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.