Chris Brooks Newsletter 007
What a month! We’ve been drivin’ drivin’ drivin’. 12,500 miles so far on the new Tesla (acquired July 30 2022).
I’ve been messing around with DALL-E 2 AI-driven image generation. Here’s a painting of our car perched by a canyon:
1. 🚘 Where I’ve been traveling
The month began with us still hanging out around Portland, Oregon, with a highlight being a Corillian reunion where I got to hang out with so many former colleagues. My brain nearly exploded. Since then:
- We headed from Portland to the Great Basin National Park area, with a stop in Ely as our home base. I still need to write up our visit to Great Basin and the Lehman Caves.
- Next stop was Las Vegas for a family wedding. Jacob and I did some hiking in Red Rock Canyon.
- We dashed off to Mesa Verde to hit the park before ranger tours end for the season. We decided we needed a down day or two to catch up on some work and relax. Some golf was played.
- Completing our Nevada State Parks gauntlet was our next mission, so we worked our way back to northwestern Nevada via Lehi Utah. Lehi was a very pleasant surprise food-wise: we discovered some new-to-us chains that had very vegan-friendly options (Zao Asian Cafe and Spitz).
- Tahoe area was our base for the end of the month. Played golf in Carson City and Nakoma and stayed with old Keuka Lake friends for a few days in Tahoe Donner. So much good hiking in that area and the weather was perfect.
- We closed out the month in the eastern Sierras at Mono Lake and June Lake. We took advantage of the last fall weather and drove out of the Sierras to the central California valley through some challenging snow, ice, and winds.
2. 📖 What I’ve been reading
On the book front:
- I’m still reading Still Life by Louise Penny, the first Gamache novel. While I enjoy it, it isn’t grabbing me enough to read more than at bedtime. This is usually a sign that I should move on to something else after I finish.
- I read most of Michael Caine’s recent memoir Blowing the Bloody Doors Off. Very average, and his shared wisdom was mostly directed at students of acting. I’m hopeless in that area.
- I re-read and took notes on Mark Broadie’s Every Shot Counts, the ground-breaking book on golf statistics. He invented the strokes gained methodology which revolutionized how we look at stats on the pro golf tours, and it eventually trickled down to us amateurs and is a very useful framework to think about how to improve your game.
- On son Jacob’s recommendation I read Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson. This is a guide book for someone exactly at Jacob’s career stage: on the cusp from moving from team technical leadership up to broader organizational technical leadership (but not management). Highly recommended. Remember how I talked about imposter syndrom in the last newsletter? It surfaced again in one of the interviews of a current staff level engineer:
What two or three factors were most important for you to reach the Staff level?
Thinking back, a potentially-surprising important factor for me was (and is) my imposter syndrome. It made me extraordinarily open to feedback; to learning and growing and to taking responsibility for anything remotely related to my work. It made me proactively seek out feedback on everything…
Two articles this month worth mentioning:
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Probably the smartest most opinionated author’s I’ve read, Nassim Nicholas Taleb , recently published an article on how he writes.
I stood the idea on its head. If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.
- Hey, did you hear that Elon Musk bought Twitter? Twitter is the only social network I participate in these days (mostly read-only) and I hope it stays around for a while. A big concern many folks have is “what will content moderation be like?” (though, this concern is probably secondary to “will Elon allow Trump back on Twitter?”). If you think content moderation is easy, read up on this advice for Elon: Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve.
3. 🍿 What I’ve been watching
Julie’s with me again so I’ve mostly taken a break from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Some crappy to great viewing this past month:
- On the crappy front was the latest Jordan Peele movie Nope. Some odd critic praise for this almost unwatchable film. This was a Halloween watch and we should have just watched the likely crappy remake of Halloween.
- As far as you can get from serious TV is Pick of the Litter, a dogumentary that follows six different puppies being trained to be Guide Dogs for the Blind. So cute and so much fun.
- The highlight of the month was Bad Sisters. I won’t spoil anything here other than to say it takes place on the coast just outside of Dublin Ireland.
4. 🎶 What I’ve been listening too
Like the rest of the planet: almost nothing but Taylor Swift’s “Midnights 3 A.M. Edition”. Rick Beato also encouraged us to revisit some Carpenters and Badfinger.
5. 🎲 What I’ve been playing
Some of this trickles into last month, but my time in Portland deserves a better recap than I gave last month on my gaming (thanks Jeff for the reminder):
- On the video game front, it is all “Slay the Spire” still on my Switch. So much depth and replayability. And there’s a boardgame now on Kickstarter!
- Played Ark Nova a few times with Greg and others. Heavy strategy for sure, but loads of fun. Don’t think I need to own it because I doubt Julie would play.
- Played SpaceCorp with the must-have Ventures expansion. Always good and the expansion makes it less vanilla.
- Tried out the Martin Wallace Anno 1800 with four players. Pretty average and don’ think I need to play again.
- Met up with Ken and Allen to play Brotherhood & Unity at Cloud Cap Games in Sellwood. This is a perhaps perfect three player wargame, playable in under 3 hours and easy to learn.
- Played a learning scenario of Crossing the Line: Aachen 1944 with Allen. We’d like to get a VASSAL game going but that’s a bit challenging when I’m roaming like this. Fun activation system.
- Greg taught me Lost Ruins of Arnak, which calls itself a deck builder but has only mild elements of that. This one is also on BGA and I’d like to play again there with family.
- On my last night in Portland, Greg and I played Everdell. Beautiful components and fun play. This is a game where you hunt for fun and powerful card combinations, and seems very replayable.
See you next month!
-Chris