Greetings from the Rockester Airport — brother-in-law Mike just drove Julie and me from Keuka to the Rochester airport. We fly to South Africa today and I won't be back until October 19 — about nine weeks of overlanding with Ken through Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Namibia, with the Central Kalahari as the remote heart of it. I wrote up the last-minute gear and prep in Preparing for Nine Weeks in Africa. Last month I predicted this newsletter would go out "from Newark or thereabouts." Close enough.

The past few weeks have been the best kind of summer. Both sons here, grandson Rory, Florida family, and Aunt Judy — I wrote it up as Keuka Lake Fun. Before that I flew back solo for a long weekend of Golf and Grandson in Napa. And Album Club rolled on with Continuum by John Mayer (my pick) and Purple Rain by Prince (Jim's pick).

1. What I've Been Reading

Articles

1. Should You Use AI for a Task? Here's a Simple Way to Decide — Schneier. Timely for me: I'm helping review a course our faculty are building on using AI in teaching, and the hardest part is that "should I use it" isn't a yes/no question.
2. R.I.P. Your Backlog — Rands. Anyone who has ever declared backlog bankruptcy will nod along. Trying to determine how to frame ideas like this in my project management class this coming year.
3. 99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots — sobering if you run anything on the open web. I have a task to review my own Cloudflare setup as well as review telemetry on site traffic.
4. A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team — via Simon Willison, who remains the most useful person to follow on any of this.
5. Buy It, Gut It, Hold It Forever? — Evan Armstrong on where private equity is pointing next. Bending Spoons is the holding company for all the online platforms I abandoned as they veered towards total enshittification.
6. reveal.js — the HTML presentation framework. Poking at it as a possible replacement for slide decks in class. I already compose slide decks in Markdown but use a tool called Marp to turn into PDF and HTML. I think reveal.js likely has better long-term support.
7. Quinn — "your hardest program question, answered in days." Why? Read Jacob's update.
8. I'm using this iOS tip just about every day now.
9. Engineering Management After the Cost of Code Collapsed — a director's case that the "old rules" (don't code, protect the team from the business, get consensus first) don't hold anymore.
10. Emily Wilson on Translating the Odyssey — and Being Asked About Gender — the Odyssey translator on the new film, why "woman translates Homer" became the only headline anyone wanted, and what she'd rather talk about. Highly recommend reading Emily's translation.

Books

1. Advice on Upskilling by Justin Skycak — short, blunt, and mostly right. Certainly a template for what I've been attempting in 2026.
2. Chop Wood Carry Water by Andrew Taggart was just OK.
3. Currently deep into Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré, which I am enjoying enormously while needing a chart to keep the Circus straight.
4. Just took delivery of A Round of Scottish Courses by Jim Hartsell — more on why below.

2. What I've Been Watching

Honestly, almost nothing. It has been an outdoors month — boats, golf, pickleball, guitar playing most nights. The screen time went into photo editing and AI assisted app development instead.

3. What I've Been Listening To

Music

1. Glen Hansard, 1970–2026. This one landed hard. Falling Slowly has been in my guitar rotation for months and I played it the week he died without knowing. There was a tribute in Dublin with people singing in the street, which is exactly the right send-off.
2. Prince, The Beautiful Ones. I went down a rabbit hole working out why this song does what it does. The verse sits in F major; the chorus jumps up a minor third to A♭ — which is borrowed from F minor — so it simultaneously lifts and darkens. And the chorus cadence is a straight jazz ii–V–I. The remarkable part is that the harmony is otherwise dead simple and the melody is 100% diatonic.
3. Guitar rotation. Old Man was queued up as the next daily focus, but the rotation goes on pause for the trip — nine weeks of playing by ear around campfires instead. Through mid-August it ran through Jack and Diane, Wish You Were Here, Landslide, Wild Horses, One, Something, Fake Plastic Trees, Angela, Father and Son, Yellow, Heart of Gold, Hurt, Wonderwall, and Girl In The War, plus newer additions Kathleen (Josh Ritter), Running to Stand Still (U2), Pink Houses (Mellencamp), and Comedown (Bush).
4. Also in heavy rotation, off the guitar list: Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Ragged Glory, Charlotte Cornfield's Hurts Like Hell, and the Jayhawks' Sound of Lies — three you may not know, all worth a listen.
5. A nerdy aside on that rotation. I keep the songs in a list with a frequency tier — high, medium, low — and pick two a day. Except the high-tier songs kept falling further behind. Turned out the selection rule sorted by oldest practice date, so a medium song at 10 days always beat a high song at 9 days, even though the high song was three times past its target. Fixed it by ranking on multiples of the target interval instead of raw dates. Then discovered the real problem: eleven high-tier songs at a three-day target need 3.7 practice slots a day and I only have two. No algorithm fixes that. The answer was to play fewer songs.

Podcasts

1. No Laying Up #1195: The Hidden Gems of Western Scotland with Jim Hartsell — directly useful for next summer. See below.

4. What I've Been Playing

Golf

1. Much golf in Napa when I returned for Jacob's member-guest tournament.
2. Rounds at Lakeside Country Club with Jacob, and at Reservoir Creek with both Jacob and Matthew — getting out with both sons in the same week doesn't happen often.
3. Mike and I played a quick 9 from the front tees yesterday morning.

Sailing

1. We won a race. Last month I described myself as a long way from a competent skipper. Matthew and I took a first this month, which I am choosing to interpret as progress rather than luck. Also took Rory out on the M-15, which he loved.

Board Games

1. UNO with Adrienne, Harper, and Andrew visiting at Keuka.
2. Jump Drive — a quick spaceship deck-builder, a couple rounds with both sons.
3. Wingspan Pocket twice — once with the boys, once with new friends Joe and Mary Sirianni. This is a very good companion to the original game - much of the same feel and challenge, but only about 45 minutes of play time.
4. Flip 7 — the new obsession, several rounds including a last one at the Brewery of Broken Dreams before we left.
5. Scout — played several nights running once Rory went to bed. Deceptively sharp for how simple it looks.
6. 7 Wonders as a Julie birthday request, played with Jacob and Matthew.
7. Five Crowns with Judy, still the reliable whole-family pick.
8. Torchlit, up at Keuka Brewing with Julie and Matthew.
9. Pickleball with the family in Pulteney, which is not a board game, but the same category of "everyone can play."

5. What I'm Attempting

Africa, August 15 to October 19. Nine weeks. The route runs South Africa → Botswana → Zimbabwe → Mozambique → Namibia → South Africa, with the Central Kalahari the most remote stretch. The logistics puzzle that ate the most time: Starlink now allows only 30 days of service outside your home country at a time, so Ken and I are staggering two terminals — his from mid-August, mine from September 18 when we head into the CKGR. Which matters more than it sounds, because…

…fall term starts while I'm still out there. WOU begins September 28 and I land on October 19, the Monday of week four. So I'll teach the first three weeks from camps in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. Student meeting hours are set for 10:00–12:30 Oregon time, which is 19:00–21:30 for me — after the afternoon game drive, under a dish, in the dark. We'll see. Also: Starlink and Namibia are still fighting and we can't use it there at all.

If you followed the link about to see our route, you are seeing an app I built over the past two weeks to better visualize, organize, and share details about our Africa overlanding adventure. The icing on the cake was integrating a deep birding target analysis I conducted with the itinerary. At first I had this as an aside and just generated notes in my Obsidian vault. Then it became obvious that the details needed to be in the app, so that happend. Example: Botswana targets.

Scotland 2027 is now real. Flights booked and accommodation locked from May 26 through July 31 — six nights in St Andrews, then Brora for two months. The last month is Orkney and the west coast, still unbooked. Two things I learned this month worth passing on:

• The Old Course now runs a digital singles draw for individual golfers — no more overnight queue. You enter in person between 9am and 5pm the day before you want to play, they photograph you on a tablet, and a randomised draw at 5pm allocates tee times. I have four realistic attempts during my week there. Sunday doesn't count; the course closes and turns into a public walking park.
• That No Laying Up episode gave me a proper routing for the Hebrides: ferry from Oban out to South Uist for Askernish, north to Harris, then Stornoway, ferry back to Ullapool, and down the northwest coast through Gairloch and Durness. It reframes that whole corner of Scotland as something you arrive at by sea rather than grind toward by road.

WOU industry advisory board. Drafted a charter for the board I run — purpose, membership, what it actually does. Mostly an exercise in writing down what we already do, plus one clause I think matters: the faculty organizer has to report back on what the board's advice actually changed. Boards that give advice into a void stop giving good advice.

PhotoLoupe continues. Non-destructive editing, AI taxonomic tagging for wildlife, iNaturalist taxonomy integrated. It's about to get the real test — nine weeks and several thousand bird photographs. Still happy to let people try it (macOS only).

That's it — wheels up shortly. Next month's will come from somewhere with a satellite dish pointed at the sky and, if things go to plan, a brown hyena story or two.

-Chris