David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #10 (December 2023)

Posted 2023-12-06 under #dispatch

We spent the week of Thanksgiving with my sister near Albany, New York. Tough drive, but it was great to get the whole family together and for Nev to get some extended time with her cousins. Highlights included the Catskill Mountain Railroad Polar Express and some unexpected snowfall.

In what’s now I guess an annual tradition, I ran a 10K the morning of Thanksgiving, this time the Troy Turkey Trot. I felt great, and I’m happy with my time (results, certificate). Claire joked that after you run a marathon, a half-marathon becomes your favorite race distance. That’s how I feel about 10Ks – it’s like the first half of a half-marathon, before it really starts to suck.

I spent few evenings building a tool to keep Markdown links in order, which I’ve called mdrenum. I documented the process thoroughly in a separate post. Super fun to make and quite useful for writing these posts. It’s up on SourceHut if you’re interested.

I bought a 201 Pocket Piano after seeing it on Bonobo’s gear list so that I could make some music while we were traveling. This thing is cool! Great sounds and patterns, MIDI in/out, battery powered and a built-in speaker. The company that makes it releases new synths pretty regularly, and it’s super straightforward to swap them out – just plug it into your computer, hit a couple keys, and it shows up as a drive.

Here’s a new track I made with it, called “Cirrus” (keeping with the cloud theme):

I published a few other things this month: “Maintenance Matters: Good Tests” on my company blog (mirrored here). I was also up for a company-wide presentation and ended up just doing a gift guide of things we own and recommend. Doesn’t seem worth a standalone post but here’s a copy of the list.

This Month

• Adventure: mountain biking on the trails near my in-laws’ during the break
• Project: make Nev an art table inspired by this one from Ikea; maybe finally build that music workstation
• Skill: Ableton Live

Reading

• Fiction: Remote Control, Andy McNab
• Non-fiction: Step by Step Mixing, Bjorgvin Benediktsson

Links

• 36 Hours in Durham, North Carolina: Things to Do and See – this is a pretty good guide to my city (though don’t sleep on Viceroy) but I’m mostly including this because you can see a couple tables I made in the upper left corner of the main image.

• A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

  Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

• What OpenAI shares with Scientology

  Even if you, as an AI risk person, don’t buy the full intellectual package, you find yourself looking for work in a field where the funding, the incentives, and the organizational structures mostly point in a single direction.

• Feedbin: Ruby Open Source RSS Reader – I’ve been a user and fan since Google shut down Reader; neat that it’s written in my preferred language/framework.