Colleague Appreciation Week (Weeknotes

All the haps from the week of Jun 10–16, 2024.

Colleague Appreciation Week

🌭 Every summer my employer celebrates “colleague appreciation week” with some fun events. It’s a nice gesture. One of the events was a big cookout with games and SWAG giveaways outside the office. The weather cooperated with sunny blue skies.
🏆 Another of the events was a visit to Lower.com Field, home of our Columbus Crew, which included a behind-the-scenes tour of the facilities. I visited the Crew’s game day locker room and posed with the Philip F. Anschutz Trophy.
🤳 I also got an ussie with our CEO.

🧻 Last week I talked about retiring my blogroll, but at the time I wasn’t sure exactly what (if anything) I was going to replace it with. Coincidentally, I launched Scraps by Mihobu, my online digital scrapbook, this week. It takes the place of my (now retired) digital garden project, which was little more than a (boring and nearly useless) collection of links. My goal for the scrapbook is to have a place to collect interesting (to me at least) content not created by me, with credit and links to the source where possible of course. That goals seems to fit nicely with the goal of the #Junited project and the idea of a point-in-time variant of a more traditional, static blogroll.
🛬 I introduced a new landing/home page for this site, which now shows a list of recent posts, rather than only the most recent post. There are a few other things I should probably add as well.

🖼️ This photograph looks like an optical illusion but it’s not. (PetaPixel)
🌈 I stumbled upon Steven Lawson’s Colour Challenge, in which folks make photographs that predominantly feature either yellow, red, blue, or green. I find it difficult to find inspiration when I’m at home so this might be something worth trying out, even if I’m so late to the party that everyone’s already gone.

😎 Fathers Day hit a little bit different this year. My girlies are both away and my dad’s not around any more. My mom came down for the weekend though, and we had a little cookout on the patio and enjoyed the amazing sunny weather.

“Election Dissection” by Fred Baldwin (U.S. Airways Attaché, July 2004) is an article I first read almost 20 years ago in an in-flight magazine. (I miss those.) It has stuck with me all these years because the author does an excellent job of explaining several different methods for counting votes, all of which are problematic in some way.
“Israel’s Forever War” by Tom Segev (Foreign Affairs) is a very concise history of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
In “The Empty Brain” (Aeon), Robert Epstein explains why the human brain is not like a computer. He argues that we need to stop talking about it as though it is.
In “A Republic, if you can keep it: how 2024 rhymes with the 1850s” by Joan Westenberg
“A Deep State of His Own” by Jon D. Michaels (Foreign Affairs)

It’s going to be hot here in Ohio for the next few days. Stay hydrated, folks.