Chris Brooks Newsletter 040
Welcome to August. Still very hot and humid in western NY. The Canada smoke has mostly cleared out here.
1. 🚘 Where I've Been Traveling
Since Scotland Julie and I have been hunkered down here at Keuka Lake, living our summer lives, playing lots of golf, pickleball, and cooking a lot for Jerry and Judy. We did do a brief overnight getaway to visit Ithaca and roam around Seneca Lake a bit (Grist Iron Brewing, miniature golf at Sampson St. Park, and 9 holes at Geneva Country Club).
We are planning to take about 4 weeks for our journey back west this fall, starting a bit earlier than usual so that we can visit the northern tier of national parks: Theodore Roosevelt, Glacier, North Cascades, and Olympic. We still have a significant supply of frozen venison to transport back to Napa so we bought a campervan add-on: a Dometic travel freezer.
Maybe you are interested in finding US National Park Service and tracking your visits? I built an app for that! Give it a try and let me know what you think. Bug reports and enhancement suggestions are welcome.
2. 📖 What I've Been Reading
Articles:
- You'll never guess the culprit in a global lead poisoning mystery
- I wanted something similar to saving links to Tot so made my own version that saves to the always awesome Drafts app. Helps me keep a running log of links I want to save (for this newsletter and other things) in a single Drafts note, most recent first.
- Get off the treadmill or stationary bike: Pumping Iron Is Their Secret to Aging Well - The New York Times
- 27 Notes On Growing Old(er) - by Ian Leslie - The Ruffian
- I'm so tired of security ceremony at airports, and Alex agrees: Time Theft at the Terminal (which refers to $83 Billion Wasted). His comments on the ridiculousness of IAD ring true to me after spending too many hours there returning from Scotland.
Books:
- Currently reading Gardens of the Moon and listening to Demon Copperhead.
3. 🍿 What I've Been Watching
TV Shows:
- Mostly Gilmore Girls as aunt Judy binges seasons 1-6 through her afternoon naps and often after dinner.
Movies:
- A golfing friend recommended the 80s flick Local Hero, set in Scotland with a Mark Knopfler soundtrack. I liked it more than Julie. Definitely of its time.
- On a short camping getaway Julie and I watched part 1 of Billy Joel: And So It Goes. This is very good! His first wife was the real rock star.
YouTube:
- Bird nerd alert: watch how an audio geek saved a PNG image to a bird. Go on a walk with me outdoors and it is automatically a birding walk, and you'll probably hear me talk about bird adaptation through information sharing (offspring and other family and bird friends). This takes it to another level. The video inspired me to buy assorted kit pieces (arriving today!) to do some backyard bird tracking with AI-powered BirdNET-Go. Sorta like an always-on Merlin. Side note: Julie and I visited the Cornell Lab of Ornithology over in Ithaca last month!
- Watched this ESPN documentary on Bill Ackman playing tennis
4. 🎶 What I've Been Listening To
Music:
- Three new-to-me artists, all recommended:
- Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms is our latest album club pick and it holds up well. Americana before we used that word much. So many good memories of this album! First heard "Money for Nothing" while working the loading dock and back room opening a new Shopko (RIP) location in Omaha.
- Lotsa Billy Joel (because documentary), The Decemberists (because concert)
Podcasts:
- My podcasts streams crossed in Choose FI Ep 558 | Designing an Intentional Life | Tim Ferriss as Brad Barrett interviewed Tim Ferriss. Tim is definitely on (card game) promotion circuit but the conversation was worth listening to. Many of you readers are of a similar age as I and are nearing retirement. In Tim's Four Hour Workweek he talks about "filling the void", a topic he revisits frequently that poses good questions to consider before you make the big leap. Fun trivia - Tim and I were on the same podcast, different episodes, back in 2007.
5. 🎮 What I've Been Playing
- Hand and Foot, Five Crowns, 6 Nimmt
- Nearly done with my second playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 in Tactician mode. Just the final battle to go! I've had so much fun maxing characters and equipment on this run.
6. 📇 Spaced Repetition
I'm finding some knowledge I want to remember more readily, specifically in three categories: Spanish vocabulary and verb conjugations, USGA golf rules, and sailboat racing rules and terms. From my time in Spanish immersion class while we lived in Madrid I had a lot of study cards created in GoodNotes. I used to be a big GoodNotes fan: handwritten notebooks on the iPad with the Apple Pencil, and live drawing demonstrations for videos I'm capturing for my students. They added a flash card / study book / spaced repetition feature a few years ago and I found it easy to move stuff I was capturing in my class directly into flash cards for review. It doesn't work well as a dedicated app for that purpose though, so I started the process of extracting my Spanish vocab cards from GoodNotes. Turns out... you can't. There's no way, other than maybe writing some custom software to crack their file format and extract the information. This sort of behavior is grounds for subscription cancellation: goodbye GoodNotes!
I've since turned to Mochi and think it is solid so far. I've successfully (manually) moved all my Spanish cards in; turns out the manual work to do that wasn't such a bad idea after all as it reacquainted me with the vocabulary. I'm using the USGA rules 101 course to harvest a first pass at content to put in for the golf stuff. For the sailing stuff I've created a custom GPT and shared the racing rules of sailing with it, along with some magazine PDFs I've purchased that cover rules, strategy, and tactics.
Next newsletter will probably arrive just as we are ending our Keuka season and starting some #vanlife adventures. Hoping you have a great final half of your summer (or winter!) wherever you are.
-Chris