Wonderful weddings [20th-Oct-24]
Another good friend ties the knot!
Hello there!
It’s been quite a week with a return to normal schedule, start of a course and playing groomsmen for a dear friend’s wedding. I was soooo tired today that I woke up, grabbed a strong coffee and then promptly fell asleep while I was trying to make the bed. 😂
What has been happening with you? Hit “reply” and let me know! Housekeeping stuff below as usual…
General housekeeping: 90% of the newsletter is completely free. Any links with * are affiliate links. If you’ve enjoyed any of my random creative endeavours/like giving to charity/want to support Substack as an awesome platform, consider subscribing. They take a cut(I can’t actually pay for this awesome service) and I tend to donate most of this to charity, but I do use it as a yard stick to know that people find the content valuable. It should work out to <$2/wk!Creative update
Youtube: First Ride in a REAL Robo-taxi
With Tesla showing off the CyberCab recently, I thought I would finally get around to editing my own experience in riding a Robotaxi recently in SF. Waymo already offers this in a few cities around the US and it’s amazing to think that this technology exists TODAY!
Video to watch
SpaceX Booster catch with “chopsticks”
While I can’t say I’m a big fan of the person that is Elon, you can’t deny he’s done managed some pretty impressive feats in various fields. This week saw another new high water mark with a rocket booster not only returning in tact, but also returning so accurately that it could be caught by the launch tower with mechanical “chop sticks” !!!
To think that not even 10 years ago, the concept of this level of rocket reusability was laughed as madness and now, they managed to pull this off on their first attempt?! Incredible!
Cool finds
Ok I didn’t see ANY leaks til after last week’s newsletter and then suddenly, the second generation Scribe was announced. If you read last week’s newsletter, you probably got the original at a great discount. If (like me) you were caught off guard and wanted the new one, Amazon does have a generous change of mind policy so you can return it and order the new one.
It wont be out til December but all early reviews point to it being a much better device for note taking.
Actionable insight
Are you making use of the luxuries you already have?
I had some guests visit recently and took them on a tour of some of the nicer elements of my apartment building. They were suitably impressed and said something that made me pause: “you must love coming here all the time!”
As it turns out, they were pointing out a really nice sauna that we have a the privilege to use. I couldn’t think of the last time I actually was in there when not showing someone around!
In my head, I always think I need some fancy membership or access to some other gym when in reality, I’m not using half the luxuries I already have access to.
What luxuries do you ALREADY have that you’re not using?
Weekly Update
This week was filled with the most amount of clinical work I’ve done since being back from Stanford. Boy, was a I getting tired! Now I know why I used to feel exhausted all the time: this amount of work PLUS working in public meant that there was at least another 30% extra work!
Given I’m still on Sabbatical, I had to start the next part of active work on it this week. I’m doing a short course on Python and building an image classifier AI model. I’ve done a bunch of similar stuff before but nothing where I build a model from scratch! I’m excited to jump back in to my nerdy tendencies!
The last few days have also been filled with guests staying with us from interstate as well as being a groomsman for the wedding of one of my close friends. To be honest, they had everything so well organised that there really wasn’t much for us to actually do!
The day, however, was long. It started at 0715 and ended closer to midnight. Given that the guest from interstate arrived the night before and I stayed up late chatting to them, I was knackered most of today!
The great thing about weddings these days is that it gives an excuse to have a social catch up with friends who normally can’t find the time to actually meet. And to see some people outside of the work setting. The photo above is of the lovely couple but also of the car of one of the surgeons we both work with. It’s one of only 5 in the country so the chances of ever seeing one in the flesh was pretty rare. While I’m not a fancy car person, you didn’t need to be to realise that this was quite an exclusive vehicle!
More over on the blog.
Quote of the week
This week the quote comes from Tim Ferriss, who was instrumental in my approach to optimising life…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Sunday Surprise to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.