I had Monday and Tuesday off this week because Callum had Monday and Tuesday off. On President’s Day Callum, Julie, and I went to IKEA. We had our IKEA lunch and shuffled around finding odds and ends. We got a pretty vase for the dining room table and I got some Zigbee buttons for home automation. Callum got a new pillow.

We had to get Callum back for a meeting so Julie and I played games. For dinner I made some beef ramen with short-rib bones from our dinner party. I thought it was tasty. Then Olympics continued.

On Tuesday I had to take Junie into surgery, then Callum to the eye doctor, then pick up Junie. Junies surgery went well. She was a bit loopy, but came back strong. She stills love the vet and we love her in her Junie suit.

The later half of the week Callum had UIL One Act Play rehearsal so I didn’t have a car to go see a movie. The fam has promised to see “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” this Friday. We’ll see if it’s still in theaters then.

I’ve gotten pulled into another project at work and I’m feeling optimistic about it, but really out of my depth and bone tired at the end of the day.

On Saturday I started with some gardening. I cleared out a lot of the back beds. Then Stella came home and we had our craft day. We had balsamic mashed potatoes for dinner and then I braved the Moody traffic to get Stella back to school. Tons of nonsense and uber drivers driving where there weren’t lanes.

On Monday Julie had Callum to watch the Olympics with so I snuck off with my movie pass to see “Whistle”. It was a better movie than it had any right to be. I didn’t know it was written by Owen Eggerton before seeing it. And there was definitely some talk of “vinyls” and how good an inherited record collection that I would have clocked as his work from a mile away. Seeing horror movies alone in a mostly empty theater is still my second favorite way to see them.

On Wednesday I took Junie back into the vet. She had a growth that had grown multiple inches in a couple days. She had to get it sampled and the vet made slides and checked it out. Junie got to go into the back to get her blood drawn which she loves. She’s such a social dog. The vet techs always bring her back beaming because she’s made friends with everyone in the office. Turns out it was just an abcess and she’s on antibiotics and it’s shrinking. But that dog is getting expensive. I’m taking her in for surgery tomorrow. Think good thoughts for her!

I thought about seeing another movie on Wednesday while Julie was at band practice. But could not get enthused. I get so stressed out trying to get to movies that start around 6pm after making dinner.

On Thursday Julie and I had one of our super-nerdy dates. We went to see Jeff Speck the author of “Walkable Cities” at the episcopal church downtown. It was wild. Like rock concert levels of clapping and woo-ing. Here are my notes from that talk:

1. One-way streets are bad for business, but they’re good for crime. If you think about it they create blind spots at every corner where drivers (including the police) never look. Having 2-way traffic on dirty sixth could potentially make it safer. This blew my mind.
2. For all but the busiest intersections traffic lights slow traffic down and should be converted to 4 way stops. Stop signs are both safer and faster. Which is counterintuitive, but probably how Google Maps knows how long your trip will take. It’s basically just the time you’ll be waiting at stop lights. The speed you drive probably changes that by at most 30 seconds.
3. street parking is good for walkable areas as it creates a physical barrier between the cars and people. So we want to keep parking to shield pedestrians and cyclists.

After that we went to True Foods Kitchen at the old power plant. We decided to eat outside in the wonderful weather, but forgot about the train. We got two trains turning the corner during dinnner. Julie did not dig it.

On Friday Julie was not feeling well and so we just hung at home.

On Saturday we had dinner with friends we’ve known since Stella was in Baptist pre-school. It was a very fancy Valentine’s dinner party with short ribs and a beautiful table setting. It’s amazing having friends for so long. I managed to take home some beef ribs and I’m currently making beef ramen which smells insanely good.

On Sunday Stella came home after much drama because the buses were on detour due to the marathon. We ended up walking the new wishbone bridge, picking up groceries, and having our traditional valentines pizzas.

This week has been quite something for me on the AI front. I was not particularly bullish on AI, but have been using it because I like to have an informed view and it seemed important for my job. I’ve been using it for quite a while now, and have had lots of anxiety about it taking my job.

But this past week and half has been an accelerant. The models have improved immensely and importantly are being used to speed up development of newer versions. I reached about 5-10x my average weekly output at work. And I’m really bone tired. Because what is left is all the really hard stuff. Reviewing code. Really understanding it deeply and looking for things the AI might have missed. I’ve become convinced it is going to take over most of our work. This isn’t something I advocate for or want to protest against. I think it’s inevitable at this point. The question is really only how as a society we change because of it.

So at a dinner party this weekend the topic turned to AI, and invariably people bring up that kids should learn a trade as those won’t be impacted by AI.

And this honestly gets back to why I can’t even imagine the future. I think we are in the middle of a transition akin to the industrial revolution. But our current economy is built upon consumers. So if 90% of white collar workers lose their jobs to AI as some tech companies are predicting it would absolutely destroy the economy.

And I think trades would suffer as well. If there are no offices and no middle class people remodeling their houses then how many electricians do we need? If people don’t have money will they pay for haircuts? They can after all do that themselves if they have a pair of scissors or clippers. Will they go out to eat? Will they need to repair their cars? To go where? Sure we’ll need plumbers, but how many? And how competitive will that field be once all of the office plumbing jobs no longer exist?

There is no safe career path if AI can do nearly everything. And that’s without thinking about what AI’s working 24/7 can do to advance robotics.

Ultimately we’re all in this together. We have to think about what kind of society we want to have.

I’m trying to be optimistic. I think we can have a Universal Basic Income and a right to housing, food, and education. And then what comes next for us as humans? That’s something we haven’t done enough dreaming about in my opinion. At the dinner party I was asked somewhat rhetorically “how may artists does humanity need?” I think that’s a really good question. What if art was something we all did? Not to create products. Not to try to sell to each other. Creating just for our own enjoyment. Something we did to pass the time and enjoy each other as all our needs are now met?

One thing that has caused a lot of discussion on social media is the notion that using AI to create visual or written media isn’t creating art. And I definitely lean more towards the notion that it isn’t. But I also think we have made all of our art too much of a product. We talk about how art is great for others to consume. Roger Ebert famously called film a “machine that generates empathy”. But one thing we don’t talk about is what art does for the artists. Limiting those who can create art has felt necessary since the number of people to consume the art is limited. Theater for years has had a creation cost that far exceeds any possible revenue. But people keep making it. What if art was also something our culture thought had a benefit for the artist? I think it’s important that art nurtures that artist’s soul as well, and I believe that’s something everyone on earth could benefit from.

So maybe I’m hoping that if AI does move us into a post-work world that we will all have copeous time to sit around creating and learning from each other.

So what should your kid study? I think something they enjoy that will teach them to think.

I’m obviously an artist so my view is very specific. What would you do if you no longer had to work?

The week started with some craziness. All the gaskets on the pool equipment seem to have gone at once. I was trying to debate replacing a temperature sensor that was leaking, but went to Lowe’s instead and got one of those rubber gasket multipacks, and solved the leak. Let me feel very accomplished.

This week Junie started bleeding again so we took her to the vet. She has 3 more bleeding growths that need to be removed so we set her up for surgery. Poor guy.

On Wednesday I made a last minute decision to see a movie and saw “Two Sleepy People”. It’s an Austin indie movie. I was really glad I saw it. A chatty relationships movie is completely up my alley. Thanks to Julie for getting me a Regal Unlimited pass. I’m definitely taking more chances in movies. In it one of the women bemoans divorce because “she raised” her husband. And man that was a really sympathetic line.

Friday we watched the Olympics opening ceremony as a family. Saturday Cal had Solo & Ensemble for Choir. He drove himself so we got to sleep, which was heavenly. Then off to UT for Texas Preview. We saw presentations from the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Communications, and Natural Sciences. Stella joined us at the end and we ate lunch at Kerbey Lane. There was a waiter assignment error and we ended up waiting way too long for our already late lunch. We got home and tried to fix our dishwasher before having our neighbors over for game night.

By this point my foot had had it. I’m trying to get the swelling back down and eat less salt this week.

We got the dishwasher fixed this morning. Trying to see glass in the bottom of a dishwasher pump well is really difficult. But Julie got it out and all is well. Finished weeding the cheat grass out of our buffalo grass and got all my seeds planted.

Now it’s time for Elizabeth Street’s “Chicken and Rice Soup” I made and more Olympics.

On Sunday we ended up going sledding before it started melting in the sun. But it didn’t melt enough and refroze as super-ice.

So the week started with two snow days. Callum enjoyed it, but Julie and I had to work like any other normal day. So it ws like a normal workday with additional climbing up the walls.

We had the yearly worry that the furnace was going out, but we just had to disconnect the temperature probe and clean it with steel wool. Always a fun time.

On Wednesday Callum and I went to see John Woo’s “Hard Boiled” in the theater. I don’t think I properly setup the movie before we went in and he thought it was all a bit too much. Which - fair. That’s basically what “Hard Boiled” is - too much. Dang that baby’s cute, tho. I’m still going to try to get him to see “Better Tomorrow” and “The Killer” when they come out.

On Friday we went to see a Middle School murder-mystery bingo fundraiser. We quit at intermission, because we couldn’t hear anything and didn’t have a kid in the show. We ended up at Kirbey Lane and had a great time.

On Saturday Stella came home for lunch and we went out to Modern Market and then the Central Library. I like to park right next to 5th street and walk over to the Central Library along the Shoal Creek paths. But that might have been a bit much on my newley walkable de-bunioned foot. Stella and I got drinks at the Cafe Creme in the library and we got books to plan our Mexico City vacation. We also bought plane tickets!

Stella took the car to go dancing, so Julie and I took Callum to see Les Miserable at Bowie and then on to a date. We started first with a reservation at Sputnik. They had live music and the general vibe was - loud and not a date so we bailed. We ended up at Osterhouse which was surpringly good. Then we went over to the HEB to get some candy, and then over to 400 Rabbits for drinks while waiting to pickup Callum. There’s not a huge amount to do in that part of town, but it was a pleasant night out.

On Sunday we got groceries and just go caught up on stuff. Julie went out with friends for dinner so Stella, Callum, and I had a chickpea laden pasta dinner, then took Stella back to UT. I spent a lot of the day working on adding live-chat conversations to Fun Old Times.

So we are iced in. We got a fair amount of ice last night and it’s quite cold. But we’re snuggly. That insulation we installed a year ago has changed these sort of events from a situation where we try to close off parts of the house and white-knuckle it hoping the pipes don’t freeze, to a very snuggly warm experience.

This week started with grocery Monday and not doing much of anything. Which was nice, but I think Julie needed more scheduled programming. On Wednesday I went to the Doctor and got a very positive report on my bunion surgery. I’m now just in a surgical boot and can walk on it. I also got cleared to e-bike places. So I went and picked up some McDonalds. For some reasons they didn’t have curbside so I ended up walking more than I wanted to go pick up the food inside. I also went on a walk around the neighborhood with Julie. I definitely overdid it on the first day which probably should surprise no one.

On Thursday I got a couple dudes out to Koko’s to hang out. That place is just weird. There were half a dozen employees there who seemed to be trying to avoid us. We had to order at the bar and the two bartenders seemed to be doing everything. Reminds me of old Austin and service at places like Opal Divines where the servers would disappear into the upstairs bar and get waster.

Speaking of Opal Divines. Friday we tried out our local hotel restaraunt - Machi Sushi which replaced the last Opal Divines in the Best Western across the highway. It had transformer statues out front and had all you can eat sushi. It was definitely a step up in food quality from Kura’s and was a fun experience. It’s nice to have a place everyone likes so close. Of course, I pledged to finish up any food people didn’t have room for so I ended up eating way too much sushi. Then I ordered a fried twinkie. The server made it look like an irradiated frog with 3 eyes. Good times, but I was in a bit of pain afterwards.

Saturday we put up the Christmas decorations. I managed to get on a ladder and get the lights down. Just went slow and steady. But my foot was an overstuffed sausage by the end of it. We watch Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” which started slowly, but ended up being a fun comedy.

This week I added the ability to poll you friends to Fun Old Times. I’m also working on something like the text message replacement I always wished I had.

This week was punctuated by trying to get me off my scooter and back on my feet. Julie really felt that all the post-surgery information saying I should be back on my feet after 6 weeks should superceded the fact my follow-up appointment is 7 weeks out. I ended up contacting the doctor and got a very firm no back.

On Tuesday Julie, Travis, and I had our first reconvening of our writing group. We did a writing exercise sending a letter from your 80 year old self to your current self. It was a much deeper exercise than I was expecting.

This past weekend we went to Houston for our belated Christmas. We hung out around the fire pit in my Dad’s apartment complex on Saturday. We got to see my sisters Kate and Christine and my nephew Peter.

Then on Sunday we had Christmas with Julie’s family and drove back to Austin.

This week I’m hoping to get back on my feet on Wednesday and have a Dude’s Night on Thursday.

This year I’m going to try to write a weeklog to record my gratitude and remember the small things.

Week 1 was mostly encompassed in my New Years post. But I did miss that we went to the San Antonio Zoo to see the new Gorilla Exhibit (and our old pals the anteaters). The Gorillas were very cool. One wandered around like a human on two legs and that was pretty wacky. We had dinner at La Fonda on Main. It was pretty good elevated Mexican. I had some skewers over rice. It had a lot of vegetables which was great, but the beef had zero seasoning which was a bit baffling. All in all a great dinner, though.

On Saturday we watched the Stranger Things finale. I think it was more emotional for me than for the kids. The ending was so wrapped up with COVID and the fact we’re almost empty nesters and everything is changing in our family very quickly.

On Sunday we went to the Wildflower Center for a walk. Checked out Fortlandia. Getting exercise on one leg while not overdoing it has proven a real struggle.

This week was back to the grind, although I still enjoy work and it’s really not that bad. I think just being tired from my leg makes everything drag.

We planned a 50th birthday party for my old friend Travis. We had custom merit badges and a fun cake and I realized that I was the one having control issues and getting wigged out about the planning. But it all came off without a hitch. We had this old badge maker we’d gotten at Austin Creative Reuse and I ordered some blanks we hoped would work off of Amazon.

Our only worry is we have kicked off this phase of our life with too good of a party and it’s going to be hard to keep this pace.

We’re taking Stella back to the dorms tonight, so it’ll just be the three of us again. I think I’m doing better about saying goodbye now. Last year was really rough.

This week we’re going to start back with a bi-weeky writing night on Tuesday. Fingers crossed it goes well.

Have you ever heard the phrase:

| He became desensitized to violence and moved to the country to live a peaceful life herding sheep.

You haven’t. Because that’s not how trauma works. You don’t need to watch that video and traumatize yourself. You already know something horrible happened. You know it’s not right. If you watch that video you will literally terrorize yourself.

People who have been traumatized seem ok. They seem to be doing fine. Except when they occasionally lash out inappropriately. Or drink too much. Or have a heart attack because they are always in fight or flight mode.

The day of 9/11 I turned off my TV and worked on my computer. The people I knew who spent the day glued to their TVs were traumatized by watching the plane crash over, and over, and over, and over*. Some decided to join the military for vengence. Some aired horribly racist views. Many gleefully supported the war and destruction.

You don’t have to watch it. You are motivated to make the world a better place without watching it. How will it help?

People who become desensitized to violence aren’t the ones who go on to make their countries better. They’re the ones who end up shooting up a friendly bipartisan baseball game.

You don’t have to watch the video.

NYE Party

We had our annual New Year’s Eve party last night. I bartend and it was a great time. I started when I still drank as a way to drink less and prevent a hangover. But now that I’ve been sober for over 6 years I just enjoy the process.

We had new friends, old friends, and I had several really meaningful conversations.

I played with generative AI (specificly Google Gemini) to try to generate a drink menu for NYE. It was an interesting experience. It was very good at coming up with drinks based upon the alcohol I had on hand. It was amazing at drink names. It was very bad at making up drink recipes. And I have no idea why it felt it needed to come up with its own recipes. It was weird. It was also great at garnishes. I tried to create a menu image, and Google’s Nano Banana just will not put the text you want in the image. It was a good exercise for seeing what the state of the art is right now. And I’ll go back to not asking AI questions for a while.

But through all these iterations/failures I came up with this drink based upon an Elderflower Collins. The drink is great spirited or spirit-free:

Midnight Garden

• 2oz Gin
• 1 oz Elderflower Liqueur
• 1/4oz Creme de Violet
• 1oz lemon
• 1/2 oz hibiscus simple syrup (steep dried hibiscus blossoms for 3 minutes in 1 cup water, strain, add the liquid + 1 cup sugar and stir over high heat until fully disolved, let cool)
• Soda water
• Garnish with a sprig of fresh thyme

For the spirit-free I used Belvoir Farm Elderflower Syrup Mixer for the NA elderflower. I used Monin Violet for the Creme de Violet, and Free Spirits Non-Alchoholic Gin for the Gin.

The Year Ahead

In 2002 I wrote a play called Scaping the Goat The play was about the way that cable news had taken the events of 9/11 that had terrorized one city, and repeated the imagery from it over and over until it terrorized the entire world.

Despite having written the play I seemed to have lost the message in my own life. I got sucked into the daily terrorizing by both parties to raise money and hurt people’s health. I got off Twitter, but got on Bluesky. The effect persisted. At some point this year I just got off the train. I’m still aware of what’s going on, but I don’t exist in a state of permanent fight or flight. I’m not terrorized by every single thing Trump says. This is not to downplay the damage he has done, but he has been even more effective at terrorizing us than breaking things.

I wrote a post because despite this administration explicitly targeting me and my family; we had a great year. And I need to celebrate that.

Around this time I started building Fun Old Times as a way to really understand how to effectively use generative AI in programming and to create the social network I always wanted. Through the process I have become more and more worried that we’re going to see an end of affordability for AI tools for home and open-source projects in the coming year and I wanted to get a head start before the tools become much more expensive.

I released new code today that was all built by hand, so I haven’t lost my brain yet.

I built Fun Old Time because I wanted a way to have smaller communities. I wanted something that wasn’t gamified. I had all these ideas for what I wanted social media to become and it never happened. Fun Old Times will import this blog post into my small community automatically via RSS. But it will also exist on the Internet. So I can have my internal conversations inside Fun Old Times and keep a blog running that can have more public reach.

My goal for this year is to continue what I started last year, and that I think was best summed up by Jenn Schiffer. I’m done with:

hating the internet instead of making the internet

This year I want to get back to writing. I want to get back to building. I want my community back. I don’t want to watch 10 second clips of “Community”. I want back-to-school pictures of my friends’ kids, dammit.

My goals for this year:

• I want to create and write again
• I want to spend more time with you
• I want to build new things together
• I want to repair and resuscitate relationships
• I want to make useless art and useful art
• I will not be terrorized
• I will add comments back to this blog so it’s not a weird one-way street.
• I will build community with Fun Old Times and not just build features.