory, write down that memory. And the trigger, when possible.
• My wife's birthday was Sunday!! We didn't do anything special - napped, went for dinner. It was a crappy day weather-wise, that was disappointing.
  • Luckily we did not get as severe a storm as was forecast.

Health Notes

• I've had lower back pain (isolated to the left side) for a few weeks now; in general it's fine, but the chairs at work seem to aggravate it. We have standing desks so I'm making use of those on and off.
• Wednesday March 26th was Purple Day, or Epilepsy Awareness Day. Believe it or not I actually forgot about it until late in the day.

Media

• I forgot another thing last week. I found the complete box set of ReBoot at Wal-Mart while I was looking around for a birthday card for my wife. I jumped in last Sunday night to the start of the Web episodes of season two (starts with "Painted Windows", continues in "Nullzilla"). It looks really good on the PS5, but the audio is a little choppy. Good enough for me!
• My wife and I saw a play Wednesday night: Secret to Good Tea by Rosana Deerchild. It's part of the NAC's Indigenous Theatre. It was at times funny but mostly serious. Lots of emotion on stage.
• The It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton podcast premiered Wednesday with the story "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death" and it's a neat little time travel love story.
• I'm giving up on The Great Train Robbery (Crichton). I was enjoying it at first, but I've lost interest. Life's too short to force yourself to read a book you're not into.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Successfully setup Miniflux RSS reader on my server. Going to try it out for a bit as an alternative to Feedly.
• File Browser is up and running now, too! Huge thanks to Sylvia for the help and doing the major legwork.
  • I broke the server a couple times on Tuesday; nothing major but I learned a thing or two about changing read/write permissions with help from ChatGPT
• I think my next tech tinkering project will be to figure out how to upgrade my macbook's OS; officially it's no longer supported but I remember reading about OpenCore Legacy to bring it up to date. I looked into it, seems like it needs a good chunk of time to complete. Not sure when I'll get to this one.

Things I Made This Week

• Digital vs. Physical Copies | Gaming with lwgrs
• Quick Thoughts on Raindrop | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Original Motion Picture Score Ultimate Edition | Alternative Airwaves
• Friday Thoughts 04 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Beware any dopamine hit that doesn’t require effort | Mike Crittenden
• The Evil Things I've Done (in video games) | Mike Grindle
• is offline the new luxury? | ava's blog

Week Notes for March 17-23

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Things this week

• In trying to be resourceful and do my own work of flipping an electrical outlet around, I inadvertently created a fire hazard and my landlord had to come over and fix it. Woops. But all is well now and things are set up as intended. And no fire happened.
• I know in a lot of cases hybrid work setups make no sense and a lot of people hate them if they can get the same work done at home - but I love it. On Tuesday I had a productive talk with one of my coworkers and we solved a problem together, in person.
• Hiro's assignment for us this week for the composition challenge is to use the golden spiral/ratio when composing your shot. This isn't something I've considered much before.
• Diamond Art is forever: I bought some mod podge to seal the canvas; it's going to take a while. Probably not as long as putting it together in the first place, but...
  • I'm still going to start my next project soon: a LEGO set

Health Notes

• I messed up my notes from last week; I should have mentioned EVERY DAY was complete in Cronometer.
• I moved up my blood donation from April 4th to March 19th. I can't donate blood on training days (Mondays and Fridays).
• Monday to Thursday were all complete days for food logging. Friday was a partial day, and Saturday/Sunday were a conscious choice not to log.
  • It's important to me to take occasional breaks. Good for my mental health.

Media

• I'm so glad Brandon recommended I play through Spider-Man (PS4) before moving onto Spider-Man 2 (PS5). I've played about an hour (as of writing this) and it's so much fun.
  • I'm falling down the video game rabbit hole. Found a couple of games I'm interested in: Star Trek Resurgence and Star Wars Outlaws. The latter is available from the library at least!
• I finally found a remixed version of Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride that I've been trying to find for quite some time: "Magic Carpet Ride - Steir's Mix"
• I finally got to Deep Space Nine in Star Trek Online. Once I found out that was possible, that's all I wanted to get to. I'm going to come back to the game later, but I'm going to put it aside for now. I took some video and screen captures and I'm probably going to take more.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Progress with the self-hosted server: it's all good to go. I have some tweaks to make to my Syncthing setup but it's otherwise working flawlessly. Next step is trying to set up Miniflux, and perhaps attempting setting up File Browser (Sylvia's guide is intense)
• I wrote these notes in Obsidian, mostly on my Android. I set up Obsidian + Syncthing on my Macbook as I was doing some other work on it with my music library so I then copied the source code from Obsidian into Github. Loving this setup so far.

Things I Made This Week

• NA Beer Review: White Water Brewing Co | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Setting up my own server | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Friday Thoughts 03 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them. So many links this week!! Some of them came from Jedda, in case some seem familiar.

• Netigen: Dissonance in the Dark - Courtney has an amazing way with words. This one was a great stream of consciousness piece.
• Non-Negotiable Self-Care: The Art of Being "Busy" for Yourself | prickly oxhe.art - A good read, but I always hate using CEOs as an example for carving out time. A lot of the time the story seems apocryphal more than anything else, and even though CEOs have a lot to do, often they have more freedom to protect their time than people lower down the ladder. Nevertheless, this is a great post that highlights the importance of making time for yourself.
• my problem with fediverse | monocyte's blog
• A new OpenBSD guide from Sylvia: Building File Browser from source and self-hosting on OpenBSD | A parenthetical departure
• Do our tools really say anything about us as people? | Jason Kratz
• The append-and-review note | karpathy
• Bear Blog’s Blind Spot | netigen
• The Notebook Fallacy: Why Ideas Are Cheap | A Room of My Own

Week Notes for March 10-16

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Things this week

• I took a vacation day Monday, and used it to finish the diamond art project (finally!) and do other random small stuff around the house. And play some video games. Also wrote some blog posts (links below).
  • Re: the Diamond Art project - looks like I started this November 30th
  • There is a huge community on Reddit and I went down a rabbit hole. Going to pick up something to seal my project with and a frame this coming week.

Health Notes

• I did a great job tracking my calories. Monday through Thursday are marked "complete". Calorie goals themselves are so-so between days. The beginning of the week was almost bang-on, the last half not so much.

Media

• More Star Trek Online: I used Google's Gemini to generate a Lower Decks-inspired character for a TNG campaign. I got Miles "Sparky" Taggart. Here's what Google generated (first paragraph out of four):

Miles, or "Sparky" as he's unfortunately known, hails from a mid-sized Federation colony that specialized in, of all things, holographic recreational programs. Think immersive historical reenactments, complex puzzle simulations, and elaborate virtual pet experiences. Miles grew up tinkering with the programming, often accidentally causing glitches that resulted in, say, a Roman legion suddenly breakdancing or a virtual cat developing a sentience and existential dread.

Unexpectedly Gemini produced a generated image when I asked what his appearance was so I could recreate it in STO. That was weird. One last Gemini note:

He carries a worn-out PADD loaded with his personal projects, including a fully functional (but slightly buggy) holographic pet Tribble named "Fluffernutter."

And This was a fun Geordi-style tuck and roll out of engineering in one of the first missions. Look at that, more video game recordings on my YouTube channel!

• Thursday night, I got the notion in my head to nuke my Spotify "Liked Songs" list; but I'm not sure if I'm able to do that without also losing or messing up playlists. I'm not entirely familiar with how Spotify adds songs to your library. At any rate it's something I started looking into.
  • Why do I want to do this? When I first started using Spotify I added albums I own / have in iTunes to my library. This isn't how I want Spotify to work for me. In fact I think I now want to regularly clear out my 'liked songs' list (by creating other playlists to collect these liked songs).
  • Aaaaand I did it. Just in case I created a backup of some playlists I didn't want to lose. I used this website that converts your playlists to a CSV file for future import: Spotify-Backup - Make your backup now!
• I have Spider-Man (PS4) available for pick-up from the library; I plan on grabbing it Monday and giving it a go next week.
• By happenstance I listened to one of the albums featured on Crucial Tracks this week before I read it! And it's a really good album!

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Testing Niagara Launcher is going well (typing this on Wednesday). The toughest part was unlearning muscle memory for where I had everything laid out with Samsung OneUI. There are some things I wish I could do with Niagara but those are possible with a paid subscription - which I'm not sure is worth it for me yet. Will write up a blog post about it next week after the full 7 days.
• I signed up for Raindrop; it's a bookmark manager. I've heard good things about both managers, and Raindrop specifically. It's allowing me to start my bookmarks from scratch. I like that there are apps and extensions. So far I like it a lot.
• Currently working on setting up a self-hosted server. I followed Derek's Tech Independence Guide and now trying to work through Sylvia's guide for setting up Syncthing. Added this to my Now page (first update since October '24!).

Things I Made This Week

• MLB The Show 24: First Impressions | Gaming with lwgrs
• Framed! | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Blog Notebook | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Entries for week 4 of the composition challenge
• Sense of Dread | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• I Can't Stop Thinking About Gene Hackman | Decoding Everything
• coffee games | enceledean - this person is going to have to explain what "coffee games" entail.
• Radio is alive | the art of arb - I will always support anyone's love for radio.
• SomaFM, an ad-free online radio platform | dearmishmash
• The Digital Packrat Manifesto | 404 Media

Week Notes for March 3-9

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Things this week

• My birthday was this past Wednesday! I turned 41. I took the day off, and so did my wife, as she took off on a work trip the next day.
  • I forgot again - I share the same birthday with Ross Brown, AKA The Brown Knowser
  • I had a great day. We had no plans beyond a 12pm gym appointment with our personal trainer. I played some video games (see below), and did some major work on my diamond art project. Then we went out for dinner!
• I worked on my diamond art project. As of Friday night it's almost finished - then I can finally move on to another project. Most likely a LEGO set.
• On Friday I ordered some non-alcoholic beer from a local shop that specializes in non-alcoholic versions of beer and wine and spirits etc. I got two of my favourites (Sober Carpenter's Black IPA) and some new ones. I drank two of them already and I intend to write a review. I need to do it fast while the flavour is fresh, because I only bought one of each can of what I drank.

Health Notes

• I was perhaps a little optimistic that I got back on the calorie logging horse last weekend. I started strong on Monday, but faltered on Tuesday. For Birthday Wednesday I just didn't bother.
  • Still haven't got back to it. Will try again Monday morning.
• Friday morning I woke up with a nasty headache and felt like I had to throw up. It took me a while to wake up, but I eventually pushed through it. I don't know what brought it on - too much bad food the night before?

Media

• I started playing Star Trek Online - I guess this was a PS4 title? Anyway it was free to "purchase" so I got it a couple weeks ago. I finally played it this week and in my first TOS mission I had a great red shirt experience. On point game. Apparently the game takes you to Deep Space Nine at some point...so I guess I'm playing STO now.
• I've taken to uploading gameplay recordings to my YouTube channel. It started as a means to an end to embed a video in a post about my first impressions of the PS5, and probably my next video is going to be used for a similar purpose: Home Runs in MLB The Show Beginner Mode. Perhaps I may continue to upload random videos!
• I briefly toyed with the idea of streaming only Canadian music out of some misguided feeling of patriotism. I can't do it. There's just so much good music out there that spans nationality. Plus it doesn't seem right to punish those who aren't responsible for what's going on.
  • HOWEVER I did browse exclusively Canadian music on Bandcamp for Bandcamp Friday. I was pleased to find out Dan Mangan has a new album coming out to pre-order - so that was an immediate buy for me; the only decision was vinyl vs. CD for a physical copy. I opted for the vinyl, so that'll be a nice treat in the mail!
• I watched Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick's directorial debut. It was just OK. Kendrick didn't bring anything really special to either the director's chair or as an actor in the film, but it looked good.
• I spent the weekend listening to a bunch of CDs on full random, 5 at a time in the CD changer. Once again I'm reminded that Sloan's best-of album, A Sides Win, is really good.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I decided to give Niagara Launcher a go on my phone. I like Samsung OneUI, but I figured trying something different can't hurt. I'll try to give it 7 days, at least (that's Niagara's recommendation).
• Photos for this week's photography composition challenge are taken, I just need some time to edit them before sharing. Will do that Monday, probably.

Things I Made This Week

• Thursday Thoughts 01 | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• try the year compass! | dearmishmash - I don't think I'm going to try it myself, but a cool concept.
• The fear of being seen - I relate to this so much! I feel so self-conscious whenever I take photos - even when it's not of people.

Week Notes for February 24-March 2

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Things this week

• Ontario voted Thursday evening; while I voted for my preferred candidate, it didn't make a difference as the result was decided within 15 minutes of the polls closing. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (literally, we have the same Premier as before the election).

Health Notes

• My cold was at its worst on Tuesday, and I had some rough nights sleeping. Things got better on Thursday when I was a lot more alert. Friday was more-or-less the same.
• It's so easy to fall away from daily calorie logging. I got as far as Wednesday Breakfast + Lunch but stopped at dinner; we ordered out for dinner and I didn't feel like looking up calorie information from the restaurant. Then I didn't do anything all day Thursday because I was having a tough / stressful day. I was about to skip Friday too but then started typing this line.

Media

• I've been playing a lot of NHL 25 (PS5) in short bursts. There is a big difficulty learning curve compared to what I'm used to. I think I'm getting better but there are several things I haven't gotten down yet (most especially the passing...I don't know how many times I've iced the puck on a faceoff at centre ice or passed the puck out of the offensive zone to my end of the ice on a power play...)
  • One great thing I never took advantage of before is that you can borrow games from the library. This is going to be my best bet at trying different games because they're so expensive. Although I am now wondering if doing something like pre-installing MLB The Show 24 before buying my own copy would work, since the disc essentially acts as a license key...does that mean I need to re-install it with a different disc?
• The first trailer for Season 2 of Andor dropped, but I haven't watched it - and I don't plan to. I'm watching the show anyway so I'm already excited about it. I will be re-watching season 1 ahead of the April 22 release date - and forcing my wife to watch with me.
• The Oscars sucked me again this year. Even though I'm not as familiar with the films nominated this year, not even on a name recognition basis, I love the show. I'm typing this after the Best Director award, so there's still a bit to go. As always, I have some more movies to watch this coming year.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Much hoopla has been made (probably deserved) of recent changes made by Mozilla regarding personal data and their privacy policy. I'm waiting until the noise dies down before really looking into it. What happens a lot is people misinterpret these changes to mean something that it doesn't, but the company making them also doesn't do themselves any favours by not explaining them properly. Also, I don't plan on switching away from Firefox anytime soon - it works for me.

Things I Made This Week

• PS5: First Impressions | An Almost Anonymous Blog
  • Video Game Difficulty (Technically I wrote this Sunday evening but it's related to the link above it)
• Wednesday Thoughts 07 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Vulture Feather: It Will Be Like Now – Alternative Airwaves
• Following Up On Hobbies | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for February 17-23

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Things this week

• I joined Hiro's Photo Composition Challenge, which started Monday. I hope to have something to share weekly. The first assignment is fairly easy - rule of thirds, something that is usually top of mind for me anyway!
• Oddity: I had a package of Reese Peanut Butter Cups, and one of the cups had 5 paper shell things. Bonus?
• Did some cleaning and organizing of the house. It felt both good and bad; bad: it was dirtier than we thought (dust). Good: It was great to do the cleaning, and to find proper spaces for things that have been sitting around everywhere before since January.

Health Notes

• Re-started food logging. The primary goal is to be back in the habit. I haven't stayed under my calorie goal all week but I have made a point to log everything.
• I hit a step goal streak for the first time in ages. I reached or surpassed my 7500 daily goal at least 5 days in a row! It stopped on Friday when I was working from home and not walking as much.
  • On Saturday, I probably had at least 7000 steps but I wasn't wearing my smart watch, so the walks I went on when I left my phone in the house didn't record any steps. For reference, around 6000 is what I had when I looked at my totals when I went to bed.
• The cold has returned, or at least a sore throat. I don't know if it's a full-blown cold or not but I'd love a break from this nonsense.

Media

• Lumineers - Automatic - It was okay. I like their single "Same Old Song" but beyond that I wasn't particularly thrilled with it.
• Franz Ferdinand - The Human Fear - Great! I wrote a review here: https://ottawa.place/@srgower/114026351591068361
• Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory (self-titled) - I loved this self-titled album. It had a very dreamy quality to it and was an enjoyable listen. I recommend it.
• I got caught up in the 4 Nations Faceoff final on Thursday - I wasn't expecting to care very much about it, but it suddenly became must-watch viewing for me. It was a good game - even though I fell asleep for the first 14 minutes of the 3rd period. Luckily I didn't miss anything there!
• I bought a PS5 this weekend; the primary reason was for being able to watch 4K movies and the ability to play games makes it a cost effective purchase. I’ll be writing a couple posts about it in the coming week (including a fun one I have an idea for on my oft-neglected video game blog).
  • A great thing I'll be taking advantage of is that the library lends video games. This will help so much in avoiding spending $90/game.
• Scotties Tournament of Hearts: Another dominant performance from Team Canada (Homan) - undefeated, including in playoffs! I believe in the final she stole 4 points to win 6-1 in 9 ends. On top of which she curled 100%, the highest curling % in a Scotties final. Crazy.
• Also, Spring Training is back!

Things I Made This Week

• How I Email | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Rule of Thirds | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Mainstream Music Discovery – Alternative Airwaves

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Ephemeral content – Manu - First time I've heard of "pop-up newsletters" as a concept. Interesting for sure!
• Using Reddit the Right Way - a Lesson Learned | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
• Netigen: Stumble Purposefully

Week Notes for February 10-16

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Things this week

• I spent the week in Toronto, and worked out of my company's head office. I walked to the office and back to the hotel each day I went in (Tuesday through Thursday). Healthy 20 minutes each way.
• There was a big snowstorm Wednesday evening into Thursday morning. The roads definitely got nasty as the snow went on. Thursday I still went into the office - it was a ghost town.
• 5am Thursday morning the hotel's fire alarm went off. The culprit: exhaust from a snow blower in the parking garage. At least it wasn't very cold out (just snowy).
• I didn't write much outside of my journal so this is a light week.

Things I Made This Week

• Start Small | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Week Notes for February 3-9

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Things this week

• There must be some universal rule about books on hold at the library being available to check out at the least convenient time. A book I placed a hold on - that was well behind the queue - is available for check-out but I won't be able to get to it before the hold expires (Feb 12).

Health Notes

• Naturally, the week before I'm supposed to be working in head office with my manager, I've got a sore throat. Hopefully this means I'll be healthy (healthy-ish at minimum) next week.
  • The sore throat became congestion within a day or two and with it incredible tiredness. Not a terrible thing for recovery I suppose.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• An interesting post from Francis Beaudet; my macbook hasn't received OS updates in quite some time but didn't know something known as #OpenCoreLegacyPatcher existed. Something I need to look into now.

Media

• Finished reading Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. I'm surprised to learn that this is his only published collection of film essays. I thought it was an interesting look into the films that left enormous impressions on Tarantino that would ultimately lead to the movies he's famous for.

Things I Made This Week

• Mastodon and Politics | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Our Lady Peace – Gravity – Alternative Airwaves
• On Writing Better | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• A Month Without Tracking | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Magnetic Utensils | Photos by Stephen Gower

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• jarunmb pointed me to this neat website for making review cards: Quick Reviews I love it and created this fun card for the review I wrote on Monday. I made another one here.
• Daily Groove Club hat tip Xavier for finding this in the Bear Blog Discover Page

Week Notes for January 27 - February 2

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Things this week

• I made some cinnamon & brown sugar simple syrup this week for trying to make a mocktail. It turned out only okay; the syrup is fine, but I think I need a stronger ginger beer for what I was trying to make (I don't recommend Canada Dry)
  • I tried something from The Artisan Drinks Co: Fiery Ginger Beer. It improved the mocktail.
• Sens vs Wild: We splurged last minute on tickets to see the Ottawa Senators play the Minnesota Wild. It was a great game and the Sens won 6-0.
• Winterlude held a "mini" pow-wow and we went to check it out. It was nice, and "mini" is the right word.

Health Notes

• Struggling this week with calorie logging. My scale weight is not "cooperating" as a result. I'll right the ship, one week does not negate overall progress (even when it feels like it).

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Why We Ditched the Icon for External Links • Catppuccin <- I think actually I like this argument for ditching it (forget the technial explanation behind why they removed it). I did it because I thought it was cool and The Cool Kids were doing it but there are some situations where I don't really want it and I do some manual workarounds. So as I type this (Friday) I'm commenting out the code on my sites for now.
• I invested some time into Alternative Airwaves, tweaking the site theme (including changing the colour palette and switching to a different WordPress theme) and creating a new logo. I also wrote a re-introduction post (link below).

Media

• A Man on the Inside - great show, not too many episodes. Works as a self-contained season but I'm sure there's another one on the way. A quote from the show I liked:

"It's how I feel. And I've had quite a bit of wine, so I'm saying how I'm feelin'" -- Calbert

• Tunde Adebimpe: Ozzy Osbourne except indie rock
• Album rec: West Coast by Studio
• Movie: Heat (1995) - I enjoyed this but I think it's a victim of hype; plenty of people heap tons of praise on the movie and some of it is deserved, but I didn't enjoy it as much as other people. However, it is entirely worth it for the coffee shop scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. One negative I especially didn't like: Pacino seemed to be playing two different characters at different points in the movie.
• Getting back into The Album Project (slowly)

Things I Made This Week

• Wednesday Thoughts 06 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Friday Thoughts 02 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Alternative Airwaves: A Re-Introduction – Alternative Airwaves

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• home printed periodicals | véronique
• Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral
• February calendar | véronique
• Ticketmaster has settled a Canadian class action suit over fees. Is there something in it for you? | Alan Cross
• Random sci-fi backgrounds (Debian) | zkbro - Mainly for the link to the sci-fi backgrounds zkbro found.

Week Notes for January 20-26, 2025

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Things this week

• Tuesday, driving home from work, I witnessed so much "stupid" on the road that it baffled my mind that there wasn't a single collision along my way. There was one very close call, but ultimately nobody crashed into each other. The one major downside of my new work location.
• We attended a 67's game Saturday afternoon - the first game this year we've been to where the team we're rooting for won.
• Went for a skate on the Rideau Canal; the ice conditions were great and the day was fantastic, but there was a lot of wind. Thankfully it died down after a little while. This was our first skate of the season.

Health Notes

• Personal training at the gym continues to go well. I haven't been the greatest with calorie counting (I'm OK with going over, as long as I don't do it every day), but I feel the results of the training. When I feel my ab muscles when I make a certain movement, I'm happy to realize that what I'm doing at the gym is translating to physical results.
• I had a rash on my ring finger for the longest time but it seems to be healing ever since we had our wedding rings cleaned. There must have been something embedded in the band.
• Samsung health has a new mood tracker, testing it out.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I remember back in the days of the first generation of the iPod Touch, album art was a huge deal and hugely emphasized. I'm disappointed that the most recent iPod Touch (7th generation, running only iOS 15) - while not exactly minimizing album art - doesn't feature it more prominently. Apparently iPhones have the capability of enlarging album art on the lock screen but that's not possible in iOS 15.
  • I feel like I should look into jailbreaking/modifying my iPod Touch at this point, but I'm weary of breaking its functionality.
• I don't think I mentioned it but I set https://alternativeairwaves.com to auto-renew, so I'm keeping the domain. The Wordpress plan expires this year as well but I'm strongly considering moving it over to https://micro.blog.
• I made a small change to the markdown frontmatter but that's all behind-the-scenes stuff that I realized I didn't need to do anymore.

Media

• Borrowed Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino from the library; so far I'm enjoying it. I was concerned I would need a deep knowledge of the films he writes about, but that's not the case. It's very accessible. In just three essays you can also see what films have heavily influenced his own filmography.
  • Also happy that he writes from a place of loving film, and not talking about his films or his experience as a writer/director.
• I'm also reading Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. I'm not far into it but I love that while rooted in actual history, it's playing out like your standard heist story: putting a team together, casing the joint (or joints in this case), then eventually pulling off the heist.
• The Good Place: pretty much a perfect ending. It hit all the right emotional beats. I'd watch it over again.

Things I Made This Week

• Meir & Co | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Practical Use-Cases for AI/LLM | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• [No tax on streaming services] | A Journal of Musical Things](https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/a-court-says-there-will-be-no-tax-on-streaming-services-in-canada-yet-if-you-love-canadian-music-you-need-to-read-this/)
• Our Mordor Walking Challenge using Google Sheets - The Wallflower Digest - I remember doing a Walk To Mordor using my FitBit data and automatically pulling data from their API...this looks easier to pull off
• What To Write - Flamed Fury

Week Notes for January 13 - 19, 2025

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Things this week

• Vacation day on Monday! I had days to burn from 2024 and the way I like doing that is taking Mondays off in January. I intend on NOT having extra days to use in 2026.
  • Naturally it's a "weather" day - snowing, expected 2-4 cm. Not the worst weather imagineable.
• Got a new laptop at work on Tuesday. Mostly a smooth process except for my job-specific software. It took a bit to get going.
• Trying to respond to bloggers directly when I read something I like
• Theme for 2025: put less pressure on myself

Media

• Duran Duran, Rio - I saw a recommendation on a random thread on reddit, it was something like a thread for recommending great albums. I can't remember exactly, but I put it on my 'to listen' list and took a rip through it this week. It's certainly a good album! A lot of meticulous details in there. My only complaint - and this is not about the album - is that on Spotify when they have a remastered album, they have all of the tracks for the album and then another DIFFERENT version of the same songs so when you're done listening to the album, it keeps playing...but over again.
• Soft Vein - Through Blinds (via https://c.im/@jake4480/113844962122171356) - Jake recommended this one on Friday and it came on the heels of me listening to 1st Wave for a good portion of the morning, so this hit at the perfect time.

Things I Made This Week

• New Year's Walk | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Wednesday Thoughts 05 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Short Posts | An Almost Anonymous Blog (Short)
• "Oops" Design | An Almost Anonymous Blog (Short)
• My Bullet Journal | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Great job Xavier for the social media detox: Journal #8: My own thoughts as commodities | Xavier H.M.

Social media had taught me to treat my own thoughts as commodities. In taking a break from social media, I found more value in my thoughts and felt fulfilled in thinking them without having to put them up for sale.

Week Notes for January 6 - 12, 2025

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Things this week

• This was my first week back to work of the new year, after a full two weeks off. Monday and Tuesday were challenging but in a good way, kind of? Also, I've been in a more "read-only" mode rather than "read & write", choosing to consume more media than to create/write anything. I feel okay about that.
• I don't think I mentioned this last week - I started a new bullet journal. I'm no longer a fan of stone paper and I didn't have many pages left so I abandoned it and went to the cheap Leuchtturm I found at a thrift store last month. I'm now free to use whatever pen or pencil I choose; stone paper was terrible for anything but ballpoint.
• It's been a while since I've talked about folding and organizing clothes, but I swear by the YouTube channel I mentioned before: Organizing TV. I can't remember which video it's in but he has a method of folding t-shirts that involves first folding a portion of the shirt underneath, then folding the arms to the middle, then in thirds to make a square, and tuck the shirt into that fold you made. Keeps the shirt together, and makes it easy to store and organize. Love it.
• My brother got me (and my wife, but I took my friend instead) tickets to see Acclaim Pro Wrestling, a local wrestling show. The event was "New Year's Wrestle-ution 13" - so I guess they've been around 13 years? Anyway it was fun, lots of great characters. We were packed into a Polish veterans legion, it was neat.
• We bought a new kitchen cabinet. We've been wanting to improve our storage and functionality and we did it. We went with Ikea's ÖNNERUP and while it is massive and took several hours to put together, it is exactly what we wanted.

Health Notes

• I finished the year on a down note: not logging anything in Cronometer after Dec 21. I began 2025 on a stronger note, properly logging things (complete daily log) as of Jan 4th. I'm trying to keep my intake at or below my daily calorie goal. I'm no longer keeping my 'calories' page on Bear Blog updated, it served its purpose.
  • THAT SAID, I feel really good. I can see the physical changes (it's easier to see when you take a random look at Facebook's memories feature), and my wife sees it too. My weight is somewhat steady at the moment, which is fine. I have a goal number I want to hit but I don't have a timeline set for that, so I won't be discouraged when I don't hit it. The personal training sessions are fantastic, and I'm looking forward to what another year of training will do for our softball season.
• I've had this rash on my ring finger for quite a few months now, exacerbated by the dry winter weather. It makes it irritating to wear my ring on most days. Our rings are due for cleaning & inspection, so maybe that will help. In the meantime I'm using copious amounts of hand cream and taking days without wearing it.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• My music podcast domain, https://alternativeairwaves.com, is up for renewal in early February. The wordpress.com subscription expires end of March this year. I face two decisions: let the website and podcast finally die; or renew the domain, and start writing about music again (and possibly move the blog to https://micro.blog - thanks Brandon for your post highlighting it). I have a few weeks to think about it the domain, and a few months for the blog host.
• I have quite a few photos from the last three or four weeks that I'd love to post on my photo blog but I haven't even taken them off my camera or phone. I have a day off on Monday, so I think I'm going to spend some time sorting that out.
• So far this year I'm continuing my blogging workflow experimentation. I started the year with Notesnook, but it doesn't quite fit my criteria: a cross-platform notes app that has a web editor, and allows me to preserve markdown notation (e.g. I can type **bold text** and it won't convert to bold text, stripping any markdown instructions when I go to paste in Bear Blog or for my week notes). Notesnook does this partially by allowing me to type in a code block, but it's visually distracting as it lacks word wrap. Today I'm writing this in SimpleNote which was my solution until captchcas provided unnecessary friction; but I discovered that logging in with my email instead of WordPress may remove the captchca requirement, so back to SimpleNote again.
• I'm experimenting with when I post these week notes - Monday, or Sunday? Today I'm trying Sunday.
• I was going to record a podcast for this week but I might end up doing it tomorrow. See above note about spending several hours putting together an Ikea cabinet.

Media

• Not a song I would assume would make my "2025" music playlist, but "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan earned its way on there. As I type this I just heard it again, and I love the piano intro.
• I finished reading Swing Kings by Jared Diamond. Based on the beginning of the book I thought the author might break down what makes a good swing a little more in-depth but the book isn't quite about the actual process, but the people - which is fine. But I also had some problems with repetition of information in the book, and when I read in the acknowledgements that it was expanded from a Wall Street Journal article I understand why I had these problems. Nevertheless it was an interesting read and I learned some things from it.

Things I Made This Week

• Monday Thoughts 01 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Bear Blog Questions Challenge | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Apple Music vs. Spotify | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• To quickly determine passive vs. active voice... | Hacker News
• On Writing Better: Getting Started – Jason Zweig
• The Monty Hall Problem - I learned about this after solving Friday's Connections
• Courtesy Lou Plummer: https://practicalbetterments.com/

Week Notes for December 30, 2024 - January 5, 2025

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This is such a weird week to recap. It feels like a long time passed between December 30th and January 5th. But at the same time, it felt very quick. Does that make sense? At any rate it makes for a hard recap for the week, because it also feels like I will be covering things that happened the week before. I'm sure noone will hold it against me.

Things This Week

• We went to this amazing antique/flea shop type place called "Relic House". It features 12+ vendors in 12 rooms. A lot of cool things. Not everything was my cup of tea, but it was fun to browse.
• When watching Wayfair commercials recently, they remind me so much of The Good Place with their "Waybourhood" spots.
• I tried making simple syrup using Splenda yesterday! It was successful. I need to try it with iced coffee, because it doesn't do very much for hot coffee compared to a regular splenda packet.
• I wrote this in Notesnook this week; I'm trying out different workflows this year and this is my first attempt.
• Thinking about publishing my week notes on Sundays instead of Mondays. It makes more sense to me to publish the recap of the week that was at the end of the week rather than the beginning of a new week.

Media

• I bought a new record player! It's not top-of-the-line by any means, but it's an upgrade from our previous machine (a suitcase model from Crosley). I ended up going with the Crosley Scout - the sound quality is definitely an upgrade, although it might not be the best sound available across record players.
• One of the things I thought of doing for 2025 was clearing my watch list across various streaming platforms. The idea was to just be ruthless and cut out anything I hadn't watched yet. It worked...somewhat well. I cleared out a few things but there were some titles that I still actually want to watch. So at least I pruned a little bit.
• I cancelled my Apple Music subscription, sticking with Spotify. I'll probably write more about that.
• Will write about it later this week but my "year of not tracking" has started. I have a pile of books I want to get through but I don't feel any pressure to read a certain amount now.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• I want to look into this one some more: The 1000 word Save Wisdom Questions. – SaveWisdom.org
• Possibly the greatest MP3 player I've ever seen: Mixxtape
• I found this via Lou Plummer" Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text – The Brooks Review
• it’s in a book – WIL WHEATON dot NET - I can't remember why I copied this link but I think it's related to Wil's mention of "seasons" of life. But there's also a book recommendation in there that I copied down to my list.

Week Notes for December 9 - 15, 2024

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Things this week

• The move to our new office building is official. While I've been going once a week for a while now, it's different with more people working in the building (including my own team). Definitely feeling the awkwardness of having any browser windows open.
• In concordance with the year without tracking I uninstalled The Storygraph from my phone. I recognized that simply having it on my phone I am tempted to update it when I'm finished a reading session. I have been consciously holding back from opening the app after reading a chapter during lunch at work.
• Went for a haircut, finally! I can't remember the last time I had one, but my hair was far too long and unruly.
• The other night, I felt like I needed to do something with my hands - ended up taking out a Star Wars colouring book and completed a page. It was nice and relaxing. It was "purposeful mindlessness".
• I think this is the last set of weeknotes I'm going to upload this year. I have two weeks of vacation coming up after this week, so I think I'm going to spend less time online - social media, posting, everything in general.

Things I made this week

• PWHL in Ottawa | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Tuesday Thoughts 06 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Conversations | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Kenny Rogers Christmas | Photos by Stephen Gower

Media

• Another advantage for Apple Music is syncing my entire music library including old playlists.
• Unfortunately relevant to recent news: Radicalized - The American Prospect

Week Notes for December 2 - 8, 2024

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Things this week

• PWHL Ottawa Charge vs. Montreal Victoire - Canadian Tire Centre. The atmosphere was great, very family-friendly with a lot of kids. Especially young girls holding signs about how they want to be professional hockey players. Arena music was way too loud, though.
• Snow shovel count is now up to 2. We had two major snow falls this week.
• Am I the only one who gets mildly annoyed when people are walking on the right side of the road as opposed to the left side of the road? You should be walking toward oncoming traffic so you can see each other!

Things I made this week

• Thrift Notebooks | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• The Fear of Being Judged | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Portrait of a Sleepy Dog | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Year of Not Tracking | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Diamond Art Time Lapse - YouTube

Media

• Trying Apple Music for a month (free trial). So far, there are aspects I both like and dislike. I haven't tried it enough to form a proper opinion. Of course I will before the free trial ends. The next Spotify payment and the end of the free trial coincide so that makes it handy for decision time.
  • So far, I prefer Spotify's personalized playlists but I think part of that is because they have so much data on my listening habits compared to Apple.
  • Audio quality on Apple Music is much better than Spotify!
• Finished Brent Spiner's Fan Fiction. This will be the last book I'm logging for at least a year.
  • Started re-reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and started Swing Kings (baseball, non-fiction)

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Another song mystery. Can you identify this track? | Alan Cross
• Brick My World | Convert real-world objects into LEGO® model by Iva Papoušková — Kickstarter

Week Notes for November 25 - December 1, 2024

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Things this week

• I took the day off on Tuesday! My last vacation day until Christmas, when I take two weeks off. I didn't do a lot of things - I finished my Deep Space Nine model for one; for two, I made a really nice cup of coffee with my French press. I used Coureurs du bois medium roast beans, ground to a coarse grind. So smooth.
• A momentous milestone this week: we had our first Costco hot dogs, ever. $1.50 for a fairly sizeable hot dog and fountain pop - that's a good deal. It was actually quite filling, especially since we skipped cooking Monday night since we were both busy with work.
• A small win: I bought some screen protectors for my phone (long overdue, there's already a scratch near the front camera, but thankfully not on the front camera). I don't think they tempered glass, but a hard plastic. The application was super smooth, and the fingerprint scanner still works. One of the best experiences I've had applying screen protectors.
• I heard an interesting quote re: privacy concepts on Bluesky when it comes to starter packs and block lists from the podcast Ruminate. I have definitely experienced the flood of notifications from being included in a starter pack and it was overwhelming for a few days.
• I started a new "funstration"^[1] project. It's something called Diamond Art by Trousse Diamond Art. I can't describe it properly, so here's the description from the website:

Using the chart, match the colour with the corresponding code and press the diamond onto the stylus using your pen and wax. Repeat the process until you cover the entire image with diamonds. Stretch or frame your diamond piece featuring authentic indigenous art!

Basically, it's paint by numbers, but a lot more meticulous. So far I've spent just over an hour on it.

Health Notes

• Is this a health note? I think so. I got a cardboard-variety paper cut on the inside of my left index finger, in a spot where it bends. And then I forgot I had it later in the day and used sanitizer.

Things I made this week

• Deep Space Nine: The Model | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Organizing with .txt | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Free Story Idea | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• I uploaded another podcast; I swear this is the last time I'm publicizing it. 2024 - Week 48

Media

• Watched the first two episodes of A Man on the Inside, from the creator of The Good Place. I liked it OK but I'm not sold on it. The premise is good. The show itself comes off as a lite version of Only Murders in the Building so it might fill the void created by binging through season 4.
• As an Indiegogo supporter of Brad Sucks' latest album, I got the digital download for "Naturally". I contributed to the level where you also get the vinyl copy and apparently despite delays it's on track to ship soon - if it weren't for Canada Post being on strike. Oh well, should give me time to A) listen to the digital tracks and B) get a proper record player.
  • I recorded the digital tracks to a cassette tape and listened to it. It was familiar to me (in a good way) since I had heard some of the singles already. It's a good album, I recommend it once it's officially released.
• I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes and started reading Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner. I like it so far - fast-paced and he has a fun writing style. A lot of alliteration, and a bit of body horror imagery thrown in.
• One of the bigger pieces of Star Trek news this week was the release of 765874 - Unification in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Star Trek Generations. A lot of people like the movie, but for me I thought it looked very fake (with the exception of one or two shots), and didn't really have an interesting story.

Week Notes for November 18 - November 23, 2024

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Things this week

• I made progress with my Deep Space Nine model! I ran out of dark gray paint on the weekend, so painting the station had to take a back seat. I decided to tackle the decals for the small ships: The Defiant, and the Cardassian warship. Holy moly...the decals are as tedious as I imagined. And at the same time, they're also not as complicated as I thought. I'm still terrible at decals.
• Writing month is going well. I'm very happy with my journal entries! I was a little light on blog entries but wrote a LOT in my journal.
• I think I should start getting into voice to text, at least when I'm out walking my dog and I want to type things. I'm very self-conscious about doing it though, it feels weird to say That sounds good period to type That sounds good..
• I'm always looking for optimizing my shoelaces. I have a pair of shoes (that are overdue for replacing) with laces that are too long when I tie them. Either the loops or the lace ends are perilously close to landing under my feet as I walk. So I did some searching around and found some options to shorten the laces without cutting them. I'm satisfied with the results so far.
• It was a tough week at work. Cuts, selling off stations...it's these weeks that affect me mentally more than I initially realize. It's a reality of the industry I work in but it doesn't make it any easier.

Health Notes

• I made it to the gym Friday morning! I intended to go Thursday morning, but missed my alarm. And then I intended to go Thursday evening, but the day was such a mess that I didn't want to go. But I got out after 6am on Friday and did 20 minutes on a bike, and 5 minutes of rowing.

Things I made this week

• Folding & Organizing Clothes | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Mastodon vs. Bluesky: It's not the battle you might think it is | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Audio Weeknotes | An Almost Anonymous Blog
  • 2024 - Week 47

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I changed the URL structure again. I had the thought when I was looking up last week's post to find something. It's now, going forward, /weeknotes/YYYY-week-##/. It makes more sense in context. Consider, https://srgower.com/2024/weeknotes-32/ vs. https://srgower.com/weeknotes/2024-week-33/.
• MGX released a new CSS theme for Bear Blog, "abzug" theme for bear blog. I really like it, so I made some modifications to include some add-ons I've tailored for my blog over the past little while and set it up for my blog. You can see it at https://lwgrs.bearblog.dev.
• I added basic analytics to the photo blog, courtesy of Tinylytics. I don't think I'll be adding it to this site though.

Media

• Finished Only Murders in the Building season 4. It was a great season! Very well-constructed. I don't want to talk too much about it lest I spoil anything for anybody. This is my second favourite season, after the first. My order of preference: 1 > 4 > 3 > 2
• Foster the People - Paradise State of Mind - Their newest album. A few weeks back I wrote about their song "Lost in Space". The rest of the album is pretty good! Highly recommend it.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Animated Knots by Grog | Learn how to tie knots with step-by-step animation - I like sites that offer this kind of instruction.

Week Notes for November 11 - November 17, 2024

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Things this week

• I forgot to mention that last week someone reached out to me about my Dreamy Sounds mixtape. So awesome to read feedback from people reading my stuff.
• I took a new profile photo! I'm slowly populating it around my online presences, starting here. It's on the home page.
• My wife and I decided last minute to go to an Ottawa Senators game. They lost in overtime, but it was a fun game. A bit of a splurge but worth it.
• For the third year in a row our softball team went axe throwing! We do a tournament and I made it to the finals (I made it to the finals in the first year too). But I lost...I was millimetres from forcing a third game for the best 2 out of 3 but just missed.
  • I had a really tasty mocktail - it was lemonade, ginger beer (made by a local brewery), cinnamon, and brown sugar. I kind of want to look up mocktails I can make at home as an alternative to just non-alcoholic beer.
• Still working on optimal methods for folding clothes. I think I'm going to write a post about it.
• Writing Month is still going well. I'm up to 15 / 30 for my writing goal (of one journal entry a day).

Health Notes

• My logging streak to date: 10
• Somehow I missed that I passed 5 years since my first seizure (Nov 9 2019). On a related note, I discovered this thread on reddit and I spent some time reading over it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Epilepsy/comments/1grfz2a/simple_question_what_do_you_dislike_the_most/
• Got our COVID & flu shots; this year I didn't get as much pain in the arm as in previous years. Other than a nice long nap Saturday afternoon I didn't really feel any side effects.

Things I made this week

• More 11ty Stuff | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Bate Island | Photos by Stephen Gower
• I miss podcasting | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Power Lines | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Privilege and Epilepsy | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Tech & Blog Stuff

• As we're getting close to the end of 2024 I realized that I was shortsighted in assigning URLs to these weeknotes. I corrected the URL to now be /YYYY/weeknotes-##/ - for example, today's link is /2024/weeknotes-32/. I set the permalink to previous notes to their original URL so that old links aren't broken. But now I will be able to start over at 01 for 2025. Yes, this probably only matters to me.
  • I learned about this permalink method while putting together the photo blog. File under "things I wish I paid more attention to earlier".
• At the behest of my friend I added an email subscription link to my photo blog. It seems to work well, and displays the whole post in the email on my two tests. It's not my preferred method of post delivery, but the option is there for people who want it.
• An interesting use of Bear Blog! Learned some new things here: Displaying a feed of short-form content | sylvia.bearblog.dev (found via Robert's post: Bear Micro Blog | Robert Birming)

Media

• Speaking of my Dreamy Sounds mixtape earlier...I have a starting point for another mixtape. One song. And I hope to put something together based solely on my physical media collection. But I don't know where I'm going with it yet.
• Finally watched the first episodes of the latest seasons of Lower Decks (the final season :() and Only Murders in the Building. I only intended on watching one episode of OMITB but the first episode was absolutely thrilling, I hopped on to episode 2. Looking forward to the rest of the season.
• I also finished season 2 of The Good Place. I wasn't as much of a fan of season 2, but I like where it ended up. So far I find the conceit of wiping the character's memories at the end of each season intriguing. Not sure if that's continuing but it's a good way to set up a different plot thread for the next season while keeping it fresh. In hindsight the show could only go so far with the plot of the first season so it makes sense that they would change it up.
• I re-watched Casino Royale; holy moly there is so much product placement for Sony in that movie. Almost all of the tech is Sony. Apparently, at the time, MGM was owned by Sony so I guess this makes sense.
• I saw this post from Darren Hester: Creating Art From Sticker Spotter Posts Anyway he has a link in that post to an iPad app called Linea Sketch. I checked it out, and it's really neat. Never mind the fact that I'm not a drawer, I just like playing with these things. Also, great artwork as always, Darren!

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Véronique has a new zine out: Monstrous Existence 3. Limited to 30 copies! Hopefully by the time this is published, she'll have sold out. I bought one!
• Understanding Banal Photography | Andy Hawthorne Photography
• Rust Red River - I think I found this while reading through zak's Mastodon post about diving into Linux. Digging through the Mastodon replies I saw that Rust Red River blog post and mention of the Ultramarine distro and after taking a look at their webiste I kind of want to try it out, at least on a live USB. I have no issues with Linux Mint, but it's also fun to play around with different systems.
• Brandon with this mindblowing tidbit
• Centre Block renovation project nearly ready to enter the rebuilding phase | CBC News
• ongoing by Tim Bray · Privacy, Why?

Week Notes for November 4 - November 10, 2024

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Things this week

• I started the week on Monday feeling congested, but my symptoms went away soon after. I think on top of having a cold the time change back to standard time hit me a little harder than most years; for three days straight I was extremely tired.
• Finally got to start painting my DS9 model; it's going to take a long time, no doubt about that. I started with just the tiny ships (the station model came with the Defiant as well as a Cardassian ship), and they are going to take a few coats. The station itself is 16" wide so that's going to take a while...patience is needed. Here's the most recent progress.
• My Bluesky post sharing a link to my picture of Bailey is insanely popular, to date it has 125 likes! They just don't stop. Turns out Bluesky likes dog photos. I had to mute the thread as I was getting so many notifications.
• Health note: I was thinking about food logging and how I've dropped the ball lately and having a hard time re-building the habit. So I created a public page to keep track of how I'm doing. I get a checkmark if I logged a complete day, an X if I either didn't log at all or logged a partial day. Link to the page is below.
• We got our new glasses! I think I need to go back in to get mine re-adjusted - they keep falling down my nose. I don't know if I'm wearing wrong to begin with or if it's an adjustment that can be made. Originally we didn't change anything when we picked them up.
• I joined Writing Month, hosted by Amin. I set my goal to write 30 journal entries in November, specifically to write about something / some moment in detail each day. I'm at 7 to date. I "missed" some days because I hadn't set a goal yet (I joined late!). Most likely I will write about more than one thing on a few upcoming days. I don't know how the buddy system works but you can view my profile and add me as a buddy if you like!

Things I made this week

• Droning On | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Tuesday Thoughts 05 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Wednesday Thoughts 04 | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Forlorn Dog | Photos by Stephen Gower
• Dreamy Sounds Mixtape | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Bad Habits | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Calorie Counting | An Almost Anonymous Blog

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I added a logo & favicon to Photos by Stephen Gower - and I fixed the social media cards not displaying said logo. I was getting tired of seeing the RSS icon being the preview image.

Media

• After a slow start I'm beginning to get into Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I was trying to finish it before the end of October but the first half of the book is clunky...but still beautifully written. Does that make sense? Anyway, I'm on the last half now, it's drawing my interest a little bit more.
• I found this fun YouTube channel while trying to find different ways of folding my clothes to maximize space: Organizing TV - YouTube. Hosted by Tor (I mistakenly heard him say it as "Thor", which would be pretty cool), he just brings such joy to the simple act of folding clothes.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• @MGX is at it again: bear blog css playground

Week Notes for October 28 - November 3, 2024

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I'm trying a slightly different format for my weeknotes. Kind of related to one of the links I'm sharing further down.

Things this week

• I bought a farraday box for our car key fobs. Happy to report that it works great! I tested it out in the car with the keys in the box - and the car wouldn't start.
• The DS9 model kit my friend got me at Christmas is coming along nicely! All the pieces are put together, and I just bought some paint on Saturday. So two more steps until I'm done: painting, then decals. I really should have followed the suggestion on the box, to complete pieces in separate stages and paint/apply decals before attaching it all together. But I couldn't help myself.
• Happy thing: the sound my dog makes as she trots through the fallen leaves in Autumn.
• I baked muffins and they turned out excellent. We had frozen blueberries from my father-in-law who picked them last summer, and they're still mighty tasty.

Things I made this week

• The Monster in Your Mind | Photos by Stephen Gower
• I shouldn't design a transit system, ever
• Suspense Files and Building Habits
• Wednesday Thoughts 03

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I tried Darktable (very briefly) - I think it's too barebones for me compared to Lightroom. I can see how it would work faster than Lightroom does on my computer, but I couldn't quite figure out the interface. I didn't give it a good chance, granted, but first impressions are pretty important.
• Added a nametag class to my stylesheet (see below). I want to use it to emulate when you tag somebody in Discord or Teams etc.
  • Of course if you're reading in a feed reader you won't see it.

Media

• I'm really enjoying the Stingray Radio channel "Decades of Alt Rock". It seems to have a lot of contemporary alt music (as I type this, Foster the People's "Lost in Space" is playing) but also some 2000s indie. It's a corporate streaming service but it's good. I also recommend the Live 88.5 "The Café" channel^[1].
• Sunday I had the sudden idea to make 2025 the Year of Not Tracking (for books, at least). I currently track everything on The Storygraph, and I have been setting reading goals for the last couple of years. I know I'm not going to hit my goal this year (20), and I don't really care - it's just an arbitrary number I picked. But I'm leaning toward not even tracking books next year. Don't know why...just a thought.

Links

This weeks links come exclusively from Jedda. She has a post roll where she posts links to individual articles. Often these are articles I don't see on my own - so I'm glad that she does so. Every week in her weeknotes she "rolls off" a set of links so that's how I end up finding them.

• What is it about people who write Weeknotes? - Twelvety
• Hunting Cryptids with Frame 352 (and a cheap thermal print camera) | quailblog
• Frame 352 by hugeboar - This is related to the above post; this looks like a really fun game to play. Sounds like something fun to do on a hike.

Week Notes 29

Week Notes for October 21 - 27, 2024

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Things I made:

• Tuesday Thoughts 04
• 2024 Softball Season Wrap
• Something to get excited about
• Introducing: Photos by Stephen Gower
• Forest as captured by an iPod Touch

Personal

• Unbelievable response to my Tuesday Thoughts post. In particular I heard from zakb, who told me that they admire MY writing and aspires to reach my level. Never thought I'd hear that.
• My wife and I picked out some new glasses over the weekend. We're happy with our choice, but now we're in that in-between period when we have to wait to get our new pair so it's hard to be excited about them yet.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• I decided after all to create an 11ty-based photo blog. I didn't intend to launch it last week, but I did! I was having a ton of fun putting it together piece-by-piece, and created a changelog to track my progress. I ended up launching it on Thursday. Check it out! https://photos.srgower.com
• For the longest time I was editing files on Github one at a time, pushing one file at a time, wondering how I could edit multiple files before pushing the commit. I found out by accident that Github has its own code editor similar to Visual Studio Code. And it does exactly what I want. I feel a little dumb.

Media

• Heard "Lost in Space" by Foster the People. I liked it - it has the familiar FTP sound, but still different. It's an evolution.
• Finished A Perfect Likeness by Richard Wagamese. It's a collection of two novellas: Him Standing and The Next Sure Thing. I thought that Him Standing was the better story, and initially made me think the other story was going to be similar in terms of referring to the supernatural. The Next Sure Thing wasn't exactly "spooky" but was still enjoyable, it just didn't stick with me the same way as Him Standing. What I liked about both is that it's about the protagonist getting trapped in a situation and making efforts to take back control. Nice allegory. Anyway overall I gave this book 3.5/5 stars.
• Cover song: "Are You That Somebody" by The Gossip (original by Aaliyah). Unfortunately can't find a link. I heard it from an Indie Rock Playlist I downloaded in 2006 or 2007.
• I started season 2 of The Good Place. Initially I didn't like the first two episodes of the season, thinking that the show didn't work as well knowing that - SPOILER ALERT - they're really in The Bad Place. The character dynamic of Ted Danson's Michael is just completely different when he's evil and talking to the other demons behind the scenes. BUT I soldiered on and I actually like the direction they're headed for season 2.

Week Notes 28

Week Notes for October 15 - 20, 2024

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Things I made:

• Thunderbird Beta for Android and other Tech Notes
• Photo Dump - September-October 2024

Personal

• I did some journalling Thursday night, and wrote about some personal writing things. I tried turning it into a blog post but I was suffering from some interictal confusion at the time; I will try to return to the post next week (this week?) when I can examine it from a distance and turn the sentences into something coherent.
• Over on Cassette Culture there have been many recommendations for using Ikea's Ladda batteries - I finally picked up a 4-pack of the 1900mAH along with a wall charger. All for less than $15! They're ready to go out of the pack so I'm testing them out right now (Monday) in my walkman. The other two, they're in my Magic Mouse in the basement.
• I finally got back to building the Deep Space Nine model my friend got me at Christmas (or my birthday? Can't remember). I got the promenade / habitat ring put together, and the three upper pylons. Once I have all the main pieces together I'm going to see about getting some model paint so I can apply the decals later. And then put all the pieces together.
• Had a work SNAFU over the weekend. Before I explain what happened, I recommend you read about how my job works. Anyway, I was covering for one of my coordinators all last week, and she has two very busy radio stations. Turns out on Friday I forgot to transfer the Monday commercial log for one of my stations. My producer/sometimes-engineer in Halifax noticed it at 11pm (eastern - so after midnight in Halifax) and sent me a message. Luckily I was awake, and nearby my work laptop as I was messing around on my personal PC (see below in the tech notes). I logged on and transferred the log, but it could have been a lot worse if things didn't go right: that he noticed it was missing, and that I was awake. Crisis averted, but it just goes to show no one is infallible. I mentioned it to my team this morning just to show them that it's OK to make a mistake and that I'm not immune to mistakes.

Health Notes

• We have another new trainer at the gym. Not yet - but we found out Friday night that our current trainer is leaving for a different gym. He's putting together a list for a suitable replacement for us, but that's two new trainers in the course of a few months. Sucks because we liked this new trainer.
• I've been neglectful in food logging for a few weeks now. My (scale) weight has gone up consequently and I'm not surprised, but I will get back on track.

Tech & Blog Stuff

• Still using the Samsung keyboard. I talked about some of its shortcomings in my post early in the week; since then I discovered that the auto-correct is at times aggressive and other times passive. It's strange trying to figure out when I'll need to manually select the correct word and when I need to tell it to stop correcting a word I re-typed purposefully! (Gboard would let you keep the "misspelling" when you backspace - that's probably a setting in Samsung Keyboard.) Anyway one useful feature is they have a grammar checker built-in, which has been useful in some situations when I knew I made a mistake, but wanted to keep going and fix later. Tap on the green highlight and select the fix, and done!
  • Another great thing: text shortcuts. It doesn't work exactly the same as text replacement but it's close enough.
• I decided I'm going to launch a separate photo blog. I looked into some 11ty templates and found one I liked, but I forgot how much work it can be to set up an 11ty blog the way I want it to look. I was working on this site for months before I finally bought the domain name and made it public. I think I'm going to host it somewhere else that has done the work, and then set up a subdomain. More to come.
• My next tech project is going to be figuring out the Reaper sample rate for audio playback; currently when it plays over Bluetooth the audio is pitched way up and doesn't play properly. The easy solution is to just use 3.5mm audio cable for my speakers, but I'd like to have those hooked up to my Linux box. So, need to address the root issue.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Unexploded WWII bombs buried in Mer Bleue bog, DND confirms | CBC News

Media

• Mellow My Mind by Brad Sucks (Neil Young cover)
• I was over at my friend's house, and he has a PS5 - and got the chance to play Hogwarts Legacy. If you haven't heard of it, it's a free-roaming video game sort of like Grand Theft Auto/Red Dead Redemption, where there is a series of quests/story to follow but you can wander around Hogwarts and Hogsmead as freely as you want. It's pretty fun!
• More video games: I hit 1000 passengers using only 1 tunnel in Mini Metro. I was trying to unlock the Extreme mode and that was the achievement I needed. Took me a few days over the weekend.
  • I just learned the developers have another game called Mini Motorways - I'll have to check that one out.

Week Notes 27

Week Notes for October 7-14, 2024

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Things I made:

• The Imaginary Things Holding You Back
• Problematic People
• Kind Words

Personal

• Still trying to get the hang of having a "free" Sunday after ending the podcast with my brother. There are things I want to do - record my own podcasts, build models, do puzzles, general tinkering...but I haven't started anything yet. I'm possibly putting imaginary pressure on my shoulders and that's what's holding me back.

Healthy Living

• The cold symptoms subsided early in the week. My wife thinks I'm going to start suffering from "seasonal change" cold symptoms. I like that idea because it means I'm not actually sick. But maybe it's all in my head? Is that a thing?
• As of writing (Tuesday Oct 8) my weight is trending back upward after several weeks of trending down. Definitely related to avoiding food logging for quite a few days between end of September and while I was away in Calgary. Back to it now, and while I'm going over my limit, the goal right now is to get back into the daily habit. Will be difficult for Thanksgiving.
• We've had two sessions with our new personal trainer; so far it's been a good fit. Things are a little stiff but we only just met him and he's been put in a tough position (as are we). But we like the variety of exercises he has us doing and it's been different each time.

Tech

• I've been playing around with different keyboard setups on my phone. I changed up some things with GBoard but then decided to try out Samsung's keyboard; people seem to like it in general so I thought I'd give it a shot. I set it up similarly to gboard (size and no number row) to give it a fair shake. I'm going to stick with it for another week or so.
• I also installed Microsoft SwiftKey - but it's not going to work for me. I don't have access to Bitmoji through the keyboard; I'd have to switch to the "Bitmoji keyboard" to insert one every time so that's too much of a bother. Otherwise, it would be a strong contender.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• I Finally Saw, and Used, an App Clip • Robb Knight

Media

• Finished The Star Web by George Zebrowski. I gave it 1 star...it started out as an interesting piece with characters using real science to try to piece together what was going on, and then it stumbled into pure adventure sci-fi with giant bugs or something. Weird book, but I picked it up at random based on cover and synopsis. Wasn't expecting much.
• Started reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I forgot I picked this up from a thrift shop a couple of months ago. Also didn't know this was a movie until I saw the book. Should be a good "spooky" read for October.
• Read Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four? by Ryan North (and illustrators). It's a fun standalone comic with various twists that are fun to read through. There's another volume available but I haven't checked it out on Hoopla yet.

Week Notes 26

Week Notes for September 30-October 6, 2024

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Things I made:

• I Can Relate
• Land Acknowledgements

Personal

• This has been a strange week for me. Monday and Tuesday were spent travelling, and then I had a very busy work day coming back from being off a day. That's usually busy, but Wednesday-Thursday-Friday were all exceptionally busy. I did some extra work Thursday night after a Fall Feast just to catch up. As a result my mind hasn't been in a super creative state. That's fine, there are always ups and downs.
• I returned to "No Socials Sunday" this week - the past few weeks I've been bypassing the lock-out on my phone
• I got new shoes on the weekend! Basic Sketchers slip-ons that are similar to a pair I found second-hand, but they're a good stop-gap until I buy a proper pair of walking shoes.

Healthy Living

• I have a slight cold. It started with a scratchy throat Wednesday afternoon and by Thursday overnight I had a killer sore throat in the middle of the night. I sound and feel better as I write this (Saturday) but am still hoping no more symptoms develop. I hate having to tackle the different symptoms of a cold separately but that's usually how my body works (sore throat & cough 》 congestion 》 stubborn symptoms that won't go away).

Techn & Blog Stuff

• I'm trying out Mozilla Thunderbird (beta) on my phone. I've never been satisfied with an email client other than Gmail since Inbox bit the dust, so I'm curious to see how this performs. So far, so good.
• Also trying to fix Gboard on my phone. I find I suffer from fat fingers way too much and it bothers me to no end. Sure there's autocorrect but I make too many errors for my liking in the first place. What I've tried so far is removing the number row so that the letters have more space. Seems to be working.
• Did some work on the contrasts site: finished adding all the colour combos I've saved to date, and I think I have the mobile view working properly now. Or at least all the table entries fit on a mobile screen and are in the proper order.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• The Subtle Art of Always Quitting Your Hobbies | Yordi ⟪ I identify with *gestures* all of this. Found this link from Robert Birming
• Pluralistic: Sandra Newman’s “Julia” (28 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow ⟪ a book to check out
• New book explores the art and activism of pioneering Indigenous artist Carl Beam | CBC News
• Setting up systems – space • time • tech
• The Sticker Book • Robb Knight ⟪- I should get a sticker book too. I have the same problem.

Media

• I started reading Stories Of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. The title story is what Arrival was based on. Thought I'd read this story first and flip through the other stories.

Week Notes 25

Week Notes for September 23-29, 2024

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Things I made:

• Re: Audio Content: How Much Is Too Much?
• Random Colour Contrasts
• Contrasts, Linux, and Plain HTML

Personal

• I linked to a new site I created, hand-coded in plain HTML: https://contrasts.srgower.com. I wanted a place to catalogue the various combinations the Random Color Contrasts bot generates. It still needs some work with the CSS but I'm holding off making any further changes to that stuff until I've finished entering all my current saved combinations.
• This week's week notes are...a little fuzzy. I was in Calgary with my wife Thursday to Sunday evening and whenever you travel, things kind of fall apart. I don't know what day it is today. Wednesday, maybe?

Nerdy Blog Stuff

• Robert Birming continues to do cool stuff with his Bear theming. I didn't use this in the way that he implemented it but I found out about this 'share' service through his share buttons post.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Linkfest #24: Secret Cars, New Euripides, and "The Torino Impact Hazard Scale" • Buttondown
• Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right | CBC Radio

Media

• Heard a new track from Our Lady Peace called "Sound The Alarm". I liked it okay I guess, better than what they released on Spiritual Machines II (I wanted to like that album more than I did). It definitely sounds like their late work, which I'm mixed on. Incidentally I heard it while listening to Indie88 via James Harris' project, scrobblerad.io.
• Finally watched Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016). Visually it is a stunning movie, and the plot moves along at a near-perfect pace. The movie reminded me a lot of the visuals in Dune. Everything in the movie felt real as well, in the sense that the spaceships looked like they were physical objects occupying space in the world. They weren't just CG creations. The score was great, as well. Highly recommend.
• Re-listened to The Strumbellas' 2013 album, We Still Move on Dance Floors. I remember I first heard their music while shopping in...I can't remember the shop to be honest. I think it was a sports store in a small town. Either way I still really like the album, I recommend it. Their album Hope is probably the most popular with "Spirits" hitting Top 40 radio here in Canada but I like Dance Floors a lot. The album art was my phone wallpaper for a while.
• I started watching two new TV shows: "Slow Horses" (Apple TV+) and "The Good Place" (Netflix). The latter I started a while back but never really got into it, so when I re-watched the first two episodes again I forgot quite a lot of what I watched before. It's a fun show! Slow Horses - I really liked the first episode. Trying to find time to get my wife to watch the next one with me to see if she'll enjoy it with me so I don't have to carve out time to watch it, we can just throw it on.

Week Notes 24

Week Notes for September 16-22 2024.

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Things I made:

• Ottawa Sports Round-Up
• On Writing For An Audience
• Friday Thoughts 01

Personal

• My wife and I celebrated our 2 year wedding anniversary on Tuesday with a simple burger & fries dinner at a local ice cream shop.
• Happy to report my glasses continue to hold together after my Gorilla Glue Repair
  • However, as soon as we got home Sunday, I found my old glasses. The prescription is close enough so I can get by without having to hope they don't fall apart.
• I wrote a "test" edition of my sports newsletter idea. I like the way it turned out. Undecided if I'll continue with it.
  • I decided not to go through with it. I don't want to take a fun hobby (following sports) and turn it into work.
• Sunday night I had time to kill, so I fired up my old desktop tower (with Linux Mint XFCE installed) and play around a bit. I wanted to install a lighter weight distro, even though XFCE is already light-weight. I thought this computer couldn't handle Cinnamon. Well, looking "under the hood" I realized that it's more than capable of doing so, so I loaded Cinnamon onto a USB stick and installed it. Currently typing this on said machine right now.
  • What am I going to do with a desktop PC running Linux? I have no idea. No practical purpose. But it's something to play with, anyway.

Healthy Living

• My back has been pain-free since last Saturday evening (knock on wood).

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• A gentle guide to self-hosting your software | ᕕʕ •ᴥ•ʔ୨ Shank Space
• Jagmeet Singh confronts heckling protester on Parliament Hill | CTV News

Media

• I finished the Going Rogue podcast series - the one specifically about Rogue One. I'm now onto Tansy Gardam's second series of episodes for that podcast, Going Solo (which unsurprisingly covers the movie Solo).

Week Notes 23

Week Notes for September 9-15 2024.

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Things I made:

• Testing The Cheap Lens
• Tuesday Thoughts 03
• Review: Healing Back Pain (Dr. John E. Sarno)
• An idea for a newsletter
• Jays From Home # 137 - Bowden Francis is One-Hittable (recorded with my brother)

Personal

• My brother said that it's becoming more difficult to work around his sons' (my nephews) schedules on weekends, and doesn't have time for our podcast anymore. So, something to figure out going forward.
  • We recorded our last podcast yesterday (link above). We left the door open for the future but I think I'm going to let that podcast end and not take it on solo. I also wrote about some ideas I have for a possible newsletter in the future.
• Along with my bad back pain (see health notes) I broke my glasses on Sunday. I glued them back together but - at the time of writing I'm unsure if they're stable enough to continue wearing in the short term. It wouldn't be such a bad thing, except that I'm not at home and only have two pairs of contact lenses (and I'm wearing one of them right now). I hope that a local optician shop has some trial pairs available or something.

Healthy Living

• I've been getting away from tracking and writing about my progress for the last several weeks. My last update was a week ago (as I write this) and there's not much substance / reflection to them. That said, I haven't been backsliding as I might expect by not being on top of things. But I feel like I need to get back into a more mindful state before things start to go sideways.
• I had some really bad back pain that led to a hospital stay. Thankfully, muscle spasms only.
  • This morning, and since Saturday evening, I've been pain-free. I bought some stronger OTC muscle relaxants to have on hand if it flares up again.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Copy Markdown URL Bookmarklet | Otávio’s blog
• Star Wars film newly dubbed in Ojibway will give 'boost' to the language, its Darth Vader actor says | CBC Radio
• Details emerge about accused, buyer in Churchill portrait heist | CBC News

Media

• Last week I borrowed Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. John E. Sarno from the library, based on a reccomendation from Brandon. I went into the book skeptical, and I still am a little bit (Dr. Sarno attributes a LOT of physical pain to mental/emotional triggers and presents anecdotal evidence as "proof" that he's right); but it's definitely an interesting read.
• Prisoners, 2013. I've had this movie on my list for quite a while and finally watched it on DVD; I thought it was great, 5 stars. I especially loved the cinematography, the way that the scenes looked naturally lit by the ambient lighting around them. The weather was done very well, especially the snow.
• Finished Batman: Caped Crusader. The season is a bit uneven but I like some of the stylistic choices they made with this one.

Week Notes 22

Week Notes for September 2-8, 2024

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Things I made:

• How About That August?
• Bad Photos, But On Purpose

Personal

• Learned about FreshRSS via zkbro (see link below) - this seems more up my alley than Feedly; I'll play around with it sometime in the future.
• This past weekend was super busy. A lot of softball. It's kind of taken over the rest of the week in terms of what I remember happening. Thankfully things are starting to slow down now that we're getting into the Fall.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Loss; 1-for-3 - Double, Run
• Tuesday: Loss; 2-for-4 - Double, 2 RBI
• Wednesday: Loss; 1-for-3 - SF, Double, 2 RBI
• I played too many games this weekend to list all the results. And it was COLD, especially Saturday.
• ✰ Looks like we are OUT for Wednesday playoffs. Takes some pressure off our weekly schedule at least!
• ✰✰ I had an unassisted double play on Saturday! I caught a low fly ball at third, and touched the base before the runner got back.
• 2024 Overall stats: GP: 51 | Slug Line^[1]: .592/.618/.828 | 7 Home Runs (includes playoffs)
• Playoff stats: GP: 8 | Slug Line: .444/.500/.611
• I think I'm going to stop reporting weekly softball results and just wrap up the season with an overall stat recap when Fall Ball is done.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Re:x4 Connecting, Consuming, Contributing | zkbro
• Saturation - Clive Thompson: "Austin Kleon is doing very fun…"

Media

• After creating a nifty mixtape last week I finally listened to it on Monday. I love the way the playlist fit together. The Side B opener "New Love Cassette" is just about a perfect response to Side A's opener "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" (in terms of audio/the sound aesthetic I was going for). There's a little sun-themed set on Side B (featuring Khalid's "Heatstroke") that is pretty cool as well. I just wish that I had one more song because there's a lot of empty time at the end of the track. I haven't flipped the tabs out on the tape yet (in case I needed to re-record anything), so maybe I'll throw an unlisted bonus track on there. Hmmm....

Week Notes for August 26 - September 1, 2024

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Things I made:

• Writing Excuses (podcast)
• Night Sweats // Lamotrigine
• Black Squirrel Books (Photo post)
• "Dreamy Sounds" Mixtape

Personal

• Idly thinking about writing a super basic HTML-only (no CSS) website or individual page - but for what? I don't know. I just like the idea of it.
• I finished my cassette mixtape! I'm really proud of it. I will be writing something about it later; I have the thoughts to make it into a zine format. There are some pictures in the thread I linked to above.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Loss; 2-for-3 ✰
• Wednesday: Win; 1-for-3 ✰✰
• ✰ Another defensive star; I played 3B twice on Monday; the first inning, there was a throw to me for a tag-out - unexpectedly the runner slid and I missed the tag. Later in the game, in another inning, the same runner tried to make a run for third - I got the ball again and this time laid the tag on him easily as he slid into the bag.
• ✰✰ Nothing outstanding about this game, just that it was a playoff elimination game and we won! On to the next round for Wednesday.
• Season stats: GP: 42 | Slug Line^[1]: .625/.647/.875 | 7 Home Runs

Healthy Living

• Early Monday morning I woke up in a heavy sweat, head-to-toe. Like, my PJs were drenched, so were the sheets. I don't know why, because our AC was on and set to a comfortable temperature for sleeping. There's 1% of my brain that thinks I might have had a seizure, but I can't be sure. My wife didn't wake up, as she normally would if I had one. I didn't feel any soreness or nausea as I might after a seizure. I'm never conscious when I have one, so there's no other way for me to know. I'm 99% sure I didn't, but that 1% sure holds a lot of weight to it.
• Weight loss plan is going well. Don't have the numbers in front of me right now but I'm going in the right direction.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• Walks Through The Edgelands | Mike Grindle
• iPadOS 18's Smart Script: A Promising Start But Don't Toss Out Your Keyboard Yet - MacStories
• Departure Mono } Robin Rendle
• The Blogosphere Lives | Mike Grindle
• Death to the Algorithm | Jeffrey Inscho
• That time Roosevelt vacationed in Northern Ontario - TimminsToday.com
• Why Gen Z loves the old-school digicam - This is right up my alley, and not the first time I've read this about Gen Z

Media

• Watched Sully (2016) - pretty good film! Suffers from the usual biopic stuff but it works overall, especially the crash sequences. Good character development through visual means instead of spoken exposition. Did not know this was a Clint Eastwood movie!

Week Notes 20

Week Notes for August 19-25, 2024

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Things I made:

• Focus
• Affirmation

Personal

• I picked up my new Walkman! It's a Sony WM-FX103, and from the manual I found (direct from Sony's website, in fact) it was manufactured in 1994. So it's 30 years old! At the time of writing this I haven't tested it with a cassette but the radio works great. The only strike against it so far is that it isn't an auto-reverse player - but that's not a deal-killer for me.
• Someone else reached out to me via email after my "Focus" blog post! So nice to hear from people :)
• This week was a lot lighter in terms of writing / creative output. Just wasn't feeling it.
• Sunday afternoon we went down for about a 2-hour nap. It was great after a long day in the sun and heat.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Win; 3-for-4 - BB, 2B, 2xR
• Tuesday: Win; 2-for-5 - 1xK, 2xR
• Wednesday: Loss; 1-for-4, 1xHR, 1xR, 1xRBI, 1xK ✰
• This week saw me get my first strikeout of the season, followed by my second strikeout. I guess I broke the floodgates.
• ✰ I hit a massive home run - it went super high and kept flying. It went over the fence and into the beach volleyball court behind the field; measuring on Google Maps I figure it was about 300 feet, at least.
• Season stats: GP: 40 | Slug Line^[1]: .630/.653/.891 | 7 Home Runs

Healthy Living

• I forgot to mention this last week; LAST weekend (August 17-18) I took a break from food logging. While I'm trying to stay consistent with logging every day, every once in a while I just need a break and this is a healthy thing to do. It's easy to get lost in daily logging and become obsessed with it.
  • And this weekend I took an unintentional break on Sunday (yesterday). It was a busy day (my wife and I marched in the city's pride parade) and there would have been a lot of estimating involved and I didn't have the mental capacity to deal with that.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think | Ars Technica
• Google's Pixel Watch 3 is basically disposable - GSMArena.com news
• In The Margins #1: ‘Walk slowly; drink lots of water’
• The First Air Force One and One Man’s Quest to Save It - Atlas Obscura

Media

• A little review of the Walkman I mentioned; I listened to two tapes: Harry Chapin's Short Stories, and Billy Idol's 1984 self-titled album. I used the "Mega Bass" function for the Chapin album, because the bass was not very pronounced. But when I put on the Billy Idol tape, and left Mega Bass on, it seemed to boost up all of the other levels, so the treble channels were way too high. It created some harsh sounds and some sibilance at the high ends. I turned it off and the bass notes still sounded good, so I guess it depends on the mix of the music whether it's beneficial or not.

Nerdy Blog Stuff

• You may or may not have noticed I've started including "week notes" images - I generated them with Google Gemini and I made different versions. Just seeing if I like it or not. I recognize using AI tools to generate images is controversial - you can read my thoughts about it here.

Week Notes for August 12-18, 2024

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Things I made:

• Re: Deleting my "Now" Page
• Google's Gemini is...not that bad?
• Colour Combinations
• LINE UP STARTS HERE | An Almost Anonymous Blog
• Streaming Vs.

Personal

• Regarding my first post this week I think I'm going to make the edits to my "Now" page to greatly simplify it. I'm not going to continuously update my media consumption - I'll do that on weekly basis using these week notes.
  • I'm also going to reduce the frequency of my website builds in GitHub; I currently have it set to Daily at 6pm, so that it catches all my recent blog posts. But I think I can reduce that to weekly, maybe on Sunday evenings. I don't think people are going to my website to get my latest blog posts (and they can click through to the blog anyway).
• I found a lead on a replacement Walkman for the one I broke several weeks ago. Won't be able to meet up with the person until next week sometime so I'll have to be patient in the meantime.
• Had some trouble with srgower.com. As of Tuesday the GitHub > Netlify deploy started failing. It took me most of Wednesday (with help from the 11ty Discord) to sort out that it was related to the rss-parser plugin that I'm using to display recent blog posts. I temporarily disabled it but it was quite annoying to not be able to figure out what was broken. The issue was resolved by Friday and it seemed to be an issue on GitHub's part.
• Instagram served me an ad for something called Pocket Dispo - what they call a "disposable lens". They have a lens for several different kinds of camera, including Sony's E-Mount (which is what I use). At $70 it seems hard to pass up. Doing some research into it but it looks like something geared toward taking shots similar to disposable film cameras.
  • In researching it seems that $70 is quite possibly an inflated price. Found something comparable on Amazon for $45, a lot more palatable. Plus that's in CAD - I think the $70 at pocket dispo is Canadian, but they are shipping internationally. They also seem remarkably easy to DIY but I think I'll purchase one first for now.
• Booked a trip to Calgary a little later this year. That'll be twice this year I'll have travelled to Western Canada, and my first time to Calgary ever.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Win; 1-for-3 - 1xBB, 1xR, 2xRBI ✰
• Tuesday: Double Header: Game 1: Win; 4-for-4, 2x2B, 5 RBI | Game 2: Loss; 3-for-3, 1xHR, 1 RBI ✰✰
• Wednesday: Win; 3-for-3 - 1xR, 2xRBI ✰✰✰
• Sunday: Loss; 1-for-3, 1 Run ✰✰✰✰
• ✰ I was having a hard time hitting this pitcher until my last at-bat. Hit a hard ball between the outfielders to left, and scored two runs. It was a single, because the two runs brought us to 6 (the max in an inning), but otherwise would have been a double if we hadn't hit the max. ALSO I made a great catch at third base again on a line drive that was quickly diving down to the ground. If I hadn't caught it, the ball would have hit the ground and bounced to the outfield for sure.
• ✰✰ I feel like I'm on a roll at the plate lately. Two nights in a row I've had some very good hard hits, and the home run in this game was certainly unexpected (but very welcome!)
• ✰✰✰ This game notable for playing my first inning at 2nd base all year, and probably for the first time in several years. I only had to make one play: a grounder up the middle straight to me, allowing me to just touch the base for the force out.
• ✰✰✰✰ None of us had a good game - a lot of pop-ups and weak ground-outs. But I made some great catches in the outfield in the first inning! That was fun.
• Season stats: GP: 37 | Slug Line^[1]: .648/.669/.904 | 6 Home Runs

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• The Limits of Novelty and Fun
• Please Don’t Idolize Me (or Anyone, Really) | Whatever (John Scalzi)
• scotchneat: "Hopefulness is a warrior emotion. kottke.org/24/08/hopefu..." — Bluesky
• New Bear Theme: Bearming | Robert Birming

Media

• Monday night saw a trailer for Blink Twice, a thriller starring Channing Tatum. Having no idea what the movie would be about based on the trailer alone, I looked up the movie. It has what looks like an amazing cast, and is directed by Zoë Kravitz. The description: "When tech billionaire Slater King meets cocktail waitress Frida at his fundraising gala, he invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. As strange things start to happen, Frida questions her reality." I told my wife this sounded interesting to me, and asked if she'd see it, but we quickly determined this is a "me" movie, haha.
• Another movie that looks interesting: Woman of the Hour. This is Anna Kendrick's directorial debut and is about the serial killer that appeared on The Dating Game in 1978. The poster alone is amazing and one of those rare artistic posters we don't get very much these days. The crazy thing: a friend brought up this story at the bar after softball Monday night, but I don't think she (or anyone) was aware this was being adapted into a movie.
• One of my favourite shows as a kid, ReBoot, is getting a documentary called ReBoot ReWind; it'll be released on YouTube on September 24th. Watch the trailer here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReBoot/comments/1eqrlcf/reboot_rewind_documentary_release_date_special/
• Finished reading Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice. It's an excellent story and weaves traditional Aanishnabe practices with a post-apocalyptic story. My Review - &#11088&#11088&#11088&#11088
• I'm starting to put together a playlist called "Dreamy Sounds" - I'm starting with "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" by Nancy Sinatra and "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak and going from there. The end goal for this playlist is going to be recording it to tape.

Week Notes for August 5-11, 2024

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Things I made:

• Pain, Back
• Public Reminder
• My Weight Loss Colophon
• Follow-Up: Weight Loss Colophon
• Boats and Landscapes (photo post)
• Jays From Home #135 - "Spoiler Alert" (recorded with my brother)

Personal

• I read Jedda's post about the Camp Snap camera again and it has me thinking about simple point-and-shoot photo adventures. While I love tinkering around with settings to get creative shots, I like the idea more and more of just taking the photo and going with the image I get - no auto processing from software algorithms, no post-processing. I suppose the middle ground (aside from buying a new camera) is to set the settings I want ahead of time and just taking the photo I get from those settings instead of fiddling to get the best shot.
• I found a bunch of free Lightroom presets: https://www.lukeptaylor.com/blog/category/Presets - I'm not a huge fan of all of them, but I'm definitely going to play around with them. So far I've only tried them in Lightroom Mobile so I think I'll get a better feel for them on a big monitor.
• I've been thinking about my "Now" page - prompted by a post from Noisy Deadlines. I'm going to write something up about it this coming week, probably.

Softball 🥎

• Tuesday: Win; 2-for-4, 1x2B, 2xR ✰
• Wednesday: A double-header! Game 1: Loss; 1-for-3 | Game 2: Loss; 2-for-2, 2xBB, 1xHR ✰✰
• Sunday: Loss; 1-for-2, BB, 2xR ✰✰✰
• ✰ I started this game with a sore back. My first at-bat ended up being a double - that was a hard run. I didn't care too much about the results off my bat, but still came away with a solid game. My best inning defensively was the top of the 1st, when I threw out a runner at first and at home.
• ✰✰ So you'd think I'm starring this for the home run (it is my first home run since May I think!), but the reason I'm starring this game is because of the single I hit: we played the same team for both games of the double header, and in pretty much all of my at-bats in the first game I was hitting opposite field (toward first base). Their pitcher kept saying to their 1st base player it was coming her way, and I could see they shifted all the way to the right. I sometimes get frustrated with this and tonight was one of those nights. I set myself up at the back of the batter's box and waited for a pitch that was closer to inside, and ripped a grounder between third and short. Perfection.
• ✰✰✰ I played an inning at third base in this game, and made an amazing catch - the ball was lined to my left, and I ran over with my arm outstretched and made the catch. No one was expecting it.
• Season stats: GP: 33 | Slug Line^[1]: .625/.650/1.516 | 5 Home Runs

Healthy Living

• I was presented with my first "dilemma" of my new plan: to eat a DQ Blizzard or not? A bunch of free Blizzards were brought into the office on Wednesday, and I was debating whether I'd like the free treat or not. Turned out they were the "mini" sizes so I opted to fit it into my budget for the day. I pushed a snack I bought at lunchtime to the next day, so that was one less snack to buy!
• I changed up some activity levels in Cronometer to get a more realistic TDEE number (outlined in the follow-up post to my weight loss colophon), which will hopefully translate to more accurate tracking numbers & better results.

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.

• You can make your J cards using photo paper! : cassetteculture
• On Sharing Photography | Another Lens - Saw this on Jedda's postroll
• How a shipwreck from 1965 still haunts some Kagawong locals today | CBC News

Media

• Really enjoying Moon of the Turning Leaves. Rice writes tension very well and it feels like there's danger around every corner.
• Watched 3:10 to Yuma (2007, James Mangold). Fantastic movie, great western overall and great action. This is now the 5th James Mangold movie I've seen overall (which is two more than I thought I had watched).
• Then watched Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuarón). This was only my second time seeing the film; the first was in 2006, in theatres. Why have I not re-watched this since then? It's a beautiful film. I'm glad that I did see it in theatres because even on a big screen TV at home, it's not the same at all.
  • And I realized that I had an unintended theme: One character transporting another character to a mode of transportation (a train in 3:10, a boat in Children of Men).
• Started watching Batman: Caped Crusader. I like it so far, especially the deliberate aesthetic. Makes me want to go back and watch Batman: The Animated Series too.

Week Notes for July 29 - August 4, 2024

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Things I made:

• Saturday Evening at Dow's Lake (photo post)
• Blogs as Creative Nonfiction
• Wednesday Thoughts: Writing About Epilepsy

Personal

• I had someone reach out to me by email after they read my Wednesday thoughts :) It was nice to hear from someone I haven't talked to before. They asked for some more posts about weight loss - I'm still hesitant about that but will probably write something later this month focusing more on the tools and methods I'm using rather than raw data.
• Spent the weekend up north with my wife's family. We come up here often, but there's usually a different experience every time. The highlight this time was fishing. We came home with 9 fish! And a lot of photos! I'll be posting them soon.
• I decided I would stay off social media this weekend, on top of my usual No Socials Sunday. I did a great job, in my opinion. I'm writing this on Monday and I still haven't been online.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Loss; 2-for-3, 1 walk ✰
• Tuesday: Win; 1-for-4
• Wednesday: Loss; 0-for-3
• Season stats: GP: ## | Slug Line^[1]: .634/.651/1.513 | 4 Home Runs
• ✰ I played an inning at short stop and did really well. I made an excellent play to get an out at first base, and made an amazing backhanded catch on a ball that otherwise would have skipped through to the outfield. Unfortunately for that play, my first baseman was way off the bag and didn't get back in time to make the play for an out.

Healthy Living

• No bike rides this week. I wanted to ride into work, but not only was it too hot, but I didn't get enough sleep so was dragging myself out of bed.
• On August 1st I started my new month micro-goal - keeping at or under my daily calorie budget. Already missed August 1st, but hoping to do better. It's not a kind of goal that is "pass or fail", but having a daily checkmark is (I hope) aspirational and will help me strive to meet the goal. I'm not going to feel disappointed if I don't make it one day or another. The idea is - if I'm not, figure out why and adjust.
• I pulled something in my back on the weekend and woke up to nearly debilitating back pain (though nowhere near as bad as a few years back when I couldn't even get off the couch). I'm better now, but man...this is an ongoing issue. I get no warning of when my back might hurt, so it's not like I know what movements to avoid so I don't hurt myself. The silver lining is unless I really hurt it, it doesn't last more than a day or so.

Media

• I was recently turned on to the podcast Going Rogue (Apple, Spotify) hosted by Tansy Gardam. I found it after reading the most recent newsletter from Decoding Everything. The first series covers the production of the movie Rogue One but goes on to cover other movies with long and often troubled productions.
• I started watching the 90s X-Men season 3 "Phoenix Saga", and only 2 episodes in. I remarked that it was amusing how casually the X-Men were able to hijack a shuttle and just fly into space like it's nothing. Additionally - does Beast wear a "Howard the Duck" t-shirt in the second episode?

Week Notes for July 22-28, 2024

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Things I made:

• Mastodon FOMO
• Review: The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz - Full Spoilers!
• A Dog Without a Care (photo post)
• Sunday Routine

Personal

• I didn't list these as things I made, because I didn't make them this week; but I reposted several of my old Wordpress blog posts on my Bear blog. They date back to 2020. I haven't imported all of them, I'm being selective; but will probably post some more.
• Veronique bought me my very first coffee!! I helped her out with some small CSS stuff but I think she was buying for my overall helpfulness with figuring out blog stuff. I hope that she is able to figure out what she wants to do with her blog (both with hosting and blog vs. email)!
  • If you also want to buy me a coffee, you can do that here

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Loss; 3-for-3, 2 x 2B
• Tuesday: Win; 2-for-4, Ground Rule Double
• Wednesday: Rainout!
• Season stats: GP: 26 | Slug Line^[1]: .670/.684/1.607 | 4 Home Runs

Healthy Living

• I went on two hour+ long bike rides on the weekend! It was beautiful weather and I've been wanting to get out on the bike for a while. I haven't been able to ride to work for various reasons, so these more than made up for it. I took some pictures along the way, which I will eventually share (I need to sort through them).
  • My favourite ride was Saturday. It was a much cooler temperature outside and I got to cross two bridges over water between provinces. I think there were more hills but this was worth it.
• Trying to put some context to my health watch numbers (steps, sleep). The struggle is that I need to keep up with it or else I'll drop it again.

Media

• I finished The Plot - you can read my review, linked above.
• A weird thing I never noticed about MLB The Show 16: if a player's visual design has them wearing sunglasses, they still wear them at night. Their walk-up music should be changed to Corey Hart's "Sunglasses At Night".
• More music this past weekend! And I am more than glad that my tape deck is working out so well. I listened to another recording I did Sunday night from the radio - it sounded really good. Also threw on 5 CDs and listened to them from disc 1 to disc 5, in order.
  • I recently found out that with Open Scrobbler you can scribble entire albums at a time. Up until now I've been typing one song at a time. This is so much easier!
• I bought a neat little zine from Trish Coxe. I don't think Trish has a store set up for her zines yet, but you can click around her site to find links to buy her art. Anyway. The zine. It's a sort of "read-along" to a song. It's short, I believe 5 panels? It folds up to slightly smaller than a CD booklet, which is clever for being a read-along to a song. I liked it!
• Weekend movies: Kill Bill: Vol 2 and The Bourne Identity. Interesting contrast in types of action in each film. The fighting sound effects were similar in both films, but felt way out of place in Bourne.

Week Notes for July 15-21, 2024

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Things I made:

• FW: Misconceptions about Firefox's Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement
• Mid-Book Review of "The Plot" by Jean Hanff Korelitz
• Re: Thinking Out Loud About My Photos Overload
• Jays From Home # 134 - Looking for the Positives (with my brother Matt)

Personal

• Well that was a fun Friday. There was a massive global IT outage caused by a faulty update from Crowdstrike. Why is it always July, on a Friday? Either way, memes were on point.
• Prompted by this post from Jedda, I grabbed a spare SSD and moved my photos to an external drive. I also uploaded them to OneDrive. Going forward I'm going to make sure I have my photos in two places and upload them right away. This SSD I'm using is less than 500GB though, and it's actually an internal hard drive, so I will need to get a larger HD and transfer them over again.
• We bought two tire racks that were on sale from $80 down to $50; we are storing our winter tires in our storage unit because we get our tires changed over at a place that doesn't store tires for us. So we needed some racks to better organize things. It was a pain to put together but got it done.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Rainout!
• Tuesday: Win! 3-for-5 with 2 x 2B, 3 runs ✰
• Wednesday: Win! 3-for-3 with 1 x 3B, 1 RBI ✰✰
• Season stats: GP: ## | Slug Line^[1]: .667/.681/1.586 | 4 Home Runs
• ✰ One of my doubles was complete luck; we had reached our maximum number of home runs, which means the next one would have been an out. I absolutely crushed the ball and I was sure it was going over the fence. Instead if hit the top of the fence and stayed inside the field.
• ✰✰ This was probably my best game of the season. Unlike the previous night my triple was not luck, I hit it deep opposite field (RF for me) and just kept running hard.
• Overall this was one of the better weeks of softball I've had in a while!

Healthy Living

• Holy moly I was so sore Friday after our PT session at the gym Thursday night. I guess that's a sign of a good workout.
• I've been neglecting my private health journalling. I guess it's just not top-of-mind because it's, well, private. The good news is that I'm staying on top of everything and I don't need the journal to keep me "honest".

Media

• We finished The Acolyte and I was a little disappointed. I feel that it didn't deliver on what was promised, except when it comes to fight sequences. I think this show gave us the best choreographed lightsaber battles in Star Wars, ever.
• Finally watched American Fiction. I really enjoyed it, but it wasn't exactly what I was expecting! And the ending - well I'll just say I'm not entirely sure about it right now. Either way, while being a definite satire it was also a great family drama.
• I recorded an hour-long radio special from CHEZ 106 - "60 Minutes of Chris Cornell" on what would have been his 60th (Saturday July 20). Great group of songs, I enjoyed it. Going to tape over the top of the tape to prevent re-recording. Maybe some day I'll print a custom J-Card.

Week Notes for July 8-14, 2024

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Things I made:

• Tuesday Thoughts 02
• Wednesday Thoughts
• Film Photography
• Saturday Thoughts 02
• Wrote 6(!) new paragraphs for my epilepsy essay (unpublished)

Personal

• I broke my walkman last week. I was adjusting the playback speed and ended up breaking the screw (more accurately, the adjustable resistor) that handles this process. Now it plays at chipmunk speed. It's fixable, I just need to source a replacement part & take it to an electronics repair shop. If only I knew how to solder...
• OK, social media sites. I think I've mostly figured out what I'm doing with each place. Mastodon - this is where I have meaningful discussions with people. Threads - this is where the joke posts from twitter went. Fun for a break to read. Bluesky↗ - I haven't nailed this one down yet. Trying to increase my usage. But seems like a mix between Mastodon and Threads, and probably where I'll go for sports talk (Blue Jays & Sens).
• More cassette deck stuff. I think I have a speed calibration issue on my new deck; I'd like to fix it but probably won't get around to it for a little bit. I'd like to have a proper speed calibration tape but won't be able to get one for this weekend, and I won't really have another chance to work on it for a little while. So I'll just deal with the state it's in.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Win! 4-for-4, 4 RBI ✰
• Tuesday: A double header! Game 1 (loss): 1-for-2, BB, 1 RBI | Game 2 (loss): 4-for-4, 3 runs, 1 RBI
• Wednesday: Rainout
• Season stats: GP: 22 | Slug Line^[1]: .658/.675/1.543 | 4 Home Runs
• ✰ I didn't have much to do in the outfield, and I didn't have outstanding hits, but I was consistent and came up with a big hit in the bottom of the 6th which helped us get an extra run on top of the visiting team so that we had more breathing room to win the game. Also, ultimately, we were all the big losers as the mosquitos feasted on us the entire night.

Healthy Living

• I went out for a really nice bike ride - just over an hour (including breaks for a lot of photos). I mainly went out to have a look at a new pedestrian/cycling bridge that was installed recently.
• I've been sticking to my daily logging - so far this month I've hit every day of the week, logging 100%. Many days I've gone over my limit but I'm making sure I don't beat myself up about that.

Media

• Going through my CD crates, I listened to some more of a recent rip session. First was Joel Plaskett Emergency's Ashtray Rock, and then I turned to Castles by The Philosopher Kings. I don't remember why I bought the latter, but it was in the crate so I listened. Not a bad pop-rock type album, good easy listening in the background while I worked. Nothing spectacular though.
  • I liked the song "Beautiful Creature".
• Enjoying https://soma.fm - specifically the 80s Underground channel. As a result I also globbed onto SiriusXM's 1st Wave channel.
• Spent the weekend listening to tapes: Foo Fighters, Taylor Swift's Midnights. And CDs: The Sheep Dogs Learn & Burn, Jet Get Born, Kaiser Chiefs Employment, Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell, Stabilo Flawed Design
• Watched a couple of movies on the weekend too! I wrote about Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood and a re-watch of *Kill Bill: Vol 1

Week Notes for July 1-7, 2024.

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Things I made:

• Big Nope
• Looking Back on June 2024
• Re: To Blogroll, or to not?
• Re-thinking my Blogroll Position
• Jays From Home #133 - "Holding Pattern"^[1]

Personal

• Robert Birming replied to an older post of mine for his JulyReply. Read it here: https://birming.com/not-everything-sale/
• Nerdy blog stuff: made some updates to my "Now" page, and to the overall CSS themes. You may notice some arrows on links - these are links to websites not a part of srgower.com.

Softball 🥎

• Tuesday: Win! 2-for-4
• Wednesday: Loss; 2-for-4 - 1 double, 1 RBI
• Season stats: GP: 19 | Slug Line^[2]: .621/.639/1.503 | 4 Home Runs
• I had my best hit of the last couple of weeks on Wednesday (the double). It's also my first double since June 4th.

Healthy Living

• Got my bike out for a ride to work. Unfortunately both tires were flat, so it needs a look-see by the repair shop. However I rode my wife's bike to work (even though it doesn't have functioning front brakes...woops!).
• The bike was fixed - the valve for the tube was crooked (probably my fault). The repair place replaced the tubes and I'm up and running again.

Media

• I'm a little frustrated with The Acolyte; I think it's a show that should have been released all at once instead of weekly. It has a lot of pacing issues and probably also stretched out too much.
• Started reading The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz (2021). I'm giving it a go for a bit but the narrator is insufferable in this story. I may mark the book as "DNF".

Week Notes for June 24-30 2024

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Things I made:

• #Junited2024 finished up this week.
• Another Gaming Interlude
• Creative Process
• Tech Alternatives and Privacy

Personal

• Now - this isn't something that I've created last week, but my brother did a couple of interviews with some authors. At around the 11:38 mark of our latest episode author David Bockino (Game On: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out, and Got Personal with Billions of Fans mentions how our podcast sounds professional and could be something distributed by ESPN or other media outlets. So nice to hear. Especially after my "Creative Process" post.
• Along similar lines, someone reached out by email to respond to my post about tech & privacy! Someone I didn't already know. That's cool :)
• Happy Canada Day!

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Loss; 3-for-4, 1 RBI
• Tuesday: Ties; 3-for-5, 1 RBI
• Wednesday: Win (walk-off!); 2-for-4
• Season stats: GP: 17 | Slug Line^[1]: .638/.656/1.553 | X Home Runs
• I got to try a trapper glove on Tuesday playing first base, for the first time. It felt weird catching the ball - did not feel like I had it in my glove at all.
• Overall a decent week on defense. Made some good catches. Offense wasn't very strong (yes I hit for a high average, but all singles and not hit very hard).

Healthy Living

• 🩸 I donated blood on Monday! And then proceeded to roast in right field playing softball.

Media

• Finally started Moon of the Turning Leaves. It was a bit jarring to pick up the story 10 years after the first book but it makes sense. The chapters move along at the same brisk pace.

Week Notes for June 17-23

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Things I made:

• #Junited2024 continues... - I've found some really good links and blogs through my own posting and from others, following the #Junited2024 hash tag on Mastodon.
• Recovery
• When "New" versions are a downgrade
• Updating my blogroll

Personal

• It was so awesome to hear from someone about my week notes!

@srgower enjoying your Week Notes! Great idea and you do it well.

— Melissa Techman (@mtechman@mastodon.ie) 2024-06-17, 1:31:30 p.m.

• I missed some days in my daily goals (for food logging mostly, but I think one night for brushing my teeth). There are various reasons but the biggest is probably because I got sick (see the healthy living section).

Healthy Living

• This past week was a test of my resolve. We took an unplanned trip to my in-laws, where I have little to no control over how food is prepared. Would I be able to keep up with my daily food logging?
• I got sick Wednesday; probably combination of heat stroke and a homemade sweet dessert not agreeing with me. As I type this (Thursday) I am extremely tired and no amount of napping is helping.
  • For the last few days I've felt what I would call "abnormally full". In the sense that I stopped eating because I felt absolutely stuffed. This is a new feeling for me - not something that is altogether bad, but something to keep an eye on because it's just not "normal" for me.

Media

• I picked Moon of the Turning Leaves and The Star Web as my next books to read but haven't started them yet. I enjoyed the first book of The Whitesky Saga - Moon of the Crusted Snow - but I feel like Turning Leaves might be a bit of a downer to read and I don't want that kind of read at the moment. I will start it soon, though.
• Found out about Paper Apps™ DUNGEON (Physical Notebook) from Alexandra's week notes - I'm not sure if I'm going to buy one myself but the concept is really neat.
• I started yet another "Be a GM" mode for NHL Legacy, using some self-imposed rules. I'm going to write a post about this later in the week. The idea came to mind while I was watching one of the Oilers vs. Panthers Cup Final games.

Week Notes for June 10-16

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Things I made:

• Forgot to list this last week: Jays From Home^[1]
• #Junited2024 continues
• Nerdy Blog Stuff
• Paywalls, Pain, and Balance
• Stop it, that's my thing!
• New Mastodon Instance

Personal

• I changed Mastodon instances; my new handle is @srgower@ottawa.place. If I did things correctly all my followers & people I follow should transfer over. Only thing that doesn't are posts. I have 2000+ :`(
• My wife's uncle passed away, so we had some last-minute travel. I expect to be a lot less "online" this week.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Double header. Game 1 (Win): 0-for-2 | Game 2 (Loss): 1-for-2 ⭐
• Tuesday: Win! 3-for-3 with 1 BB
• Wednesday: Win! 3-for-4 with 1 RBI ⭐⭐
• Season stats: GP: 14 | Slug Line^[2]: .644/.667/1.644 | 4 Home Runs
• ⭐ Fun play on Monday - there was a ball hit hard a little to my right and I knew I wasn't going to catch up to it with my glove. I stuck my foot out with the sole (no pun intended) intention of stopping the ball. What happened was I kicked it straight to my rover who picked up the ball and tossed it into the infield. Beautiful play.
• ⭐⭐ I had a great defensive game. I alternated between Left Field and Rover with another player and I made a lot of great catches. I was tracking the ball very well. Overall I've had a great week on defense compared to last week.

Healthy Living

• We finally got back to the gym and personal training. We could have gone on our own without a personal training session, sure, but when we're in softball season it's hard to do it on our own without a schedule forcing us in.
• I got my bike out for a test ride. I went out for about an hour on Saturday, taking my camera with me for some pictures as well. I need to "develop" them so they will be online somewhere at a later date.

Media

• From the Ruminate podcast, episode 186 - A Wallet-Trembling Show. Robb and John dicuss the concept of "Our Web" instead of "Small Web"; it's about 26 minutes in if you're not able to listen via Pocket Casts.
  • I thought their discussion was great especially the parts where they talk about those who frown upon monetization.
• Finished reading Making It So, Patrick Stewart's memoir. I enjoyed it. I appreciated that the bulk of it covered his life before Star Trek because I didn't know very much about his life before that. Plus, a lot of "behind the scenes" stories of Star Trek are very well known already, so there wasn't much there he could have written about that would surprise me. I highly recommend it!

Nerdy Blog Stuff

• See the "Nerdy Blog Stuff" post I linked to above. Basically I changed up my blog formatting and wrote about it.
• Updated the layout of srgower.com; based it on MGX's McLuhan Lite theme. Links will be in colophon.

Week Notes for June 3-9

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Things I made:

• Junited 2024 Continues - also be sure to check out the #Junited2024 hash tag on Mastodon!
• Past Self Got Rid of Too Many Video Games
• Android Navigation Buttons vs. Gesture Navigation
• Weight Loss
• Milestone: June 5, 2024
• I Used to be Young

Personal

• I took a vacation day on Monday. I have a LOT of days to use up and no fixed plans to use them. I spent part of it playing video games (played a game of NHL Legacy and MLB The Show 16 respectively), then took care of some other 'round the house things such as putting in our window AC unit in our bedroom.
• Monday was also World Bicycle Day; I didn't get my bike out though. I wrote a short note about that in the 'healthy living' section.
• I started re-organizing my OneDrive into a system somewhat resembling Johnny.Decimal; in the process I found a bunch of test HTML files and one of them was an example of an HTML card or box. I thought it was neat. Thinking of incorporating it into my week notes, somehow. An example of what that looks like:
  
• I mentioned Junited above - I thought I might struggle to find links ahead of time and scramble to put something up each day, but as I type this I have at least 9 chosen and ready to go.

Softball 🥎

• Monday: Loss :( 0-for-4.
• Tuesday: Loss :( 4-for-4 with a walk. 2xDoubles, 3 Runs, 1 RBI.
• Wednesday: Win! :) 2-for-3, 1 RBI
• Season stats: Games Played: 9 | Slug Line^[1]: .647/1.088/.667 | 4 Home Runs
• In Tuesday's game, I hit a DEEP fly ball to CF; at this point in the game we reached our allotted home runs, which means if I hit one I'd be out. It stopped JUST short of going over the fence and landed sharply at the base. Phew!
• This wasn't a good week for me on defense.

Healthy Living

• Reached 1 year seizure-free on June 5th!! ✨
• Would love to start biking to work, but waiting on our condo corporation to get some new privacy fences up so I can keep my bike outside.
  • The work finished, and I put my bike shelter up. We were under a heat warning Wednesday, and rain on Thursday, so biking to work is still on hold.
• I really noticed the difference in playing softball after two weeks off from the gym. I feel beat up and sore all over.
• Did some light garden work, and pinched/pulled something in my lower back. The rest of Saturday and most of Sunday wasn't too fun. I feel okay today! Hoping to play softball tonight.

Media

• I want to figure out some way to put a moratorium on MYSELF and OTHERS from buying new books.
• I talked myself out of buying a copy of MVP Baseball 2005 for the GameCube; I had some fun playing a couple of games of MLB The Show 16 and found some downloadable rosters & suggestions for changing sliders. I fear playing MVP might feel like a downgrade.
• I deleted the Retro app. It was a neat idea, but I haven't been returning to it every day and I don't see much point to it. Just another Thing to give my attention to.

Nerdy Blog Stuff

• I've thought about moving my blog to srgower.com; however I feel like I would need to do a total re-design and re-arrange things and - I don't want to do that. Also re-considering hosting my Week Notes here but I kind of like having them in their own space.
  • Having said that I am considering upgrading my Bear Blog and set the URL to something like lwgrs.srgower.com instead of .bearblog.dev.
• I'm thinking of switching Mastodon servers; my current server has suffered from some slow load times and I've heard good things about another one that is more local to me. Still thinking about it.

Week Notes for May 27th - June 2nd 2024

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Things I made:

• Hodgepodge
• I still don't have my tape deck
• Review: Sleeman Zero +
• Junited 2024 This wasn't my idea - inspired by Robert Birming

Edit 12:57 PM EDT: I mistyped my "Junited" title and URL.

Personal

• We're short a moderator on /r/podcasts. I forgot how much heavy lifting there is. We're trying to automate some more things but also (slowly) starting the recruitment process for an extra moderator.
• Another reason for ditching Notion for my .md templates: when I had links that went to subdirectories (like /weeknotes/) it inserted https://notion.so/ in front of it...why???
• Two pay periods in a row we were charged more than expected by our gym...trying to sort this out. We're enjoying our experience there, but it's frustrating when you budget for a specific amount and double the amount budgeted comes out of your account.
• Got out to two local baseball teams this weekend! The Ottawa Titans hosted the Windy City Thunderballs; the home team (Titans) won both games, winning the second one by a score of 17-5. That game was wild.

Softball

• Monday: rain-out
• Tuesday: Win! 2-for-4 (Home Run, BB)
• Wednesday: Win! 2-for-2 (Walk, RBI, Run)
• Season stats: .571/.588/1.214 (AVG/OBP/SLG) / 1.803 OPS | 1 K, 2 BB, 1 2B, 4 HR, 16 RBI

Healthy Living

• My weight is going back down, hovering in the ~259-260 range. I anticipate some more positive changes next month when my micro goal is to log all my meals daily, instead of 1 minimum meal logged daily.
• I tried wearing my smart watch while playing softball on Wednesday. What holds me back is that it doesn't sit well on my wrist when I wear batting gloves. It worked out okay; I loosened the strap a ton and got the batting glove to fit without the two accessories getting in each others' way.
• I switched my pill times from 8:45 am/pm to 9 am/pm. Mostly so I can sleep in longer on weekends.
• Starting June 1st, my new goal for food logging is ALL meals Monday-Friday, and at least 1 meal on weekends

Media

• I've been enjoying Spotify "Daylists" - the music is not always what I want to hear, but the titles are often times bizarre. I'm tracking them in a Notion database.
• My brother sent me this podcast a few weeks back and I finally started listening. As an avid curler and curling watcher, I knew mostly about this story but not as many of the details as I thought. A good listen. Broomgate: A Curling Scandal
• My wife and I finished both Star Trek Discovery and The Crown.
  • The Discovery was okay; it's tough when my comparison for a season finale came just last weekend when I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things. This entire season was one long treasure hunt and while there were fun moments, I miss the more contemplative Star Trek. I guess that's what we have Strange New Worlds for.
  • The Crown's last season started off strong, but I felt that the last 6 episodes were uneven. The finale was definitely strange with Imaulda Staunton's Queen Elizabeth getting visited by previous versions of herself (played by Olivia Colman and Claire Foy) throughout the episode. It was a bit weird and definitely A Choice. Still, it was better than the last two seasons.
• I played some more of Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (PS3) on the weekend. I still think it's a great game but I haven't fully grasped controlling the car. For example, there are a few race courses you need to beat the clock to catch a suspect but the car you're given can drive 200+ km/h. It's super hard to control a car at that speed in the game! But realistic, I suppose. One thing I wish existed: that in the "police free drive" (where you can drive around the road courses without affecting "career" stats) you are able to chase down suspects.

Week Notes for May 21-27, 2024

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Things I made:

• Trying "Vanilla Freddo Cappuccino" (here's a picture of said coffee)
• In Which My Dog Fell Off a Boat
• Pulling from the Stack(Edit)
• Jays From Home #130 - L3, 4-6
• Productivity Traps

Personal

• I thought I'd move my softball results to its own heading.
• I'm getting tired with Simplenote - I love the app and all, but the captchca requirements every time I log in to the web app really irritates me. I'm trying to find something similar but most notes apps automatically convert markdown to WYSIWYG editing which I don't want.
  • Notesnook seems to be able to export your notes to markdown, but I'm unclear if that's a Pro feature or not
  • Trying out Notion's editor as well; it seems a little more straightforward for exporting as markdown.
  • SimpleNote still winning out for simplicity + easier to edit in plain text with an option to preview
  • I remembered Stack Edit. It's browser-only but is not giving me grief with captchcas.^[1]
    • Also, I have a bunch of things written in here I forgot about.
• Never mind the above. I gave up on apps and web based stuff...I'm doing all of this with text files and OneDrive. It's better that way.
• Re-installed the Daylio app) - I want something for tracking my monthly goals)
  • I started building a habit tracker in Notion and then remembered there are apps that do the hard work of setting this up much better than starting from scratch

Professional

• I celebrated 18 years with my organization on the 22nd. Crazy to think that I've been there almost 20 years. The longest I've been with one company before that was 5 years, and that was a McDonald's.
• Employee tech issues are stressful. My team constantly needs help, and I do my best, but it can be taxing on the mental health.

Softball

• Only got one game in this week. Hit 2-for-3 with a walk. 2 RBIs^[2] as well

Healthy Living

• My foot is feeling so much better. I went out for two long-ish walks at lunch at work this week. I've been holding off for the last few weeks to try to rest my foot a little.
  • Of course I undid some progress by spending all day outdoors on uneven ground Saturday, wearing sandals.

Media

• My wife and I moved on to season 6 of The Crown (Netflix)
  • I found seasons 4 and 5 to be disappointing. It feels like after the first 3 seasons the producers/writers got bored and wanted to skip to the salacious material (i.e. Charles & Diana). Several things were touched on in one episode and then completely ignored. Phillip's father was killed when his boat was blown up - but no follow-up to the IRA after that?
• Fell down a rabbit hole and watched a YouTube video analyzing how realistic the law is portrayed in Liar Liar
• A cool explainer of decaf coffee

Week Notes for May 14-20, 2024.

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Things I made:

• Returning defective products is harder than it should be

Personal

• Two home runs in one game! One was a grand slam!
• I wasn't as prolific with creating things (for the public) as last week. I wouldn't say I'm burnt out but feel like I used a lot of creative juice that needs replenishing
• I had some leftover quotes from Outsider that I cut and pasted into my current journal
• Got out of the city for the long weekend. Always good for recharging the batteries.
• have been using the Retro app as suggested by JCProbably. I haven't added any friends/contacts, but is neat for uploading daily pictures.

Healthy Living

• Spent the weekend outside of the city and (mostly) offline
• Also spent the weekend NOT wearing my smartwatch. I survived!
• Mosquitos and sand flies are vile creatures

Media

• Read more of Making It So (Patrick Stewart)

Week of May 7-13, 2024

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Things I made:

• A Post About Health
• Review: CREMO Original Formula Concentraded Shave Cream Classic
• The Album Project Part 2 | Alternative Airwaves
• What to do with a laser printer?
• Jays From Home #129 – Mother's Day^[1]

Personal

• I had my last few days alone before my wife returned from her work trip. Unfortunately softball was cancelled two of 3 nights, so I had to fill my time with other things (see media notes below).
• This is sort of a "healthy living" note but not exactly. I'm trying to find ways to get more protein into my diet, and one of the things I'm trying is protein powder. Some things I did this past week:
  • Figured out the right ratio of protein powder to iced coffee. It's not an exact science yet as the only thing I measure is the protein powder...the rest is eyeballed to the "max fill" line of the blender cup.
  • Made the strawberry smoothie recipe on the side of the protein powder jar. Added some banana to the mix. Very good. Need to try it with plain greek yogurt instead of vanilla greek yogurt - just a bit too much vanilla.
• Last week I felt like I worked way more than 5 days during the week (see below). I think I've recovered.

Professional

• A very tough week at work; our main software went offline for about 2 and a half days. Thank goodness we had a "disaster recovery" plan in place, but that first day we went offline I didn't do very much work because I couldn't work.
• I worked in the office 4 of 5 days instead of my usual 3, and combined with the software failure - it felt like a really long week.

Healthy Living

• I got a copy of my foot x-ray and exported the scans to JPG. Very cool thing to own.
  • My foot is getting better. I iced it a little bit last night after softball, but it's not hurting nearly as much. Still trying not to walk as much + wear loose shoes.
• Calorie logging is going well. I'm trying not to focus too much on calories consumed, but more about the act of logging.
  • Actually, it's not as rosy as I wrote earlier this week. I'm still hitting my goal of logging 1 meal daily though.

Media

• Reading a little more of Making It So (Patrick Stewart's memoir)
• X-Men 90s cartoon; never realized how serialized this show was when I watched as a kid.
• Almost cleared my podcast backlog. It's a good feeling. One episode in particular I enjoyed: Song Exploder: Peaches - Boys Wanna Be Her
• Discovered Open Scrobbler, a website that lets you manually "scrobble" music you're listening to (such as [on cassette[(https://mstdn.ca/@srgower/112416807397683570)
• Video games - I mostly played NHL Legacy this week. I played some of the most fun games in a long time.

Week of April 30-May 6, 2024

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Writing this week:

• Mini Goals
• The Office Drains My Energy
• All Take and No Give
• NHL 99 (N64) Is An Ugly Game, But It's A Lot of Fun
• Re-Evaluating My Smart Watch Usage
• A note to my wife
• Several pages in my journal (current notebook is almost full!)
• Started work on part 2 of The Album Project
• Wrote two introductory paragraphs to epilepsy essay

Personal

• My wife has been away since Friday and isn't back until this Sunday (the 12th). Like Brandon I have A Week Alone
• Currently sitting in the office unable to do any work - our main software is down. But overall I find it extremely distracting because the building is more full than usual, and people are getting up and walking back and forth all over the place. Trying to let it go but it's draining my social meter real fast.

Healthy Living

• Went for an x-ray - my first ever, not including dental x-rays.
  • I went for my foot; I thought I might have a fracture as it's been quite uncomfortable for a few months now. Turns out there is no fracture - just some soft tissue issues
• Trying some new fitness tracking (see above re: smart watch usage). Only on Day 2, but Day 1 was a success, at least.
• Softball started Monday; I went 2-for-3 and hit a home run in my first game!

Media

• Figured out how to scrobble Apple Music listens
• Love Need For Speed Hot Pursuit. The game looks amazing. I really should play it on a big screen TV

Week of April 23-29, 2024
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Personal

• Whereas last week I did a lot of tidying up, I kind of undid some of that when trying to set up my Nintendo 64 (see the Media notes below). I need to tidy that up again - a project for the weekend.
• Speaking of tidying though, my wife and I did some minor housecleaning and finally swapped our winter shoes for summer shoes. Yay sandals!
• I picked up some new clothes this weekend: a pair of comfy green pants, and some comfy shorts from Old Navy; and a couple of plain t-shirts from Wal-Mart. Nothing special about them, it just feels good to find clothes you like.

Healthy Living

• Probably best to label this unhealthy living this week - I contracted a cold in the middle of the week. Started with a sore throat for a day and a half, then progressed to congestion. Seems to be getting better as of today.
• I'm feeling the results of personal training. No soreness/stiffness after softball practice, and in general I feel more flexible and a better range of motion.
• As of today (April 30) I have flossed every night of April. That was my one small goal for the month and I must say I'm smashing it.

Media

• I got a haul of video games this week. First was a PS3 copy of Need For Speed Hot Pursuit; I had a small cache of USD in my Paypal account that I was able to use to buy on eBay.
  • Then I found a copy of Mario Tennis for the N64, followed by NHL 99 - both games I've been looking for for a while. And then I had an embarrassingly hard time connecting the N64 to my TV

Week of April 16-22, 2024

Personal

• Another weekend ending with my wife going on a business trip. A longer one this time - she was gone Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. She had a really good trip and an enjoyable conference, so that's good! On my end I made some updates to the website^[1]
• I watched the late Blue Jays games (they were in San Diego) - usually I don't watch late games because I don't want to stay up. But not going anywhere the next day and being on my own...makes for something to do
• More video games: I played a couple MLB The Show 16 games; I have a "bottom feeders" playoff bracket set up with all the bad teams that finished at the bottom of the league in 2016. I won 1 game, lost the other.
  • I also set up a NEW Be a GM mode in NHL Legacy; as I said last week I made a team TOO terrible and wasn't getting much out of it. I created a new BAGM controlling the Edmonton Oilers. We'll see how that goes.
• I wrote two blog posts but spent a lot of time posting on Mastodon; I especially liked my post titled "Habits" because it's part of the writing I'm trying to do where I write more about memories of the past.
• Monday (yesterday) I set up a Tasker profile & task to set a random daily wallpaper from a folder on my phone. I have a hard time picking a wallpaper I want to stick to so this will help with that. I'll probably write a post about that later.

Healthy Living

• I don't know if most people would qualify this as part of "healthy living" but this is my page, so I am. Last week I mentiond listening to a "life hacks" episode of Ologies, well this week I listened to one about decluttering. I've been taking in a lot of the information in these episodes and applying them in different ways.
  • As with things from Stolen Focus I am starting to use Google Keep to record things I want to look up - and save them for later instead of looking them up right away. The next step here is perhaps including context as to why I want to look it up.
  • I tidied up a shelf full of tools and extra screws. In the process I got rid of a bunch of rolls of tape we have no use for. And I found some lost tools!
• Still experimenting with KT Tape; I've found what works for my toe/metatarsal. And I also confirmed that it still hurts when I don't have it stabalized with tape, so my upcoming doctor visit is still relevant.
• I cleaned out my car! It was looking pretty dirty from its last long-range trip and it was a nice day Sunday, so I finally got to wiping it down and vacuuming.

Media

• I read this article: How Platforms Killed Pitchfork; kind of a sad mini history about Pitchfork but also prompted me to do more listening to my Spotify Discover Weekly + Release Radar playlists
• Watched more X-Files - I really enjoyed "Beyond The Sea" and I think it's the strongest of season 1, so far
• Caught up with the latest season of Star Trek Discovery. We watched the first 3 episodes. I like it so far but it's very much following a similar format to the last 3 seasons.

Week Notes are a popular thing these days. I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and see how it works for me. The link I provided above looks like it's mainly about productivity but I've seen examples of more personal notes, which is what I'm aiming for.

Professional

• Work has been a mixed bag. (For context, read about what I do here.) Last week was rather busy because I had a day off on the 5th, and then another day off on the 8th. Even then, the 8th was a bit hectic because I had another employee on my team off and as a team of 4, having two people off is not ideal - so I worked while traveling.
• But in the latter half of the week things were slow. Thursday was dreadful - I saw two people in the office and no one else. Yesterday was a tad slow as well. I expect things to pick up the rest of this week, though.
• Slowness can sometimes be helpful to allow me to work ahead so that when things pick up unexpectedly, I have time and space to get more immediate things done.

Personal

• I've been thinking a lot about writing lately - both about producing things and about being true to myself in my personal journal. As a result I've spit out several pages' worth of entries in my journal, although not as many written pieces on my blog (or elsewhere).
• My wife was away for 36 hours (Sunday morning to Monday evening) which allowed me to have some time to myself. I spent it playing a lot of video games^[1]. I also watched some TV, recorded a podcast, and did a few other things around the house.
• My wife is going to be away again Friday to Sunday. I think I'll need to fill my time a little better; perhaps I'll get together with my brother in some capacity - it's his birthday on Saturday.

Healthy Living

• I don't want to dwell on this too much because I am keeping my "health notes" to myself instead of broadcasting them.
• My wife and I have a personal trainer at the gym that is helping us with strength training to improve our overall mobility. Looking forward to how that will help us playing softball this summer.
• Scale weight progress has been all over the place. Trying to be better with my food intake.
  quick edit: I forgot to include KT Tape. I am fairly certain I have a fracture of my 5th metatarsal; KT Tape has significantly reduced pain. I should be able to manage it until my doctor appointment at the end of the month.

Media

• As mentioned, watching a lot of TV lately. I've focused on: X-Men (90s cartoon); X-Files; Flight of the Conchords. No movies this past week.
• I finished reading Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. I have some thoughts about this but haven't put them together either in written form or in podcast form. It was a three-star read for me.
• Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts. I made my way through a few backlogged items but wanted to highlight one in particular: Ologies - LIFE ADVICE Encore: For anyone who is tired & needs some hacks. I'm not a fan of all the advice in this show, but there were some good tips. I try not to get bogged down with "how to be more productive" kind of things but I liked the sentiment behind most of these.

I think that's all I can muster for now. The format here will probably change as I go. Normally I include contact info at the bottom of my posts but for these...I think I'm going to leave them out.