Here are a few of the more noteworthy happenings of the last few weeks.

🌵 Continuing our stay here in Arizona, where the winters are much more appealing than Ohio’s despite reaching some chilly temperatures at night. I’ve gotten out for a few nice bike rides (including getting my first flat tire ever) and scenic hikes. We’ve been spending a lot of time getting our new (to us) place in shape—a few repair and update projects and a bunch of new furniture. It’s starting to feel like it’s “our” place.

🍸 Our new neighbors have a daily (yes, daily!) happy hour, which is sometimes referred to a “circle time.” Everyone has been very welcoming and it’s been a great way for us to get to know the folks on our street. I’ve learned pretty quickly that drinking alcohol every day is not the path to wellness, so I’ve dialed that back significantly!

✝️ Probably inspired by all the religious-oriented fiction I’ve been reading lately (see below) I launched Saint Bot, a Mastodon bot that posts daily blurbs about Catholic Saints. Follow along, if that’s your jam.

📚 I finished three books in the last few weeks. (I guess that’s where some of my time has gone lately!) Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Sign of the Cross by Glenn Cooper, and Three Marys by Glenn Cooper. All were very entertaining. (Links are to my mini reviews if you want to know more.)

🧠 While my body may not be getting quite the attention it needs, I have been spending time exercising my brain. In the hope (possibly in vain) of preventing dementia, I continue to do the workouts and puzzles in Elevate, where I recently completed my 500th workout. I’m also continuing to resuscitate my Spanish language skills, and just completed my 100th day in a row of studying with Mondly. I feel like I’m getting value for both paid subs.

That’s probably enough for today. Thanks for reading. See you next time.

If you’re in the USA you’ve probably seen the Progressive Insurance commercials depicting Dr Rick, a man on a mission to help 30- and 40-somethings un-become their parents. I think they’re hilarious, but I’ve noticed that some people take them personally.

Despite all that, it semms inevitable that we all are doomed to channel at least some of our parents’ behaviors as we get older.

To my perennial horror, I frequently notice myself using gestures are turns of phrase that I absorbed from my father.

But this week I had a particularly startling revelation, and it didn’t arrive until long after the fact.

Let me back up and give you some background, in succinct bullet list form:

• I like to hike while I’m here in Tucson.
• I wear a straw panama hat that I bought in Mexico.
• The hat does not have a chin strap.
• I like my hat and don’t want to lose it.

A week or so ago, I was getting ready to leave with a group on one of our weekly hikes. At the last minute, I realized that my hat might be in danger so I rummaged around the shed to see if I had something to fashion a makeshift chin strap.

I didn’t find any old shoe laces or leather cord. Nor could I find any beads.

🚩 This right here, this should have been my warning sign to stop and go do something else.

But I persisted.

To my delight, I found some string and a hex nut.

You read that right: A HEX NUT.

This will work! I thought as I hastily accessorized my headwear. Success! The wind would not beat me on this day.

As an impromptu response to an urgent situation, this probably was okay. But it’s been two weeks now and the string and nut apparatus is still attached to my hat.

This is totally something an old man would do. This is not what cool dads do. I’ve wandered into “Okay, Boomer” territory.

I’m beside myself with a strange mix of pride (for my resourcefulness) and shame (for, well, you know).

I need Dr Rick.

• Pali Canon Summary (PDF, 2013)

• Consanguinity Table (PDF, 2018)

• Celsius to Fahrenheit Cheat Sheet (PDF, 2024)

This is a simple tool that generates five paragraphs of random “pseudo-English” text having structure and letter frequency similar to that of English language. The current implementation returns five paragraphs of random text with these characteristics:

<?php echo 'hello'; ?>

• Each paragraph has between 8 and 12 sentences.
• Each sentence has between 5 and 15 words.
• Each word has between 3 and 7 letters.

What is this good for? I suppose it’s good for Greeking, sort of like what Lorem Ipsum does, but in fake English rather than fake Latin.

Technical Details

The back-end code is loosely based on a Perl script I wrote years ago. That script was more of a multi-purpose command-line tool for generating (potentially large volumes of) test data. For this tiny project, I really just wanted to test creating an AWS Lambda function exposed as a simple ReST API.

You are welcome to download and use my buttons to link back to any of my blogs!

Film Simulation Recipes

Other FujiFilm Stuff

• 2026 Print-ready ISO Week Calendar
  • Past Years: 2022, 2023, 2024 2025

• TPS Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese

• Eating the Dragon, a three-book Chinese character frequency reference guide

• More Chinese Language Resources

• Demystyfying Generative Artificial Intelligence, slides to accompany a presentation I delivered at a meeting of IT architects (PDF, 2024)

• Assessing Classification Model Performance Using the Confusion Matrix, a quick reference for Data Mining students (PDF, upd. 2024)

• Choosing a Hypothesis Test (aka “The Burkhardt Chart”), a quick reference for Statistics students (PDF, upd. 2025)

😬 I’ve spent six of the last seven weeks in Arizona. There were a couple of tense weeks because there’s only so much togetherness with one’s mother one can take. But she returned home at the end of February and the sailing has been much smoother since then.

✍️ It’s interesting that a change of location can so profoundly change my routine. I haven’t been reading or posting to my Mastodon account as much. I haven’t been keeping my daily journal regularly. I haven’t been watching as much television. On the other hand, I’ve spent more time outdoors and have been more physically active these weeks. So I guess that’s good?

💻 Part of the “problem” is that I’m still working every day—on Eastern time no less! My work day starts at 5:00 AM and ends at 2:00 PM. I’m an early bird anyway so I mostly don’t mind.

🥵 If you’ve been following the news you’ll know that we’re experiencing unseasonably high temperatures. In the last few days we’ve topped 100ºF two or three days in a row. Believe it or not, It’s not uncomfortable to be outside—as long as you’re in the shade. You don’t want to be in the sun for very long at the hottest part of the day, and with my work schedule that makes getting out on the bike a little harder.

🚲 Speaking of biking, I did get out early on Saturday for a nice long ride. It’s so lovely to see the mountains in almost every direction. We saw a lot of the usual wildlife—prairie dogs, roadrunners, and even a bobcat—along the trail.

🐍 Oh and on the topic of wildlife... My eldest daughter came to visit and we went for several really nice hikes. On one of them I had my first snake encounter. It scared the bejeezus out of me, but it was just a harmless little gopher snake.

🍹 Our new neighbors get together every day for “circle time” (happy hour) at 3:30 PM—one of the perks of living in a 55+ community. I’m really grateful because it’s given us a chance to meet a lot of people very quickly and we already feel quite at home.

📮 I sent a post card to some friends on the other side of the country today. I hope they enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Would you like to get a post card from me? I’d be happy to send one if you share your address with me.

That’s probably enough rambling for now. Talk to you soon.

There are a lot of songs by a lot of artists that I enjoy, but there aren’t that many complete albums that I could listen to again and again from beginning to end. But drop the needle on any one of these and I’ll listen straight through.

• 1977 / Rumours / Fleetwood Mac
• 1986 / Boomtown / David & David
• 1987 / Brasil / The Manhattan Transfer
• 1987 / It’s Better to Travel / Swing Out Sister
• 1988 / Union / Toni Childs
• 1989 / Dancing With The Lion / Andreas Vollenweider
• 1990 / Alegría / René Dupéré (for Cirque du Soleil)
• 1990 / Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 / George Michael
• 1990 / The Rhythm of the Saints / Paul Simon
• 1992 / Diva / Annie Lennox
• 1992 / Rites of Passage / Indigo Girls
• 1992 / Little Earthquakes / Tori Amos
• 1994 / The Division Bell / Pink Floyd
• 1996 / Crash / Dave Matthews Band
• 1998 / Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too / New Radicals
• 2006 / The Holiday / Hans Zimmer
• 2016 / 22, A Million / Bon Iver
• 2012 / The Four Seasons Recomposed / Max Richter
• 2016 / Nine Track Mind / Charlie Puth

This seems like a short list, so I’ll likely come back and add to it at some point. I don’t do metal, but apart from that what did I miss? Drop me a line and let me know.

These are my thoughts on some of the biggest firms in the technology industry. Some are informed by my own experiences with these companies over the course of my 35-year career. Others are just observations. This is not intended as an exhaustive academic or financial analysis, just some random observations and opinions.

Nvidia (NVDA)

Market cap: $4,300,000,000,000

CUDA is an impressive and groundbreaking technology and Nvidia stands to profit handsomely once the world figures out what (if anything) massive foundational models are actually good for. But the lazy suzan arrangement with Microsoft and OpenAI seems destined to collapse.

Apple (AAPL)

Market cap: $3,761,000,000,000

A lot of people are bent out of shape about Tim Cook bending a knee at the altar of Trump, but Apple has a huge target painted on its back already and if I was him I’d pander to that pea-brained bully’s ego too if it meant keeping him from going on a revenge-fueled rampage against my company. Apple shareholders care less about principle than the security of their investment, and if Tim Cook won’t do what he has to do to protect it, then someone else will. At the same time, Cook hasn’t done a stellar job of leading Apple. They’re coasting — Apple’s iPhone is like Nabisco’s Oreos; people are born wanting them — and directionless. Is it because there’s nowhere left to go? Surely not. But Apple’s biggest product launches since Steve Jobs died (more than 14 years ago!) have all been refinements of existing products — a watch, headphones, and VR goggles. Yawn.

Alphabet (GOOG)

Market cap: $3,562,000,000,000

Google is a company built on luck. No, that’s unfair. They’re a company that’s coasting on the momentum of a few key breakout technologies: PageRank (the secret sauce behind Google’s search algorithm), MapReduce (which revolutionized processing very large datasets), and Tranformers (the “T” in GPT). Take those away and you’re left with a “false friend” that whimsically takes away just as many useful products as it delivers. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a few nice things, but why would you use GCP when there’s AWS?

Microsoft (MSFT)

Market cap: $2,776,000,000,000

Microsoft is one of my biggest tech pet peeves. Their motto should be, “anything you can do, we can do worse.” How can a company that’s been in this business for as long as it has (51 years) still be so. freaking. bad. at. everything? Their user interfaces are excruciating. Everything is named “copilot.” Their search functions couldn’t find the sun in the sky on a clear day. Windows is a convoluted mess. Teams sucks. Outlook sucks — although in fairness, it’s better than Lotus Notes. Azure Cloud sucks. Ever since they acquired it, GitHub sucks. Everything this company touches is junk.

Amazon (AMZN)

Market cap: $2,252,000,000,000

Amazon has some problems. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, is not particularly likable. The company engages in some ethically questionable practices that mostly stem from an inherent conflict of interest with respect to its status as both a third-party sales platform and producer of products. Like other logistics giants — most notably, UPS — they have a questionable track record when it comes to their workforce. This is less a corporate problem than a public policy problem; as long as there are weak labor laws, there will be companies that exploit workers. I am a regular Amazon customer (including Amazon.com, AWS, and Whole Foods) and I interact with AWS professionally. There’s more good here than bad.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM)

Market cap: $1,758,000,000,000

TSMC (as it is usually known) built a massive enterprise manufacturing semiconductor chips to order for other companies, including Apple (it’s biggest customer), Qualcomm, Broadcom, and even other semiconductor manufacturers like Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. Don’t look now, but most of your chips come from (the Republic of) China.

Meta Platforms (META)

Market cap: $1,453,000,000,000

This is another company that I just hate. It’s not because they are evil, although I’m pretty sure they are, and it’s not because Zuck is a twit, although he is. The thing that really grates on me is that they’ve made delivering a supremely awful user experience into a high art. The “feeds” on Facebook and Instagram are inscrutable. They are delivered out of sequence without dates and with more “for you” garbage and ads than the stuff you actually follow. It’s a veritable continuous vomit-stream intended to keep you engaged, all in the name of monetization. What a load of horseshit. No thanks.

Broadcom (AVGO)

Market cap: $1,491,000,000,000

Hock Tan, the Genghis Kahn of CEOs, is currently waging a campaign of conquest as he pillages the customers who can’t migrate of of Broadcom’s products and wriggle out of its bone-crushing contracts fast enough. When it’s all said and done, there’ll be nothing left but burning embers.

Tesla (TSLA)

Market cap: $1,353,000,000,000

Just as Donald Trump is a stupid person’s idea of what a rich man looks like, Elon Musk is a stupid person’s idea of what smart businessman looks like. He hasn’t created anything and he’s clearly got some kind of mental defect. Even setting that aside, a lot of people are fond of saying that Musk’s ability to spot talent and invest in good ideas makes him a savvy businessman. His one real success, PayPal, turned out to have lasting value and fueled what has since been a turbulent shit show. The Boring Company, Neuralink, Twitter, and xAI are all raging dumpster fires. Tesla is a company in decline, due to a combination of a failure to innovate (apart from the breathtakingly stupid Cybertruck) and Musk’s blatant nazism. Who would want to buy something that is both passé and known colloquially as a swastikar? Surprisingly, he hasn’t (yet) managed to tank SpaceX. Maybe it’s just a matter of time.

These next few companies are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of market capitalization, but they are significant companies.

ASML Holdings (ASML)

Market cap: $517,200,000,000

Who?! The biggest tech company you’ve never heard of, ASML holds a global monopoly on advanced Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography machines, a key component in the manufacture of today’s semiconductors. They’re at the center of numerous controversies, but hey what can you do? We gotta have chips, right?

Oracle (ORCL)

Market cap: $421,000,000,000 I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: Larry Ellison is the devil. Do business with Oracle at your soul’s peril. There’s nothing there that you can’t get just as good or better get elsewhere.

Palantir Technologies (PLTR)

Market cap: $355,100,000,000

One of my rules of thumb is that anything associated with Peter Thiel is inherently evil, so it should come as no surprise that Palantir provides surveillance and intelligence gathering software to government agencies like ICE. Fuck them.

Intel (INTC)

Market cap: $253,000,000,000

Intel is the “name brand” chip maker that’s still around despite numerous competitors producing generics that are just as desirable. The company may sport a cheerful sound mark but like Coriolanus Snow’s roses it can’t eradicate the foul stench of the Randall Schwartz affair.

IBM (IBM)

Market cap: $232,900,000,000

IBM still exists? Oh yes, I am reminded every time I try to bring in a new vendor on a project. Invariably (this has happened at multiple employers) the Procurement department steps in at the last minute and insinuates IBM into the conversation. On one project, they (Procurement) even invalidated my vendor scorecard because IBM wasn’t included in the evaluation. I guess professional services keeps IBM going these days, and funds some ongoing research. It’s been ten years since Watson, and now they’re doing something with quantum computing. That’ll probably reach a peak in a few years then quickly be eclipsed by something from Google. And then it’ll be on to the next thing.