Todd Grooms

Winter is my least favorite season. The lack of sun or being able to enjoy the sun is difficult. The days at short and the amount of time to enjoy being outside is even shorter. The temperature is usually on the colder side. Even in Tennessee, the temperature ranges from the mid 20’s to the mid 40’s. For most people, temperatures in the 40’s probably don’t seem so bad. Unfortunately, my extremities become ultra sensitive in these conditions.

I have been diagnosed with Raynaud Syndrome which is described as, “a medical condition in which the spasm of small arteriescauses episodes of reduced blood flow to end arterioles.” While the condition typically only affects one’s fingers, it can also affect one’s toes. Unfortunately for me, it affects both. I have tried describing the condition to those who do not suffer from it, but it’s difficult to describe the sensation of only certain fingers or certain toes rapidly becoming numb and suddenly having difficulty controlling those extremities. You just want the numbness to go away, but once it does it is replaced with searing pain. Thankfully, the pain typically doesn’t last a prolonged period of time.

In addition to Raynaud Syndrome, my feet and toes remain in a constant state of hyper sensitivity. The sensation of the tips of my toes rubbing against my socks can actually trigger a pain response. To avoid that discomfort, I will remove my socks. However, that just leads to cold and numbness in my toes; rinse and repeat. The sensitivity is magnified into excruciating pain if, for example, I stump my toe or someone steps on my toes. In particular, my beagle has a bad habit of accidentally stepping on my toes when coming in or out of the house. Thirty pounds and sharp nails pushing into sensitive toes is torture.

I have been trying to find things to enjoy during this season, but it’s difficult to find enjoyment when you spend so much time in a hyper sensitive state or when you’re in pain.

Finished reading: A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket 📚

My younger sister loved this series and wanted to share it with Max. They have been reading these books together. I had not read the series and decided to start reading them as Max finished them.

Finished reading: When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron 📚

I believe I saw this recommendation on kottke. This title felt necessary after the last few months.

🔗 Complaints | Seth’s Blog

This is a distinction with which I have struggled. I am prone to whining. Years ago, this was something brought to my attention. Ever since I became aware, I have tried to become mindful of what I’m upset about and I now try to avoid whining. “Try” is the key word.

I had abstained from using AI assistance since the initial ChatGPT announcement. I understood, at a high level, how large language models (LLM’s) worked. I assumed that they would not be that useful to me. However, at this point it is almost impossible to avoid it. Random Google searches will occasionally include Gemini content. Gemini content in a web search was actually my first use of LLM generated code. I was trying to do something relatively simple in Bash. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but was unable to recall the Bash syntax to achieve my goal. I do not typically write scripts in Bash and it is always a series of web searches to get the syntax correct. I was honestly using Google to eventually find StackOverflow posts when Gemini suggested a generated script that would, allegedly, do what I wanted. I paused and read through the snippet. It seemed reasonable. I did a few more searches to verify what each line of the script would do. Everything checked out. My needs were fairly low risk, so I opted to use the suggestion. I left comments in the script to ensure I would remember where it came from, just in case I ran into issues later.

A few weeks later, I was in the process of migrating my blog to Micro.blog hosting. I could have just manually edited each markdown file to cleanup my custom front matter for Micro.blog’s import feature. However, where is the fun in that? I started putting together a script to cleanup my front matter. After a bit of researching, I realized I needed a few sed commands. Unfortunately, I find sed to be difficult to use. I struggle with the syntax and I always have to make a few searches to piece together what I need. This seemed like a good candidate for LLM assistance. I used Gemini and its suggestion resulted in an error. I then tried ChatGPT. The response seemed so confident, even broke down what each part would do. This also resulted in an error. I tried to follow-up with ChatGPT and indicate the first suggestion resulted in an error (with the error message). It apologized (ridiculous) and suggested a slightly different approach, which also resulted in an error.

Unfortunately for me, my blog migration script required quite a few sed commands. I did not get one working sed command out of an LLM. I had to experiment and tinker with each one until I got the desired outcome. This wasn’t a dealbreaker and honestly wasn’t unexpected. Whenever you’re dealing with a series of slashes, it’s understandable that an LLM would not spit out a working implementation. However, the suggestions at least put me in the same zip code as a solution, which I did find helpful. My experience was largely what I expected: somewhat helpful, but not a silver bullet. At this time, I think I will include these tools as a tool in my toolbox, but I will continue to give its suggestions a critical look.

Also: I really detest the nomenclature of these tools as “AI”.

🔗 The confusing reality of AI friends

Lengthy, but fascinating. I’m not sure how I feel about it all. I would like to think I wouldn’t get wrapped up in an AI companion, but I also think about online relationships that I cultivated as a teenager and how those people were spinning their own narrative and I was none the wiser.

📺 I used 1980s technology for a week

Loved it. Clever challenge and amazingly creative execution.

Louisville’s men’s basketball team has not been competitive over the last three or four seasons. I love cheering on my alma mater, but until this season, I haven’t had much for which to cheer. That outlook started to change after the offseason hiring of Pat Kelsey, our new head coach.

I was excited for this hire, but tried to temper my expectations. After all, I was very much onboard with the Chris Mack hype train, and I felt that Kelsey very much exuded Chris Mack energy: both were energetic, excited, and on the younger end of the spectrum. The Chris Mack era came to a halting end a few years ago. I don’t even want to get into the Kenny Payne era that nearly took away my enjoyment of Louisville basketball.

This past Wednesday, the Sports app reminded me that Louisville was playing No. 14 Indiana. I no longer subscribe to a service to reliably watch live television and the game was not being broadcast over the air here in Nashville. I was busy and didn’t expect much anyway. Well, around the start of the second half, I had a moment and checked on the score. ​Indiana 40, Louisville 74​. I was gobsmacked. I was in disbelief. I assumed there was a data error in ​Sports​. I looked at the box score. Louisville had zero free throws. How was this even possible?

I enabled the live activity in Sports so that I could follow along on my iPhone’s Lock Screen or on my Apple Watch. As the final score update came across, I was speechless. I then started to wait for a phone call, but this phone call would never come. It was then that my excitement gave way to sadness. I expected my father to call, as he always did, when Louisville pulled off something miraculous.

My father wasn’t a diehard Louisville fan. I would say he was passionate, but he was a ​passionate sports fan. He watched any game that was on, but always kept a keen eye on anything Kentucky-related (meaning any team that called Kentucky home). His father, his brother, and then his son (me) all attended the University of Louisville. I think it’s safe to say he had a soft spot in his heart for Louisville athletics.

I don’t think my father and I really ever butt heads, but we did not always agree or see eye-to-eye on everything. However, one common thing that we could always share was sports and, specifically, University of Louisville athletics. I wanted, very badly, to share this moment with him.

Louisville’s victory came in the Battle 4 Atlantis in-season tournament. They would go on to beat West Virginia on Thursday, but lose to Oklahoma in the championship game on Friday. While I was sad to see them lose a heartbreaker to Oklahoma on Friday, I was still feeling good about this run and the beginning of this season. It is bittersweet. I have so many fond memories around Louisville athletics and connecting with my father. I am thankful for that.

📺 Twin Peaks: All the pie and coffee

Happy pie for breakfast season, to all those who celebrate.

🔗 Tesla owners turn against Musk: ‘I’m embarrassed driving this car around’ | Elon Musk | The Guardian

Another uncertainty is how Tesla will be affected by policies pursued by Trump. The incoming president has called the shift to electric cars “lunacy”, said that supporters of such vehicles should “rot in hell” and vowed to strip away incentives to purchase them.

As a Tesla owner, I have considered whether or not I should sell. I do not see a sale of my vehicle as punishment to Tesla (they already have my money). I would not currently consider another though if this one fails.

About a month or so ago, I realized that I had become stifled with my previous blog setup. I had been maintaining a Jekyll based static blog since 2015. The first iteration was hosted via Github Pages. Eventually, I migrated the site to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I moved the git repo from Github to the server on NearlyFreeSpeech.net and that server would run the Jekyll command to generate the site and copy it over to the public folder. This worked fine. Eventually, I fiddled with it a bit more and moved the repo back to Github, but left the hosting duties to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Every push would trigger a Github Workflow that would build the site and rsync it to the host. This worked fine.

The biggest issue was the publishing hurdle. If I was on my Mac, publishing wasn’t too bad. I could create a post, commit it to the repo, then push it up; a few minutes later, the post was published. If I was on my iPhone though, then I had a few hurdles. I played around with a few ideas. I had a few Shortcuts that would publish to the Github API. I used Working Copy for a bit as well. All of these methods produced friction for me. Additionally, if I wanted to post a photo to my blog, that added a whole other layer of complexity.

A few years ago, I signed up for a hosted Micro.blog account. Initially, I used it for photo blogging. I enjoyed the frictionless posting. Then, I migrated my self hosted micro blogging posts to it and started posting short notes to my Micro.blog account. Again, the posting was frictionless. I found myself sharing more thoughts and notes online. I’m not really sure if anyone really reads them, but it became a public journal of things I found interesting. When I would write for my blog, I found myself being a bit jealous of how easy it was to post to my Micro.blog account.

I considered migrating everything to my hosted Micro.blog account. While the name of the service might be Micro.blog, it can handle short and long form posts with ease. As October wound down, my anxiety was looking for an outlet. It was then that I decided to migrate everything to my hosted Micro.blog account. I am happy to announce that the migration has been completed. If you are reading this, you are reading my blog which is now hosted by Micro.blog. I hope this incarnation of my blog results in more frequent sharing. If the site withers now, it’s not due to friction, but rather my occasional apathy to sharing online.

🔗 I have some notes on Sam Altman’s note-taking advice - The Verge

Finally, blue ink is unserious. Use black like an adult.

I don’t really have strong opinions about note taking, other than I wish I could get into a better habit of taking notes. Every time I have tried, I always approach it haphazardly and it never sticks.

🔗 The Tetrahedral Days of Christmas

A fun exercise and a Peanuts comic strip. What’s not to love?

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I have this version of the Serenity Prayer bouncing around my thoughts today.

We visited my sister in Kentucky this weekend. I had been looking forward to this trip for a few weeks. In addition to having dinner Saturday night for her birthday, we were also having dinner to celebrate our father. Saturday would have been his sixty-seventh birthday. Unfortunately, he was only there in spirit. After a relatively short illness and bout with pulmonary fibrosis, our father passed away in August.

His death caught me off guard. I knew he was in the hospital and I knew the prognosis wasn’t clear, but I genuinely believed he would come home after a few weeks. The seriousness of the situation didn’t hit me until the day he would eventually die. In a tearful conversation, my sister let me know that there was a good chance he would die that day. After a bit of time, I tried to drive to the hospital, which was two hours away, to see him one last time. I received word that he died before I could get out of Nashville.

Grief comes in waves. Sometimes it’s calm and you feel okay. Then you feel the water move up and down a bit. Before you realize it, the water comes over your head and you’re temporarily under. You didn’t get a good inhale of air in before the wave caught you off guard and now you’re choking on water. It feels turbulent and it feels as though it will never stop. Suddenly, the water is calm again and you feel as though you can relax a bit, but now you’re a little more cautious.

Saturday was my father’s birthday. I knew the waves would be active. I also fully expected a memory from Photos and a reminder to call him. I received both of those. As much as I liked seeing his face in the first photograph, it was bitter sweet. A photo of me holding my son, with my sister on one side, my father on the other. The photograph was likely taken eight years ago. He always looked old to me. His hair had turned white when he was a young adult. From stories I’ve heard, his hair turned solid white shortly after high school graduation. I always think of him with a Steve Martin look. The memory hurt and I decided not to watch it.

I wanted to spend time with my sister. I knew it would be a tough weekend for her, with his birthday on Saturday and her birthday on Sunday. She will forever be reminded of him as her birthday approaches, which seems cruel. I am so grateful that I was able to spend time with my sister this weekend and that we were able to go out for dinner. She wanted to eat at Jasmine’s, which is a Thai restaurant in Murray, KY. A restaurant that our father would have struggled to choose a meal. His food choices were always very safe, which is another polite way of saying bland. My sister and I joked, wondering what he would have chosen. My money was on ham fried rice.

System 7 - Wikipedia

This would be followed by version 1.1, which included LaserWriter driver version 7.1.1 and added a hidden extension called “Tuna Helper”, intended to fix the “disappearing files” bug in which the system would lose files.

I totally hit this bug the other day while playing around with my Classic running 7.0.1 and assumed I had somehow corrupted the partition. I am glad to know I didn’t break anything, but I started an apparently unnecessary erase and install earlier today.

Peak computing.

I tapped out at work after a half day. I am just not feeling well and I wanted to rest.

I have been tuning out on news and most social media, but I have been tuning into how I feel and how I am processing where we are at. I initially felt equal parts anger and despondency. I am thankful that I sat with those feelings and did not rush to share them. They were raw and unrefined. After eleven days, they have softened a bit. I still feel sadness and disappointment, but I am trying to prevent these feelings from driving my experience.

The last eight years have taken their toll on me. My stress and anxiety levels have remained elevated and regularly peak to new highs. I don’t want to admit to the amount of time I have lost with my family due to my anger and anxiety over the news and the state of our government. I have spent too much time staring at my phone instead of being present in the moment. I lost my sense of humor in 2016 and have never fully regained it. It’s easy to blame the polarizing President-Elect, because he comes across as an awful person, with questionable scruples. However, I mostly just blame people. I blame a party who repeatedly decided to nominate the most unqualified individual to lead their ticket and the people who either decided to vote for him or those who decided to sit it out and let it happen. If you’re not going to take this assignment seriously, then why should I?

🔗 2004 was the first year of the future

I adore the thought and care put into this retrospective of 2004, which was the year I graduated high school and began college. It feels like a lifetime ago (maybe two).

🔗 Election Day

It’s tempting to imagine that the person who would feed a group of strangers every morning just because they’re camped at his doorstep and hungry is somehow different than the person who would vote for concentration camps. But they’re the same person. We’re all the same people.

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.

I’m trying to find inspiration at the end of this week from this snippet of The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.

💿 Merrie Land

Damon Albarn began work on this album in the aftermath of Britain’s EU referendum. I keep coming back to this album after our own referendum and I wonder what it means for our country and our people.

When I was younger, I typically counted seconds too fast; now that I am older, I typically count seconds too slow.

🔗 The Yale Review | Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the Art of Children’s Literature

Regarding Ole Risom and Richard Scarry’s I am a Bunny:

I never read it as a child, but I can now attest to its elegant, quiet beauty, because it was my daughter’s first word book ever, and I read it to her several hundred times. I never tired of its pictures or its words, the simple zen-like magic it evokes of the inevitability of the passing seasons always somehow putting the reader in a pleasant passenger-seat view.

I adore this book and have always loved reading it with my kids.