The Weekend

The winter sun in this part of the world looked like 4pm even if it was only 12 noon.

We drove through places that were now familiar to me; the place with the quirky shops, the place with the great pies (there was a long queue), and the place with the salmon fish. After that, a big blue lake appeared on the right and it seemed never-ending as we drove alongside it.

At one point, we drove past what looked like tourist vans parked on the lake shore. A mass of white, naked bodies- teens, adults I couldn’t tell- were actually swimming in the cold water. Good on them.

I never sleep on these trips, but this time I did with the soft 4pm sun caressing my face.

When I woke up we were nearly there and you could see the mountain or the mountains, standing guard like a gate to something. Before them, a vast plain of bush and grass, rocks, and a single road that led to the village.

And it wasn’t really a village in the true sense, but accommodations for tourists and scattered housing for conservationists, scientists, and maybe the military.

We stayed at the best one- the oldest one, and it looked like it was in the middle of shedding its age and donning new retrofits for the future. Half of the hotel wasn’t even done- we could see mattresses lined up along the corridor from the large windows in a connecting wing- and we stayed half a kilometer away at refurbished cabins.

We settled in (there was a buffet for dinner) and in my room, I could see the mountain looming high and shadowed.

It was’t at all inert- it was alive.

Today

What's the time?

The very first time I put on the Apple Watch when it first came out, I was hooked (though I had to take it off every night to charge it because the battery of that 1st generation model didn’t last long).

But this was because I literally had Apple everything and if you were in that ecosystem, the watch was another extension of that. You quickly viewed text messages on it (which prompted people to ask if you needed to go); answered calls (which got you strange looks); or even paid your groceries or purchases via NFC (which had people gaping which was actually pleasing).

But three watches later, I feel that I’m done with it. I’m currently using a stainless steel model and if it broke, or got old and irrelevant (the fate of every Apple device), I don’t think I’ll pay out another $NZ 1400+ for a new one.

I’m also done with having to be ‘connected’ all the time- it’s exhausting and pointless. If it meant doing and actually acquiring/achieving something tangible like money, or saving a life or benefitting someone, then I’m all for it.

But all it ever does I feel is gaslight me 😅. So there, I’m really done it!! (though full disclosure- if the Watch Ultra was smaller, I would have bought it).

But I feel that I’m ready to go back to analogue and these are my picks:

On my 'shelf'

(from the NY Times review) In Törzs’s world, books of magic, all written in human blood, can do incredible things when someone feeds them a drop of blood and reads them aloud. Abe Kalotay collected these books to protect them from falling into the wrong hands, and raised his daughters, Joanna and Esther, as stewards of a beautiful and dangerous library that had to be kept hidden at all costs; in Esther’s infancy, her mother was murdered by powerful people who wanted the books.

A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them.

Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us―and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.

J'aime la France: qu'ils mangent du foie gras

Don’t ask me how much we paid for dinner.

J'aime la France: la recherche du goût

If there was a Popeye’s chicken, would I eat there? For sure. But we steered clear of fast-food (we checked the menu of Burger King and Maccas if there was a local entry, something like a foie gras burger with truffle shavings but there wasn’t any so..) as well as ridiculous items such as $NZ 50 burger and fries. We know there’s inflation, but that’s fancy hotel inflation.

So now we know (which Google didn’t tell us) that if you find yourself in any of those hotels on that narrow strip of white-sand beach, food is $$$$$.

I don’t mind pricy food- if that $50 burger had real truffle shavings on it or was served with a tablespoon of caviar on the side, I would’ve tried it out once.

J'aime la France: jour deux

We woke up early to watch the Apple Developer’s Conference where they announced new MacBook Airs. terribly expensive and unnecessarily powerful Mac Pros and my next terribly expensive purchase, Vision Pros. This means that I do need to get used to using contact lenses, because if I don’t, I would have to buy terribly expensive extras in the form of Zeiss made prescription lens inserts in order to see through the damned things.

The conference made us hungry and depressed ($$$$) so off we went for buffet breakfast and it was spectacular. There was a pastry station with petite almond madeleines so freshly made, they felt like a dog’s tongue on your skin, warm and sticky. There was the usual hot-food station with spicy breakfast chipolatas, scrambled eggs, bacon, hashbrowns and a food server who did crepes made to order. There was the cereal-granola-fresh fruit-yogurt (TWELVE kinds including genuine Swedish langfil) station which I’ve always ignored; the pastry station with 10 kinds of croissants, danishes and specialist breads. And there was even an ‘Asian’ station where you could create either noodles or congee with different toppings.

The morning feed was good because on our walk exploring the eastern side of the city, restaurant food was ridiculously expensive. We ordered a galette to share only because we didn’t know how big it was and it was the first time I had one that had curry and rice as a filling.

But coffee was a disappointment- I thought this was a culture that was big on coffee?

We found another superarket and decided to do DIY dinner- a baguette, a good bar of butter, a pate and a rillette and a block of cheese.

J'aime la France

Today’s expenses:
1270 F for macarons
680 F for cappucino
chips and water ? F
250 F (2) cannelle

First we went to the beach. In the distance, we could see an ever shifting curtain of rain. It could come or it won’t, but we did bring our umbrellas. There was a long narrow wharf and midway, Sam got anxious. It wasn’t rickety but it was gappy. The water below was really clear and blue.

I couldn’t tell when the buildings were made. The Hilton looked like the buildings in Muriel’s Wedding and a quick Google search showed that the movie was made in the 90s, so there you go. But the streets all over the city were in a state of repair and we had to walk our way through a maze of orange cones. Doing pedestrian crossings felt like Russian roulette and finally, we found a supermarket.

We were stumped. We wanted cheese, butter, ice-cream and sorbet. but it was at least 45 minutes walking back to the hotel, so…..

Everyone literally had a baguette under their arm. The bread section held different sorts and we wanted to just stand there and smell it. We figured, we needed a car and then we’d go crazy shopping. So we’ll be back.

Darkness fell fast just like as it was back home. The restaurants were half-empty and we were all Frenched out asking questions so we just went back to the hotel.

We opened the courtesy bottle of brut champagne (an Armand de Brignac) and had it with bags of Lay’s potato chips. That was dinner done.

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Tapioca pudding

Can’t remember if we were kids or actually a bit older, but one day, our mother made tapioca pudding. We absolutely loved it, and she never made it again.

So it was that singular event that made us- me at least- look for it ever since. And who knew that it was just really tapioca (I believe she used a boxed one from the States). Funny thing is to this day, she only half-remembers it, but then she wasn’t really into cooking when we were growing up. I saw a pack at the Asian store, and said to myself, let’s make it and I did and it was exactly as I remembered it. Funny that.

Online articles say it’s a bitch to cook, but not really. Watch over it as much as you could (boil a cup of the tapioca in about 4-5 cups of water) letting it simmer just until the whiteness in the middle of the pearls fades to the point of becoming invisible.

Turn off the heat and let it cook in the heat a bit before putting into the fridge after it’s cooled. I did a mixture of cream and condensed milk. It will be wanting for more sweetness but up to you if you want to add more sweetener.

You can put any fruit in it and I remember the version my mom made used pineapple chunks so that’s what I did, as well as mango.

The morning commute

When I started at my current job, we lived out west which was more or less under 40 kilometers away- but it might have well been 400 for someone who took public transport. I would wake up at 4am, make breakfast (for everyone) when I still ate breakfast, took the train to the city, and from there, took another one south.

The trains then were slow, and not the faster, quieter electric ones we have today. But none of these things- the waiting times, the (small) crowds- mattered to me. They didn’t because I had no other choice. I made the choice to NOT drive.

Those long commutes were actually relaxing; I read books, listened to this then little known singer named Adele.

I’ve been using Uber heavily for the last couple of years because I have this notion, that, ‘it’s saving me time’. But for what exactly I’m not sure. Can I ‘spend’ it? Can I ‘save enough of that time’ and use it for something fantastically miraculous?

So far, I really have nothing to show for (again, choices?) so I thought, the weather has turned cold and dark. The buses are nearly empty. The walk would be good. So here we are…(and listening to Adele still).

Currently reading: Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

I’ve had multiple dreams with varying contexts, but essentially all the dreams are in the same location.

A dark path into woodland with faint, fog-swathed light at the end of it. Winding, craggy paths. An abandoned villa with red adobe brick. A hill with a view.

We always look for second chances in life, but the ‘fantasy’ in this book is about finding something better- a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even infinite chance. But this is not Marvel- you won’t find a version of yourself in the multi-verse and swap jokes about wanting to compare genitalia just to see if they’re the same.

But who knows because I’m just in the middle of it and wondering why a major character who dies in the earlier chapters is still alive.

But the science is titillatingly plausible; ironically, I checked it with chatGPT and it came up with the same theoretical assumptions, hmmmm. Scarier still is the fact that AI plays a major role in the book (of course it does).

The Weekend (in photos)