Brad Barrish

In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite hot in Los Angeles, but that’s October in LA for you. I went to the farmers market, as I do nearly every Sunday and even at 9am it was insanely hot. I’m sitting in my car in Santa Monica at the moment and it says it’s 101 degrees. My watch say 95, so it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

I distinctly remember going to pumpkin patches in October when the kids were younger and it was always dreadfully hot.

And if the heat weren’t enough, the mosquitoes are completely out of control. I picked up buckets at home depot so I can build some mosquito traps for around our house. A neighbor I was talking to yesterday did the same.

Good lord. This Low performance of “When I Go Deaf” from 2013 absolutely wrecked me. I miss them as a band and still can’t believe Mimi is gone. Low is just one of those bands for me… (h/t Sippy)

My new Apple Watch Ultra 4 got delivered today. I got the natural color with the translucent gray Ocean Band. I had the same setup with my Ultra 1, only it had a white Ocean Band. I traded in my Ultra 1, so that will be heading back to Apple. The Ultra 4 looks exactly the same, though the color is a bit different. I love how it looks and am excited to check out the latest Apple Health stuff.

I’ve been going back and forth on the iPhone Duo. I love taking photos with my iPhone and the Duo’s cameras aren’t nearly as good as the ones on the Pro. I’ve had a Pro since they started making them. I love the idea of the Duo, but it might just not be the phone for me.

I found out about this unreleased Steve Albini version of Cheap Trick’s In Color from a Threads post and have had it on repeat ever since. Anyone who knows anything about Albini knows he was a massive fan of Cheap Trick. The short story is the band apparently thought the original mix of In Color was a little too polished so they ended up re-recording the album with Albini over the course of a few days. He discussed this in his Tape Op interview in 2012.

A fairly big project for them was rerecording the entire In Color album. At the time, that struck me as a mistake; like a capitulation of “we did our best stuff a long time ago.” It seemed like a mistake, up until they started working on it. Then it seemed like the best idea ever. It was so invigorating and it was so much fun. It was so satisfying to hear them blowing those songs out full- bore.

So far they haven’t released it. I think it was more about them exorcising their demons about that record. I think they felt for years like they’d been carrying that record around and that record didn’t represent them. They just wanted a shot to do it their way. And, once they did, I think it soothed their ennui. I don’t think they feel the need to exploit that; it’s just something they wanted to do.

He also discusses it in a Stereogum interview from 2024.

Now, I’ve never confirmed any of this with the band, but my intuition based on what was going on around the band at the time was that they were in the middle of extricating themselves from a managerial relationship and also from a record label relationship. And that album, the In Color album, had most of their hit titles on it. And so by remaking that album, they created a version of it that they owned entirely and that then they could use, they could license and keep all the money from. And that was a tactic that was later used by Taylor Swift and other people. They were pretty early and pretty on the ball doing that.

That seemed like such a crazy idea. And it almost seemed like a kind of a tacit admission that their later material wasn’t as good. I thought it was a bad idea, and I said, so. Then from the minute they started, I just could not have enjoyed myself more sitting there listening to it, and I’m so glad they did it. If you’ve ever seen them play live, that’s what they sound like. They’re an energetic hard rock band, and their studio record version didn’t, didn’t really bring that across that much.

Wow! I really hope the band officially releases this at some point.

I used Bearable to track a lot of my biometrics and symptoms for about 5 years. I stopped using it consistently in 2025. I fell out of the habit and grew kind of tired of it. Part of it was my own fault for trying to track too many things. This has happened to me many times before. I’ve been suffering from a lot of headaches and migraines lately, so I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of tracking things again. I have an appointment at UCLA next month, so I figured it would be good to get back into tracking things. I wear an Apple Watch and Oura ring, but it doesn’t capture everything and I can’t quickly add tags or notes to my data in Apple Health and I don’t like Oura’s interface for this, mostly because I don’t have a way to look back at it.

I exported all of my data from Bearable and had ChatGPT create a Base in Obsidian, which was pretty simple since the data was already in a CSV. Then I created a template using the Templater community plugin for Obsidian and had ChatGPT create a template to fill in some things that I wanted to track. I then generated an Oura API token worked on a little helper script to pull my data from Oura into the template for the current day in addition to collecting several data points, which I fill in manually. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I do this sort of thing at least a few times a week. It is so fun to be able to go from an idea, even a complex one, to a finished product for myself in a few hours. I feel like I say it all the time, but AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that only trained developers could do. It’s incredibly exciting and so weird. It continues to thrill me and also really freak me out. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. That said, I don’t think it’s going to kill us all. I’ve learned not to bring it up with most people, though I do wish I could have nuanced conversations about it with people in my life.

My absolute favorite RSS reader, Unread, got a big 5.0 update. Congrats, John!

This selection of Los Alamos Rolodex buiness cards brings me so much joy. I mean look at these beautiful business cards!

As I struggle to know whether it’s even worth having a website on which I regularly publish, I made a few small improvements to this one over the weekend. If you read via RSS, you won’t notice anything. If you visit in a browser, you’ll now see a blogroll along the right. The list will get added to over time, but I started with a bunch of my favorites. I also tweaked the header a bit by adding a personal logo beside my name and I dropped the link to my mom’s obituary as one of the main links. I plan to move it to a more permanent place on the web at some point. I also added a now page, which is a bit sparse, but it’s something I’d been meaning to add.

For an individual, I pay Google a lot of money every month. I pay for YouTube Premium (for the family), YouTube TV, NFL games, Google One for extra space on my OG Gmail account and Google Workspace for my personal domain. I’ve finally come to the point where I’m going to begin moving away from Google services. It will take a while, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Google Photos will probably be the most difficult service to move away from, but Immich looks like a promising replacement. Fastmail is likely where I’ll end up for email, calendar and contacts and I’ll likely start that process soon. Since I have multiple personal domains, that will be a helpful migration. Docs and Sheets might well be impossible, or at least the trade-offs might be too great. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do there yet.

I don’t plan to cancel YouTube Premium. The value is irreplaceable and nothing really comes close. I don’t think you can watch NFL games anywhere else, so that will have to stay as well.

Google Maps is relatively easy to replace with Apple Maps. I guess Mapquest is making a comeback too, which is kinda nuts.

If you have advice on the topic, I’d love to hear about it, especially as it relates to Google Docs and Sheets.

The Hugging Face Incident is, in a distorted and dangerous way, an illustration of what the AI companies are trying to achieve. They want long-running AI agents to work without human intervention, solving problems and organizing as needed, with our human job limited to giving instructions and evaluate output.

From Ethan Mollick’s post, Agency and Agents