Week 6 of 2025
I’m very late to writing this today. I’m not sure where the day has gone. The same could be said, I think, for the year thus far. It’s already mid-February? Well, at this pace, the apocalypse will be here and done with very shortly. So that's thrilling.
Rather than a lengthy exploration of what I’ve been up to, maybe I should just resort to bullet points. It seems a little half-assed to do so. I guess I could just postpone writing this until the morning. But then it’s Tuesday, and I have a million other things to get on with.
Indeed, my calendar is getting fuller and fuller by the day -- all sorts of requests to speak and visit classrooms and write things. And I’m four weeks (or thereabouts) away from my spring “A” race. So the running-training is ramping up. As is the lifting: I deadlifted 150 pounds x 3 reps this morning.
Speaking of running, I ran the 5 Bridges with my run club on Saturday: from City Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge then back across the Manhattan Bridge, then back to Brooklyn across the Williamsburg Bridge, then up to Queens, going over the Pulaski Bridge, then over the Queensboro Bridge back to Manhattan. It was a gorgeous day -- a temporary reprieve from this never-ending winter that keeps dumping snow. 3+ inches Saturday night meant the cancellation of a run in Central Park with a bunch of Olympians, but my hamstrings were pretty sore after all that elevation change with the bridges, so I wasn’t too sad.
One year ago this week, I had my “accident” when that asshole knocked me down. So I’m just thankful I can run and move. I registered for the NYC Marathon this week, so let’s hope that I keep it all together for that.
My Garmin broke, and I was mad that I was mad that I couldn’t get accurate data from it. The new watch is here, and it says it needs to "get to know me" or some shit before it can offer accurate data. I hate all of this.
Food data: we ate out at Empanada Mama (or rather, takeout on Tuesday), Ramen by Ra (breakfast ramen!! Kin wrote about this), Hani’s Bakery (the best chocolate chip cookie in memory), and Burgerhead (today’s Burger League visit). We stopped into a coffee shop with our friends Mike and Meg who were in town -- Picky Barista maybe? It was terrible.
It was wild to see those two again -- it’s been a decade. Mike informed me that our former boss has written a book about his glory days of tech blogging, and we are in it [derogatory].
Speaking of writing, I sent two Second Breakfast newsletters (on Friday, Monday), as usual. I was also on another podcast with Helen Beetham -- talking with her has been a high point lately in a world of very low AI lows.
On Monday, Kin and I went to the opera again -- to see Blind Injustice, an opera based on the work of the Ohio Innocence Project. It tells the story of six people, wrongfully imprisoned. We also recently watched Sing Sing, a movie about the Rehabilitation Through Arts project at the Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison.
I spoke to a group of NYC principals last week about AI. I was -- I am -- of two minds about all of it. On one hand, I don’t think we have any reason to panic. AI is 70 years old now, and these men consistently overpromise and underdeliver. Then again, we seem to have had a little coup, an AI coup, here in this country. So if we haven’t run out of time to stop things, we’re darn near close to it.