Thoughts

Charlie turned six months this week! He is growing so quickly and gaining a lot of core strength and coordination. I bet he’ll be crawling in the next month.

Public education suffers from many things, chief amongst them is the complete lack of autonomy most students face for the majority of their childhood. The effects can be devastating and have long-term consequences. (Inspired by this Twitter thread.) More student autonomy is desperately needed. We each want to feel like we have more say over the directions of our lives.

We renewed our vegetable CSA (community supported agriculture) share for our 9th year. We are going with Roxbury Farm this year, similar to the last two years. The vegetables and variety are great, the pickup location is convenient, and they send out an informative newsletter that we enjoy each week. I love the challenge each week of making meals with the local seasonal assortment of vegetables we receive.

I went to a funeral this week for the first time in six years. A close friend’s father passed away unexpectedly. It was the first Jewish funeral I’ve attended. I found the Hebrew chants quite beautiful (though I didn’t understand the words). I was also moved by how the filling in of the grave is a physical communal act that brings a sense of finality to the ceremony. One isn’t just watching someone get buried, but actually doing the burying. I participated, then after the other attendees finished their shovelfuls, I helped my friend and a couple others finish filling in the rest of the grave. It was an honor to be handed a shovel and asked to help. The experience was on my mind all week and it will stick with me for a long time.

I’ve been making a lot of website updates. I switched to twentytwentytwo and went all-in on FSE. I’m slowly updating templates and template parts and dialing in mobile. Also taking the opportunity to add more pages to the site about various projects I’m working on. I’m making these updates primarily when Charlie sleeps, so changes will be gradual.

I got a Work Sharp Mk.2 and it beats every other knife sharpener I’ve used in terms of speed and the level of sharpness you can get in such a short period of time. My kitchen knives are razor sharp after just 4-5 mins per knife. I first heard about it on Cool Tools.

I got my smoker out for the first time in a year and a half. (Has it really been that long? Pandemic time is mind-bending.) I smoked some pork for tacos arabes. I decided to leave the smoker out so that it lowers the barrier to using it. High on the “in the next month or two” list: Pastrami (which I’ll make when I cure corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day), beef for birria tacos, Canadian bacon (needs to be cured beforehand).

Everyone is thinking about Wordle’s acquisition and indie games. I have an idea for a number game that I’d like to hack on soon: Pick a random two-digit number and figure out how to combine 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 with any operators (+, -, /, *, sqrt(), ^n ) to create the number. Share your time and whether or not you used all 5 numbers to create it.

I found my canelé molds in the basement this week. I want to experiment with making small batches of canelés and dial them in. They are my favorite coffee break snack.

It is almost time to start seeds again! The leeks didn’t work well last year, so those are out. I want to grow some jalapeños this year (which I haven’t in a couple years) so that I can make some fermented hot sauce and smoke some to make my own chipotles.

Reading

I’ve been reading so much recent stuff that I forgot how great Project Gutenberg is for old books. I just downloaded a bunch of Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers to my Kindle.

Recently finished: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Continuing: The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse and The Control of Nature by John McPhee

Articles I’ve enjoyed this week:

• My friend Jackson Bierfeldt is doing a retreat to build a new game, Subject Predicate. I’ve enjoyed his weekly updates.
• Jeremy Felt’s note about Elinor Ostrom, commons, and WordPress. Particularly of interest to me with my background in econ. I’d love to see more studies on open source communities. Which reminds me that Working in Public is still on my to-read list.
• Everything in the new Right Click Save publication. Good commentary about the NFT space from Artnome and his team.
• On the generative art front, something I’ve been exploring a lot of recently
  • Ben Kovach’s What Makes Generative Art Hard?
  • Gorilla Sun’s post laying out an algorithm for polygons with rounded corners in p5.js
  • Nadieh Bremer’s write up about her recent release, Anhedra.