Charlie has been completely attached to stuffed animals this week. He carries one with him at all times, including when we are at the grocery store and when he is sleeping. He refused to let an Elmo from daycare go on Friday, so Elmo is hanging out at our house this weekend.

We went and cut a Christmas tree today. Compare this photo of Amanda & Charlie picking out a Christmas tree today to Amanda & Charlie last year. He is getting so big! 😍

ChatGPT was the big thing in the tech world this week. I got access to the beta and have been using it as a learning tool. Pairing that with GitHub Copilot has sped up my programming and quickly resolving errors that would have otherwise taken me a while to figure out, such as “Serialization of ‘Closure’ is not allowed.” ChatGPT told me exactly where the error was and how to fix it! Amazing. It also coached me on how to break large requests down into smaller chunks to avoid timeouts.

Unfortunately it is still in early stages and sometimes makes up complete falsehoods. For example, I asked it to recommend a mystery book, which it did, but then it said the book won a prestigious award that I can’t find any evidence of it having won. Or suggesting API endpoints on public APIs that don’t exist. Or confusing WordPress.org with WordPress.com, which is a common mistake.

I used the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday emails as a chance to clean out my subscriptions with Leave Me Alone. Their $7 7-day pass is gold. They are an indie company, and unlike Unroll they don’t sell your email data.

I fixed a couple of bugs on my site that have been bothering me for a while. Feels good. I also made a ton of progress on making Jetpack Likes for posts into Webmention likes. I have a few things to tweak and test, but I expect to run it on my own site this week and then blog about it and share my script.

Amanda and I both noticed that we had some free time in our work schedules one day this week, so we decided to go out and have a lunch date at the spur of the moment and spend some child-free time together. That was really nice. More things like that in 2023, please.

Currently watching:

• The new season of The Crown on Netflix.
• The new Star Wars Andor series on Disney Plus.

Currently Reading:

• Neal Stephenson’s The Juncto, the fifth book in the Baroque Cycle series.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I added my Blogroll to the site this week after seeing great resources like blogroll.org and ooh.directory. Blogrolls are now more important than ever in our age of online social diaspora.

I also blogged about holiday cocktail ingredients and batch cocktails over at CookLikeChuck:

Homemade cocktail ingredients and batched holiday drinks that make great gifts – Cook Like Chuck

Have a cocktail lover in your life and want to make them something unique? Or want a host gift for a holiday party that will stand out against the bottles of wine everyone else is bringing? Here are some cocktail ingredients you can make at home and some batched holiday drinks you can make. Homemade…

cooklikechuck.com

I’ve been on a holiday cocktail quest lately, tracking down recipes from the Sippin’ Santa tiki popup, making syrups and liqueurs (cranberry syrup, cinnamon syrup, nutmeg syrup, ginger liqueur), infusing pineapple rum, and mixing up batches of Black Christmas and tequila and sherry eggnog. Some for personal consumption, some for gifts.

We are making good progress through our holiday card list, aided by the drinks above.

My Spotify Wrapped for 2022. Again I’m in the top 1/2% of Tycho listeners. I think they must be excluding certain artists, because we listened to A LOT of Caspar Babypants.

I’m off to do some Christmas decorating, cookie baking, and card writing! 🎄👋