I don’t know what is worse as a Chicago Cubs fan. The frustration during the season when the players don’t perform as expected or the frustration during the off season when the front office don’t perfom as expected.
We have had very frosty weather the last several days. Way too early for me. #Frost #mbdec
Today is my last work Monday, and as every milestone passes the idea of my being retired becomes more real. The company has a mandatory “shut down” for the last two weeks of the year, so while my last official day as an employee is December 31, 2025, this coming Friday will be my last actual day “in the office.”
Finished reading: Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang 📚
We got five inches of snow over night. I think the probability of a white Christmas is high.
Beginnings And Endings
As I wind down my 36 year career in information technology I feel that I am in a nostalgic loop, which is probably inevitable particularly when I am closing down my career 37 years to the dates when it started. I find myself thinking all the way back to high school and reasons why I decided to go to Michigan Technological University (MTU) for a degree in Computer Science.
In the early 80s computer science was just becoming a thing, in fact Computer Science was a part of the Mathematics department at MTU and not the separate college that it is today. If when I was starting college I was asked what it was that I was studying to become I would have answered “a programmer.” Of course, over the course of my five years at MTU I learned Computer Science was more than programming, but that was still its core competency.
I think nearly everyone who I may have told I was going to be a programmer would have had an appreciation for my career choice because while they may not have understood exactly what that meant they likely knew that computers were the “hot thing” and programming was done on computers.
The irony is, of my 36 year career programming turned out to be the least of what I did, what programming I did was done during the first three years and then fate moved me on to more broader topics like the SEI Capability Maturity Model and technology architecture. Turns out my learning to program a computer was merely a foot in the door.
Happy eighth blog anniversary to me. In my first post on this site I said that I wanted a posting switchboard, which is what micro.blog provides me although I am not as selected of which locations to which a post is sent than I thought I would be.
In a blog post Dave Rogers describes mine and your obligation to the men and women who served in the United States military as a duty of care. I think this is a very important point about our obligations, not our feelings but rather how should see ourselves as committed to providing to those who made a commitment to us.
For me my obligation is to only ask these people to do the things that put their lives on the line when it is absolutely necessary. One of the largest moral failings of the United States is the casualness at which its government has caused the death of its own and others in the world. All military action should have strong scrutiny from the perspective if whether such action is absolutely necessary. Determination of what is absolutely necessary must go behind the whims of whoever services in the White House.
In this Congress fails to meet its obligation as our representatives. To fix this Congress needs to state there is no such thing as a war on drugs or a war on terror as such things are too broad and go well beyond the understanding of war as known to the founders. Congress can enforce this by ending the national emergencies that it has declared over the years.
It's Not AI That I Fear
It’s people. I think there are similarities in how people make claims about guns in the United States and the claims about AI.
More often than not whenever you encounter a person who opposes any form of restrictions on access to or use of guns they tend to make the claim that “guns don’t kill people,” which is obviously true. Guns are inanimate objects, they don’t just on their own fire and kill. The real problem are the people who have access to guns and what they do with them. In reality, all gun regulation laws apply to people, what they can access, how qualified to use them, etc.
Most promoters of AI go to great lengths to try and persuade us that there is nothing to fear about AI. My response when I hear this is that I don’t fear AI, I fear the people behind AI and I fear the people who will use AI. My fear is driven by the reality that greed drives everything in the United States, if not the world.
Giving greedy people access to AI is equivalent to giving a person who has nothing but contempt for others or does not have hope or can’t control their emotions and wants to go out in a blaze of glory access to guns.
The lengths to which I see people in power in the United States are going to try and convince me there is nothing to fear about AI does nothing more than increase my skepticism and fear. You have not earned my trust and you cannot earn my trust until you demonstrate the maturity of self restraint.
Today is the five year anniversary of one of the Chicago Cubs worst mistakes in the post World Series era when they did not tender a contract to Kyle Schwarber. The Cubs could make up for that mistake by signing him as a free agent, but I doubt they will do it.
Today I learned about the University of Michigan Press open access ebook collection. It’s basically a catalog of free ebooks in either ePub or PDF format. According to openaccess.nl:
Open access is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data. A publication is defined ‘open access’ when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it - that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.
I found books published as far back as 1918. The older books are PDF scans for which you won’t be able to change font size. If you are looking for free things to read, you might find something of interest on this site.
On November 27, 1989 I boarded an airplane for the final destination of Plano Texas on the first day of my employment with Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Over those 36 years that I worked what was a subsidiary of General Motors became again a standalone company in 1996 only to be acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2008. In 2017, after a brief stint as part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, I and what was left of EDS was merged with Computer Sciences Corporation to form DXC Technology. On December 1, 2025, on the 37 year mark of the first Friday of my employment with EDS I submitted my resignation for the purpose of retirement. I didn’t plan it this way but I am struck by the timing of this moment.
Finished reading: Better Ways to Read the Bible by Zach W. Lambert 📚
For those of us who came of age with a version of Christianity that depends on certainty, like-mindedness, and answer-book faith, when we lose that certainty, it can feel like we’ve lost God altogether. In all my years alongside people doing the good, difficult work of reimagining their faith, I can attest that nowhere is that disorientation more felt than in our relationship with the Scriptures
Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen 📚
I really enjoyed reading this book, it drives home how handwritten notebooks are the technology of thinking. Not much is covered about how information was retrieved from these historical notebooks, it’s more about the process of writing and thinking.
First substantial snow fall of the season nets us a couple of inches. I’ve seen reports of up to 5 inches just a couple miles south.
Cubs Took A Loss On Kyle Tucker Trade
Bleed Cubbie Blue has a survey asking Cubs fans whether the trade for Kyle Tucker last year as a success for the Cubs as GM Carter Hawkins claims. The writer of the post suggests that it was, and to do so he uses the results for each player involved in the trade.
I think the post misses one key point in the analysis, which is the value of the players at the time of the trade and take that in to account along with their actual performance. While the Cubs traded three players to the Astros for Tucker, the deal really came down to two players, Tucker and Cam Smith.
At the time of the trade Smith was the Cub’s top prospect in the farm system, which made him one of their most valuable young players. If Smith had stayed with the Cubs he likely does not make the major league roster whereas the Astros immediately put him on their roster. So I think the real comparison is another year of Smith developing for the Cubs versus Tucker’s performance for the Cubs this past season.
When a team trades away a top prospect they are giving away the potential future value of a player, usually in return for something needed now. Did the Cubs need another bat? Yes! Did that bat have to be Tucker in right field, particularly when you had a good hitting right fielder on your roster? Probably not.
In my opinion, when Tucker signs with a team other than the Cubs, the Cubs will have lost on the trade. Had the Cubs kept Smith they still had value in the bank for future years and they lose that future value no matter how you slice it. From a Cubs fan perspective, if you had told me we would only have Tucker for one year, which was very likely at the trade time, and the team did not advance to the NLCS I would have said that one year of making the playoffs was not worth losing Smith. From a Cubs ownership and management perspective, making the playoffs and the extra revenue that generated made the Tucker signing worth it.
E-ink Tablet Lock-in
In a YouTube video the developer of My Deep Guide, which is a robust PDF organizer template for e-ink devices, talked about the issue of e-ink device lock-in. The issue is that when you use a brand of device, say Remarkable or Boox, there is not a way to move your data from one device brand to another. The only file formats common to all device types are PDF and ePub but that does not provide for extraction of the information within those file types.
The problem is not just with moving from one vendor to another, but affects searching for one’s writing, which requires some form of indexing of the handwritten data such that a search can be run. I touch on this issue in my recent post in which I describe using Google NotebookLM to search for what I write on my Viwoods AIPaper Mini tablet.
As I understand it, what one writes on the Viwoods tablet is translated to vector graphics data that is stored in a file on the device. Viwoods, like Boox, uses a “.note” extension for these file names and those files even sync to my Google Drive. The problem is, there is no application provided by Viwoods to read those files and thus provide a way to search within the files.
The problem here is very similar to about 40 years ago when word processors like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect were developed and used proprietary file formats. Back then the only way to view and thus search within your writing was to open the files in their original application, you couldn’t read Word files in WordPerfect or vice versa. Years later this issue became moot as application vendors reverse engineered the file formats so that files could be moved between word processor brands. Many people vow to avoid any possible word processor vendor lock in by only storing their writing in plain text that may use markdown for formatting.
I think the ideal for tablets would be a standard data file format for handwritten notes that either the tablet providers used natively or at the very least provided for exporting. PDF exports are the equivalent to printing a document and saving that hardcopy as an archive/backup, it provides a bare minimum but quickly becomes unwieldy as the number of documents and pages within them increase. We really need fully searchable formats to allow us to retrieve information from our writing.
I wrote the previous post in Obsidian and used the micro.publish plugin to publish it to this site, however the graphic on the post was not uploaded. I had to manually upload the graphic and then insert the link to it in the post article here on micro.blog as a post publication step.
Also note that the cross posts, particularly to Day One, do not include the edit, which is a problem with cross posting from site to another. In my experience only the first version of a post is every cross posted no matter the source and destinations.
Use Google Drive And NotebookLM With Viwoods AIPaper Mini
I recently started using the Viwoods AIPaper Mini, which is an e-ink tablet with an 8-inch black and white display that is optimized for reading and writing. The reason I bought this device is that I wanted a smaller and more portable tablet for reading and writing than the Boox Note Air 3C I have been using.
The AIPaper Mini, like most e-ink tablets, is designed to provide the ability to write notes by hand in a manner that feels like writing on paper. The handwritten input is usually stored as vector graphics data in a format known to the software on the tablet. Unfortunately there isn’t a standard file format for this data and Viwoods does not provide a way to read those files, which have a .note extension, via a desktop or web application. Fortunately, Viwoods does generate PDFs of notes that reproduces the handwriting as seen on the device display, so exporting or syncing of the generated PDF files is primary means for archiving and retrieving information captured using the device.
Even The Wealthy Are Not On An Island
I am not going to lie, I am happy to be at the end of my career rather than at the beginning. I have no doubt that in the context of a greed driven United States that the wealthy/power class see AI as removing their greatest cost, which is the people they employ. The ends is ever more wealth no matter the means. How might this actually look like? Well I think Daniel Miessler’s description of AI Maturity is as good as any.
The biggest problem I see ahead of us in the United States is that because any thing that looks like “central planning” is deemed anathema, no serious consideration, let alone action, will be taken on the impact to us as a whole. In a society that expects every able person to have a job so that they can take care of themselves, what happens where there are no jobs to be had?
Further, I think the wealthy class should be thinking about this because for where that wealth actually comes from. All of their wealth accumulation is derived from us spending money on products and services they sell. What happens when there are no jobs for people to earn money to therefore spend money that makes them rich?