Blog of James David Williams

As I wrote last week, the second leg of my back-to-back travels was to New Orleans. New Orleans is one of the very few distinct cities in America, and even if that brings certain negatives I hope that it maintains its own identity. I spent about six weeks there during one of my law school summers in a misguided attempt to find a home for the start of my legal career. That isn’t enough time to truly get to know a city, but that experience did make me a relative expert among the attendees. One person, perhaps in a fit of overexuberance, told me that my recommendation that he stroll along Frenchman Street and pop into one of the jazz clubs led to the best part of his trip. I took a similar walk myself after the final evening’s activity ended en route back to the hotel and enjoyed it myself. This conference was a digital business owner summit and not a legal conference, so it was a fire hydrant of information as everyone was talking about what’s working in different business models, what’s not, and what people are building as AI tool enable more and more use cases. I have definitely taken advantage of the subsidy that is a per-seat license on an AI platform since I returned.

On this trip, once the rideshare dropped me off at the hotel I didn’t wander much. I didn’t venture across Canal and only went north of the Quarter by a short distance for the closing arcade event. It wasn’t the sort of trip to stroll down St. Charles or Magazine. Had I not needed to cram work into the mornings, I probably would have. Instead, I took a shorter morning walk to different places for beignets. Of those, the ones at Café du Monde were best. Maybe that was the walk down Royal towards Jackson Square or the café atmosphere more than even the pastries themselves, but they were better nonetheless. If I ate that much sugar on a regular basis the consequences would be severe, so it’s a good thing that I don’t partake outside of vacation mode. I stuck with Creole food for most of the other meals too. Other than how spicy certain things can be, I enjoy the food (which like the music has a distinct identity in a manner that makes the city punch above its weight class in cultural relevance compared to population). And now that I’ve returned it feels like we’re finally in fall, which is the best time of year to be in North Carolina.

The last week has been a travel bonanza. We opted out of most of the ETA conference circuit this year, but two trips back to back feels a little like being on that circuit anyway. My first trip was to Cleveland and it was more of a personal trip. While the weather was nice with some brisk early fall temperatures, I don’t feel any compulsion to go back soon. I stayed in a lovely little boutique hotel, but downtown Cleveland wasn’t a great place to be. There is a lot of empty square footage and all that comes with that. It would take a lot to change that now, maybe too much for people to actually do it. I did eat at some nice restaurants and saw a late night comedy show, but the Triangle is a better fit for me.

Then after a quick overnight pit stop in Durham, I was back at the airport bright and early yesterday morning. This second part of my travel double header is for a true conference. We don’t go to legal conferences, but this is a tech conference that I’ve attended for several years now. In the past, it’s always been in Las Vegas. This year brought a nice change as the distance I had to go is shorter and I don’t enjoy Las Vegas as much as some other people. I woke up this morning in the French Quarter in New Orleans. I haven’t been here in several years, and it was time for this sort of trip again. This morning, rushed though it might have been, I had some beignets. Not at Café du Monde; that will have to wait until at least tomorrow or maybe Friday, but I am in the Crescent City nonetheless. Now it’s time to drink from a fire hydrant of information for a few days and then take the next several weeks digesting what I’ve heard.

This is a week of all of my fall activities all starting in earnest. That started with the first league game of the curling season on Monday. While I’d played a pickup game the week prior, there was still plenty of rust that I’ll need to shake off. I was also consistently narrow with my ice calls, which probably doesn’t mean anything to most people reading this but is something that has been a consistent theme of mine when skipping. This will be my first time skipping on a team with people who have curled more than a year or two, so there should be room to grow there as people are more capable than I’ve had before. It won’t matter, though, if I can’t execute my own shots better. As I told at least one person afterwards the Olympians should not be concerned about me taking their spots in the next cycle, at least based on current form.

Last night was the start of my one new activity for the fall, a module through church that will last six weeks. The topic is faith and work. With the nature of my work and the fact that almost all of it is either on or mediated through a screen, the topic of work and life being integrated is something I’ve thought more and more about as time has passed and the law firm journey has continued. This morning was the kickoff to the fall semester of the men’s bible study. There is a lot of continuity in my group, which I appreciate as it should allow relationships to deepen. And this evening my small group will kick off in earnest and welcome a couple of new members. Lots of church activities this fall, which is intentional on my part in this season. Combined with some upcoming travel, it also means that I’ve not needed to fill my evenings with television. Even though I have good content lined up, that’s still refreshing.

I have a few personal AI projects in addition to my business ones. I first wrote about these projects around four months ago, but they are further along now. The simplest is a storage list of all of the spices and sauces that I keep in my kitchen so that I can get recipe ideas easily. Then if I like the recipe, I save it or tweak it and slowly I’m building my own little personal cookbook. The feedback loop for this is hardly perfect as I don’t always provide the follow up information, but it still serves the basic purpose well.

This post is about a more ambitious project though, one that incorporates my feedback and preferences across different forms of media with the goal of picking up on common threads and uncovering new things that I’d like. We’re talking movies, TV, music, podcasts, and different types of books. The initial seeding is the heaviest lift, one that is still in process. For some categories, it was a matter of downloading history. Those were simple. For others, it was scanning bookshelves and combing through my memory. I continue to fill in some of that back catalog in fits and starts. I also have to provide commentary and feedback on what I liked, what I didn’t like, and why. That’s been a use case for the dictation tool we use as I just ramble for a few minutes and then submit it to be synthesized.

I’ve used the media project for a couple of books already, a few that I read before my Slovenia trip and my current nighttime read. Music has been hit and miss thus far, but I have found a few new subgenres that I’ve enjoyed (Cabo Verde ballads anyone?). This week, I used the accumulated information to help pick a podcast series for my drives, a new television show to watch, and a few nonfiction books to read. The immediate impetus was that I finished a show—season two of The Chestnut Man—and needed a new one. It was almost as gripping as the first season, though definitely not bedtime viewing for many people as it is a fictionalized serial killer drama based on a Danish novel. I also haven’t been reading as many idea books in the last year or so and want to get back into that as an antidote for brainrot.

For the TV quest I gave some initial guidance on what I wanted my next show to be, namely another Nordic noir. The chat then gave a few recommendations of ones I hadn’t watched and gave short synopses of why it thought I might enjoy them based on what I’ve already reviewed. I’m two episodes into the one I selected, but it’s enough to keep going even if I have to access it through an app available in conjunction with my library card. This round is also the first time that the cross-pollination has been useful, even if still nascent. This was particularly true in some crossover between books and podcasts, though I also added some layers of refinement to the instructions when it recommended books based on some of my movie preferences but that don’t fit with my reading goals. With each round of refinement and each additional bit of context the results should continue to improve, and I expect that after a few more rounds it will be a really useful toy.

At the end of last week, I had some visitors. My parents decided to receive a debrief of my Slovenia trip in person, which I duly provided in the evenings after my workdays concluded. And while I still haven’t replaced the sheets on the guest bed, they are washed and everything is otherwise back to normal in my house. Whenever they come, I share a new restaurant or two with them. While the fact that I’ve lived here for several years now means there is a shrinking list of new places to take them, we did visit two on this trip. Both lean Italian, one focusing on handmade pastas and the other on pizzas. Both are also downtown institutions and went over well. Perhaps the only complaint was that we ordered too much at the pasta place; oh well, I ate all of mine.

Sunday was a bit crazy. After church, I drove to Charlotte for a baby shower. Then I drove home afterwards. The math is a little wince-inducing, four and a half hours on the road and only about two hours at the destination. I haven’t been to that many baby showers in my life, and will probably keep it that way, but this one was worth attending. The couple live in Atlanta and this was a rare chance to see them, especially as their world is about to change in a big and wonderful way. They were gone when I visited Atlanta a few months ago for the world cup semifinal so I grabbed this opportunity instead. The day was also a reminder if I needed one that I don’t ever want to have a lengthy commute again as that was way too much time in the car. It was a good thing I had the holiday on Monday to get myself mentally prepared for this shortened workweek. Now onto the rest of September and transitioning back into more sustained normal rhythms.

Settling back into normal routines has been almost seamless since I returned from my summer vacation. I had my normal return meal of Peruvian chicken for dinner. I made my normal trip to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning and then supplemented things with a run to the grocery store. I had my normal blueberry muffin and took my normal weekend walks. I even went to a baseball game on Saturday evening. There are things like washcloths and top sheets that I was perhaps a little too excited to get back to. The sweltering late summer heat and humidity, not so much.

Returning from Europe has always been easier on my circadian rhythms and sleep than going to Europe (I’ve found the opposite to be true when going to Asia). Mind you coming home lacks the excitement of going on a trip, but extending a day by a few hours after arriving back in the US in the afternoon is easier than starting a new day with effectively no net sleep during the previous night as happens when you arrive in Europe in the morning. Nonetheless, my wake time gradually adjusted at a rate of almost exactly one hour per night until I got back to my normal sleep cycle by about Sunday night/Monday morning. If anyone has any tricks to help speed that process up, feel free to send them my way.

This week, I’ve done several vacation things to the max. After I picked up a rental car, a little Renault Clio that beeps at me way too much, I left Ljubljana and headed north towards the Julian Alps. I stopped in the hamlet of Kamnik for a hillside lunch and then took a cable car up to Velika Planina. I spent a few hours walking around the alpine pastures in what turned out to be a mere appetizer of what was to come. Once I descended, I drove to my accommodation at the far end of Lake Bohinj,. After twisting and turning over mountain roads, I reached the lake just as the sun was beginning to set so I was able to take it in (though I must say that it was best in the early morning).

On my first day at Bohinj, I took it easy with a gentle morning stroll around the lake. Mind you, this took around four hours to complete, but it was still a gentle stroll. It was also a test run for my new day pack trip. Then there was some pesky work that had to be done, and I decided to splurge and do a big fancy tasting menu for dinner—many small courses, optional wine pairings, gentle music, the whole shebang. It was very good.

The next day was a marathon hike. I was out the door by around 6:30 for a half hour drive to the trailhead. Parking was a challenge so I didn’t actually hit the trail until about 7:20. As it turned out, that is also when I returned to the car 12 hours later.

The Seven Lakes Hike, is not supposed to take 12 hours (more like 9 to 11), but I suffered an equipment failure as my resoled boots delaminated on me and I took a more gingerly pace after that as the soles were held together by my shoelaces looped underneath them and I was in real trouble if those tore through on the jagged rocks underfoot. I don’t often get sentimental about things, but I am going to miss those boots. They finally gave out last year and I tried to get them repaired in advance of this trip, but to no avail. I just wish they’d failed on my test run the day prior instead so that I would have worn the new pair of hiking boots I brought in case something like this happened.

There is almost 1000 meters of elevation change in the hike, so you start in a mixed beech and spruce forest and ascend above the timberline for much of the day. There are huts offering food and drink spread along the different routes. The first such hut is about an hour in, still in a forest section although in a clearing with pasture and a lake. It was a nice place to have breakfast. Then the real hiking started. There wasn’t a payoff until several hours in and I reached the viewpoint above a double lake where there is another hut. Descending down to it on the route I took means holding onto steel cables to keep one’s footing and then walking/sliding down switchbacks of loose scree. I was above the timberline at that point and only on the descent did I come back into alpine meadow. The lakes are a blue green depending on how deep they are and if there is any vegetation under the water. Otherwise, they are so very clear. After lunch of a few apricots and sandwich meat (the contrast from the night before was almost laughable), I ascended further up the valley past several more lakes, each seemingly more beautiful than the last. What I currently recall as the second-to-last one was the prettiest of all. The trail went past it from above and on its right, meaning you get to look down on it from several angles. The sky above, without a cloud in it, was bluer than blue. And so was the water below, just a darker hue. From there, I kept pressing up the valley to a third hut/rest area to refill my water bottles and eat some more of my grocery store provisions.

The hardest part of the hike itself, by some margin, was after leaving that final hut and taking a route that crested a saddle high above the valley before winding its way back down to complete a great circle. That ascent, in full afternoon sun and over jagged rocks, was also the point at which my boots began to fail. It was very much in the type 2 fun category and not of the type 1 variety. From the crest of the saddle all the way down, it was more about completing the hike and keeping my shoes together than enjoyment. My legs were burning and the jagged scree had done its work on my feet, but I found a slower rhythm and treaded carefully to try to keep my midfoot where the shoelaces were looped from the worst of the sharp edges. Then I put one foot in front of the other and got on with it all the way back to the car, stopping only briefly at the hut where I’d breakfasted in the morning as that marked the completion of the great circle route I’d taken.

I followed up this hike with a rest day. Not that I do full rest days, mind you, but it was a rest day by my standards. I returned to the fancy restaurant where I’d eaten two days prior for an afternoon cooking class with the chef. I filleted a trout for the first time, made some panna cotta, received a metaphorical kick in the rear for not using my sous vide machine more in my home cooking, and talked with the chef about his own journey as he looked to be about my age and the restaurant is still new. It was actually the cooking class that had introduced me to the restaurant in the first place as that came up in my search for offbeat activities.

Then there was another travel day driving over a high mountain pass on a road built by POWs in World War One into the town of Bovec where I’m writing this post. The food here has been very mediocre. Yesterday was another big hike, 9 more hours on the trail, down the Soča Trail from the source of the river at the foot of the pass I’d crossed the day before back to my hotel in Bovec. The path was every bit as rocky as my walk had been in the Seven Lakes Valley, and that made it difficult to stay in a rhythm or to enjoy the views of the river without stopping. It also meant that my feet are very sore today also. The water is turquoise and reminds me of the water at some of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean. Of course the water in this river is much, much colder, but that was the color. In terms of absolute beauty, yesterday’s hike did not match the Seven Lakes hike. The best views were from the suspension bridges across the river and in the narrow gorge sections, but they were often very similar and the rest was up and down and over rocks and tree roots on repeat. In hindsight, doing a shorter section of the yesterday’s trail would have given me 90% of the payoff with much less effort. That said, it was more type 2 fun and I’m sure that I’ll look back on it all more fondly once my feet feel better.

It was only last night that I finally had my “I’m in Europe” meal of a lemon Fanta and a doner kebab. That was the closest place to eat and I didn’t feel like walking more than necessary. I’m now headed into a more relaxing week to finish my trip, starting with a few days on the shores of Lake Bled looking out over the most famous view this country has to offer.

For my summer vacation this year, I chose a marginally less obscure European destination than last year when I went to the Faroe Islands. This year I’m in Slovenia, the northernmost country on the Balkan peninsula. It is bordered by Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia and has the varied topography you might expect from that mix of neighbors. Today is my last full day in the capital Ljubljana before I pick up a car and begin my travels to other regions. One of my tour guides described Ljubljana as a quiet city where it’s nice to raise a family. That description is apt, both as a positive and a negative.

The area was first populated thousands of years ago but none of their wooden structures survive. There are Roman walls, a couple of which are still in use as one side of a public courtyard. The medieval city sits on the other side of the river from the Roman settlement of Emona where there is a hill topped by the city’s castle. That is the old city, which expanded across the river once walls were knocked down and the city expanded. The newer buildings on the approaches to the city center are similar to what is seen in other parts of Europe—soulless apartment blocks and grocery stores with lots of glass and small parking lots. It seems that every region has its own flavor of contemporary architectural blah. The city’s architecture was also impacted by the Yugoslav period, but even though there are a few tall brutalist eyesores they are at least clustered together in one (very unpleasant) square and none of the buildings in the old city were bulldozed to make way for them. It also helps that this city was untouched by the many conflicts that affected the region during the twentieth century.

The buildings in the old town are in Viennese styles as this place was part of Hapsburg Austria for a few hundred years (interrupted by only a short Napoleonic interlude) up until the First World War. None has the majesty of the buildings that line the Ringstrasse, but the river here is much more central than the Danube is in Vienna. It’s hardly fair to compare this much smaller city to Vienna, but Vienna is the benchmark against which I compare the beauty of every city. There also aren’t the lovely cafes of Vienna here, or at least I haven’t managed to find them for those pesky work sessions that have intruded into my vacation mindset.

I’ve had a mix of restaurants, from fancy ones with white tablecloths to street stalls. Slovene food is a mix of styles, but the primary influences are from Austria to the north with its more subtle flavors than we would have in America where we tend to over-season everything. I’ve also had goulash, pasta, and cevapcici too so far, though, showing the mix of influences from other directions. I expect there will be less variety and more pork once I leave the capital, but I’ll continue to eat a mix of cheaper and more expensive places as I flit about.

The best part of the experience of Ljubljana may be that the old city is almost fully pedestrianized. Restaurants spill out into the streets, everything is quieter, and people are always milling about. I wish more places would take a page out of that book, Vienna included.

Last Thursday, I accelerated my normal weekly dinner out and took it during the week instead of on the weekend. I was tired of eating almost all of my meals alone and so reached out to a friend to see if I could bring dinner for us to eat together. Meeting his family out is a logistical challenge as they have two young children, but that’s less of an issue when I act as both the delivery drive and guest. It’s such a simple thing that I should have been doing it much sooner, but in the whole time they’ve been here this was only the second time I’d been over for dinner. We had my favorite Thai place, which I picked up downtown after I finished my work for the day.

The older child knows me and so he came to the door to greet me when I arrived. He couldn’t quite get the door open and his dad still had to come help him, but in fairness the door does stick. He almost always smiles when he sees me, and he did so this time too. We jumped straight into racing his toy cars around on the floor after I took off my shoes and set the food down. I hadn’t seen him in a few months, so he was a little taller. We talked about all of the fun things he’d been doing at his summer day camp. Then it was time for dinner.

I hadn’t seen the younger child for an even longer period of time. He looked completely different, much more like a little human now that he’s almost a year old. He didn’t manage to get much of his food into his mouth, but he sat in his highchair and smiled while the adults had a conversation about life and work and near future plans. The older child ate well until he decided he was done and then refused to eat more. He went back into the living room and played more with his cars before he came back for dessert. For that dessert, I introduced him to the wonderful treat that is mango sticky rice. He was a fan. 

Last weekend, a friend came to town on short notice. This meant scrambling to find activities. A highlight was a sketch comedy show on Friday evening hosted in the same little black box theater where I took improv classes some time ago. Did I understand all of the jokes? Absolutely not, and for the same reason why it’s a bad idea to rely on me during the pop culture portions of a trivia contest. Did I enjoy some laughs? You bet.

It also meant eating out more than normal. Though my favorite Thai place was out of commission due to some kitchen maintenance, overall I was satisfied that I offered my guest a sampling of the Durham food scene. Handmade pasta, seafood from the coast, Mediterranean-inspired spreads, Peruvian rotisserie chicken, and Carolina-style BBQ (even if he chose not to get the chopped pork) all featured. We also tried a mix of cocktail bars and taprooms, but the new spots we tried aren’t going to become regular destinations for me.

We capped off the weekend with a Sunday evening walk through Duke Gardens since my friend is a plant guy and a small time gardener. For some reason, he chose not to bring his phone and then got mad at himself for having left it in the car when he was unable to take pictures. It’s not like I’d told him that the gardens are impressive or anything. Maybe next time he’ll be a better listener. Oh well, it was funny for me.