Show Notes - Week of February 21, 2022

Greetings from 53.5° north latitude, the land of nearly 11 hours of daytime! I jest of course, but it is nice to go leave for a bike ride at 07:30 with the sun fully up and it being bright outside. 

Posted for posterity. Note how much daylight we had today.

In potentially interesting news, I am learning how to stream on Twitch and YouTube. I have no visions of becoming a full-time streamer, but I am keenly interested in how to make that work. I am also not a gamer per se, and certainly do not have the reflexes or emotional disposition to play first-person shooters which seems to be the most common game genre played by many full-time streamers.

Instead of that, I decided to stream a few sessions of playing Microsoft Solitaire. Solitaire is definitely more my speed, plus it is something I would do every day anyway. As a result, I figured it would be the easiest game for me to play while learning how to stream. 

Even with something I am so familiar with, I found it incredibly hard to simultaneously talk cogently and concentrate on playing. I had respect for the FPS streamers before, but even more so now after experiencing how hard Solitaire was to do well during a stream. 

As I say in the videos, I am doing this to learn about the Twitch and YouTube platforms. If people watch, great, but I will continue to post the streams and recorded sessions until I figure I have learned enough regardless of the number of viewers. That said, I somehow had four people watch a recorded Twitch session, which kind of blew my mind. If you are at all interested, you can see my Twitch channel here where the live streams and last thirty days of content are located. A more permanent record of the videos I deem "worthy" will be uploaded to my YouTube channel here.

hahaha I look funny!

Reading Pile:
​Book #8 for 2022 was "Keep Sharp" by Sanjay Gupta. This was a book I started a couple of times and could not get enough momentum to finish. I finally had a road trip to visit my mom and used the three hours of travel time to plow through the second half on an audiobook version from the library.

To use an analogy from my career and work experience, many (all?) self-help or self-improvement books have enough good information for a memo or an agenda item in a meeting but get stretched to cover the entire time for a full-day retreat. Keep Sharp fit this analogy perfectly. Give me an overview of the science and I will be happy: Plaque on the brain is bad? Got it. Inflammation anywhere in the body is bad for the body AND the brain? Makes sense and I can use that to change habits. My diet affects my brain? Understood, thanks for the heads-up (pun intended). Definitely enough information for a memo or an item on the agenda for a larger meeting.

But instead of that, we get the full-day retreat version. Ten hours of information, anecdotes, and here-is-what-I-experienced-when-I-visited-this-famous-person stories. Ten. Hours. Thankfully, audiobooks have the option to be listed to at 1.25x speed. Sigh.

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New Drinks:
​Four new beers this week, with two that were disappointments. Both of the Blind Enthusiasm beers failed in my mind because the goal seem to be different instead of just focusing on quality. This seems to be a real failing for so many breweries at present. Instead of making something good, the trend seems to be to combine elements from several beers - hoppy lager, dark lager, et cetera. Give me a Warka from Poland or a Hacker-Pschorr Münchner Gold from Germany any day over a lot of these mashups. There were two good beers though, with the best coming from Driftwood Brewing in Victoria. 

The four beers were the Blind Enthusiasm South Island Hoppy Lager (3.25 / 5); Blind Enthusiasm Lager O'Darkness (3.0); the best of the week, Driftwood Brewing's It'll Be Fine Southern Hemisphere IPA (3.75); and, Samuel Smith's Tadcaster Taddy Porter (3.5).

These four bring my lifetime unique check-ins on Untappd to 870. 

New Words:
​Three new words this week from either my year-long Reddit group re-read of "War & Peace" or from the Gupta brain health book.

hospodar
[ˈhäspəˌdär]
NOUN

1. (historical) a governor of Wallachia and Moldavia under the Ottoman Porte.

cunctation
[kəNGkˈtāSHən]
NOUN

1. (rare) the action or an instance of delaying; tardy action.

inimical
[iˈnimək(ə)l]
ADJECTIVE

1. tending to obstruct or harm.
   
2. unfriendly; hostile.