⚙️ Work
Natasha’s research leave started July 1, and Derritt Mason started as Interim Sr. Director to cover the role for the next year. Lots of meetings to re-introduce ourselves and to talk about our goals for the year.
Izzy led the integration of Entra ID into our Brightspace environment, replacing the ancient CAS authentication. Looks like it worked - everyone now has to login using their IT accounts.
And I’m on vacation now. “Vacation.” Staycation, until July 15. J took next week off as well.
🔗 Links
Arthur Holland Michel @ The Atlantic: Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever (possibly un-paywalled link).
Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off.
and
In other words: To help save the planet, should we be using less data? Given how much of modern life depends on megabytes and teraflops, the answer could be a key facet to living nobly in the AI age.
Which, of course. We should all be mindful of the energy costs of everything we do. Publishing this weekly thing adds to the energy demands of The Internet™, and will do so until my website goes dark. Although, not really, because the content will continue soaking up electrons in the Wayback Machine’s archive, in every search engine, and in all LLMs that were trained on it (ignoring the robots.txt file). So, do I reduce my digital footprint to try to reduce the energy burden? While trillion-dollar-companies boil oceans while powering data centres across the globe so that they can do spicy autocomplete based on their analysis of our archived content?
📚 Reading
- Still working through the Clan of the Cave Bear series, on book 4: The Plains of Passage. It’s just interesting enough to keep going (yay, sunken-cost fallacy!) but boy howdy is it hit-and-miss. Entire chapters filled with mundane detailed minutiae of every species and migration patterns etc etc etc. (I get it. Jean M. Auel did a lot of homework) and then random passages that devote the same meticulous description of pretty raunchy stuff (also, lots of homework? ugh.). Anyway. Just interesting enough to keep reading, skipping huge chunks ala Tom Bombadil…
🧺 Other
Michael J. Fox played onstage with Coldplay at Glastonbury 2024, in front of like 80,000 people. Damn.
And our long nightmare is almost over. After almost a month, The Pipe™ has been repaired and we can flush toilets at will once again.
My fitness is almost back to where it was a couple of years ago, as I was recovering from the stupid afib stuff, then my back went out, and now I’m building back up.
🗓️ Focus for next week
Vacation. Unplugging as much as possible. Catching up on deferred maintenance around the house. And hopefully fitting in some daytrips and rides.