Looks like Mark Few finally got voted into the Naismith Hall of Fame this year. Totally deserved for a guy who has never missed an NCAA tournament during his coaching career, and has a shot to reach 800 career victories next season.
Sounds like De Zerbi to Spurs is as good as done- a 5-year deal with no relegation clause, just waiting for the official club announcement. I have incredibly mixed feelings about this appointment.
Came home to a dog-escape disaster, so spent the rest of the evening repairing an entire section of fence in the corner of our yard behind our shed. Unfortunately, I had to pause halfway through to charge up my drill's battery. Hopefully, the sheet of plywood I put down to block the gap will keep them in for now.
Cool to see that my custom microblogging system has doubled the number of posts that I do in a month. I averaged about 60 posts in January and February when I was doing it by hand.
Impressed that one of my coworkers picked 3 seed Illinois to make the Final Four and would have had all four if not for the wild UConn - Duke finish. Arizona is my sentimental favorite because of Tommy Lloyd, Michigan seems like the rational choice, but rooting for Illinois for the pure chaos of it.
Now that Igor Tudor has departed Spurs by mutual agreement, my favorite wild replacement rumor by far is Ben Davies. He has his coaching badges, knows the squad, and is fully COYS. Probably makes too much sense at this point for Vinai and Johan to actually get on board with it.
No rain, but kind of a gloomy morning. Mary's given me about three different tasks to complete around the house today so trying to be productive.
For All Mankind S5E1: First Light 👍👍 A solid return to one of my favorite shows, and some interesting cast additions. It's also pretty wild how the casting works since they skip a decade every season. Sean Kaufman, the perfectly cast actor who plays the aged-up Alex Baldwin, is two years younger than Cynthia Wu, who plays his mom, Kelly Baldwin! Ruby Cruz, who I recognized from the Willow series, is a similar age profile in real life, and plays Lily Dale, Miles Dale's daughter, a classmate/love interest for Alex. It all just works, and the Aleida/Margo prison scene was probably my favorite scene between a couple of seriously aged-up old cast members and friends.
Mary and I spent a couple of hours at urgent care this afternoon getting her earlobe stitched up. One of our pups is prone to lunging at faces when excited (it's completely inappropriate, friendly behavior we've actively tried to discourage with limited success), accidentally caught one of Mary's hoop earrings on a tooth, and ripped a diagonal gash through her lobe.
Put down a deposit to reserve the car we test drove last Friday, and it looks like we can pick it up tomorrow. Going to be a real relief to have enough cars to go around once again.
Cleaning up my browser tabs, as you do.
Arizona absolutely smoked Arkansas last night 109-88 in a game I kind of wish I had watched now. If I'm Tommy Lloyd, I'm not really sure that Carolina is all that interesting, especially if he wins the title with U of A this year.
To summarize, Claude will now periodically try to clean up and organize the notes and information accumulated by the "Auto Memory" functionality to reduce accumulated noise, vague references, and contradictions.
It seems like a sensible approach to maintaining quality, but as some pointed out on Reddit, yet another automated background process to burn through your tokens.
Wild that Tommy Lloyd's name is being tossed around for the Carolina job, and Roy Williams has been gone for five years already. We even lived in the same apartment building way back in the day when Tommy was the junior assistant coach on the Gonzaga staff.
Working on a few more M4 Mac mini Zoom Room installations this morning. I think we'll have at least twenty in use on campus within a few weeks.
Daredevil: Born Again S2E1: The Northern Star 👍👍 Great return to action for Matt Murdoch and friends with a particularly fraught ending. Looking forward to finding out more about the juicy details of the Kingpin being in bed with the CIA.
Just heard that Paradise has been renewed for season 3. It was originally planned as a 3 season story arc so this is great news. It's such a well-crafted show that carrying out the original vision as intended sounds like the best possible outcome.
Updating Zoom Room Mac minis this morning. 26.4 came out in the last couple of days and want them to be as up to date as possible on deployment. Pretty happy with how they’re working in this role so far.
Paradise S2E7: The Final Countdown 👍👍 Banger penultimate episode to a highly entertaining season with a little bit of resolution, and a couple of major new questions. Oh, and things are looking grim for the bunker. Can't wait to see how it all plays out.
Claude gave me a fairly brief amount of help on a task today before letting me know I had to wait until 1 pm for additional assistance on the free tier. Makes me think that I was on some kind of intro mode for a few weeks to get me hooked because I had to have been using way more tokens while working on building Microcosm than I did this morning trying to solve a macOS scripting problem!
Is This Thing On? 👍 With his marriage to Laura Dern dissolving, Will Arnett stumbles into stand-up comedy as a means of coping with his issues. Impressed with how believable Dern and Arnett were in playing a married couple at least a decade younger than their actual ages.
Spurs lose 0-3 to Forest and drop below them on the edge of the relegation zone. Gray and Tel were good in the first half, but it was all downhill after giving up the late first-half corner goal to go behind. Udogie did nothing of note when he swapped for Van de Ven. They might just sack Tudor after this one.
Spurs lead 8 corners to 2 and trail 0-1 to Forest. So frustrating, but they're playing well offensively.
Zags inexplicably let Texas dribble down the last 30 seconds of the game while down 1, then give up yet another dagger 3. I would have fouled early in the shot clock to prevent a 3 and have possession with time at the end of the game.
Paradise S2E6: Jane 👍👍 Every time I'm ready for Paradise to answer some questions I have they seem to do it in the next episode. I'm guessing we're going to have to wait a little longer to learn about the "Killer" texts, but I'm bettings it's related to the mystery company Billy helped Sinatra acquire.
Test drove a really promising car with Mary this afternoon, but financing is a little tricky because it's a repaired insurance auction car. Figuring out if we have some different options with our credit union.
On a happy note, my bracket in the group contest we have at work, is tied for second after yesterday. I'm the only person who has picked Houston. A lot of people have Arizona as their number one choice because of the Tommy Lloyd, Gonzaga connection. 6 people picked GU. I would love that, but just getting to the Sweet 16 will be a major accomplishment if they can pull it off.
I'm working from home today, but still miserable with this cold and cough I've had all month. At least I'm taking the afternoon off.
Zags get it done in the final couple of minutes and win 73 - 64 over a very tenacious and physical Kennesaw State. It wasn't pretty, but I'll take it.
Refs and commentators are killing the vibe with the Kennesaw favoritism at the end of the game. 69-62 Zags with 1:45 to go.
Solid offensive push in the final couple of minutes allows the Zags to go on a 10-0 run and take a 33-27 lead into the half. No real surprise that the Zags also completely flipped the rebounding margin during their run.
Kennesaw State is crushing the rebounding battle, particularly on the offensive glass. Now I'm going to check the stats to confirm my evaluation. 19-13 with 6 OR vs 3 for GU.
7 - 14 Kennesaw St at the 11 minute mark. Mark Few calls timeout. Pretty disappointing start.
Got a Sling 3-Day pass so I can watch the Zags play today and hopefully Saturday. Zags started okay defensively with a lot of deflections, but trail 2-6 early.
I was pleased to discover that Passwords auto-filled my GitHub token when I set up the admin.html page on a work computer that I've never posted from before today thanks to iCloud keychain.
I'm feeling better and improving, but still completely fed up with this congestion, nagging cough, and sore back muscles that are very uncomfortable when I cough.
Spurs 3-2 Atleti (5-7 aggregate)
Satisfying win at home even if our Champions League run is over, Spurs need to build on this one heading into the crucial Forest match on Sunday.
‘It’s time’: After 44 years, iconic Spokane event Pig Out in the Park comes to an end
It's wild to me that this has been dependent on one guy, Bill Burke, the entire time. A long-established and successful community event like this should have transitioned to a sustainable model with multiple contributors and shared governance that could continue on indefinitely years ago.
Handsome is the weekly comedy podcast Tig Notaro does with Mae Martin, and Fortune Feimster, and I find it to be a pretty fun and funny watch/listen. They've got a nice cross-generational rapport and riff about whatever for a while before they discuss/answer an interesting question submitted by a fellow celebrity like Stephen Colbert or Jennifer Aniston.
I've used the carousel horse emoji to represent Spokane in at least a few microblog posts, but unfortunately I forgot to add it to the emoji picker yesterday when I was revising it.
Impressed to see that Tig Notaro is doing two back-to-back shows in Spokane on June 12th at the Bing Crosby Theater at $70 a ticket, and the first show is already sold out! I would love to see her in person, but $200 for a night out with Mary would be a pretty big hit on the monthly budget.
One of our family St. Patrick's Day traditions that Mary started is making snake-shaped calzones. We eat a ton of homemade pizza at our house, so we're all expected to be able to shape some pizza dough and toppings into a credible snake shape!
One kind of surprising thing about 2026 (to me) is that I’ve started getting more interested in comedians, standup comedy, comedy albums, and comedy podcasts.
Emoji handling is hard, flags need special code. Had to do a quick bug fix to get the US flag to resolve in the holidays section.
Just took my first crack at updating emoji_data.json since factoring it out of admin.html. Definitely not the final form, but it should be an improvement. Can't actually test and take advantage of it until my next post.
Cold, rainy day today, and it didn't help that I was feeling under the weather. Ended up working the first half in the office. and now I'm finishing the day working remotely from home.
LIV 1-1 TOT FT Richarlison gets it done late with the equalizer. I actually missed it because I was checking something for Mary, who's off at work right now. Doing my part!
LIV 1-0 TOT HT Richy has had a couple of header chances, but can't quite find a way past Alisson. Liverpool have been knocking at the door, but don't seem unbeatable.
LIV 1 - 0 TOT Szoboszlai capitalizes on a soft foul free kick from the top of the box. Vic got his hand on the shot, but too much power.
Refactored some emoji picker code this morning and set up some other emoji related tools. The current picker works great, but is missing some emojis I need and also contains a bunch I'll never use.
In 2012 comedian Tig Notaro nearly died from an abdominal infection, her mother died suddenly, and not long after that, Tig was diagnosed with breast cancer that required a double mastectomy. Tig 👍👍 is the 2015 documentary about what came next, and it's incredibly real, sad, moving, funny, and ultimately inspirational.
The post tagging functionality in Microcosm is a happy accident that I didn't fully appreciate until after I had been working with the system for a few days. Now I've realized it allows me to filter to exactly the output I need for a given task.
Thinking of a feature, describing it to Claude and having it build it in a minute or so is pretty magical. Updated export-posts.js to be able to specify posts from a specific range of days in the markdown format I use and render any associated images in markdown format. Exporting microcosm and image posts to so.axodys.com just got way easier.
Big 1-0 win for Eddie Howe and Newcastle over Chelsea at Stanford Bridge today. Love to see it.
Productive morning. Caught up on my last three Week Notes and two Microcosm posts on my Bear Blog (so.axodys.com), which tends to be more of a periodically updated archive than a blog with daily activity. The next Microcosm post (Microcosm 2026 - Mar 8-15) will be interesting because it also contains mini-posts that should get standalone posts in Bear. I think I'll update posts-exports.js with a couple of flags to strip tags and simplify making those posts.
How to love comics - Mike Monteiro with a very relatable piece on his love of comics.
Comics were 25¢ when I started going to Mister Grocer after school. Which meant all I had to do to get a comic was to find a quarter somewhere. And quarters were kinda magical as a kid. They didn’t come around every day. But every few days you’d come across one in between the couch cushions, or just minding its business on the kitchen table, or left on the edge of the bathroom sink by my father as he prepared to go out for the evening. Quarters weren’t given. They appeared. And they quickly disappeared. Into my pocket. To be traded for a comic at Mister Grocer the next day.
Comic books were still in the 65¢ to 75¢ range when I fell in love in the 80s. I spent a lot of lawn mowing money on my collection.
Just came up with a pretty big usability improvement to the posts tab in the Microcosm admin page.
The MacBook Neo - John Gruber's review of the new Apple consumer laptop.
My three-device lifestyle for the last decade has been a MacBook Pro (anchored to a Studio Display at my desk at home, and in my briefcase when travelling); my iPhone; and an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard for use around the rest of the house. This last week testing the MacBook Neo, I haven’t touched my iPad once, and I haven’t once wished this Neo were an iPad. And there were many times when I was very happy that it was a Mac.
This is a killer observation to me. The only thing I regularly use my iPad Pro for is watching YouTube videos during my lunch. I could easily do the same and so much more with a cheaper MacBook Neo.
Not only did it snow overnight, it’s still snowing this morning. Classic Spokane March!
Just noticed that when editing an existing post in Microcosm (I forgot tags on my previous post), there was no cancel button. Whipped up a fix with Claude and will use this post to test it.
It worked!
Spokane Valley Performing Arts Center director asks city for millions to help finish theater
Phase one of building the new performing arts center is predicted to cost $32 million and would be 45,000 square feet, with 463 seats at the main stage, 220 seats in a studio theater and an acting conservatory area, according to Johnson.
Lembeck Appraisal and Consulting found that SVST’s revenue projections and historical data were inaccurate. The appraisal found that the theater was overengineered and would only be worth much less than its construction cost.
Yeah, this project is dead in the water, considering there are already two 700-seat venues in downtown Spokane (The Bing and Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center at Gonzaga) directly competing with it to bring in outside acts. There's no way a 453 seat community theater venue can produce the yearly revenue required to pay back the amount of construction debt they're talking about, and the fiscally conservative Spokane Valley City Council is going to laugh in their faces.
SGA and OKC got it done in the fourth quarter, winning 104-102 over Boston. Former Zag, Chet Holmgren, hit the winning free throws, but Gilgeous-Alexander carried the Thunder with 14 points in the fourth quarter, and finished with 35 points and 9 assists in his record-breaking night.
Watching OKC - Boston, and the thing that immediately shocked me was the full rows of courtside seats that have shifted both coaching staffs to the end of the court, and the benchwarmers completely beyond the endline!
SGA (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) just broke Wilt Chamberlain's record for consecutive games scoring 20+ at 127 in the third quarter of the ongoing OKC - Boston game. The record stood for 63 years!
One more tweak, fingers crossed that I'll be satisfied after this one.
Tweaked the vertical padding on post layout a little bit this afternoon. Not completely satisfied, but it's a lot better.
I didn't really even think about it until just now while reading something that Dave Winer wrote, but it's pretty cool that GitHub pages just gives you https support automatically.
The "Rubincon" episode title seems to have thrown a lot of people (I had to edit my previous post after realizing my own Rubicon mistake), but it actually makes sense and was intentional, not a giant typo.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy S1E10: Rubincon 👍👍 Everything a Trek fan could possibly want in a season finale. A Federation-wide threat, a giant show trial, and a chance for a ragtag crew of cadets and their mentors to save the day against terrible odds. Such a great cast, but Tig Notaro, really took Jett Reno to another level this season. I know we've got 10 more episodes already in the can, but I'm worried that Paramount's new ownership is going to screw this up for future seasons beyond that.
This a test to see if adding a new post to out of date local post data will blow up the GitHub copy of posts.json.
It did!
So I added a manual sync button.
One thing I really like about Paradise is the way it shows us characters behaving at their best, and also at their worst, depending on time and circumstances. Also, it has at least one character who's an outright chameleon, and I look forward to learning about her backstory and connection to Sinatra. There's still a lot of ground to cover on Sinatra's journey to ruthless bunker mastermind as well.
It was incredibly windy overnight, but it seems to have died down some this morning. I’m always wary of the tall pine trees in our backyard during these kinds of conditions.
Don’t fully trust Microcosm on my phone. It didn’t download the posts.json file to local storage after I connected successfully. There’s supposed to be a check if you try to publish a new post now with local data that doesn’t match GitHub, but if the logic is wrong it will overwrite posts.json. Syncing is tricky.
Had a productive day working with Claude on the Microcosm static microblogging system. Fiddled around with tag filtering and unifying the post layouts across the home page and archives. Then got down to brass tacks this afternoon and sorted out the permalinks. Finished up by updating the RSS generation logic to reflect the correct permalinks and subscribing in NetNewsWire.
I like the way my emoji + [tags] titles look in NetNewsWire on iOS, but I'm not completely sold on them in the desktop application. I got the idea from how Microcosm displays posts (originally just on index.html, now all archives as well). Might turn it into an optional setting down the road.
Paradise S2E5: The Mailman 👍👍 Good to finally see Teri's survival story. So much serendipity with Bean (which makes me think back to what the mysterious Professor Miller said to Billy in S2E3), but what a gut punch twist.
Testing one last permalink UI tweak to improve visibility.
Just pushed out a few more permalink fixes to GitHub. Then I'm going to take a break before I start working on the RSS feed generation later tonight. Things are coming together.
Just had a moment where Claude raced into a fairly big coding task with one mistaken premise that saw immediately, but couldn't interrupt its process. Claude corrected the mistake pretty quickly after I prompted it, and now I've pushed up the change. Time to see if permalinks work as expected now.
Doing another test post to see how everything is coming together in the Microcosm UI. The tag filtering is cool, and I'm pleased that it's functional in the index and all archives now. Now I need to add permalinks to the post entries in the archive pages.
Working on the tag filtering functionality right now. Just pushed a couple of commits through to github and now need to generate a little bit more content
You can't make this kind of thing up. Spurs trail 3-0 thanks to two glaring mistakes from Kinsky and one from Van de Ven. Field is really slick and Spurs are just hapless so far.
I didn't think that microblogs should publish titles, since the RSS spec doesn't actually require titles, but something occurred to me today, and now I want to try it out since I control my own publishing platform.
Have a Super Mario day!
One thing that working with Claude on my Microcosm microblog project has confirmed to me is that AI is very helpful, but not remotely infallible or close to being ready for full autonomy. It's an amplifier, and it will happily amplify mediocre people's mediocrity.
Happy Birthday, Dad. Wish we were having a big family birthday party tonight with Gonzaga playing Santa Clara in the WCC tournament title game on TV in the background. Would you believe that the Zags are playing in their 29th straight WCC tournament final after beating Wayne Tinkle in his last game coaching at Oregon State, have won 21 so far, and are joining the Pac-12 next year?
One last post for the night. I think I've figured out what was breaking my archives. Going to bed either way though.
Update: It worked!
Time for another check. Can we overcome GitHub's annoying page cache and free our archives?
Going to try checking something momentarily. Is there a cache issue?
16 - 15 Santa Clara just under the ten-minute mark. I expected this to be a close game, but kind of disappointed that Santa Clara already squandered their good start and let SMC right back in.
SMC vs Santa Clara off to an interesting start. Broncos lead the Gaels 12-5. They're very much a bubble team so a win tonight would go a long way towards securing a dance ticket. Kind of surprised of how shaky St. Mary's has looked early.
Oops, just realized the Zags are playing in the WCC tournament semi-finals against Oregon St. right now. Guess I’d better see if I can find it on ESPN.
Welp, got derailed by an emoji encoding bug and some kind of git filesystem chenanigans where it refused to acknowledge the updated file that Claude gave me, but I was eventually able to sort things out manually in VSCode. Fingers crossed that I can safely make some new posts through the web interface now.
Finally got the static, GitHub Pages-hosted, personal microblogging system I've been thinking about forever, up and running with a lot of help from Claude. It's still pretty rough, but it works, and I'm looking forward to building on it further.
Eureka moment? Or just disappointment? I'll know in a moment if this actually works.
Claude helped me make some tweaks to the Microblog format I've been using and I should be able to import everything all the way back to September. Unfortunately, it's struggling to make the final import-posts.js utility right now. Must be a lot of compute demand at the moment.
Working with Claude on my microcosm project.
How did I not realize that Modric had gone to AC Milan this season? All the more reason to root for AC Milan in Serie A.
Mary cooked up a huge Panda Express-inspired spread, and now I'm completely stuffed.
Chelsea had all of the possession, but Wrexham was the better team by far with multiple chances beyond their fantastic goal.
Wrexham 1-1 Chelsea HT Excellent game, just unfortunate that Garnacho ended up unmarked with the ball of the left wing in transition and was able to create an own goal situation for the equalizer. Okwonkwo really hadn't been troubled all game prior to that goal.
Brilliant route one goal from Sam Smith over the top puts Wrexham up 1-0!
Looking forward to rooting for Wrexham over Chelsea in the FA Cup today.
Just heard Gorillaz will be the musical guest on SNL tomorrow night, and now I want to tune in.
I've been listening to The Mountain from Gorillaz all week, and I've been really digging it. Orange County was the earworm that I found myself humming to myself at random times after a few listen throughs. Turns out the whole album was strongly influenced by the deaths of both of Albam's and Hewlett's fathers during production, and now I feel like it's a serendipitous gift to revisit the emotion of my dad's passing almost exactly twenty-five years ago.
jottit.org is a really simple editing tool that Simon Carstensen originally built with Aaron Swartz that Simon recently decided to fully resurrect as an open source project. Of particular note to me is that he's clearly using Claude as part of his development process.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy S1E9: 300th Night 👍👍 Excellent penultimate episode to the season with a cliffhanger to boot! Enjoyed SAM's personality evolution and internal conflict over her previous version's memories, and obviously this is the Caleb storyline we've been waiting to see play out all season.
Learned yesterday that we were having weird streaming issues on our TV upstairs with Peacock and Prime failing to load videos. It took MTGA to stop working for our computers for me to finally realize our Xfinity router needed a reboot.
Making progress with Claude on the personal microblog project that I've been thinking about for a few years. The starting implementation was impressive, but the iterative assistance since has been impressive. Getting the project set up on Github, and then setting up unit tests has been really helpful and educational.
Heh, accidentally lost a Jump-In game to my daughter by decking with my Summoned Elves deck. Probably one of the most synergistic pairings available right now.
The MacBook Neo looks sweet and the price point is great, but only 8GB of RAM bums me out.
Dave Winer's comments about working with Claude on a programming project mirrors my own initial experience. It's very collaborative and works quite well if you have enough knowledge to give it a directive, evaluate the result, and continue iterating.
Paradise S2E4: A Holy Charge 👍👍 Welp, this one didn't turn out how I expected at all.
Macbook Neo is the leaked name for the new entry-level MacBook from Apple. I think that's pretty good if it's true.
After 3 episodes, it's fair to say that Paradise season 2 is off to quite a start. Impressed by all the new layers in this onion, and now I wonder just how many seasons they've got planned.
Building a static microblog with Claude has been amazing so far. It's a very iterative collaboration. So far there has only been one breaking bug introduced after I introduced some additional functionality and Claude immediately figured it out and fixed it when I brought it up.
tags: ai, coding
🤖 MAR 02 13:39
I guess all the Claude ads I've been seeing have been working because I decided to sign up and see what kind of microblogging system it could build for me based on a variety of specifications.
Feeling fairly functional now that I'm fully hydrated, but wasn't feeling tremendous four hours ago when I woke up with an aching neck, sore back, congestion, raw throat, and a minor cough.
My Hero Academia: You're Next 👍 Fun to see all the students and heroes in a feature-length film, but kind of a ridiculous premise to fit such a huge and momentous one-off side conflict into the week before the actual final battle of the series.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy S1E8: The Life of the Stars 👍👍 Lt. Tilly is back to sort out all of the cadets' post Miyazaki drama in dramatic fashion, and SAM gets an unexpected system restart with the help of her creators and the doctor.
20th place Wolves beating 3rd place Villa 2-0 is the Prem in a nutshell this season. Spurs are in serious, serious relegation danger.