Writing

We had two weeks for a country we could spend months exploring. From a Vladivostok layover to the Great Wall, misty mountains and Shanghai, with Lena, a tour group and a questionable teapot.

I miss the old cars on the streets, and I would very much like another plate of ropa vieja. But the change that has stayed with me most is how differently I now react to news from Cuba.

I want several ways through a blocked network without changing the address my accounts see. The first hop gets me through; the second is the exit I chose.

I approached Anathem with some caution. By the end, I was taking a document about its philosophy to a festival so I could spend a little longer in its world.

Tasks, projects, reading notes, things I want to remember. An agent can help with all of them, provided the note on my phone actually reaches its filesystem.

I wanted to learn how LLM bots worked, but another helpful assistant sounded boring. A slightly ridiculous pig-pirate sounded much more promising.

A pinned tab can keep running Monday's JavaScript while a fresh page loads before its chunks finish uploading. A version marker helps with the first problem; publishing index.html last addresses the second.

I was copying review comments from GitLab into an agent chat. Being the mailman got old, so I built a watcher to deliver the feedback and remember what still needed attention.

A long migration should be easy to pause and resume. An old PHP-to-Symfony rewrite taught me how to move a large Bazel repository without stopping the release train.

Sometimes a browser needs to be in another country while the rest of the laptop stays put. SSH, Tailscale, and a SOCKS5 proxy make that possible.