unfiltered thoughts
Unfiltered thoughts is an assortment of sort of stream-of-consciousness thoughts, not structured like a "normal" blog post. Any and all topics are on the table.

If you want to get in touch with me you can use this link to send me an email: https://letterbird.co/srg

a future for this blog?

It's been a hot minute since I shared anything here. No particular reason why, except maybe that I had no "unfiltered thoughts" to share. Or any that I wanted to share anonymously. 

But I still like the idea behind this platform. 

I just don't know what the future is for me. 

I have a few thoughts - one of which is some sort of niche blog. 

We'll see!

in the office

In February I'm going back to 5 days a week in the office. That's all well and good, I knew it was coming. But if they're going to make me come in 5 days a week, I better be getting a dedicated nap room for 10-15 minutes.

change in habits

I recently began working from the office 4 days a week (instead of 3), and will soon be in the office 5 days a week - a return to life pre-COVID. There's been an adjustment period, to say the least. 

It's a different kind of adjustment, though; I feel like I'm not on top of things like finances etc. because I've been too busy (between "real" work and interruptions from colleagues) to bring our budget notebook out to check off various items. I suppose there's also a bit of wanting to keep my private life, private: I'd rather not have my budget out in the open even if deep down I know people aren't looking. 

One positive: I've taken to public transit one day a week (will be twice, in the new year) and I find it a joy. I say that unironically! It takes twice as long to get to work, but I'm able to focus on what I'm listening to, whether it's music or podcasts or - lately - audiobooks. I don't get that kind of time in the office, the car, or at home. 

books about relationships

I want to find a book or a podcast about relationships. But I want something that is applicable to me, so I don't have to skip around to find what's relevant. 

But I don't know where to find these things. Or to vet them to see if they're what I'm looking for. Where do I start? 

Every non-fiction book that is self-help in some way (and I have reservations about these in general, but I'm willing to give them a shot) I've found has come from someone else's recommendation. I've never been able to seek out my own books or podcasts. 

putting the cart before the horse

I got this neat idea last week for a writing project, something that is probably short term (i.e. a defined end, rather than an ongoing project - but who knows). It's something that would lend itself well to a series as part of an existing blog, or a newsletter. 

Tonight I started researching options for self-hosting a newsletter (because I don't want to pay for a service, and I have my own hosting setups already). I had to stop myself. 

Sure, I'm excited to create a new thing, but shouldn't I focus on the what and not the how? That's my problem, every time. 

When I get excited about an idea, I need to focus on the idea itself and stop thinking about all the ways I could potentially distribute it to people. 

Sometimes I need someone to give my head a good shake. Glad I did it myself this time around. 

main character energy

I see it every day on my way to or from work. Now that I drive (almost) every day to work on our busy highway, there's usually at least one car - you know the one - that exudes "main character energy". They drive around like they're the most important person on the road, everyone else's lives be damned. 

Yesterday it was a small white sedan who was accelerating to dangerous speeds given the bumper-to-bumper traffic, weaving in and out of lanes with inches between cars as he (she?) passed, only to get stuck in the far left lane anyway (as I chuckle to myself after watching this display of stupidity). Were they late? Did they think getting 5 cars ahead in a long line of stuck cars will help them make their appointment or get to work on time? Who knows the reason, but the result will be the same: you're still late. 

That's what we normally call "main character energy". But I thought about it this morning...am I doing that anyway, by being all smug and calm in my car, knowing I'm probably going to make it to my destination in one piece? If something happens to that person, it's happening to them, it's not happening to me. And if what happens to them affects other people past my exit - well that's not affecting me either. I'll be off the highway and on more trusted local streets. 

Is that main character energy too? 

more llms

I used another LLM chat to get some quick input about how I messed up the point at which I mixed oil into a spice cake recipe.

(I was supposed to whisk it with eggs & buttermilk etc. but I totally forgot, and mixed it with the entire batter at the end while it was in the pan.)

It told me that it was probably going to end up like a bread than a cake. And also scolded me for not following instructions exactly for recipes. 


Anyway it turned out fine, exactly as I made it last time. But I have this strange compulsion to go back to the LLM and report that it worked out. Do I want to prove it wrong? Or reassure the bot that it all turned out okay in the end? 

I feel like I'm probably not the only person that does this. 

For what it's worth, I will report back that something worked when I'm trying to fix a coding issue or something. I feel like that's relevant. 

This situation though, I think I'm just being weird.

a voice chat with chatgpt

This morning I decided to try having a voice chat with chatGPT — not voice typing or voice to text  — but straight out pick a voice for chatGPT to talk to me with and have an out loud conversation. 

It was about shoelaces; I don't know why I decided to do it instead of typing things out. Probably because it was easier — I mean the other alternative was voice to text which, is how I am typing out this email post, but I wanted to have a conversation just for the heck of it. It was kind of creepy at first. 

The first step to go through is you have to pick a voice for chatGPT to use and, I don't know, I felt kind of weird with most of the voices that came back. The first one was a British voice and it was a male. There are other voices — with female voices, though, for some reason it felt weird to me picking a female voice. I ended up going with what was described as "Ember". It's a male voice, kind of bright and upbeat. 

So I started speaking and I was asking about how to loosen my shoes and because they were too tight at my forefoot. It suggested methods I've seen before but so I could have just as easily looked at myself. I didn't end up going with the suggestions that it made (I do have looser shoes now, by the way), but the conversation itself was interesting. 

The people behind chatGPT made the conversation from the bots to sound like a phone call. The voice sounded somewhat natural — not perfect, you could probably tell it was chatGPT out of context. But the sound of the voice on the other end sounded like a phone call so sort of like you were hearing the voice through a bit of a filter. I thought that was kind of neat and they even gave the voice some pauses. 

They were made to "sound" natural, like how you would have a conversation I don't think it used very many filler words like I'm using "like" a lot right now when I'm doing the voice to text, but it did do some slight repetition of some words to make it sound like someone was speaking with a natural rhythm. 

I don't know if I would use it again for regular searches — I mean typing either on the computer or on my phone is just fine, but I think I would consider doing it if I was having some sort of brainstorming session maybe and I needed to bounce ideas back and forth. The neat thing is that they save the conversation and it's transcribed in a chat so you can refer to it later. I think you can actually play the voice back although I'm not sure if you can play your own voice back, which raises some privacy issues but that's something you have to decide for yourself. 

Note about this post: I used GBoard's voice-to-text feature while I was walking my dog, saved the email as a draft, and cleaned it up later (mainly punctuation - gboard doesn't understand commas or em-dashes or sentence structure at all). If there's any awkwardness in the wording it's because I converse differently than I type, and I was conversing with my keyboard (weird phrase). 
chatgpt llm

excuses

My wife and I play on two different teams for softball. We're both on each team, they're just different friend groups. The two teams couldn't be any more different. 

Our Tuesday team is super relaxed and we're in it for fun. It's the recreation division so nobody is super serious, the competition level is fairly even. 

Our Monday team is in the "lower intermediate" division. Competition is a little more heated. That team is very serious at times, though ostensibly we're in it for fun too. 

It's tournament weekend. In our first game, with the Tuesday team, we played through pouring rain - both the usual vertical and the dreaded sideways. We had fun. We won the game. 

The Monday team...we arrived late in the 3rd inning because our first game went long. But that team was taking things so seriously. We weren't the greatest at the plate, and made some defensive gaps. 

It's fine to play under your own expectations, but no...the bitching point was that the other team was full of spares. They were convinced half the team wasn't really part of the team (they were - my wife and I recognize a bunch of them and they were all wearing jerseys for the team). Suddenly this became the excuse. They had ringers, that's why we lost. 

No. You guys got in your own heads and couldn't make it about your play on the field. Couldn't make adjustments at the plate to change your approach because what you were doing wasn't working. 

When you start making excuses for why you lost, don't act surprised when you do lose. 

(For the record - my wife and I had great games. I had first base locked down and caught throws that by all rights should have been too high or too low or wide. And we both had solid hits, while everyone else was flying out on a deep field.)
excuses softball

switching to iphone

The thought crossed my mind today to finally make the leap to iPhone from Android (when I'm ready to get a new phone, that is). There are a few reasons. 

But the main one is, apps. Most of the cool new apps that I hear about are Apple only; and just today while using Letterboxd, a message came up saying that finally their Android app is on par with the iOS app. 

Android app development is always secondhand to Apple. There are a lot of good things I like about Android, but every additional 30 seconds it takes to unlock my device (it is increasingly sluggish to just access my home screen) is another 30 seconds pushing me toward Apple. 

I wouldn't be pleased with that outcome, there are so many things I'm able to do with my Android device I know I won't be able to do with Apple. It will change my entire workflow with Obsidian, I'm pretty sure. 

Oh well. That time is not now. 

keep your stuff accessible


Earlier this week I read a well-done guide on how to use your phone less often (as he writes a blog post from his phone) that I thought was useful in some of the messaging. It was up at https://reddit.com/r/coolguides/ for less than a day before moderators took it down. I suspect it's because the guide lacked sources for some of the stated facts. The party also generated a lot of controversy in the comments, and the OP provided a downloadable PDF but put it on a website that requires a paid subscription (cancel anytime!) to access. So probably a myriad of reasons why it was taken down. 

Regardless it underscores the notion that when you share stuff you've put a lot of care into online and want to share it, make sure that it's not at the mercy of moderators that can take it down at a moment's notice. Apart from myself several others were dismayed to find that it was no longer available - I was ready to download the images to save later. 

Maybe one of those websites that archive reddit posts might be of use, but I need to find one of those first. 

Anyway, the Internet might be written in ink but I think it's written with those erasable gel pens you can get nowadays.

(Those pens are pretty good actually, but not for longevity.) 

I hate having to justify using AI as a tool

This metaphor might not work but it's what came to mind. I use AI as a tool - sometimes I get a little bit of help tweaking a sentence, or suggesting alt text, or suggesting meta descriptions for a blog post. Sometimes I use it as a sounding board to work through some things on my mind. The most I use it for lately is for coding personal projects.

One such use is for creating shell scripts to automate some things in Obsidian for me; I also will get some CSS help. Honestly most of the coding I get help with is NOT public-facing. But I've also used it to trouble-shoot some technical issues I've had, whether it is with my websites or my Linux box at home. 

People call this vibe coding and people think it's the absolute worst (maybe second after generated images). I understand some of the reasons behind this - security risks among them. In my experience ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot will tell me if a certain option poses inherent security risks when giving me coding solutions - such as "this is the easiest route, but also has some security problems etc. etc." I understand the risks, and I can choose what to do from there. 

And yet if I say that, maybe I get vilified by people who think everything related to AI comes from Robot Hell. 

What if I were to compare this to cooking? People find recipes online all the time and follow them blindly when they're not able to figure out ratios themselves. Is this "vibe cooking"? If I created a great-tasting dish from a recipe book I'm still praised for making a great dish. But it's not truly my creation. I mixed the ingredients together and did the cooking process, but someone else put the work of testing out the recipe to get the optimal flavour. 

Except I don't need to justify using a cookbook. They just understand. Why does it have to be so different with coding? 

existential blogging

What does it mean to be a blogger? I feel like that's all I'm reading this week. Probably not a coincidence as we are 25 days into the "Blaugust" month that many are participating in (1 post each day). At some point everyone is probably looking at their writing a little more closely and start questioning everything about it. I feel that's inevitable. 

Heck, I question my writing all the time. One of the most common things that pop up are feelings of being imposters (a "syndrome", if you will), envy of other people's writings, the feeling that you want to do "more", whatever that means to each individual.

I'm not criticizing or writing from a position of superiority. As I said I ask myself these questions all the time. One of the reasons I write here is so that I can feel free to write as loosely as I want, and keep structured writing to my "main" blog. As well as stay anonymous (to those who don't already know where to find me here). 

the irony of posting this on a blog platform

I've had a lot of thoughts running through my head lately, between notebook setups and website hosting. It's surely a coincidence but website hosting specifically has come up more often than not. Recently it's been people hand coding their own sites, or desiring to ditch their blog host for their own thing. 

I have no interest in building my own blog again (I have a photo blog, and it works, and I dread going through and upgrading it to 11ty 3.0 but I know I'll need to). If that parenthetical aside didn't tell you, I don't enjoy the process of maintaining self hosted applications. I'll do it if it's easy, but having tried setting up a new 11ty project from scratch and not being able to get plugins to work - well, upgrading is for sure less desirable at the moment. 

But designing something by hand, something simple - that I can do. I'm just talking about a personal landing site. But realistically I could probably create an RSS feed manually, I think I've done that before. It's also not hard. Time consuming? Yes. Difficult? No. 

Design - like, complicated CSS design - something not my forté but even that I would simplify as well. There are probably aspects of my site that would suffer, but they probably also aren't going to be a part of my site going forward (week notes). 

I'm likely not changing anything right now. Just some thoughts I had.
html thoughts web