Much Nothing About Ado

-

 

Rounding the bend on Ride the Rockies

As I look back at 2023, I get the sense that I'm basically finishing this year where I started the last one. Sure, lots of stuff happened, but ultimately, I don't feel significantly ahead or behind where I was a year ago. Is that good? Bad? Neither?

I'm finishing up my 8th year with the Colorado Department of Education. It's still good work, but there's so much of it! It's difficult to not finish each day just dwelling on all the things that might help people but there's just not enough hours to do it all. This has also been a year for many new colleagues, which brings new opportunities and challenges.

By some measures, you might say this was my biggest cycling year yet. I rode Ride the Rockies for a second time, and that week was dominated by cold, wet weather. The highlight of the week should have been riding over Rocky Mountain National Park on Trail Ridge Road, but snow had closed the road and even if by some good luck the road had opened, it was going to be lousy (and perhaps dangerous) conditions for cyclists. We shuttled around the park instead. I also rode RAGBRAI and that week was dominated by heat. So much heat. I joked with people that 75 degrees F is perfect biking weather, and all the 50 degree days on Ride the Rockies were combining with the 100 degree days on RAGBRAI to give me that 75 degree average. I held on to enough fitness to also ride the Buff Epic 100 in September. It has almost 8000 feet of climbing, which is a lot for me (and a lot for most people shaped like me). I came in with the last group, but I made it. I have so many photos to process and I really should have tackled that this week during my winter break, but maybe I'll get to them in early 2024 before I start taking photos of next summer's adventures.

This year's big math conferences were in Washington, D.C. at the end of October. I didn't do much touristy stuff, as I usually stay focused on conference activities when I'm conferencing, but I did slip over to the National Archives for a couple of hours. It's such a privilege to get to travel for work events, and so important for my professional growth and outlook on the work I do.

One twist to the end of my year was spending a couple days serving on a jury. The charge was unwanted sexual contact, so there wasn't anything fun about the details of the case, but I'm glad to have served my civic duty.

I keep thinking that I'm going to replace this blog with something else, and maybe 2024 is finally the year that I do it. I've been slowly tinkering with Hugo, a static site generator. I can whip up a site quickly using a pre-made theme, but before making the jump I'd like to feel like I know more about making and customizing themes of my own. I know I don't write much here anymore, and haven't for years, but I take some pride having stuck with Blogger since 2001. (Back in the Pyra Labs days before Google bought it!) But I de-Googled my email this year by moving to Fastmail, and maybe it's time to move from Blogger, too.

Location: Broomfield, CO, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Effects of Handbrake presets and RF quality settings across AV1, H.265, and H.264

-
Image
  "Fantastic!"   Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider
Read more

My Podcast Predilection

-
I think my main modus operandi is to interact with as much information as possible. I read for school, keep track of a couple hundred news feeds in Google Reader, watch documenaries, and follow really smart people on social networks who share good things. It's a full-time job, and I love it. Now that the semester is over, I can try to stay more up-to-date with a growing number of podcasts I follow. Being a PhD student is a very immersive experience, but podcasts are one way I keep myself stretched in more than just one direction. Here's a list of what I watch or listen to on a regular basis: TWiT.tv : I keep up with a ton of technology news and debate by following Leo Laporte and others on his podcasting network. Here are the podcasts I prefer to watch: This Week in Tech  (This is roughly the tech equivalent of "Meet the Press," but far, far less formal) Tech News Today  (Today's their 500th show, and I'm sure I've never missed one) Security Now  (St
Read more

Think before you shoot

-
Here's an interesting story from the Denver Post . Apparently a couple of young males thought it would be fun to go out into the street and shoot their paintball guns at people passing by. Unfortunately, one of the people they shot at was a kid (probably 15 or 16 years old) who was carrying a real handgun. He fired back, hit one of the paintballers in the head, and now their little prank has put somebody into intensive care. Just sad. You can easily find enough blame to spread it around to everybody. I'm left to wonder where the kid with the handgun developed that kind of aim...maybe he just got lucky...or unlucky...
Read more