Month: September 2026

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.