Chris Brooks Newsletter 014
1. 🚘 Where I've been traveling
My last update ended in Brussels, the final destination of our Europe adventure. Since May 9th I've been steady Eddie at Keuka Lake, with the only travel adventure being an out-and-back to Erie PA for a golf lesson. I love travel but nice to be sleeping in the same bed for a while.
2. 📖 What I've been reading
Articles:
- How to Summarize Books Using ChatGPT: 7 Experiments in AI Distillation -- Tiago Forte is a personal knowledge management (PKM) guru and I use his approach to summarizing books for most of the non-fiction reading I do. This article demonstrates his adventures in using ChatGPT to help with the process. Very promising.
- and... In Pursuit of a Better Book takes a different view on how we might augment traditional reading with AI.
- I've been listening to and reading more from Derek Sivers, and this summary of a talk he gave at the Berklee College of Music is worth a read. Do not accept their speed limit!
Books:
- I read the (would be cancelled if published today) cop thriller Rules of Prey by John Sandford. Pretty decent but I'm moving on to some other fiction before returning to book 2.
- I re-read Josh Waitzkin's (he's the kid in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance with a goal of writing better notes. The book is hailed as a masterpiece on learning theory by many; I think it is pretty average but still worth a read. The book is basically an autobiography with lessons on how he approach learning and mastery. I grew weary of the blow-by-blow descriptions of his Tai Chi matches, and his theories on learning are anecdotal. Still, I found some interesting tidbits and I'm happy to share my notes if you reply to this email.
- Kevin Kelly wrote a short book with his Excellent Advice for Living that was pretty good. N.B. don't every buy an eBook from Barnes and Noble if you want any hope of reading it outside of their ecosystem.
- Similarly, Derek Sivers has published advice / self-help books and I read Hell Yeah or No. Good stuff.
3. 🍿 What I've been watching
TV:
- We wrapped up Ted Lasso and Barry. Good endings to very good series.
- Enjoyed the light-hearted fun of season 2 of Schmigadoon (aka Schmicago), made all the more fun because we'd recently seen Sweeney Todd on Broadway.
Movies:
I watched three off my "want to see" list on the flight from Brussels to Newark!
- The Great Gatsby (2013) because I'd just read the book. The visual style was mostly OK, sometimes off-putting. Fairly true to the book.
- Devotion, about a friendship between two Korean War pilots (one black, one white) was just OK.
- Summer of Soul is an excellent documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival (the forgotten Woodstock). Highly recommended.
And a few more:
- Tetris is campy tech-documentary-fiction and very fun.
- I had Kingpin on my list for a while and finally watched it when we renewed Amazon Prime for a (free) month. Typical Farrelly brothers fun; it had its moments.
- Three more documentaries, all very good:
4. 🎶 What I've been listening too
New albums from Jason Isbell and Josh Ritter. Podcast madness about PGA Tour and Saudi PIF merger (yuck).
5. 🎲 What I've been playing
- About eight hours into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. So much fun! This will keep me occupied for another year and has forestalled my purchase of a Steam Deck.
- No boardgames in real life last month, but I played 24/7, Jump Drive, 7 Wonders, and Draftosaurus on Board Game Arena.
6. 💻 My Latest IT Project
I'll have a longer blog article soon on this, but I'm a month into achieving independence from the various cloud providers we've relied on for so many years. I used the free Google Apps for Domains for so many years on chrisbrooks.org, and when they moved to (an expensive for the value) subscription model (we knew this would happen, right?) I started cutting the cord with Google. That experience has been so fraught with problems and data loss, that I became very interested in re-evaluating my whole stance with cloud providers (mostly Google, iCloud, DropBox, and Flickr). The Tim Ferris podcast with Derek Sivers inspired me with some very specific steps I could take.
I'm about 80% of the way through this journey, with major moves like escaping DropBox and Flickr complete. More info coming soon.
-Chris