Systems, Soup, and Summer Planning

-

Morning routine. SESIG face-to-face. First Tuesday Lunch discussing Venezuela and AI trust. Afternoon work on annual planning. Exercised. Fernanda catch-up covering travel, work, and future plans.

A day of social structure and system refinement

January 6, 2026

These notes describe the events of Monday, 01/06/2026.

I drove to Imagine Coffee for the SESIG face-to-face meeting. The conversation ranged across a zombie apocalypse spider diagram, motorcycle suspension, and the planning/journaling system I've been refining. These morning discussions continue to provide the kind of intellectual stimulation that sets a good tone for the day—practical engineering questions sitting alongside thought experiments about societal collapse.

After SESIG, I worked on further refining the planning and journaling system. The integration between TheBrain and Claude continues to evolve, and I added a feature request for pin management capability that would automate the daily thought pinning process. Small improvements to workflow infrastructure compound over time.

At noon I attended the First Tuesday Lunch. The conversation touched on network markets, the HP Halo videoconferencing system that several of us had worked on, implications of the Venezuela situation, questions about AI trust, Claude-based systems and MCP servers, and alternatives to Windows. These monthly gatherings bring together an interesting mix of perspectives on technology and current events.

I spent part of the afternoon working on annual planning—the kind of broader time horizon thinking that complements the daily and weekly rhythms. I also took a nap, sent out a note about blocking a camping weekend for this year, and fiddled with prints from the Joey shoot a bit more. The exercise routine felt more complete than yesterday: three 45-second planks, fifteen bird-dogs, and five stretches. Progress on rebuilding consistency.

Late afternoon I caught up with Fernanda over a video call. We discussed walking and weather and hair, the fact that she'd taken ten days of vacation. She described the beef they'd had for Christmas—Wagyu and Picanha. She's planning to go to Brazil for Easter in April and asked me to bring back a full report on New Zealand. She wants to visit Paris and mentioned she's now working at PayPal as a technical director. She bought a mountain bike—apparently there are many nice trails near her new house. She's achieved second-degree Tae Kwon Do. She's using Claude extensively these days, listens to the Spotify "Bore Me to Sleep" podcast, and is reading The Lord of the Rings. We scheduled lunch at her place for January 31st.

Today's meatball soup
Between conversations I prepared soup in the crock pot and researched repairing ldmsvr01—the battery for the Smart Storage Array appears to have died. I received a replacement battery and found a video demonstrating the replacement process. The family camping trip date got settled on August 8th after some email coordination. Fernanda also scheduled lunch at her place, adding another social anchor point to the calendar.

The day demonstrated something about the layered nature of planning and connection. The annual planning work operates at one time scale, the summer camping coordination at another, the monthly First Tuesday Lunch at a third, and the daily planning/journaling system at the finest grain. Each layer requires different kinds of attention, and together they create a framework that holds both structure and spontaneity. The three conversations—SESIG's technical and speculative thinking, First Tuesday's current events and technology discussion, Fernanda's personal updates and future plans—reminded me that intellectual engagement and personal connection aren't separate categories. They're different expressions of the same curiosity about how to move through the world with intention and awareness.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Humanity Worth Saving?

-
Image
It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.   That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants. What does the universe...
Read more

Understanding

-
One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...
Read more

Identity

-
I recommend the book ... Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment  by Francis Fukuyama In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.
Read more