Weekly Update 2026-02-12: Spinning Like A Turbine Edition
What happened during the week of February 9th - February 11th, 2026:
‼️ In last week’s entry, I mentioned options for posting the next weekly update, such as waiting until I returned from San Diego on Tuesday 02-17, or rolling it into a larger edition on Sunday 02-22. A third option recently occurred to me, which is what I’m doing here: posting a small update that goes live as my plane takes off on Thursday 02-12, then recapping the trip in the Sunday 02-22 post.
🏣 Most of my non-work activities this week were spent in preparation for the vacation. Meanwhile, my work activities thankfully did not include many long meetings, as I suspect even my teammates were tired of them from the week before. I will be missing out on the quarterly Epic update on Sunday 02-15, so if any problems were to arise as a result, I will have been outta town when that sh*t happened. As for my Outlook rules updates, I believe I have things under control now with the new set, but I really don’t ever want to do that again! I needed two full days to reorganize two years’ worth of emails, though I have to remember when compared to many of my other teammates, having only 2 years of emails means I got off light.
🎒 Psst. My Sony camera backpack is still for sale on eBay.
🌊 And with that, I am off to the southwest corner of mainland America. Catch you later.
Items Of Note From Last Week:
Outbound Actions
- 🎨 Create: No time for creativity in this time span. Check back later.
- 🧑🧑🧒🧒 Encounters: Errands were all focused on preparing for the vacation. I made a brief appearance at Side Project Cellar on Wednesday 02-11 for Stout Week for the release of RL Persona, which I had a preview of a couple weeks prior. If you like eating almond cookies and drinking heavy beers, this is the stout for you!
- ⛑️ Health: Usual round of three 7-minute workouts this week. Warmer weather meant having the return of a neighborhood walk with L. on Tuesday 02-10.
Internal Obligations
- 🗂️ Organize: Getting things together for the vacation.
- 🔬 Testing: Updated to the official release of iOS 26.3 and macOS Tahoe 26.3.
- 💼 Work: Outlook rules were revamped, as mentioned earlier. I crammed five days of work into three, which was hard to do at first but actually worked out well by the time of Wednesday 02-11 afternoon.
Media
- 🔊 Listen: Episode 627 - SoCal Hops, ABV Chicago Craft Beer Podcast; Panopticon: 3 feat. Cory Doctorow, Trashfuture
- 📚 Read: No lights, total immersion: Autechre’s 'pitch-black' Tokyo show, Japan Times; Cornell College to launch national search ahead of president’s departure, Iowa Capital Dispatch
- 🖥️ Watch: Watch Royal Albatrosses Plop Down For A Landing Near The Nest | DOC | Cornell Lab, YT, Cornell Lab Bird Cams; Solo Luxury Ferry Trip in Japan: 12.5 Hours in a Royal Cabin All By Myself (Osaka to Fukuoka), YT, Solo Travel Japan
More Info About The Media Selections From This Week:
Keeping the media recap short this week, for obvious reasons. I am somewhat unhappy with my old college, as they recently slashed their way through some academic programs that help define what a small liberal arts college should be. Apparently satisfied after the hatchet job, the college’s president announced, per Iowa Capital Dispatch, that he will step down at the end of the subsequent academic year in June 2027. I’m somewhat happy he’ll be leaving, but I fear that a Far Side cartoon may come to life when his replacement takes over.
This week’s Trashfuture episode features frequent guest Cory Doctorow, who leads the gang in talking about the stupidity of data centers in space and the truly dystopic idea of having doorbell cameras spy on you to find your lost dog (you can read a bonus article from 404 Media about Ring’s attempts at “mawkish sentimentality” to disguise a surveillance state folks apparently want). A good antidote to mawkish pleas is, of course, beer, and in a perfectly timed episode release, Ryan and Craig of ABV Chicago review five IPA’s from San Diego breweries. It’s entirely likely that during my vacation, I’ll be able to visit most of them, including L.’s request to visit Duckfoot.
Traveling by boat in a cabin without windows feels like a nightmare in the making for me. Not having an outside exposure from my room would only intensify claustrophobic feelings. Fortunately, Solo Travel Japan paid extra on an intra-island ferry between Osaka and Fukuoka, allowing him to stay in a higher-class cabin with several windows. He had the ability to let light into his cabin, unlike those folks who went to “see” Autechre perform in Tokyo. There’s a lot of Autechre’s music I enjoy, though I do not believe I would be able to handle hearing a concert in total darkness, as reported by Japan Times. Those same feelings of claustrophobia would return, particularly when combined with some of the more…abstract sounds that could easily overwhelm one’s senses.
Finally, let’s conclude this abbreviated recap with something pleasant to watch. Albatrosses are graceful flyers, and somewhat steady walkers on land. Landing from a flight, however, is often an exercise in clumsiness. The landings recorded by Cornell Lab Bird Cams aren’t the most awkward ones I’ve seen from albatrosses, but they definitely rank in the upper tier. Note how the birds try to shake off the embarrassment of plopping in front of the webcam!
Picture time!
Let's try a new feature to reward folks who've made it this far in the blog entry.
Back in November 2025, prior to canceling our upcoming New Mexico trip, L. & I went to the National Museum Of Transportation on a bright fall day. Some of you may remember my post from that visit, but there were many pictures I didn’t get a chance to share on my blog (though I shared more on Glass, including the example shown below). NMOT has one of only 9 surviving examples of the 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car experiment, and out of that small group of 9, the NMOT model is one of three that can still be driven. Its “Turbine Bronze” paint is one of my all-time favorite colors for a car, and in the display lights, both the exterior and interior glow.
