We headed over to Lewis Ginter this morning to exercise our membership. The flowers were blooming, and we got 25 bird species too. I saw an agitated Blue Jay in a tree and when I took a look with my bins I saw why he was so agitated. There was a Barred Owl in the tree. The Blue Jay successfully chased the owl out of the tree, unfortunately while I was trying to focus on the owl with my camera. We followed the owl to get another look, as did the Blue Jay. We did not find the owl again, but we did find a Red Shouldered Hawk that was getting the business from that same Blue Jay. I did manage to get a photo of the hawk.

That is one bad ass Blue Jay. 2-0 against an owl and a hawk in a 5-minute period. I saw two Blue jays in that tree where the owl is, so I'm wondering if it was protecting a nest.

Also, after never seeing an owl in 4 or 5 years of birding we've gotten two in the last few weeks.

Photo album

Happy weekend to both of you reading this :) Actually, Tiny Analytics recently informed me that I'm averaging over 1000 visits a month, which exceeds the free account threshold, and that they would like me to start paying. I never thought site traffic would build back up like that. I'll probably just remove the analytics because I really don't care about the stats.

I spent the week looking for a job. It's bleak out there. I've also spent a lot of time this week thinking, researching, and playing with cash flow spreadsheets for being self-employed. Right now its 50/50 which way I go. If my options at the end of this month are take a job I'm not excited about or go solo, I think I'll go solo. Maybe. This decision is more complicated than it needs to be in the US because of of the lack of a social safety net. I'll have to buy my own health insurance, which will be my second largest monthly expense after my mortgage. And even with that hefty premium, I'm still looking at needing thousands of upfront cash to get by deductibles. It could actually cost more than my mortgage on an annual basis. Imagine needing two mortgages just to get by. It fucking sucks. Basically, only live in the US if you rolled a 20 on your Constitution roll during character creation.

You'd think not working would mean I have lots of links for you, but I don't. I'm not sure if that is related to how focused I was on looking for a job, or maybe my mood was shit all week and nothing seemed good to me.

You should use /tmp more argues that we should get in the habit of puttting any temporary downloads in /tmp, so we always know they can just be deleted later. When I think about all the time I spend deciding what in my downloads folder I need versus what can go, this seems like a very good idea.

This 15 minute video argues that the hyper growth of the last 150 years is a complete outlier that has to end. We spent millions and maybe billions of years building up fossil fuels in the earth, and we are going to use up all that stored energy in 200 years.

If confronted by the police, can you prove you are a US Citizen? Unless you are carrying your birth certificate or passport around with you 24 x 7, your answer is nope. Scalzi makes a very strong case for getting a passport card and keeping it in your wallet, not for crossing into Canada or Mexico on a regular basis, but to avoid getting sent to El Salvador if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

AI is an important technology, but LLMs are likely to kill us all before we master the power of the technology. LLMs are basically very expensive Mad Libs. It's not crafting answers to your prompts, it's filling in the blanks, often totally devoid of context.

Keep writing and publishing, especially if nobody is reading. It's the only way you'll get better.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.

2025 continues to suck in the most suckiest ways possible. I was let go from my job yesterday after only 5 months. It was the most productive opening 5 months I've ever had at a new job. In 2025, that gets you fired, I guess.

Anyway, enough of that. This week I wrote a couple of things.

I talked about our Memorial Day weekend camping trip.

I added a couple more entries into the Revisiting my MP3 Collection series.

Stuff I read, or at least saved with the intention of reading.

Why Gen Z loves 1990s Casio watches. I'm GenX and I have two old school digital Casio watches.

Video of Purdue student's robot solving a Rubik's Cube in a tenth of a second. That's faster than the time it takes you to blink once.

People used to sweep their yards to control pests, and eliminate tinder that could lead to a fire.

Profile of a guy that takes personal privacy to an extreme.

Apparently life in the US is now similar to life in cold war era Russia, in that normal day to day stuff that government does simply doesn't work, yet the citizens soldier on trying to live normal lives.

A collection of summer reading lists.

An argument that SpaceX's Starship rocket was doomed from the start, and that it will never work. Of course, I'm sure NASA will keep funding it.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.