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Had a Bottas moment biking to school this morning when an arrowhead shaped rock stabbed through my rear tire and tube causing it to rapidly deflate. Since it’s winter in Boston it was cold and rainy too! Thankfully I was near campus and could walk my bike to a sheltered area to take off my wheel and then check if I could patch the tire. If not I’ad have to walk it home or bring another tube the next day. I noticed bubbling on the wheel (a little disconcerting that my tire itself has many leaks - I should probably replace them) and sure enough I found a hole in the tube there. I patched it and prayed to the biking gods to let it seal. So far (✊🏻🔛🪵) it has held!

Didn’t realize this was going to turn into my bike maintenance journal haha. It is nice for me though; in the past I would have brought it to a bike shop to get it fixed, but now I enjoy doing it all myself. Gets me more comfortable and used to repairing my own things, which I think is somewhat of a lost art in modern society.

Daily Listening

Still listening to a bunch of tracks from my liked songs playlist. I did finally listen to this album from a famous (in China) rapper whose album finally became available in the US. I saved it years ago when I read an article about him during a dive into finding Chinese music (I had this awakening a while back reading translated literature that the rest of the world has really interesting and great culture - it just requires to find if you do not live in it and you will probably find things that you really enjoy).

Daily Reading

Freedom’s Forge: It’s hilarious how much this author disparages unions without giving them any credit for getting better wages and safer working conditions for the workers. I get that its a wartime effort, but if your executives are getting rich and those actually making the machines of war are literally dying during their construction you could probably improve your process. My skepticism meter is definitely pretty high with this book, which I think (hope) enables me to enjoy the sheer facts of the enterprise. I wish the story took a more systemic perspective of how these things actually came about instead of saying it was these “great men” figuring it out. What made them great? How were they able to get all these pieces to work smoothly and effectively together to outproduce the Nazis? It’s not exactly clear to me and hand waving “the free enterprise spirit of Americans” is not a testable hypothesis.