Yesterday’s post was first handwritten on my Remarkable2, then auto-transcribed to text, emailed to myself, and pasted into WordPress.
It’s been at least six months since I tried Remarkable’s writing-to-text service, and the improvement is, well … remarkable!
It still doesn’t recognize bulleted or numbered lists well, or even simple paragraph breaks. But after I pasted the text, I made only one correction to one mistranscribed character in this entire post; it even recognized ‘Tetlockian‘! I took the slightest bit of additional care to write neatly, but not enough to slow me down or distract from writing. And I wrote in my normal ~80/20 mix of cursive and printing.
I wonder if the improvement was the integration of newer and more powerful models, tuning, or if I’m just imagining it?
Previously, the Remarkable service struggled to recognize my writing’s characters themselves and struggled to identify word breaks properly, meaning it never was quite good enough justify using it. I would have to spend more energy on writing extra neatly than was worth it to get the transcribed text. So I would use the Remarkable2 only for my own notes, never when I would need the text. This is supposed to be a huge value prop of the platform, so I’m glad it’s working so much better now. I think it will reinvigorate my usage of the product.
Last year, for the first time since 2018, I did not set New Year’s Resolutions. But for good reason.
2024 for me was one big Resolution: I took the year off from work, guided by a vision to Pursue Spiritual and Intellectual Clarity. In that pursuit I wrote, read, travelled, reflected, learned, and practiced new skills.
In 2024 I also succeeded in several efforts that had been repeat-failures as Resolutions in years past. This time I succeeded because these things were incidental to my greater purpose, and because I had few other obligations.
In 2024, I …
Kept up near-daily writing and meditation habits
Read a lot of books
Made real improvements in diet and reductions in drinking
Worked out a lot
Invested in the spiritual dimension of my life in a way I never had before
After last year’s reset, I am back to formal resolutions for 2025. We’ll see if the accountability from posting them somewhat publicly increases my success rate. (In a few days I’ll try to post a recap of my success/failure rate in prior years).
In 2025, I will …
Boot up on classical music. I have had this thread pinned to my personal email all year and never got to it. But today I started.
Make predictions and measure my accuracy. In the Tetlockian/Rationalist tradition. This is another one I’ve had good intentions around for years, but have never quite gotten to. This will get its own post.
Do a programming project with new AI & web tools. This will also get its own post.
Complete five formal public speaking engagements. Can be anything, as long as it’s part of an event and there is an audience. Public speaking has been my most consistent personal growth focus for several years now.
Finish 10 books; sample and but not finish 10 others; attend six movies/concerts/shows. Review all of them here.
Reengage with the pursuit of spiritual clarity. If I do it, this will get its own post as well.
Get down to race weight. Even if I don’t race this year.
In the past I’ve broken my Resolutions into primary and secondary sets. This year I am just listing them in roughly descending order of priority.
I’ll cover about a day-and-a-half with this post to tie up the rest of the time I spent in Kyoto before heading to Sydney. We covered a lot, including seeing the the incredible torii gates at Fushimi Inari as well as the Nishiki Market, both of which have been photographed by so many talented photographers and bloggers so I’ll spare the additional photos and more on a few observations that leapt to mind while I was there.
Of course, still took pictures – I’m a tourist, after all!
Don’t stop believing. In my first post, I reflected a lot about holding on to the principle of journey. At Fushimi Inari shrine, that principle seemed to come alive. With its estimated 10,000 Torii Gates (source: link), the shrine seems to invite you into a space that is in-between – inside a winding corridor but also outside and exposed to the elements, of this world but also of something else in warding off evil spirits, deeply spiritual yet also innately commercial with the names of people and business sponsors etched onto the back of each gate.
I found myself doing a lot of reflecting for myself while walking the path under the torii gates, of my own self being in-between, from where I came from and to wherever I will go. Each gate passed was a milestone (particularly in the heat, although the day we went was blessedly cloudy with a slight breeze), but also firmly pointing to the steps ahead to the next gate and all the subsequent ones to follow.
We talked about our lives and careers but also mused – with a small twist, the path around the shrine could easily become a nightmare. Imagine the repetition and the familiarity of passing gate after gate and if there was no end. The comfort of the familiar would take on a whole new light…
Waiting for the bus. In Chicago, I hate riding buses. I’ve had multiple times waiting to get home for the number 8 bus, getting ghosted by 40+ min, giving up and getting an Uber, only to have the bus saucily saunter up just as I’m getting in the car! 🤬
In Kyoto, that is not a problem because each station has a sign that forecasts when they will be arriving with these analog bus station signals for each bus. They flip up in real-time and – most importantly – are accurate.
Who needs GenAI/LLMs, when you have analog things like these that just work?
Finding new meaning in getting Lost in Translation. On my last half-day in Kyoto before heading to Australia, we went on a mission to find all the Kyoto sites that appeared briefly in Lost in Translation. TL;DR, we found the sites and I got super excited (yes, I am a bona fide nerd).
That’s right, the Black Widow toured Japan before joining the Avengers!
In Lost in Translation, Charlotte lightly jumps across stepping stones in a pond. The shot is beautifully framed, which was true to form when we got there. What I didn’t expect was how beautiful the surroundings are – the stepping stones are themselves located in a well-kept garden surrounding the Heian Shrine. To get there you walk on a small trail beside a small stream gently tinkling to the soundtrack of cicadas (on the level of cicada-pocalypse in the US), see serene lilies blooming quietly in a pond – then you get to the steps.
When you look at the center of each of the circular steps, you’ll notice a little “dimple” – apparently, it’s because they were cut from a pillar and reused.
One of my favorite moments for the whole trip was then as we were finishing the walk around the garden, there is a small bridge that crosses over the pond. Hanging in organized rows on both sides of the bridge are what basically seem like glass “wishing bells” (I don’t know what the real word is, will look that up later). As we hung out there to take a few pictures, swig some water in the shade, the breeze kicked up – and the whole bridge came alive with the sound of these bells clinking gently with the breeze.
When I closed my eyes, I could hear the wind and the bells around me – and, for that brief moment, I felt surrounded by playful laughter and joy. It’s not like anything I’ve felt before.
Core memory achieved!
Disclaimer: No GenAI, LLMs, and/or Chatbot interfaces were used to write or assist in this post. Just the squishy neural network of my own brain.
My brain needs more GPUs to stay competitive in this market!
Day 2 in Japan trip was a whirlwind – all the obstacles from the previous day seemed to melt away and, today, we seemed to flow just-in-time.
Because there’s a lot I want to write about, I’m fighting my every instinct to turn everything into a bulleted list of short, succinct, and quantified statements…
Early morning in Tokyo. Woke up a bit too early thank to jet lag but decided to roll with it. Breakfast and the Shinkansen train weren’t running yet so we walked to the Grave of the 47 Ronin/Sengaku-ji Temple nearby only to discover that it also wasn’t open either 😔. Still was a fascinating read about civic duty, particularly with the shenanigans going on with the upcoming US elections.
Breakfast highlight: ate “natto”, which is fermented soybean. Very stringy but also savory-delicious when combined with mustard and a bit of soy sauce. No slo-mo needed!
Writing this from the Shinkansen on the way to Tokyo. Yes, we actually made it! The ride is fast and strikingly quiet. Though the seats are full, all the riders are just listening to music, fiddling on their phones, sleeping, working, or – at most – talking very, very quietly. For those of you who know the CTA/Metra in Chicagoland, no need to crank up noise-canceling on your AirPods; the silence of the rider is only punctuated by PSA announcement and other ride information
My brother functioned as a noise-canceling mechanism and told me to shush several times when I tried to talk to him even though I was sitting right next to him! I’m sure the other riders were grateful for the premium brother noise-canceling service.
Daytime in Kyoto. We’re here! First up: took an amazing bike ride through Kyoto and did a partial perimeter of Kyoto’s downtown, hitting some of the most important landmarks like the Kinkakju Temple shrine, Nishi Honganji, and a few of the Geisha districts.
We rode in single file to hide our numbers.
The bike tour was awesome and the city seems to be pretty friendly to cycling. Our tour guide was incredible; she guided us unerringly through the streets, answered innumerable questions from the group (and for those of you who know me, you know I always have questions), while being continuously chill.
Lunch was conveyor/rotary sushi and the prices alone were worth of a *chef’s kiss*. Compared to similar rotary sushi restaurants in Chicago, we were talking 2-4X cheaper AND the food quality was just so much better.
Kyoto in the evening. After the bike ride, we immediately sprang into a walking tour. As part of it, we experienced heading into two Izakaya establishments, which are very cozy bars that sometimes have food. For sense of scale, by “cozy” I mean that in the first one we went to, it looked like it could seat maybe 8 people max! It meant that the setting was also really intimate – while our tour group was there, a native visitors from Kyoto showed up and the chef called out “Ah, come in! it’s been a long time since you’ve been here.” The relationship matters.
In terms of food, move over Wagyu beef – for me, it was all about the wasabi. Not the green-colored horseradish we often get in the US; real wasabi that has a different texture and hits different. While everything was tasty, I found myself eating the wasabi alone and actively avoiding mixing it with soy sauce like I normally do with the “wasabi” in the US!
In hindsight, this could have been two posts – oh well, there’s more stuff in my head that I’ll save for later posts. Till the next post!
Disclaimer: Forgot to add this in my first article - none of this content was aided or written with GenAI tools. Just good ol’ human hands-on-keyboard!
Ever since I watched Lost in Translation, I’ve wanted to visit Japan. Yes, Bill Murray and pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe Scarlett Johansson probably hyped up what I would actually get to experience if I got there, but my mind was enamored – the culture, the sites & sights, and the food and Suntory whiskey (which I did learn to enjoy later on).
Can you blame me for associating relaxing times with Suntory time?
Most of all, I yearned for the opportunity to be lost in all aspects of the word – elsewhere in a place foreign to me with no claim to who I am or should be and vice versa. There was just never time to make the trip though with a million different reasons to say no and choose otherwise for where to go.
Close to 20 years later, I finally got to yes and – I’m here, in Japan! But it’s been a harrowing trip with a lot of different factors that made it very uncertain for if I’d make it, thus the motto that my brother traveling with me and I adopted and the title for this post: don’t lose sight of your destination, but enjoy the journey.
So, a shortlist of obstacles that I enjoyed in my journey to get to Japan:
The CrowdStrike outage was impacting different matters at ORD even when I get to the airport – I wasn’t sure if I’d get a last minute cancellation while I was at the airport. 😰
Thankfully, the flight took off right on time!
~14 hours later, we arrived in Japan! We headed over to take the Shinkansen (“bullet train”) to head to Kyoto, only to learn that there had been a maintenance vehicle crash on the Tokaido line we were taking, resulting in ALL trains for the day being cancelled (link). 😮💨 Alright, deep breath.
After considering all our options, including heading back to the airport to take a flight to Kyoto or even driving ~6 hours, we decided to book a hotel nearby the station and try the Shinkansen the next morning. Reciting “journey before destination”, we decided to experience one tourist attraction in Tokyo that hadn’t been on our original itinerary planning: the Tokyo Skytower. Fast forwarding for a second to finalize about the theme of obstacles, on our way back to the hotel, we then got hit by a pretty major thunderstorm!
Finally, we re-directed our plans to a hotel close-by, tried to hit up an attraction that wasn’t high on our itinerary for the Tokyo Tower only to be hit by a thunderstorm as we were heading home! ⛈️
We’d known and thought we were prepared about summer in Japan being very hot and humid; we were not prepared.
But the strawberry vanilla soft serve ice cream we had the Tokyo Skytower was exactly what we needed – and didn’t even know existed in the world (or at least I’ve never seen that flavor at McDonald’s in the US!).🍦
In any case, there it is – my first post on the legendary sabbatiblog! ✅ The first is always the hardest so glad I got this going – I’ve got lots I want to to cover since this first post was written across multiple places – combination of Tokyo, on the Shinkansen to Tokyo we eventually were able to board while wrestling (unsuccessfully) with jet lag, and in Kyoto. You could say…I have a backlog! Till next time.
Bittersweetly, my sabbatical will come to an official end in a couple of weeks. I’m still figuring out whether I’ll post here, elsewhere, or both. I do plan to keep writing in some capacity.
And I do hope there are more sabbaticals in my future. The dream is to begin my next 10-year+ work journey now, and then be able to take another extended break.
In the meantime, I’ll post here at least when I travel or vacation. And a guest-poster or two may be writing here soon as well. I’m excited to see what they have to say!
The range of human passions runs both broad and deep.
If it can be climbed up, slid down, flown, or ridden; if it can be thrown, caught, stacked up, knocked down, pushed, or pulled; if it can be assembled, dissembled, timed, measured, predicted, or drawn at random; if it can be discovered, hidden, organized, jumbled, or deciphered; whatever we can do with our environment, we will do it.
And whatever we do, we will make a game of it. Homo habilis, or “skilled human,” was the early hominid first associated with tool use. We, homo sapiens, are the “thinking humans.” But we can understand ourselves equally well as homo ludens, the game-playing humans.
The games we play, and the communities and subcultures we create around them, make us who we are. Within our games can be found all of our humanity. They teach us cooperation and competition. Communities built around games help us to belong, but also to stand out. Playing sports, we lose ourselves in the moment, achieve a flow state, and brush up against the infinite—our whole being a machine, mind fused to body as one, tuned to one activity in real time, and also outside of time. But games also teach us to strategize, to think long-term, to aim toward goals hours, weeks, or years away. Simon Sinek’s concept of the infinite game, with ever-changing rules and players, is as good a metaphor for life as any.
We tend to assign an air of seriousness to big games with mass appeal—once normal games that have been elevated to cultural events: the NBA Finals, World Cup, or Tour de France. And we sometimes denigrate the most niche games and communities as silly, nerdy, a waste of time. But I think the most niche pursuits reveal the purest beauty in our game play.
The next time you see the cup stacking, cheese rolling, or Tetris world championships on YouTube; or the cornhole world series on ESPN 2; or an ad for a local Magic, The Gathering tournament, don’t think of how many hours the competitors have spent with their plastic cups, or how many dollars on their card decks. They aren’t trading their time and money only to be the best at Tetris or cornhole. They’re trading it for belonging, community, and achievement in general, but expressed narrowly. And for a brush with the infinite.
Years ago when I first started at Relativity, we had an amazing engineering leader named Security Bill.
Security Bill taught us a lot. For instance, he knew our most likely breach scenario was low-tech: someone tailgating into our office behind a polite door-holder, then sticking a USB into an unlocked machine. So Bill set out to create a new norm. Everyone would badge into every door, every time. If you were walking back from lunch with your best work friend, and the CEO happened to be walking behind you? All three must badge in, one at a time. If the CEO was distracted, late, in a rush, and forgot to swipe his badge, it was your duty to remind him he needed badge in. Even if you were just an intern. This would usually mean stopping right in the doorway and physically standing in his way. It was a hard norm to enact in a company of a few hundred people, but Security Bill was a patient and persuasive man. Leadership bought in first, and slowly the new norm stuck. Within a couple of months, the whole company was badging in, and holding each other accountable.
But the badge norm protected against only the first half of the threat, and still wasn’t foolproof. So Bill also had a custom stamp with a red ink pad. He carried the stamp and ink in a little case, along with a fresh set of yellow sticky notes. If you stood up for a drink or bathroom break and didn’t lock your computer, and Security Bill happened by, you’d return to find a sticky note on your monitor. On the yellow paper would a red stamp that read in block letters “WHAT’S COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?”
And Security Bill was always willing to describe for you what could possibly go wrong.
Security Bill taught us other things, beyond how to have a security mindset. I was once asked in a meeting to do something that was outside my skill set and comfort zone. I said something like, “I’m not very technical, I don’t think I can own this.” Bill encouraged me to try, and offered to help if I got stuck.
After the meeting, he pulled me aside and told me a story. “When I was young, my parents sent me to work on my uncle’s farm for a summer. For the first two weeks, every day I was asked to do something I had never done before. What would he have said to me if I’d told him, ‘I’m not very agricultural, I don’t think I can do this.’ Some things are hard. But we’re smart, and we figure them out.”
Security Bill created a permanent security mindset at Relativity. Throughout his career he also helped me and hundreds of others learn how to build a culture of excellence; how to fight an uphill battle and win; when to be a careful thinker, and when to jump in and figure it out.
As I exit my sabbatical, I’ve spent more time thinking about what’s next. These thoughts tend to with come hopes, desires, and worries. But they don’t have to.
This year has been the first time in my life I haven’t had a plan or timeline for my next phase. That openness has helped me appreciate the present, and be wary of the future. I’ve learned to notice when I’m ruminating on the future (rather than taking practical steps along my desired path). It gives me an uncomfortable feeling, like leaning too far over high ledge.
In my meditation app recently, I heard this advice:
“You cannot become happy. You can only be happy, in this moment, right now.”
We should still make plans and follow through with them. But we shouldn’t confuse those plans for living a good life.
On the last morning of my recent trip to Amsterdam, I had time to check out one more coffee shop before leaving for the airport. Google Maps is a blessing and a curse, because you can always find something good, but by the time you get there, you often know so much about the place that the sense of discovery is all gone.
There was a coffee shop called Kafenion right next door to my Airbnb, which I’d poked my head into on my first day. It was absolutely packed, a good sign, but looked kind of old school and had a strange vibe. So I found another place that seemed more modern.
This last morning, as I looked through Google Maps, there were a bunch of options I hadn’t tried, all within a short walk.
But, they all pretty much looked like this.Or this.Or this.
… natural wood, airy, brass, granite, stainless steel, minimalist. Don’t get me wrong, I love hanging out in places like this, and loved each of these individual places when I visited them.
But it’s a bit of a bummer when you’re traveling, looking for new experiences, and you’re hanging in a bunch of places that from the inside could be in New York, Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, or Tokyo. Lots of people have written about the loss of local character and increasing “sameness” of many great cities, and that morning, I was feeling it. Of course, if there’s a problem here, I’m part of it: I always do my research on Google Maps, always look at the pictures, and had already visited five different modern espresso cafes with Scandinavian minimalist design and single origin beans.
So, I decided to try Kafenion, the place right next store that had been packed, but seemed a bit weird. I figured, best case it’s great and different, and interesting. Worst case I don’t love it but it’s still coffee.
I walked in, and it’s a big space, but nearly every seat was taken. It seemed to be 50% hip young Amsterdammers, and 50% old Greek guys. There was no latte art, no bronze fixtures, no blonde wood, and no neon. It was dark, with dark wood, black and white photos, stacks of books in Greek, and a bunch of chess boards (another very good sign). The seemed to be high-quality Italian, but not exotically grown and locally roasted. The only thing artisanal was the olive oil (I’ll get to that).
The barista/manager/owner(?) took my order. I later got his name, Omar. He asked me a question I don’t usually get asked at coffee shop, “Is strong okay?”
I thought he meant a dark roast, and I said whatever he recommends is fine. He looked at me kind of funny, so I asked, did you mean the roast? No, he said, the caffeine content. I told him yes! Strong is great. I was low on sleep and had a long travel dat ahead. Then he gave me that look that tells you someone is sizing you up a little. He apparently decided I was open enough to suggestion, and he ask, “Do you want something kind of weird? If you don’t like it, I’ll make you something else.” Now we’re talking. Yes! This is what I came for.
Omar started doing his thing, making the espresso, steaming the milk. Then he measured and poured in two spoonfuls of something thick. I assumed it was some kind of homemade syrup, and I really don’t like sugar in my coffee, so I was prepared to not like it but pretend to, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. When I tried it, it was unexpected—great coffee, something strange about it, but definitely no sugar. I asked what was in it.
“It’s olive oil, a very special olive oil from my family. You can’t taste it much, but it makes everything very smooth and nice.” I told Omar I loved it, he fist bumped me, and then I stayed and enjoyed the atmosphere and the drink, and ordered another for the road.
It was a perfect cap to a great trip, an experience I wouldn’t get anywhere else, and a reminder to take more chances and do less research.
sabbatiblog 