Wabasha, where I currently live, is the oldest town in Minnesota, inhabited since 1826. An 1843 map, by Nicollet and Fremont (names you’ll see a lot of in Minneapolis) lists it as the trading post of ‘Roques’ for the half-Indian (mother was the sister of chief Wapasha, for whom the town is named), half-French leader …
I would have never thought of visiting Puerto Rico if my sister wasn’t currently living there for a year now. I decided to stop by, visit her and generally explore the island for a month while working and cycling as I like to do. It proved to be a great digital nomad winter escape, and …
I grew up in a household where the inevitability of death was a strangely common motivator. We were told, as 10 year olds, to exercise because it would help us live longer. Bad habits were frequently flagged as sources of death. Statements about our future were usually conditioned by “if you live that long.” It …
Naomi Novik is one of the best fantasy writers around. Her early book, His Majesty’s Dragon and following series was one of my favorites, but it had a problem. It rather wandered around the globe, Patrick O’Brian style. Unfortunately, as an obvious result, it felt rather disconnected and random at times. Naomi Novik conspicuously avoided …
The Golden Enclaves: Naomi Novik finally completes a trilogy Read More »
The HP Book Studio G9 is very nearly perfect. I need a computer for data science with which I can also travel far and wide as a digital nomad, and I’ve been searching a while for the best one. Besides programming, movies and writing are the other use cases, and the occasional Civilization game. I …
I can see why Columbia, particularly Medellin, is a popular travel destination. Firstly, the weather is perfect all year round. It has a tag of the City of Eternal Spring, or perhaps more likely, eternal summer given that it is mostly 70 rarely leaving the 60-80 degree range. It is lush and fertile, with ample …
City of Bones is a rather niche, otherwise forgotten book from 1995 that has enjoyed some renewed interest as a result of the amazing Murderbot book series by the same author, Martha Wells. It is not to be confused with another book of the same name by a different author. It can be rather difficult …
Setting up a Python environment is often a pain. Even worse is that sometimes the environment, once it is finally built, is surprisingly slow because the underlying numeric libraries (BLAS, OneAPI, and so on) are improperly configured. This aims to be a fairly definitive guide to fixing those problems as of early 2022. How much …
Tunisia is a difficult country to judge. On the one hand, it is the most interesting country I have been in for quite a while – away from Europe which was becoming routine (if pleasant). Tunisia is warm, inexpensive, not crowded, and has excellent history On the other hand, I got sick three times in …
2021 was a long, eventful year. Was it good or was it bad? I am not sure. Both, I think. The defining thing about 2021 for me was the sheer amount of travel I did. I was in Ukraine, home, then Savannah, Knoxville, Utah, home, and then Lithuania, Croatia, Tunisia and then home. These weren’t …
