It’s been a little over a week since I announced my RunningAHEAD Analyzer. Yesterday, I did a couple pull requests to the repository. Since I now have the new Mac mini with the M4, I’m slowly moving some of my homelab activities to it. The first thing that I wanted was an ETL script that would persist my RunningAHEAD log and some analysis into a DuckDB database stored on the file system. I re-factored the script to remove the Jupyter notebook as I can now use a notebook for analysis and not for the ETL. In this post, I’ll describe some of the design decisions and talk about the first night of the ETL script running through a cron job on the Mac mini.

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Formula 1 is back after a three break¹! This is the third Grand Prix in the United States and the second year of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Last year, it seemed that the race was going to be a colossal failure but it exceeded all expectations. We’re going into this year’s race with the Driver’s Championship potentially getting locked up. Despite that, I can’t get too excited. It’s a night race in Las Vegas where the temperatures are going to be cold. There’s no chance I’d be able to stay awake to watch it, so it puts a real damper on my schedule as I need to watch the replay immediately after waking up. I also missed the Free Practice sessions, so I’m coming into this recap feeling a little underprepared.

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Last month I analyzed and wrote about my run streaks. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I did the analysis through Excel. Excel has its uses but I’m a data engineer and I really should be doing something that is more capable to be run easier when my heart desires it. My running log of choice, RunningAHEAD doesn’t really have an API that I could tap into so I am left with their log export functionality into a tab-delimited text file. In addition, I’ve been playing around with DuckDB which natively supports a lot of file formats where you can analyze the data through SQL. This got me thinking and I spent a little time over the last few days to build the initial version of my RunningAHEAD Analyzer. It’s by no means complete. Today it contains a Jupyter notebook that I’ll outline in this post.

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With the proliferation of smart phones we are taking more photos than ever. It has been a net positive but there are small things that we’ve lost. Using disposable cameras or cameras that required film to be developed to see the photos is inconvenient, but there’s some delight in going back to your photos. I’m not hipster enough to warrant getting a film camera in 2024, but I found a free iOS app that captures this feeling: pure is a screenless camera app.

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Like a lot of people in the United States over the last week, I’ve been going through some shit. The last thing I wanted to do was post something on the blog. The day after the election was a low point. Living in a swing state, the election has hung over our heads for over a year, and the results were traumatic. I’ve spent a lot of energy over the last week trying to understand what happened, and through doing so, my world view changed.

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Some people have some tremendous streaks in World, the word game that the New York Times purchased in 2022. I’m a recent convert with a 120 day streak. It’s become a daily habit alongside their game Strands. However, that streak is going to end today. The New York Times Tech Guild has gone on strike. I support their right and stand in solidarity. Collective bargaining is a powerful tool for the working class and for too long it’s influence has waned for the worse. If I need to end a streak and potentially cancel my subscription to the NY Times then that is what I’ll do.

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We’ve been really lucky the last few weeks with Formula 1. The Driver’s Championship being close has turned to some great story lines, but it was going to be more of the same this weekend except we had some intervention with the weather. Oh my goodness! This was one crazy weekend. It cultivated in one of the most impressive feats I’ve seen that really reiterated that it’s important to be good, but sometimes it’s great to be lucky.

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My first full month of the website is behind me now. For how often I would start blogs and let them peter out, this first full month has demonstrated that there is something here. I’m having fun collecting my thoughts and adding some content to the internet. Here’s everything that has changed in October.

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My weekend was jampacked but I was able to get to watch all the sessions of the Mexico Grand Prix, our 20th race weekend of the 2024 season. It’s sad to see what Aston Martin has done this year after their successes last year, but it’s really impressive to see that this is Fernando Alonso’s 400th Grand Prix start though it didn’t really pan out for him. I was disappointed we saw some racing that wasn’t clean, and it will have impacts on the championships. Let’s go through the weekend.

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Podcasts have been an integral part of my life for a long time. My first memories are that I had downloaded the show Revenge of the Screen Savers, later ranamed to This Week in Tech, back in 2005. I dipped in and out over the years but it has been a daily habit since 2016, when I subscribed to Overcast through the App Store. If you wonder how I take so many steps, the answer is I have a robust podcast subscription list and I am a completionist. I find the best time to listen to podcasts are on my walks and runs. This post is meant to catalog the subscriptions I have in October 2024, as I add new ones and take out old ones over time.

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