Wednesday, October 7th, 2026

Yesterday’s theme of the day seemed to be painting. There was one wall in my workshop that needed to be primed and painted before the plumber comes back to do his finishing work. And I started working on the last couple of panels on my motorcycle that I wanted to paint. The experiment of using vinyl wrap to remove all the red on my Honda 300L Rally didn’t work out as I had hoped. So far the paint seems to be holding up pretty well. And it is much easier to get a good look on all the oddly shaped parts. The prep takes time. Getting the panels cleaned, sanded, and primed, then sanded again is a most-of-the-day type project given the waiting times between coats. But, this is the type of project where preparation really pays off.

While I was doing all my painting yesterday, I decided to dig into some musical acts that I haven’t listened to in a long time. Some that I don’t think I ever attempted to listen to an album of theirs. It was a more enjoyable experience than letting the algorithm pick music for me. I could control what I was in the mood to listen to. I’ve found that these algorithms are often trying too hard to fit to what they believe are my tastes. When an auto-generated playlist based off a blues musician included Metallica, I know the system is trying to overfit. Sure I like Metallica, but not next to a song by Gary Clark Jr.

These systems are impressive in many ways, but it feels like the more we give up to them the more we lose in our own decision making process. Not that making a decision about what to select is easy any longer. With millions of musical tracks available at our fingertips it is counterintuitively easier to either fall back to the same artists over and over again, or give up entirely and just have the computer decide. This is the same problem with the streaming video services. And we all know where social media has gone over the last several years. No longer the place you go to stay in contact with friends, but a hyper curated feed based on what the company is looking to sell you.

I believe I have at least the start of a plan to rediscover my love of music by focusing on artists and albums. And it may be time to start to slowly build up my collection again. And being more deliberate about how I use services such as Apple Music I think can really make the difference in the meantime. It is the interface with social media that gives me the most pause. The need to use platforms such as Facebook still really bothers me. The user groups are the most valuable thing given our travel plans. Although I know I have already decided that our travel blog will be the main place we record our travels, the idea of needing to share the content with these companies still bothers me. I get that this is where most people are. I could decide just to ignore all that and just focus on what we want to share where we want to share it, and be done with all this. I guess we will see. Unlike many other travelers we are not interested in attempting to make our travel content the source of some type of business. So in that case we don’t need to follow anyone else’s rules.