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@Voltron - no doubt Al. If she was hundreds/thousands of miles away I'd be a bigger mess. That's for sure. But I'm very much trying to give her the space that she needs to grow so it'll likely be a while before we visit. @recstar24 - these things all hit us differently, but I literally feel your pain on the 'what am i good for' side of things. Do yourself a favor, spend deliberate time with her these next two years before things change even more. You will not regret spending more. @Dusty Chalk - the only thing we can't buy in life is more time. I feel that more each passing year. I do my best not to dwell on it since it is the inevitable but I'm also a softie and can't help myself at times.

Close enough. Live Theater, with The Bard in a redwood grove in Mill Valley. The Curtain TheatreThe Curtain Theatre | Free Shakespeare in Mill Valley - T...― William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost The Stage under The Redwoods

Interesting bit of history here:

Le Ren - Don't Be Funny Without Me Ex.

Somewhat in Nate’s area of emotions - my daughter turned 16 on Friday. She unfortunately failed her driving test that day (did well but on way back to DMV she tapped a curb pulling into the DMV which can be an auto fail). Very big emotions lol. Got her signed up for a retake yesterday and she passed! First day of independence for her and she drove to Walmart for an sd card, drove her younger brother for 7brew, and drove some friends for bday dinner. Basically I was incredibly nervous and worried even with my son reporting she is a great driver lol. also apparently somewhat sad to know there’s a thing I’ve been useful for I no longer am needed as much. Goes to say parents never stop worrying they just worry about different things lol

We did three nice things in London yesterday. Theatre, matinee at the Old Vic. "How the other half loves", a farce by Alan Ayckebourn with a stellar cast including Roger Allam. Absolutely laugh out loud hilarious https://www.oldvictheatre.com/stage/other-half/ Followed by an Indian meal at the famous Cinnamon Club https://cinnamonclub.com/about-us/. Canapes, starters, main course and pudding, two glasses of wine and coffees UK£115 for two. Stunning value for money in London; had to pre-book of course because it fills quickly. If any of you all get to London and like really subtle Indian fine dining - go there. Followed by this https://luminiscence.com/london/ at Westminster Cathedral (Catholic). Narrated (recorded) by Hugh Bonneville and sung live by the renowned Cathedral choir. The cathedral, built in the late 1800's to early 1900's is huge, seating 2000 .

Really sucky. ☹️

A couple more donations rolled in over the past few days so I'm over the $2k hump and running down the last 20%. I needed to run into the office today so I decided to treat it like a shakedown ride for the Cervelo that my friend Paul (flying in from MN) will ride again this year. It was a good double-session despite somehow having a headwind both ways. And the bike is at least looking good.

Sucky.

Daniel Donato Cosmic Country Ryman

What a shame. First Jonas, now Tadej. Dangerous sport. https://youtu.be/aArF6UhvgZM?is=jJnzhxh4aak5D2xw

As I have said previously: Time Machine, once a jewel in the Apple ecosystem, has become a neglected, buggy shell of its former glory. Currently I have Schrodinger's backup. I have "successfully completed" the first backup of my M1 MBP to my M4 Mac Mini. Apple have been making increasingly insistent noises about discontinuing support for Time Machine backups on drives attached to a router. With this in mind, I bought a second 8 slot Thunderbay enclosure from OWC (see Jacob's Jacobless Jacobing.) I reformatted my 8TB backup drive for the M1 to APFS. This cost me all of my old backup images, but I have learned that in practice I only care about the most recent one. The backup process was nontrivial. I had to update both machines to Tahoe (something I had been dragging my heels about for quite some time) and make sure both had every other software patch applied. Prior to upgrading to Tahoe, I could not get the MBP to play nice with drives attached to the Mini. I also had to dig out my CalDigit TS3+ TB dock (and, ahem, the damn Thunderbolt cable) because wireless is too slow and too unreliable for a ~1TB backup. With the CalDigit and TB3/ethernet, the backup process only took a couple hours. As a bonus, the Time Machine image is now on a drive that is backed up to the cloud Backblaze. This is an arrangement I've wanted to do for five or six years. Of course, none of this actually fucking works. The backup was successful (it completed 100%) but it also wasn't (the Time Machine app doesn't think the backup completed properly.) I spent considerable time pestering some of my geekier friends and even when as far as employing Clod Claude AI for help. Apparently this is a "known issue" with Tahoe. There are some fussy workarounds, but I am currently a bit low on energy and very low on patience. I'm going to pursue the problem further at later date. On the other end of the spectrum, the 2012 (ya rly) Mini my (sainted, octogenarian) mother uses now has an external HDD enclosure attached to it via USB3 and it's cheerfully backing itself up every hour. Also the Mac Thunderbolt Display she uses with it has built in speakers of sufficient quality that she can watch some of her British TV shows on it and understand the dialogue. We really have lost ground, haven't we?

New Yello! Music on TIDALYello - Break OutListen to Break Out on TIDAL

"You Can Have My Walkman, Just Don't Take My MixTape" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/28/style/mix-tape-analog-music.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9FA.Aap5.CDGpwOT5lktS&smid=url-share

Sorry I missed this. My sincere condolences to you, Antonio. In my defense, I got distracted by the thought of Jaye P. Morgan's breasts.

Antonio, my condolences to you and your family. RIP Uncle José Luis.

I don't have kids, so have no idea what you're going through, but...DAMN, she's in COLLEGE ALREADY?!?!? Fugaces labuntur anni...or as another great man once said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Me: Went to a new patient appointment with my new GP. Also got vaccinated against pneumonia, diphtheria tetanus pertussis. Afterwards, I got my local AI working again. (It would keep crapping out. Found out it was because there aren't a lot of good models set up for two GPUs that don't talk to each other via NVLink.) That's good, because I definitely believe I have a couple legitimate research topics that will get pretty complex, so I need to be able to have long-running conversations.

It's tough to drop off your eldest to start their life away from you. It sucks even. But you have it relatively easy in that we dropped Sophie off in Poughkeepsie and went back to SF, whereas you can take a short drive to see Lily or rescue her or congratulate her. No doubt change is still hard and you can't be swooping in every minute even if she is relatively close. Hang in there and make Andrew's life miserable while you adjust.

One of the hardest things to face IMO. And all those coincidences!! The only saving grace (for me) was that Andrew was becoming the person he was meant to be. He had some amazing growth in college, found some great people, and set the stage for what he is now, and that is amazing to me. His senior year, when I helped him move in the last semester, I was on my way home and Cat Stevens' "Father and Son" came on my playlist. I almost had to pull over I was tearing up so much. Good luck to Lily, you, Maura, and your Andrew!

This one will be hard to write, not because anything bad happened, only because change is hard. TL/DR - Nate is sad because Lily is in college. Longer, rambling version. Today we helped Lily move into college. She decided that she wanted to go to UNH in the spring time, so that's where we headed today. On top of the usual angst/sadness associated with dropping your first kid off at school it was a bit of an emotionally-charged day because that's where I went to school, met Maura, and lived for a few years even after graduation while Maura pursued her graduate degree. And in a simple twist of fate, the dorm that we lived in while Maura was a hall director is where Lily ended up as a Freshman. So it was a day of wildly swinging emotions. I'm confident that she'll do great there. The program that she's in (Occupational Therapy) is as good or better than any other in New England and it's very much right up her alley. So we know where she'll be for the next 5 years - it's a 4+1 masters program. What I can't figure out is why it very much feels like I have a broken heart? I mean I get it in lots of ways. As I explained to Andrew on the way home (he and I left first to get him to soccer practice), for every day in the last 18+ years I've known exactly where and when I'd see Lily next. Now, not so much. I expect it'll be at least a few weeks, if not longer before we see her. That's probably most of the pain I feel. But there's also a piece of me that feels a little, well, lost without her in the house. So we'll see how these next several weeks go with only one kid to day-to-day worry about. I'm not sure Andrew wants the additional attention coming his way. 😂

Yeah, I think this one just "speaks to me" and my generally somber/dark/morose/goth/melancholic/whatever personality. I'll probably give all his solo piano albums a revisit. He is literally one of my two favourite keyboardists, along with Hiromi. Unrelated: NP -- Toyah, Ophelia's Shadow -- the flip side of the coin of Kneeling at the Shrine by Sunday All Over the World (same exact lineup). Both great art rock albums. With a capital GREAT.

Speaking of more piano. For Elvira by Francesca Tandoi Trio (2014) https://open.qobuz.com/album/a7s0cd5mvszhc Example: More on the traditional side of jazzy jazz. Nice set.

I agree it is a good album. I am still partial to the solo piano work from Country Aires myself. But being Rick Wakeman, there's like five or six solo piano albums that I listen to on the regular.

Interesting. I was peripherally aware of this fellow because of a couple EPs he released years ago. I had no idea he was still at nor that he had such a substantial modular rig.