Chris Brooks Newsletter 041
Today is our final full day at Keuka Lake as we begin a month-long journey back to Napa late tomorrow morning. The sailboats are put away, golf practice net stowed, van mostly loaded up, and the cottages nearly ready for winterization.
1. 🚘 Where I've Been Traveling
Not much travel at all! Julie and I did an overnighter on Cayuga Lake to do a shakedown run in the van and sanitize the water system. Went to the Women's Rights National Historic Park and played some golf at Seneca Falls Country Club. Museum was very cool and the golf was very average.
We also hosted a big crowd for the week leading up to Labor Day weekend.
2. 📖 What I've Been Reading
Articles:
Free the Patient: A Competitive-Federalism Fix for Telemedicine resonated with me; probably Julie as well as she's been dealing with telemedicine challenges. Try this: we are in a different state than our mailing address, a different state than our domicile, and a different state than our healthcare insurance provider. Trying to engage in telemedicine in a fifth state.
Good advice in Claude Code Q&A: What Works, What Doesn't, and What Will Save You Hours; I've been using Claude Code almost exclusively for tasks that go well beyond just programming.
Peak cinema has some likely good pointers to movies I should watch.
So good: What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?. As we grapple with generative AI etc. remember how little we know about our own human brains work. How do we string words together to complete sentences? How do we "create" new content?
I read What is Blueskyism? after deleting the app from my phone. No longer linking to my profile on my blog either. Not that I've ever been very engaged in social media, but the echo chamber effect is high in the blue sky.
The numbers are surprising: Birding Is a Booming Hobby—and a Big Business.
Son Jacob forwarded Class Dismissed and I subsequently listened to A.I. School Is in Session: Two Takes on the Future of Education about Alpha School. K-12 (and higher ed?) is going to see disruption and this model is a leading indicator.
Books:
Finished listening to the wonderful "great American Appalachian novel" Demon Copperhead; if you read it wait to listen to Ezra Klein interview Barbara Kingsolver until after you're done.
I'm winding my way through Merlin's Wisdom Project and highlighting some solid passages. I wrote about Merlin Mann back in 2009!
Almost done with Gardens of the Moon; second half of the novel much more engaging (and easier to follow the characters) than the first.
3. 🍿 What I've Been Watching
TV Shows:
We wrapped up season 2 of the surprisingly fun series Shrinking.
Invasion has been enjoyable on Apple TV, though maybe a bit too sci-fi horror for Julie's tastes.
When I'm alone (charging the Tesla!) I'm watching the 90s Cowboys and Jerry Jones documentary America's Team.
Movies:
I had a hankering to watch Clueless for the first time and it didn't disappoint. Alicia Silverstone is magnetic.
4. 🎶 What I've Been Listening To
Music:
I'm always in love (with Wilco) and I wrote a welcome kit if you think the time is right for you to do the same.
Jim and I continued with our album club, with our latest entry being Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Maybe the first time I've listened to this with headphones? "Hey Joe" sounds better than I ever expected this way, and brough back memories of hearing high school friend Mike play this in his band while I was living with him in Indy in 1985-86. Andrew Hickey has a great companion podcast.
Julie and I go way back with Matthew Sweet, who suffered a stroke while touring in Canada last year. He recently gave his first interview since the stroke and it is nice to see his recovery progressing. The notes about the major $ support from notable artists were touching. Recommended album listens: Girlfriend, 100% Fun, his series of covers with Susanna Hoffs starting with Under the Covers, Vol. 1.
5. 🎮 What I've Been Playing
I picked up the deluxe version of Vantage directly from Stonemaier Games and it was a big hit with the family crowd.
Coyote is surprisingly good with the right crowd. Rory even joined in for some table slapping support.
Similar to The Crew, the recent release The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a mission-based cooperative trick-taking game. I think the theming and missions in the LOTR game are much better, and the introduction of characters improves the play variety.
Our markers were fading in Just One plus we sometimes play with more players than advertised. So I bought Just One: New Version and mashed the two sets together.
6. 🏗️ What I'm Attempting
A new section! I'm always trying new things, building new stuff. Here's where I'll share the latest.
I use a Kobo as my eBook reader, coupled with Calibre for library management. I've been interested for a while in doing more with the Kobo than just reading novels; I'm deeply invested in Readwise and wanted to try using the Kobo to read long-form articles and even non-fiction eBooks. This will only work if I can highlight on the Kobo and have it sync back to Readwise. A year or two ago I installed KOReader on the Kobo (I think I was using a self-hosted Wallabag at the time) but gave up as the UI was too wonky and dissimilar to the native Kobo for my tastes. With the release of a Koreader plugin for Readwise Reader I decided to give it another run, this time successfully. I took more time learning how to customize the experience, finding this opinionated guide to KOReader very helpful.
My latest vibe coding adventure is a macOS app that can build an Apple Music playlist from a text file (e.g., an article), an audio file (e.g. podcast) or video file (e.g. YouTube). I find myself listening to podcasts that talk about music (like Indiecast) and wanting to explore the music discussed. Same for articles like this Ozzy tribute. I'm using Claude Code with an added MCP: sosumi.ai - Apple Docs for LLMs.
I did indeed buy another Raspberry PI and have a BirdNET-Go instance running. It works very well, though with non-stop overnight false positives for screech owls. I think it is the insects (cicadas) around here tricking it. Those are easy to ignore, and even with the water wave background noise it is giving me more clues about local birdlife that isn't always visible. Example: trail cams setup by our neighbor as they trap muskrats revealed a massive great horned owl wandering our shoreline. BirdNET is picking up calls at night from the very same. We'll take this on the road with us, using our Starlink connection to listen to birds in our different settings as we head west.
7. 🌅 Our Go West Itinerary
Here's our rough itinerary for the next four weeks:
Golf at Sand Valleyc in Wisconsin (courses: Sand Valley, Sedge Valley, Mammoth Dunes, and Julie and I will play the Sandbox). Sadly it doesn't look like I'll get to play The Lido.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park for two nights. Prairie dogs in the badlands.
Glacier National Park for two nights, scenic drives and day hikes planned.
North Cascades National Park for two nights, with the first night being a backpacking trip to hopefully wander through the changing colors of the larches.
Ferry over to the peninsula to visit Olympic National Park for two nights. Our focus will be rainforest and coastal hikes.
A brief stop on the Long Beach peninsula before stopping in the Portland area for 5-7 days. Medical tourism and old friends. Seeing WOU colleagues.
Arrive in Napa about October 8th. We have a fun birthday adventure for Jacob planned that first weekend that I'll report on next time around.