pw4001

Just finished Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War" book last week. Well put together, the timeline is interesting as is the idea that North Korea would use 1MT weapons, and that Russian missile detection is so poor that they can't tell the difference between something overflying them to detonate elsewhere and something aimed at them. I hope that's an incorrect US evaluation.

About to start her Biological War.

A work I take notes of all the meetings I attend in Markdown with Notepad++, and they're in a folder that's backed up automatically. There are pages in Confluence for ongoing work, and I no longer use OneNote.

A home, I keep a diary, one file per month, lightly formatted text (not Markdown) edited with vim with a nightly script that converts parts of the text into a set of web pages and drops them into an in-house Wiki. That's the Wiki I wrote close to 20 years ago that's a holding pen for pages on pretty much any subject that interests me. A hand-written NLP/NER pipeline munges the pages looking for interesting material and generates indexes that get added into the Wiki as well. The pipeline still needs a lot of work, because right now it's more "interest" than production ready.

The wiki is hugely useful for material clipped from web pages and emails as well as notes that I write myself. Documentation for any of the software I've written for myself and still use is there as are several hundred old Usenet threads. There's a big list of media that I want to view/read/consume at some point, and more gets added than gets marked off.

I'm still looking for the perfect PIM (and yes, I do know there's no such thing), and the search generates notes as well. If I ever find it, it's going to replace Joplin (like the UI but not the need for a database), Dendron (like flat files but not the UI), Drafts (like the virtual notebooks built from tags but find the UI clumsy) and of course the wiki I wrote.

I'm a month from 71 and I still get excited by stuff. Things I half expected aren't going to happen in my lifetime (fusion for example after working on JET years back) which is disappointing. And flying cars - thankfully seeing how ground based cars are handled. OTOH I came across the Internet in the early 70s and it's been amazing to watch it change. I still work in cyber security and that keeps giving challenges which I enjoy.

I've been married and been not married and had long term relationships. Built a couple of houses, moved from the UK to Australia, then across country. So much new to see there's never time to get bored. A decade ago I started to feel burn-out so I did an MSc (Mobile Biometric Authentication), worked at an ISP and learned about voice.

My current side project is a mix of NLP and semantic graphs, and I read a lot. The biggest change over the years is probably that I listen to less music now. I never really got into podcasts or audio books, but I still have 70s, 80s and 90s mixes on the server, but they're played less. Probably because I know the content too well.