Mirrors and Shelves

Morning routine. SESIG meeting. Email infrastructure reorganization. Gmail label system work. Stud finder lesson at Ace Hardware. Second bedroom shelf installed. Planks. Beer:30 at Suds. Formal Logic. The Avengers.

From SESIG's wide-ranging discussions to hands-on afternoon projects

Events and activities that occurred on Friday, February 06, 2026

The early hours brought system work — email summary automation needed attention, and the kind of debugging that benefits from a quiet house. After a brief return to sleep, the morning routine led into the week's SESIG gathering, where the conversation ranged across an impressive sweep of technology past, present, and future.

Arboretum visit in England

Evan's updates from HP painted a picture of a company at an inflection point. Enrique's departure after thirty-seven years to run PayPal marks one kind of transition, while HP's strategic pivot toward becoming a software and services company marks another. The tension between cost-cutting executives making decisions via PowerPoint and innovative engineers trying to build the future was a familiar story, now playing out against the backdrop of NVIDIA's DGX platform and the growing dominance of ARM processors over Intel's aging architecture. Bruce has stepped in as interim CEO, and HP is now reporting software and hardware independently — a structural acknowledgment that the company's identity is shifting.

The discussion expanded into Larry's work with a new 3D scanner, the learning curve of mesh creation in Fusion software, and the painstaking process of cleaning scan data into usable models. Thomas brought the group to the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab, where 8.4-meter telescope mirrors are cast and ground with extraordinary precision. The interstate transport system imposes a practical ceiling of ten meters on mirror diameter — a constraint where physics meets highway engineering. The conversation wandered through binocular telescopes, interferometry, and synthetic apertures, the kind of SESIG tangent where curiosity leads to unexpected connections.

Software development's boom-and-bust cycles surfaced as another thread, with the group noting the global distribution of development talent and the complexities of outsourcing across time zones and cultures. The story of Indigo hiring Palestinian developers offered a counterpoint to the usual friction narratives.

Between meetings, a brief conversation with Joshua, the project manager for the subdivision behind the house, touched on downed trees from recent weather. The kind of neighbor-adjacent exchange that comes with living next to active development.

The afternoon shifted to hands-on work. A walk to Ace Hardware for a stud finder yielded something better than a purchase — a hint about how to use the one already sitting at home. It still does not work particularly well, but perhaps marginally better with proper technique. The second bedroom shelf went up successfully, completing a project that had been waiting for exactly this kind of available Friday afternoon.

Technical work resumed with the Gmail label resolution system. The process revealed an interesting meta-problem: Claude resets its working context every time a conversation compacting is triggered, losing track of what has been completed and what comes next. The solution was elegantly simple — maintain a running checklist so that Claude can recover its place without rederiving the entire sequence. A small insight about working with AI tools that applies well beyond label management.

The day closed with three forty-five-second planks before a walk to Suds for Beer:30 with Michael, Cathy, Tim, and Mary. Cathy provided a ride home afterward — the kind of easy generosity that marks long friendships.

The evening settled into a different kind of learning. Another episode of Formal Logic proved surprisingly engaging, the structured reasoning offering its own satisfactions. An episode of The Avengers rounded out a Friday that had moved from telescope mirrors to bedroom shelves to formal proofs — the range itself being the point.