The flooring and painting at the Napa house is wrapping up and we're looking forward to moving back in soon. In the meantime, we've been staying at Kaitlin's grandmother's place and spending a lot of time with our grandson Rory—urban hikes, trail walks, and general adventures around the valley. Usually involving balls, and often in search of elephants.

1. 🚘 Where I've Been Traveling

Julie took a work trip to Kansas City for a few days, so I had some bachelor time in Napa. Still enjoying hiking the area - I did a trail run at Skyline Park, Julie and I hiked Westwood Hills Park together after she got back (nice views of the valley and perfect weather), and we did a hike together with Rory back at Skyline Park.

2. 📖 What I've Been Reading

There's a lot about AI below, and for good reason. Nearly everyone I know in software development who's been using AI tools – mainly Claude Code – over the past two months agrees: we just hit an inflection point. Feel free to reply to this and chat with me if you want more editorial.

Articles

1. AI continues to dominate my reading list. Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, shared how he uses his own tool—his setup is surprisingly vanilla. Molly Cantillon wrote a provocative thread called The Personal Panopticon about running her life out of Claude Code and the asymmetry of personal data visibility.
2. Claude + Obsidian Got a Level Up by Eleanor Konik is relevant to my own Claude Code + Obsidian workflow. I just run Claude Code out of the root of my vault and it has become the primary way I interact with it these days.
3. On the education front: Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots resonates with challenges I'm facing in my own courses. I'm basically done giving exams.
4. My son Jacob launched Specmark, a tool for annotating markdown specs for AI feedback. He also wrote up his 2026 theme, objectives, and key results.
5. Two fun lists: The 100 Best Films of the 21st Century and The 9 Best Video Games of 2025 from Roger Ebert's site.
6. nanolang is a tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs. Interesting concept. We also have (from Simon Willison): Introducing Showboat and Rodney—tools for AI agents to demo what they've built. So yes, humans are designing development tools using AI to help AI get better at developing.
7. Simon Willison on The Perfect Commit—a commit should include the implementation, tests, documentation, and a changelog entry. Reviewing materials for a software testing class I'll be teaching next term.

Books

1. Finished Tandia by Bryce Courtenay, the sequel to The Power of One. They are both good, not amazing. A bit too much "white man savior" complex going on for my taste. Still good to hear South African place-names and reflect on my past visit and look forward to my next one.
2. Julie and I are both deep into Dungeon Crawler Carl, all the rage these days and for good reason. I'm on Carl's Doomsday Scenario, book 2, and Julie finished book 3. We've heard the audio books are amazing but haven't tried yet.
3. Listened to Love and Let Die by John Higgs—an exploration of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones through the lens of the 20th century. I really didn't know what to expect with this book but it was engaging enough to keep me through the end. Definitely a hit piece on Ian Fleming and I guess his estate isn't too happy about this. For Beatles fans this is a great companion piece to John and Paul: a Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie.
4. Finished Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Don't bother.

3. 🍿 What I've Been Watching

TV Shows

1. Finished Stranger Things season 5. The nostalgia ride has ended but a great ride it was.
2. Caught up on The Night Manager season 2 after finishing season 1 and it didn't disappoint. Diego Calva as Teddy Dos Santos stole the show.
3. Finished It: Welcome to Derry on HBO. This is solidly in the category of stuff Chris has to watch without Julie, and it was top notch. Great characters, scary as #$@%.
4. Rewatched Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV with Carolyn and Julie. Just as good the second time around.

Movies

1. F1 on Apple TV—Brad Pitt comes out of retirement to mentor a younger driver. Fun watch if you enjoy racing or staring into Brad's dreamy eyes.

4. 🎶 What I've Been Listening To

Music

1. The highlight of the month was seeing Jason Isbell live at the Luther Burbank Center. The band is excellent and it's easy to forget how good Isbell is on the guitar.
2. Album club picks: Double Nickels on the Dime by Minutemen and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by ... Lauryn Hill. Both outstanding in their own ways, but also both not likely to enter my usual rotation. They are seminal works that are important for when they happened. The Minutemen album is harder to relate to unless I can transport myself to 1984 when I was listening to 1984 (duh), Born in the USA, Purple Rain, Make it Big, etc. Double Nickels would have felt so out of place, so groundbreaking, but I'm sure I couldn't have appreciated it at the time. We likely wouldn't have Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and maybe even Wilco in the same way without their influence. And Miseducation... much more listenable, always reminds me of What's Going On.
3. I'm continuing to take guitar lessons weekly with Collin on Lessonface. Recently I've worked on (and listened a lot to): Hurt (Johnny Cash version), Come As You Are by Nirvana, and Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead (why not go listen to the acoustic version from Clueless?).

5. 🎮 What I've Been Playing

Boardgames

1. Wargames on Vassal continue: BCS Arracourt rematch with Allen, Holland '44 with Doug is nearing the end (my Allies are flooding the island - with troops, not water!), and Italy '43 campaign with John is just starting.
2. War Diary Magazine from War Diary Publications was referred to me by friends Ken and Bruce, and I purchased issue 28.

Videogames

1. Hades II—I think I'm finally done. For real this time.
2. Now on to Blue Prince, I've gone through a few days and enjoying it.

6. 🏗️ What I'm Attempting

1. I created a Vassal module for Undaunted: Stalingrad and looking forward to resuming my campaign with Greg soon.
2. Trying more dictation via Handy.computer.
3. moltbook caught my eye as "the front page of the agent internet." Worth keeping an eye on as agentic AI matures.
4. Of course I have OpenClaw up and running, now my preferred way of interacting with Claude and my Obsidian vault when away from my main computer.
5. PyView is a Python web framework I'm evaluating for potential use in my software development courses. Same for Hotwire / HTML Over The Wire and Datastar.
6. Good Start Labs—AI model training and evaluation using games. I'm close to experimenting with my own AI training focus, likely around rules for a complex wargame (Advanced Squad Leader or Battalion Combat Series).

Enjoy your February. Next time around we will be ready to start our annual trek to Arizona and southern Utah.

-Chris