Week Notes, 2025-03-23
Weekly Features from March 17th - 23rd:
📲 On Thursday 3-20, my first-ever on-call rotation at my new job ended. I only received four calls during my week of coverage, with three of them involving our Security team to validate people's access. The coverage wasn't difficult, but I would say the anxiety surrounding it made the overall experience worse than it actually was. I don't have to be on call again until mid-late June, so I hope I won't psych myself out as much as I did last week.
🛳️ My in-laws' extended stay in French Polynesia, though not necessarily by choice, will soon be over. Before they left on their month-long cruise, they took out additional travel insurance which has already paid for itself in numerous ways. Medical coverage for my mother-in-law's time at the hospital on Nuku-Hiva comes from both their regular health insurance and the supplemental travel insurance. I also think the supplemental insurance is helping out with my father-in-law's housing near the hospital, with the cruise ship taking care of the rest. The biggest benefit from the supplemental insurance comes courtesy of a traveling nurse, who has just landed in Nuku-Hiva after leaving Cincinnati yesterday. The nurse will accompany the in-laws on their journey back to their Florida condo, up to the point of helping them settle back into their home. At that point, the nurse will fly back to Cincinnati, hopefully well-compensated for her journey halfway around the world and back.
💬 Blogging feels like a "normal" activity for me now. I have prepped the weekly update format to be a largely plug-and-play affair, minus these free-form entries. I also established my "unarchive," where I revive entries from former blogs and reflect upon them in the present day. The first entry was from 2016, covering a dubious anniversary of a real lowlight in Doctor Who history: the charity single "Doctor In Distress."
Other Things to Note from The Week That Was:
📺 Watching:
- MST3K Episode 504: _Secret Agent Super Dragon_
- New England Webcams, YouTube, Boston and Maine Live
- Japan’s Most Inconvenient Onsen Ryokan with No Signal or Electricity | Lamp No Yado Aoni Onsen, YouTube, It's Time To Travel 🇯🇵
🎧 Listening:
- Episode 398: The Treacherous Eunuch, This Machine Kills
- Episode 436, Hypnagogue Podcast
- Episode 788: Travel Tech, Mac Power Users
📖 Reading:
- From COVID to fascism: Tapping into our collective humanity, Black Girl In Maine
- Does anyone else smell metaphor? I think there’s a leak., Lawyers, Guns & Money
- AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality, 404 Media
- Entries on Scripting News about “the writer’s web"
💫 Creating:
- Updated all of the non-Spiels portions of this blog.
- Photographing a goose on her nest, with at least 5 eggs:
🗄 Organizing:
- Nothing to organize this week. All looks clean and tidy.
🌾 Socializing:
- Spent a couple hours talking with folks at Side Project Cellar on Thurs 03-20.
- Church and grocery shopping on Sunday 03-22.
🧪 Testing:
- Decided to keep Typora and register it, so now I have two working macOS platforms for Markdown editing. On my iPhone, One Markdown is a solid app for Markdown editing, with its free version meeting my needs as of now.
- Foqos on my iPhone is working again. The error I experienced in the past is related to one of the entries in the Finance section of apps/sites to block. I'll report it to the developer this week.
- The Good Place, a members-only social network for those who are signed up with Craig Mod's Special Projects. If you save the website to your desktop, you'll see an icon of Ted Danson from the TV show of the same name.
🏥 Health:
- Echocardiogram test on Monday 03-17, with normal results.
- Shoulder rehab on Tuesday 03-18.
- A hike of 3+ miles on Saturday 03-22.