I’m still annoyed that thanks to a missed payment, I lost quixote.com.

It would also be nice to have a configurable transportation choice for the time to leave notice. Because some things I’ll walk to, some I’ll take transit and some I’ll drive and Apple seems to want be to just pick one and only use that.

My other map complaint is that there’s no indication of how much tolls are when comparing toll vs non-toll routes. Because if it’s $5 to save ten minutes, no thanks but for a buck, maybe I’ll do it.

Improvisation goes back as far as music and even some classical music has improvised elements (cadenzas were traditionally improvised before they became commonly notated, Baroque music scored for continuo essentially provides a bassline and chord changes, albeit the chords given in an archaic form (figured bass) that is not widely known by contemporary musicians.

The most amazing improvisers, it turns out, are professional church organists (think the ones who work for the largest churches/cathedrals, not the grandmas playing a church warbler at the corner parish, but sometimes them too). When I auditioned for the Holy Name Cathedral Choir, I wanted to sing a piece by Massenet, but I had lost my original sheet music halfway through trying to transcribe a cleaner copy so I had a melody line and only a few parts of the piano accompaniment. The (assistant!) organist who accompanied me at my audition site-improvised an accompaniment for the piece that was, in my opinion, actually better than the written accompaniment I had lost.

That said, being able to read music can be a sort of superpower. So many times on church gigs, I’ve had guitar players be astonished by my ability to pull chord changes out of piano/organ parts without notated chords. Certainly, some aspects of music are hard to convey in notation. Swung rhythm is a particularly notable case where you’re playing something halfway between a triplet rhythm of ♩♪ and a dotted rhythm (insufficient Unicode to write a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth). The early transmission of jazz music to European composers by way of sheet music led to them missing out on the rhythmic aspects but picking up some of the harmonic novelties. A common injunction to musicians is to play the music, not the notes.

It’s kind of weird that this area that I was only aware of because I like studying maps has popped up a whole bunch in the last few weeks.

What I miss is that back when Safari had RSS built in was I used to just open all the new articles in tabs from an RSS list in my bookmark bar. This is the experience I really would like to recover, being able to just get a set of tabs that represent new posts at sites that I want to follow. Maybe I’ll vibe code this for myself now that I’ve given in and turned to the dark side with Claude.

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1. Yes, there are people who are more into the operations side of things, but I think for most model railroaders it’s as much about the building as the running.