Author: smartpeopleiknow

Things to Pack When Heading to the Emergency Room

Here’s a really good list: 11 Things to Pack When Heading to the Emergency Room.

A few thoughts/additions:

  • take your smartphone. Much of this information can be found there. Indeed, you can put much of this information in a central, easy to find place on your phone, so when you are at the hospital and at admittance, you can easily share it with the hospital. Plus you may use your phone to order Ubers, pay for things, update work, etc.
  • take a smartphone charger. Your smartphone is your contact to the outside world. It’s also a reliever of boredom while you wait for treatment. You don’t want it to die on you while you are in a waiting room.
  • take your wallet. Things not on your smartphone are there.
  • take some snacks (e.g. granola bars) and water if you can. You may want to have some sustenance to keep you going if you are waiting for awhile. Don’t assume your trip will be brief or you can find food there.
  • take something to listen to sounds on your phone. It can help you stay calm and relaxed when you are waiting.
  • write down the timeline of events that made you decide to come to the ER. Do this either on your phone or on paper. It will help you when you have to repeat things and you and you are too tired or ill to tell them.

Dead week, week 52, Janus week, the last week of the old before the first week of the new

How to think about week 52, the last week of the old year before the first week of the new year? It’s a good question I’ve been considering since I read this post by Austin Kleon over on his substack: How I’m spending Dead Week. He states:

For years, I have dreaded the weird no man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Because I set my own hours around here, I never know what I should be doing. Should I be working? Should I rest? Should I do both? I was delighted when Meg sent me Helena Fitzgerald’s piece, “All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year.” Finally, a term I can use. “Dead Week!”  Fitzgerald says instead of dreading Dead Week, she looks forward to it all year long. She frames Dead Week as a “nothing time” in which nobody really expects that much of you and nothing you do matters that much.

Ha! That’s one way to look at it! I think it especially good if your year has had you burning the candle at both ends….use that week to let the candle burn out! Rest and recuperate, I say. Read some books. Take some baths! Grabs some naps. Let things slide.

I also think of the week as Janus week. As wikipedia explains:

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus  is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces. The month of January is named for Janus (Ianuarius).

That’s how I like to use the week. There’s lots to look back upon and consider during that time. Indeed, it’s hard not to, as media of all kinds publish their Bests of 2023 lists on every topic you can think of. And while it is fine to contemplate the year that past — and I recommend you do —  it’s also a good time to think about what you will do in the new year. So do that too. Like Janus, look backwards and forwards simulataneously.

So while it is a dead week for some, for others like myself it is a transition week where the old goes out and the new comes in and I prepare myself accordingly. Does this mean I am discouraging you from hot baths, trashy TV and Christmas leftovers? Not at all. I think there is room for both in this, the last week of the year.

Enjoy week 52, however you go about it. Your earned some rest, and then some.

Merry Christmas! From me, in 2023!

Merry Christmas to all the smart people I know! I’ve written quite a bit on the topic of Christmas over the years, as you can see if you follow that link. As a small present, so to speak, I’ve pulled out some of my best Christmas links and put them below:

Dickens’s Bob Cratchit from “A Christmas Carol”, then and now


Well this is fascinating. People have been claiming that Bob Cratchit from A Christmas Carol was a) destitute b) still earning more than the current U.S. minimum wage. So USA Today did some investigating, here: Fact check: Bob Cratchit’s salary higher than US minimum wage.

They state:

The claim: Bob Cratchit was destitute but still earned more than the U.S. minimum wage The work of Victorian-era novelist Charles Dickens went viral over the holidays, when a tweet used his 1843 novella “A Christmas Carol” to make a point about the minimum wage.  Posted Dec. 19 and retweeted by over 14,000 users, it centered on Bob Cratchit. The character works as a clerk and accountant for wealthy Ebenezer Scrooge yet struggles to provide enough food and clothing for his wife and six children. According to the post – which was screenshotted and shared by many Facebook users – Cratchit symbolizes “destitution” in the novella but would have made an inflation-adjusted wage of around $13.50 per hour – almost twice the federal minimum wage.

From there they go on to say the claim is not really true. I highly recommend you go read the rest of it on their site.

P.S. If you can, I recommend reading “A Christmas Carol” on Christmas eve (today!). It puts me in the Christmas spirit, and it’s a great read (of course).

(Image, from wikipedia, of Scrooge hosting Cratchit.)

How to take the stress out of entertaining over the Christmas holidays

Christmas time is a busy time and a stressful time. If you are having people over for dinner during this holiday season, you can reduce your own stress by taking some tips from House & Garden and serve what they have to offer, here: The easiest dinner party you’ll ever host: seven cold plates to serve this Christmas.

Make those dishes: the food will still be great, and you will have a much more enjoyable time hosting.

Good luck!

Who let the (robot) dogs out? And other animated machines on the loose you should know about

A year ago I wrote: Sorry robots: no one is afraid of YOU any more. Now everyone is freaking out about AI instead. A year later and it’s still true. Despite that, robots are still advancing and moving into our lives, albeit slowly.

Drones are a form of robot in my opinion. The New York Times shows how they are shaping warfare, here. More on that, here.

Most of us know about the dog robots of Boston Dynamics. Looks like others are making them too. Still not anywhere as good as a real dog, but interesting nonetheless.

What do you get when you combine warfare and robot dogs? These here dogs being used by the US Marines.

Someone related, the NYPD has their own robot and you can get the details  here.

Not all robots are hardcore. Take the robot Turing for example (shown below). Or the ecovacs, which can mop your floors and more.

What does it all mean? Perhaps this piece on the impact of robots in our lives can shed some light.

Robots are coming: it’s just a matter of time before there are many of them everywhere.

Advent of Code: a great way for coders to celebrate this season

You’ve likely heard of Advent, but have you heard of Advent of Code? Well let the maker of the site, Advent of Code 2023, explain what it is:

Hi! I’m Eric Wastl. I make Advent of Code. I hope you like it! I also made Vanilla JS, PHP Sadness, and lots of other things. You can find me on Twitter, Mastodon, and GitHub. Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other. You don’t need a computer science background to participate – just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware.

It seems like just the thing for coders of all kinds, from amateurs to professional devs. Check it out. And if you want to get involved from day 1 in 2024, make a note on your calendar (assuming Eric still does it.)

Canadian Christmas gift ideas you can use now (or even the rest of the year)

For Canadians who still have some Christmas shopping to do, this list of made in Canada Christmas gift ideas from Chatelaine could be just the thing to help with those left on the gift list.

And hey, unlike the beautiful panettone from Viva pictured above, many of them would make good birthday gifts too. So even if you have all your holiday shopping done, give it a look.

Cleaning is part of a cycle. Complete the cycle (though cycles are never done)

I have come across the idea of completing the cycle when it comes to cleaning and it has made a difference in how I perceive cleaning.

I hate cleaning, but a contributor to that was I didn’t complete the cycle. If I was making a meal, I’d start the cycle by getting out the ingredients, then cook them, then eat them. The end of that cycle is putting the ingredients away and doing the dishes. But I didn’t commit to that, which meant the dishes would pile up. The same was true of other activities: I would stop at the satisfying part of activity (e.g. eating).

Once I committed to completing the cycle, things improved. I recognized that doing any activity meant I had to clean up at the end. Cleaning wasn’t a separate activity: it was part of the overall cycle of the activity.

I thought of this again when I read this piece in VOX on the vicious cycle of never-ending laundry. In it they are so close to getting it. It’s true, laundry is a cycle. They seem to think of it as something you can complete. You can never complete doing laundry, any more than you can complete cleaning your bathroom or complete eating. They are all cycles. The best you can do is complete a cycle of whatever you are doing.

Think of laundry as part of a bigger cycle of caring for your clothes, which is an extension of caring for yourself. There are any number of things you do to care of yourself during the week, from getting good sleep to exercising to…well, washing drying and putting away your clothes. Laundry is all part of that cycle you do every day and week to take care of yourself. It’s part of completing that cycle. Don’t think of it as a separate activity. (Unless you actually love doing laundry. :))

Completing the cycle: a smarter way to clean up and stay clean.

P.S. For more on the “Complete the Cycle” Cleaning Method, read this.

I also thought that this piece in the New York Times has some good advice on  how to clean was good.

Finally, if it is all too much, the Washington Post has an article on how to fake clean your house. Hey, whatever works.

The rise and fall? of DieWorkWear (and other Friday fashion items)

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There was a weird time on Twitter in 2023 where Mr Derek Guy (i.e. @dieworkwear) was appearing everywhere in people’s feed. So odd. Anyway, here’s a piece he wrote on  professional workplace respectability dressing.  Here’s something else he did on men’s wear wins and fails on the campaign trail. He also weighed in on the topic: do dress sneakers belong in the oval office.

With the fall of Twitter, I suspect his star will fall as well. He’s a smart guy, though. And not a snob. For example, reading him, I ended up reading this on value focused brands. Worth a look.

Also worth a look is this good look for men in summer: garb tourist. It works for men going away to someplace warm this winter, too. If it’s still cool where you are, grab a chore coat. Here’s a nice one: outerknown utilitarian chore coat.

This is a good take on the recent Vogue september issue featuring the supermodels of the 90s. Another good take, this time on the decline of the brand  Balenciaga.

This was funny: GQ on how celebrities do not know how to dress in summer style. This was ridiculous: the mschf microscopic handbag from Louis Vuitton.

 

 

 

Cool devices with e-ink display

E-ink displays are useful for more than just for e-book devices. Take this portable e ink typewriter, for example:

A great way to write your next great novel without being distracted. Or how about this e ink wall frame lets you read your newspapers front page:

Is it expensive? Very. Is it cool? Without a doubt.

You can find more cool designs using e-ink displays, here, at Yanko Design.

 

If you are having a difficult time, you need to listen to Michael Caine

If you are struggling with difficulties in life, then you need to listen to what Michael Caine has to say on this. He recalls once when he was acting on stage…

“I opened the door, and I said to the producer who was sitting out in the stalls, ‘Well look, I can’t get in. There’s a chair in my way.’

He said, ‘Well, use the difficulty.’

So I said, ‘What do you mean, use the difficulty?’

He said, ‘Well, if it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it. If it’s a comedy, fall over it.’

This was a line for me for life: Always use the difficulty.”

I think that is great. He followed up by saying, if possible avoid the difficulty! 🙂

You can hear him talk about it, and more,  here.

Remember: USE the difficulty.

The rise and fall of Beaujolais Nouveau Day in Canada

For many Novembers the LCBO and other alcohol distributors in Canada made a big deal of Beaujolais Nouveau Day. In Ontario it started with a few French winemakers and expanded to winemakers in Italy and other countries releasing similar styled wines on that date. I personally thought it was fun and a bit over the top and expected it to grow and get bigger in the future.

That’s why I was surprised to see at the beginning of November that the NSLC in Nova Scotia was dropping the whole thing. No doubt plunging sales had something to do with. Then the LCBO in Ontario dropped it as well. The bubble had burst.

Well. the bubble has burst in Canada, anyway. As far as Wine Spectator is concerned, 2023 is a solid year for fun Beaujolais Nouveau. And winemaker Georges Duboeuf put out a press release to exclaim:

Beaujolais Nouveau Day is not just about uncorking a bottle, it’s about a shared experience—a time when wine lovers around the world unite to raise a glass and celebrate.

So now doubt they are still into it.

If you are in France or elsewhere, grab a bottle and have a fun time. In Canada, you’ll just have to drink the older style of beajolais wine. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

P.S. If you are curious, here’s a piece on  the story behind Beaujolais Nouveau Day.

The benefits you get running Ubuntu/Linux on an old computer and why you should get one

I am a big fan of usable old computers. After you read this, you will be too.

Currently I have an old Lenovo M57p ThinkCentre M series that was made around 2007 that still works fine and is running Ubuntu 20.04 (the latest version is currently 22.04, so this is very current). Not only that, but it runs well. It never crashes, and I can download new software on it and it runs without a problem.

Here are some the benefits of having such a computer:

  • it can act as my backup computer if I have a problem with my main work one. I can read my email at Yahoo and Google. If I need to, I can use things like Google sheets to be productive. I can download software to do word processing on it too. I can attend online meetings. Most of my day to day work functions can be done if need be.
  • it can act as a test computer. I was writing a document on how to use a feature in IBM cloud, but I needed to test it out with a computer other than my work machine (which has special privileges). This old machine was perfect for that.
  • it can also act as a hobby computer. I like to do things with arduinos and Raspberry Pi computers and the Lenovo computer is great for that.
  • it can help me keep up my Unix skills. While I can get some of that by using my Mac, if I had a Windows machine for work I would especially want to have this machine for staying skilled up.
  • it can do batch processing for me. I wrote a Python program to run for days to scrape information from the Internet and I could just have this machine do that while I worked away. I didn’t need to do any fancy cloud programming to do this: I just ran the Python program and checked on it from time to time.
  • It has lots of old ports, including VGA and serial ports. Will I ever need them? Maybe! It also has a CD-ROM drive in case I need that.

As for the version of Linux, I tend to stay with Ubuntu. There’s lots of great Linux distros out there, but I like this one. Plus most times when I come across online Linux documentation, I will find it has explicit references to Ubuntu.

Now you can buy an old machine like this online from Amazon or eBay, but if I can do this on a 15 year old computer, you likely can ask around and get one for free. A free computer that can do all this? The only thing that should be stopping you is how to get started. For that, you will need these Ubuntu install instructions and a USB drive.

Good luck!

P.S. The software neofetch gave the output above. To install it, read this: How do I check my PC specs on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS?

What is happening with running shoes these days? Thicccckkkkkness.

The shoes, they are getting thick.*

Perhaps they’ve been inspired by the Nike alphafly 3 proto running shoes shown below:

…but they seem to have moved far and away from the minimal sole. For example these New Balance Permafrost Fresh Foam X which are made for winter running are might think in the sole:

Same with the New Balance x district vision trail running shoe:

Nice. I have always been in favour of thick soles, so I approve of this trend. I am also a fan of running shoes made for winter running (and you’ll be too the minute you go for a run and get freezing slush in your shoe).

Need new shoes? Check these out. You’ll be faster in no time.

* I am sure there are plenty of running shoes that are being sold that are not thick. But definitely noticing a trend towards a thicker sole.

It may be time to ditch Evernote. I went with Joplin and it’s been great

Now that Evernote is all but killing their free plan, you may be considering moving. That was me awhile ago. I loved Evernote, but the restrictions and bloated features made me want to move.

I wasn’t sure what to move to, so I did some research. These two links were especially helpful:

I nixed migrating Evernote to OneNote because I use the latter mostly for work notes. And while I use and love SimpleNote, I like it only for specific purposes. I considered Obsidian, but it seemed more than what I wanted.

In the end I went with Joplin for a few reasons:

  1. Joplin made it easy to move my Evernote material into it.
  2. Joplin can run on my Mac, iPhone and iPad for free.
  3. With Joplin my notes are stored on Dropbox, which I like.
  4. Joplin seemed closest in features to Evernote for me.
  5. With Joplin I can use Markdown if I want.

I haven’t had any problems with Joplin since I moved to it many weeks ago. I kept Evernote on my Phone in case of problems, but I have not used it in ages. After I post this, I think it will be time to delete the app from all my platforms.

I was a big fan of Evernote. It was great. But Joplin is great too, and once you start using it, you won’t turn back.

P.S. Don’t just take my word on it. Read those links, too. You might find you want to go with one of those other tools. I use OneNote and SimpleNote all the time and I highly recommend those, too.

November! A month of cooling off in many ways. Of endings. Here’s what’s happening plus the usual ramblings (i.e. the November 2023 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter)

November is a month of chills and cooling off. Not just literally but figuratively. So many things have been cooling off, dying off, or just ending this month. Many things, but not all things.

Dying: A year ago crypto exploded in a fireball. Now all that’s left are the embers. Last month the fraud / conspiracy trial of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was underway. How did it go? Well, not great for SBF. He was evasive under cross examination. His lawyers did not do well with their closing arguments. It didn’t help that so many of his coworkers plead guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. In the end it took the jury less than five hours to find him guilty on all charges. No doubt pictures like this couldn’t have helped his case:

What a mess.

If you want to read more about it all, this piece by Zeke Faux is good. Check out his book too. You can read the book Going Infinite by Michael Lewis as well, though this review which discusses how he fell for the antihero (SBF, not Taylor Swift) makes me wonder if I would bother, even though I like Lewis’s other books.

The other big player in crypto is Changpeng Zhao (CZ) of Binance. Is? Was. The SEC has been cleaning the Aegean Stables that is crypto and went after him and forced him to plead guilty and step down from him company.

In the end the only people I felt sorry for in all this  debacle was SBF’s parents. Do I feel bad for crypto investors? Well in April of 2022 the Financial Times sat down with SBF and more or less explained how SBF’s crypto yield farming was a ponzi scheme. If you had major money in crypto after reading that, then you got what was coming to you, I’m sorry to say.

Cooling off: after being heated in all the ways, China is starting to cool off. Last year China and Xi were at their aggressive peak, lecturing Trudeau and others with their wolf warrior diplomacy.

Well that’s gone, and Xi recently adopted a milder manner in this month’s meeting with President Biden. Wolf warrior diplomacy is dying off. No doubt some of that has to do with the many problem that China is suffering, from real estate problems to high youth unemployment to the decline of  their belt road loans program.

That said, while China seems to be backing away from invading Taiwan, they are still being very aggressive in dominating the South China sea, as these two stories here and here show. They are still aggressive at home, too, as this piece on China spies campaign shows.

It’s not all bad news for Xi and his country. This is good news, for instance:  China’s war on pollution has great improved air quality for their citizens. But things could be better. Will they be under Xi is the question. Read The New York Times piece on  Xi’s rule and decide for yourself. Don’t miss this piece by Noah Smith either. Smith thinks the Chinese leader is incompetent and he makes a compelling case.

Dying off: Culturally we may be seeing the dying off of the superhero movies that have dominated screens big and small for so long. The Marvels, the latest film from Marvel Studios just came out and it recorded the worst ever North American opening weekend performance of all those films. The Times put it simply: it floundered.

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This has all led Disney, the owner of Marvel Studios, to do some backtracking.  They are delaying  Deadpool 3 and other such films. TV wise, Disney is not doing great either, as their new series, Ahsoka shows.

Will bringing back the  X men help? Maybe fantastic four will do it? Or maybe it’s the beginning of the end of the superhero movies, as this piece examines.

On death’s door: well, that would be twitter. I mean it’s been dying all year since Musk took over. But his increasingly mismanagement of the site and his own terrible behavior has led to many companies pulling their advertising dollars from it. Not only that, but increasingly people I used to follow regularly have moved to sites like Threads and Bluesky. I am not sure when it will die off: Musk could keep it on life support for a long time. Dan Sinker’s has a good piece on the site known still as Twitter to read while we sit by its deathbed and wait for the inevitable.

Moving on, office work is also waning. A sign of this is wework going bankrupt. Some of the Toronto locations have shut down. That’s too bad: I am a fan of wework. In better news, in New York some financial district offices have been  converted into housing. Here’s to more of that.

Gone but not forgotten: I hadn’t realized that November is JFK season in the US. Or so says Mark Bittman in this piece: JFK season. Perhaps it always will be, until the last of the Baby Boomers in the US has passed away.  Meanwhile we get people still second guessing the JFK assassination. And RFK Jr is hanging around the current election, cashing in on his family name while he spouts his toxic views on disease and race.

The pandemic is not dying, but heating up in many places, including Nova Scotia, which reported 35 covid-19 deaths since august. In China there has been an increase in respiratory diseases in children. The Times has more on where we are in this article.

Wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine continue to burn on as well. Here’s to better days in both places and soon, though right now soon is no where soon enough. In the mean time I am going to the New York Times for news on the latest developments in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine and I recommend you do so too.

Speaking of endlings, that’s the end of this month’s newsletter. Thanks for reading it. May the next one be merry and bright.

You can’t have it all (a poem and a remembrance)

In reading this remembrance of a dear friend of Maria Popova, I was struck by  this poem, You Can’t Have It All by Barbara Ras. It starts:

YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

….

Click on the link and read the poem and the remembrance, too. May we all be remembered so well.

Here’s 10 fun things to check out on a Monday

I get it: it’s Monday and you are busy. Fine. But if you need a break for any reason, then check out these 10 cool /  fun /interesting / useful links:

  1. Need gifts for the holidays? Of course you do. The Wirecutter has a list of the best gifts under $25. Nice.
  2. Not to be outdone, the web site Design Milk also has a list of the best modern gifts under 25 bucks as well. Time to go shopping.
  3. I still use RSS, thanks to the Feedly app. If you do too and are on the lookout for more good feeds, then check out thhe rss feed from the CBC . Long live RSS.
  4. As someone who was a fan of the Whole Earth review, I was happy to see it is all now online. You can check out the whole earth index here.
  5. Want to see Spotify top numbers? Click there and you can.
  6. Eras — not centuries, but eras — from now there will be two Africas. As you read this a major fault line is opening up there and a new ocean is forming in Africa along a 35 mile crack that opened up in ethiopia in 2005. Fascinating.
  7. This is fun. You can use this site to build your own customized pencils.
  8. I thought this story in the Paris Review was great: the sofa.
  9. This is fun: whimsical.club.
  10. Finally, I liked these 10 rules of being human from kottke.org.

Ok get back at it. Happy Monday!

If you are going for an eye exam in Ontario, ask some questions before you go


If you are going for an eye exam in Ontario, ask the staff some questions before you go. Otherwise you might get surprised by charges you were not expecting.

As the Toronto Star reported, the Ford government has cut back on OHIP-covered eye services for some seniors. Specifically….

 Free annual eye exams paid for through the Ontario Health Insurance Plan will no longer be available to all seniors…Only those with “eligible medical conditions affecting their eyes such as macular degeneration, glaucoma or diabetes” will get a yearly checkup. “Seniors without an eligible medical condition will receive one exam every 18 months,” the government said…As well, seniors will be limited to just two minor followup assessments with an optometrist every year. Currently, there’s no limit on such minor assessments. OHIP coverage of eye exams for people of all ages with cataracts will continue.

Additional charges are not limited to seniors. I was surprised at my last visit: I knew I was going to be charged for the visit, but I did not know that the optometrist was going to do additional tests that drove the cost of the visit to over 300. I am lucky to be covered for that: some Ontarians who have stretched finances might find that hard to deal with.

It’s not just limited to Ontarians, either: provinces like Manitoba and Nova Scotia only insure eye exams every 24 months for all seniors.

The next time you go, ask what it will cost.

(This might be mind boggling to any Americans reading this, I know.)

A magic table you can use for Thanksgiving and other holidays

Over at Yanko Design is a story on a table that can go from this:

to this:

If not magical then certainly amazing. Sure you need a space to expand into, but anyone who has to host larger gatherings on the regular and has the space should check it out.

And to all my American friends, happy Thanksgiving!

Cook Out is coming. Get ready!

If you have not heard of Cook Out, you a) likely have not been to the U.S. South b) have been missing out! Whenever I can get down there I try to make one visit for a burger and chili fries. It’s fantastic. I would eat there all the time if I could.

Well good news: I might be able to. According to Slate, the Cook Out fast-food chain is expanding! Hey if Chick-fil-A can get to Toronto, maybe Cook Out can too. The thought of it is thrilling!

If you do get a chance to go to a Cook Out, I highly recommend it. Until then, read the Slate piece to find out more about this fine fast food place.

P.S. No, the burgers do not come with googly eyes. Slate did that. 🙂

Raiding the Beaton Institute archives for my past

If you have an interest in Cape Breton, you owe it to yourself to check out the The Beaton Institute’s website. It is filled with great images of Cape Breton. That’s what I was doing earlier this year.

One of the things I found there that reminded me of my life in Glace Bay is the hospital in this picture:

I lived not too far from the Glace Bay General Hospital (above) and I used to cut through the grounds of it to get to high school or go to play hockey at the Miners Forum. I remember playing soccer with friends on the grass in the front of the hospital. I remember going to get inhalation treatments in the basement for my sinuses. It was a cool old place.


One of the jobs I had when I was younger was going into Sydney and cleaning the Nova Scotia Power Trucks (shown above). It was a cool job I did with some friends of mine. We would drive the trucks out (somewhat like this), wash them, then return them to the parking lot. It was hard work, but good and memorable.


Finally, I love this photo of Marconi in the Marconi Station in Glace Bay. Here he is making communications history!

Let’s get sauced! (Friday food links for food lovers, November 2023)

Sauces are the way to take a simple and maybe even boring dish and transform it into a great one. If you agree, here’s dozens of sauce recipes I’ve been collecting that can help with that. Grab a pan and let’s start in.

Pan sauces are a great way to sauce up your dish. Here’s something on the perfect pan sauce. If you want to make restaurant quality pan sauce, read this. Maybe you want to know how to make an easy pan sauce in minutes? That can help.

Do you eat a lot of chicken? Here’s 3 variations on pan sauce for weeknight chicken. Want something lighter? Here’s 3 Great (and Easy) Pan Sauces for Chicken from Cooking Light. Finally here’s one more pan sauce recipe for chicken to add to your repertoire.

if you’re cooking beef or pork, here’s how to make a basic red wine reduction sauce to go with it. Or make one of my favorite sauces: Supreme. I am a fan of veloute, too.

Bechamel is a useful sauce. Here’s how to make a perfect bechamel according to the chefs of Food & Wine. More on that. sauce here and  here and  here.

Here’s how to make a roux and use it right. Relatedly: this is a basic white sauce recipe.

More on the French mother sauces here and here: month and daughter sauces. Speaking of that, here’s how to make mayonnaise. Last, this is supposedly essential sauces for the home cook.

Not even meal needs a sauce from France. For instance, here’s some great sauce recipes for guacamole,  sofrito, aioli, pine nut free pesto, Peruvian-Style Green Sauce, more peruvian style green sauce, homemade ketchup, and fresh chili harissa.

I would be remiss if I didn’t include some tomato sauces. Here’s a good marinara sauce recipe. Though this one from the New York Times is my all time favorite.

This piece argues this heidi swanson 5 minute tomato sauce is genius. Who am I to argue?

Speaking of genius, check out this piece: Adding Oyster Sauce to My Spaghetti Was Probably the Best Thing I’ve Ever Done. The folks at Bon Appetit like to be dramatic. Speaking of dramatic, the Guardian argues that this sauce will change your life.

Let’s dial it back and take a look at these marinades from Food and Wine. Not sauces, but related.

Happy Cooking!

 

We need more eco-friendly design

In my mind, there is not enough eco-friendly design out there, and there should be. It can be a great way to recycle and reuse.

Case in point, the stools above, which are made of plastic and fiber-based waste. Or these concept shoes below that are made of sugar derived from plant waste and microbes which is then turned into nanocellulose as a material.

For more on the topic, I owe it to myself to go through all these Eco-Friendly designs over at Yanko Design. I recommend you do too.

Race to the moon! (What I find interesting in math and science, November 2023)

Space: Well there has been plenty of space missions in the last while.

India has made great progress with their space missions, including successfully landing on the moon. The New Times has a piece on their moon launch here. It’s an exciting development! You can read more on it here and here. And India is not just going to the moon: they have mission going to the center of the solar system. Great to see all this activity.

Unlike India, Russia has been less successful, with their spaceship crashing on the moon. More on that, here. Space is hard.

Meanwhile,  Japan is aspiring to be doing work on the moon, too. More on the all the participants in the moon race here.

As for private space exploration, the Times has a piece on an alternative group to SpaceX that are making progress here. Good: we need an alternative to Musk’s company. Speaking of alternatives, here’s more on  Virgin Galatic’s recent progress. And this asks the question: How long will Jeff Bezos continue to subsidize his New Shepard rocket? Maybe if NASA goes with this new way of doing  moon missions with his Blue Origin organization. 

In other space news, here’s something on the new crew for the space station. This is a new theory on galaxy mergers that could shed light on how galaxies evolve.

Other things on space that I loved was this piece:  Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue. Also this dazzling view of the Milky Way from southern Africa. I love this too:  Microsoft has an introduction to Python programming by taking on assignments inspired by NASA scientists to prepare you for a career in space exploration. A great collaboration.

Here’s some less than loveable space story I read. For instance, this is bad:  Space junk is on the rise, and no one is in charge of cleaning it up. More on that, here. Also not good: what a long term mission in space does to the human body.

Physics: this is a good explainer on quantum entanglement. Relatedly, if you thought quantum mechanics was weird , check out entangled time.

Here’s something on a study combining continuum mechanics with Einstein’s field equations. Worthwhile.

last but not least, if you want to learn or relearn physics, then head over to Susan Rigetti (nee Fowler)’s great site, here.

Math: three good math pieces: 1) a good introduction on lagrangian-mechanics 2) something I liked on Multivariate calculus 3) Also this on mutlivarable calculus.

Biology: I thought this, on our golden age of medicine was good. As was this piece on newly detailed nerve links between brain and other organs  and how it shapes thoughts and memories.

A dozen or so good pieces on good artists, from Michelangelo to Tracey Emin

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(Top image: Richter. Bottom image: Day)

Starck + Perrier: two good things that go together well

Glad to see that Perrier has come out with a new and cool bottle done by my favorite designer, Philippe Starck. Vive la France!

Sadly this will not be in Canada. I need to find a way to get a bottle. Perrier, if you are listening… (Just kidding, this is 2023. Now if it was 2009…. :))

You can read more about it here at UnCrate and the Perrier site.

 

Family meals are a good thing, but they are not the only good thing

From time to time articles will appear promoting the importance of families eating together. If you search on “how important is the family dinner table”, the first piece that you might see is an article from Stanford Medicine on Why the Family Meal Is Important.

I don’t deny that there is value in good family meals. But I was also heartend by this article, Bad Cook, Great Mom from Cup of Jo, where she writes:

 Before having kids, I envisioned sitting down for dinner, Norman Rockwell style, and sharing our hopes and dreams while breaking bread. But honestly? We didn’t have regular sit-down family dinners until Toby was around 10, and we still eat at the table together only a few times a week. And yet. I’m a terrible cook, but I crush it at being a mom.

When I think about my children leaving the nest and looking back on their childhoods, I know they won’t picture epic homemade meals because I did not serve many. We eat simply, and pizza is regularly ordered. But there are SO MANY BEAUTIFUL THINGS they will remember….

I think this is right. I also think this comment someone posted in response is also right (I added the bold):

Well I will say this: I am a good cook. I’m French and my English husband delights in my cooking. But last year, our 6yo French-British daughter gave me her Mother’s Day card, on which she had written “I love my mummy because… she’s a great soup maker”
To this day I am still laughing every time I see the card. Soup is what I make with all the tired veg from the bottom of the fridge when I am totally uninspired. And yet, I got the highest praise for it.
You never know what your children will remember fondly, really…

You never can know what your kids will remember fondly. The things important to you may not be important to them. And the things that other people think are important in their family (family meals) may be less so in your family. All you can do is try your best with the skills you have. There are many ways to be a good parent. Never forget that.

P.S. I’ve recently started having Sunday suppers with my adult kids and I really enjoy it. But I also have more time these days to do that. When they were smaller they weren’t into eating at the table and I was just happy when they were eating good food, regardless of where they ate it.

On bullshit jobs and how to overcome them

Do you feel like your job is socially useless? If so, you may have a bullshit job. As this piece shows, many people feel they work in pointless, meaningless jobs.  Just look at the graph above, taken from the article. People in all sorts of occupations feel like their job is a waste of time. People in office jobs especially so.

What I would like to focus on is the jobs at the bottom of that chart. Many of those jobs center around helping others, be it trainers, librarians, healthcare practitioners, and social service workers. There are also jobs where people make things, be it in construction or engineering and architecture. When you are making something like a building or a road, you know you are doing something useful. Likewise, you know what you are doing is useful if you are helping to educate someone or helping them get healthier. I suspect that is why people in those professions they don’t find their jobs useless.

If you have a job that you feel is useless, see if there are aspects of it that are helpful to someone. Or try and find activities where you make something that others can take and do something with. Or do both. It might feel like you currently don’t do any such things, but if you track what you do in a week or a month, you may find you were doing those things and you just weren’t aware of it.

You can also try and insert more of those activities into your job. Share the things you know with your coworkers. Mentor new people on the job. Create material that others can use to make their own job easier, even if it’s simply a spreadsheet or a Powerpoint template. Look for ways to be useful to others on your job. You may find yourself enjoying your job more in the process of being useful.

Good luck!

 

 

 

On there being two types of freedom

There are two ways to be free:

  1. to be in a higher state of being
  2. to be in a different state of being

The first way of being free requires a continual effort to remain that way. If you do not expend this effort, you will slip back down and no longer be free.

When political people say “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, they are talking about this type of freedom. It’s also true for people that get into shape, or quit a bad habit, or make improvements in other aspects of their life. Indeed, any type of freedom that has to battle decay and entropy is a type of freedom that needs continual effort.

The second way of being free does not require continual effort. When you graduate from school, quit a job, end a relationship, or move away from someplace, you become free of those things. You have transitioned to a different state of being.

You might argue that some people have to work hard to not go back to that old job, that old relationship, or that old home town. I’d counter that even if one does, they are a different person than when they left and what they return to has changed too Additionally I think most people do not go back. People move on. They move away.

It is easy to get discouraged if you think all forms of freedom require continual effort. Many do, but many do not. Sometimes you just need to push to get to the other side to be free, and once you do, you are free once and for all.

P.S. For more on this, see: It takes a daily effort to be free by Austin Kleon. His piece got me thinking along these lines.

P.S.S. If you think of life as being cyclical, you are likely to see freedom as being something you constantly have to work with. If you see life as linear, you are likely to see it as something you can achieve once and be done.

If you can’t write to your USB drive on your Mac and you want to fix that, read this

If you are reading this, chances are you cannot write to your USB drive on your Mac.

To force a USB drive to be both read and writable, I did the following (note, I had a Kingston drive, so my Mac identified it as KINGSTON and I went with that. If you buy a USB drive that is not from Kingston, you may see something different):

  1. In Finder, go under Applications > Utilities and start Disk Utility
  2. Click on your USB disk on the left (E.g. KINGSTON) and then click on Erase (top right)
  3. You can change the name if you want (I left it at KINGSTON) and make Format: ExFAT
  4. Once you do that, click the Erase button to format the disk
  5. Click on Unmount (top right) to unmount the disk
  6. Open a terminal window (Open Finder. Go to Applications > Utilities > Terminal) Enter the following diskutil list command in the Terminal window and note the results:
    diskutil list
    /dev/disk2 (external, physical):
    #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
    0: FDisk_partition_scheme *62.0 GB disk2
    1: Windows_NTFS KINGSTON 62.0 GB disk2s1

    Note it my case the KINGSTON drive is associated with disk2s1. (you see that on the line “1: Windows_NTFS KINGSTON 62.0 GB disk2s1”. It may be different for you. Regardless, you want the drive name that comes after the 62.0 GB.)
  7. While in the terminal window, make a corresponding directory in the /Volumes area of your machine that has the name of your drive (in my case, KINGSTON)
    sudo mkdir /Volumes/KINGSTON
  8. Also in the terminal window, you can  mount your disk as writable and attach it to the mount point sudo mount -w -t ExFAT /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/KINGSTON

You should now be able to write to your drive as well as read it.

It’s crabwalk time! Here’s some thoughts on how things are going sideways in many ways as well as the usual ramblings (i.e. the October 2023 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter)

Happy. Hallow’een! It seems many things have gone sideways this month, almost like a crab walk. Many things, but not all. Let’s take a look.

In Ukraine, people are worried that their counteroffensive against the Russians is struggling to go forward and is only going to be more so as the winter season arrives. Not that it’s looking good from the Russian side. No doubt Putin would like to see the US drop the amount of aid they give to Ukrainians, as some on the America. right are threatening. Whether or not that happens, we shall see, now that Congress has finally elected a speaker.

Another thing going sideways is COVID/the pandemic. It was surging in Ontario and other places, but I checked the New York Times and they record hospitalizations going down this week. All I know is the new XBB vaccine booster is out, so you should go get that, people. Get a flu shot, too.

 

 Remember inflation? It too continues to crab walk (see chart above). Same with Donald Trump. He continues to meander through various courtroom preceding in the US. He is currently participating in his civil trial in New York and is expected to testify. He also has a three other trials underway: the Washington Post has more on all that here.

In North America it’s been a summer of strikes starting and ending and that does not look like it is going to change this autumn. While the Writers strike in Hollywood has been settled, the Actors strike is still on going. The UAW in the US is expanding the autoworkers strike in the US, while the autoworkers in Canada settled their strike. In Ontario the workers at TVO continue to walk the picket line with no hope for a resolution.

Not everything is going sidewise. In the Middle East, Hamas forces from the Gaza Strip attacked neighboring Israeli towns, killing over a 1000 soldiers and civilians, and then withdrawing with over 200 hostages. In response the Israeli army has repeatedly bombed Gaza, killing 1000s more Palestinians. And that is just the beginning. Likely by the next newsletter Israel will move ground forces into the Strip, resulting in even more loss of life for their soldiers, Hamas fighters, and Palestinians stuck in the middle of the fighting.

As the world watches this unfold, people have been tying themselves in knots in trying to respond. And regardless of whether or not they have responded, they have been criticized. Former president Obama issued this statement on Israel and Gaza and the length of it highlights the difficulty on weighing in on the matter. Personally I don’t think commenting on social media is the way to go, and I wrote about that, here.

What happens next and how this plays out, no one can say. I suspect it will play out like one of the other Israeli wars of the last decade or so.

A year ago Elon Musk took over Twitter. It’s been a weird time for social media since then. It’s been zigzagging for the most part. Dan Sinker has a good run down of what it’s been like, here. I highly recommend that piece, as well as anything that Dan writes.

In terms of crypto and NFTs, they have more or less scuttled off to their demise. The only thing going on of note is the trial of SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried). It’s not looking good for him, as the Verge explains. We shall see. Anyone wanting to read more about the rise and fall of SBF and crypto should read Michael Lewis’s new Book, Going Infinite.

I wish climate change was only going sideways. Instead it continues to worsen. At the beginning of the month, New York was suddenly hit with crazy flooding that caught them unaware. At the end of the month Mexico was hit with a sudden CAT 5 hurricane. Bad weather from global warming is bad enough: surprising bad weather is even worse.

As always, thanks for reading this, whenever you are reading this. If you are reading this years from now, I hope things improved, and things went from going sideways to progressing.

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What’s it like to be an instacart shopper

I’ve written a number of things on Instacart from the viewpoint of a user of the service. Now here is something on what it’s like to be an Instacart shopper. The piece is centered on a day in the life of Larry Askew, who works for Instacart early in the morning and Uber at night. Larry alone is worth reading about.

One thing that struck me was how some shoppers use bots to scoop up the best of what Instacart offers its shoppers. I imagine it’s not unlike people using bots to snag tickets for events.

Besides that, I learned a lot about the service I didn’t know before. It’s a good piece, and if you use Instacart, I highly recommend it.

P.S. Always treat your shopper well, and that includes tipping. Do not tipbait, especially. Thank you.