Two Fun Guys

Morning routine. Journaled Thursday. SESIG on fitness tracking, the election aftermath, data centers, and energy economics. Server upgrades. A timeshare call for Brian's trip. Puerto Vallarta planning. A walk beside Bald Hill. Mushroom photos from the grandkids. Block 15 with Michael, Mary, and Jen.

A day of SESIG debate, home infrastructure, and an evening at Block 15

Events and activities that occurred on Friday, November 6, 2026

The SESIG conversation wandered as freely as it ever has, and that was the pleasure of it. Jon opened with his weightlifting app, which texts his trainer directly, and I described logging my own Planet Fitness workouts through Claude. From there the group drifted to the coast, where a landslide of roughly a million cubic yards near Eddyville has reshaped how Highway 20 gets repaired, and then into the election aftermath. Mike framed the post-election question the way he would a product roadmap: pick a few things you can actually deliver rather than promising everything. Thomas brought Gallup data on what voters say matters most, and the talk turned to campaign finance reform efforts in Montana and Hawaii.

The middle of the hour belonged to energy and computation. When the subject of AI reached data centers, I made the case that well-built facilities on the ground are a better bet than the current fascination with putting them in orbit, where cooling becomes a hard problem rather than a solved one. Thomas walked us through Dalio's The Changing World Order and its index of national power, then pointed out that solar's energy return on investment now matches oil and gas. Mike noted that storage policy offers no incentive to discharge batteries when prices peak. Somewhere in that thread the phrase "demand destruction" came up, so I posted a definition to the chat: a drop in demand that doesn't come back when prices fall, because people bought the efficient car or moved closer to work. Rajeev recommended The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist before leaving for another meeting, and the session closed on lighter notes, including Larry's CNC router running again and the reminder that Exploding Whale Day falls on November 12.

The rest of the morning went to infrastructure, the unglamorous work of getting the home platform solid. Servers were rebuilt and upgraded, and the photo library shed a few hundred duplicate images that had piled up between the phone and the computer. A call to the timeshare company brought the answer I had hoped for: the points remain usable as long as there is time to book a stay before they expire. That clears the way for Brian to take his Mexico dates at the end of the month, and it leaves enough for a trip of my own.

That trip is taking shape around the Virgen de Guadalupe processions in Puerto Vallarta, in the second week of December. The pilgrimages build toward the night of December 11 and the morning of the twelfth, and the plan is to photograph them and return with daily journal posts and one illustrated story.

In the early afternoon I walked the flat trail beside Bald Hill under an overcast sky and stopped to photograph the valley. Walks like this have become thinking time, and this one produced a string of notes on how the house might eventually sense and respond: speech recognition tuned to context, a few tiers of local computing, small devices in every room, screens, lights, audio, cameras, even projection. The common thread was a home that adapts and learns as life changes rather than one configured once and left alone.

Loni sent photos of the grandkids posing beside fly agaric mushrooms near Tigard, captioned "two fun guys."

The evening belonged to friends. Michael and Mary had claimed a table outside at Block 15's Southtown taproom, and Mary's friend Jen joined us a little later. The conversation was easy and mostly led by Michael and Mary, the kind of evening where you mostly listen and enjoy the company. At home afterward I caught the end of The Last Starfighter and part of The Fifth Element.

By the end of the evening the tank was lower than I expected, and I noticed it. The day had spread itself wide, from global energy economics to a valley view to the small, specific pleasure of a daughter's pun, and some of that reach comes with a cost. The two old science fiction films were the right size for what remained, and good company for a quiet end to a full day.