Take 5, D.

Weekly Update 2026-03-14: The Sock and Pi Edition

What happened during the week of March 9th - March 14th, 2026:

🍇 This weekly update will likely be posted a day early, as I'll be attending La Chaussette on Sunday 03-15 and won't be in much of a condition to write up a blog post. My thoughts about this natural wine festival will have to wait until the following update on Sunday 03-22.

🥧 Happy Pi Day (and 314 Day) to those who celebrate them.

🤐 It's been a relatively quiet week overall, so not too much to say in this section. L. had her schedule messed with this week, so she alternated morning and afternoon shifts with a day off thrown into the middle of the mix. She also worked on Saturday 03-14, so I spent some time walking around downtown Saint Charles with my film camera.

🏋🏻 Before I forget, I will say that one highlight of this quiet week was a personal best during a workout. On Wednesday 03-11 for the first time, I held a plank for 90 seconds! Iikely could have held the pose for a full two minutes, but since it was part of my 7-minute workout, I had other exercises to do instead. Before Wednesday, my personal plank best was 40 seconds, but that old record is now in my dustbin of workout history.

Items Of Note From Last Week:

Outbound Actions

Internal Obligations

Media

More Info About The Media Selections From This Week:

Due to the briefness of this week's entry, I've kept the selections just as brief.

To answer the question raised by Squirrels at the window, you befriend a frightened squirrel by being patient, by making no sudden moves, and by repeating your actions until the squirrel sees there's no harm there. In this case, the action is simply offering the squirrel a nut, either close to a human or directly from their hand. The young squirrel takes her time, but eventually accepts the offer of a tasty peanut.

One of my favorite music websites, The Quietus, is now offering a try-before-you-buy offer to get one month's of subscription benefits for free before committing to a payment. Their Low Culture podcast is one of these benefits, and many months it's worth the subscription costs alone. March's entry looks at the 1977 debut self-titled album by Suicide, a singular entry that's not quite punk or industrial or doo-wop or rock or dub, but manages to be all of these things and none of them. The discussion assumes you've heard the album before, but if you haven't, here's where you can catch up. A significant portion of the podcast is dedicated to the album's centerpiece, "Frankie Teardrop," which has not lost any of its shock or bite in the nearly 50 intervening years. You'll also get to hear about the band's early origins, the hysterically awful first draft of "Frankie Teardrop," and a brief debate as to whether Suicide could be classified as radicals or as tricksters.

For a jarring shift in tone, let's check in with Ian Betteridge, whom you may recognize from Betteridge's Law Of Headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." His article is another examination of the pipeline from California hippies to Silicon Valley to MAHA, "...how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn." Purity logic leads to, per Betteridge, an obsession with contamination and how it can be removed, often in increasingly horrifying ways. While his argument isn't exactly new, it's still concisely written and can educate those to whom it is new.

Two bits of technology are up to bat next. The first, Upgrade covering the release of the new Apple MacBook Neo laptop, talks at length about the audience for this low-cost laptop and what kind of impact it can have on the computer market as a whole. It's a better buying proposition than buying an iPad and adding accessories so it can mimic a laptop. Minus the low-ish memory of 8 GB, it's nearly a perfect laptop, so while I am intrigued by the 2026 version of the Neo, I'm more interested in its follow-up. Meanwhile, MIT Technology Review examines the fallout from AI conquering the game of Go back in 2016. Some of the comments by Korean players of Go saddened me for reasons I can't fully explain, as I read their dejection as due to losing part of their self-identity to a computer, or how they now have to follow AI's lead instead of analyzing the board game by themselves. On the flip side, AI has changed how Go is played by focusing more creativity on the middle aspects of the game, and by allowing more women to confidently compete in what has traditionally been a male-heavy domain. I feel that in 10 more years, many of these same dejected Go players will have learned new strategies that revives their love of the game, and that AI will be seen as a learning tool for Go with little of the current mystique surrounding it.

Finally, let's spend a night at a train station in rural Japan! CAPSULE JAPAN takes a train to Kōyashita Station near Mount Kōya, which now offers up the stationmaster's building as a small two-room hotel! Mount Kōya on the Kii Peninsula is home to many Buddhist monasteries founded by Kūkai (also known as Kōbō Daishi), who is considered one of the most important saints in Japanese Buddhism. The small train station is along the railway leading to the mountain and its monasteries, so it is often bypassed by pilgrims but seen nonetheless. The hotel in particular is rather cute, though its isolation was clearly apparent even by watching the video of the stay. As long as you could entertain yourself (and, more importantly, buy food and drinks beforehand as there are no amenities nearby), it would make for a unique one-night stay.

Picture time!

Let's try a new feature to reward folks who've made it this far in the blog entry.

During a solo walk around my neighborhood on Tuesday 03-10, I came across a heavily-decorated backyard that edges up against a small pond. A portion of this yard is popular with the Canada Geese and Mallards, so occasionally I'll startle some waterfowl when walking on by. This particular goose appeared to be lost in thought, so they didn't see me. What could this goose be thinking about?

A goose lost in thought?

#Apple #Documentation #Jobs #Life #Mundanities #Photography #WeeklyNotes