2024 was a big year for reading books for me. I log them on Goodreads, mainly to help prevent me from re-reading something that was forgettable. I rate them, but I don't write reviews. I just did a quick search, and it looks like the last time I mentioned a book before this post might have been in 2015. And 2009 before that.

I love and also hate going through different Best Albums lists this time of year. It's a little overwhelming -- so many albums that are supposedly great but that I never heard of.

I made a paella yesterday. It turned out pretty good, but I didn't get all of the credit that I deserve.

This is kind of a steam of conciousness post, where I start with the state of our kitchen, work in some info on a ChatGPT experiment I did a few months ago and then reflect on how bad artificially generated content is. Too bad we see it everywhere now.

I was planning a nice little post-Thanksgiving wrap up post this week, but I checked my phone yesterday and realized that dispite having my whole family (minus the grade-school twins) together in one place at the same time, I don't have a single picture. For someone with a renewed dedication to documenting his life online, this is a criminal level of negligence.

There's this video that I remember from my childhood. It must have regularly come on right as Saturday morning cartoons were ending. It was the opening bit to Indiana football or basketball games.

This morning, I found a data set with all of the data for Billboard's Hot 100 charts. So I did what nerds do. Ko has started up with the Christmas songs already, so I looked at the most interesting chart history I can think of.

We don't pass too many October without spending a week or two in New Orleans. We welcomed our dear friend Camilla this past weekend for a long day of being tourists. For the nightcap, Camilla and Ko went to the Taylor Swift concert in the Superdome. After picking our girl up at the airport, we dropped off gear at the house where we stayed in the Bywater. We changed and went to brunch in Mid-City (Katie's, yum) and then spent a few hours wandering around the French Quarter.

Yesterday, I went to one of the normal places I go for coffee in the morning. I set my bag down on a table outside, and then I noticed that there was some dried up jelly on the table. I went in, paid for a coffee, and asked the lady for a towel to wipe the jelly. I expected, "Oh, I'm sorry. Let me come wipe that for you," but instead, she just handed me a damp towel.

While we were sailing, we were also schooling. One of the things we did with Kolya is poetry. And of course, poetry starts with Haiku.

This morning, I woke up really early, got busy scrolling through internet garbage, and then ended up waking Ko up late. I drop him off downtown, where a bus takes him to his school. This saves me a good 45 minutes, most of which is crawling through heavy traffic to get in and out of the neighborhood where his school is. So it's very important for me to make the bus.

All of a sudden, the socials for dumb asses are flooded with fake pictures of Donald Trump doing something good for storm victims. I've gotten a good laugh, but can I use AI to create some more?