Hello world!

I got my new bike a few weeks ago. This week I finally am at the point where I am truly up and running with it. All the tweaking and tuning to bring it to parity with my old bike is complete. Early Sunday morning, I rode the new bike in the neighboring state of Ohio for the first time. Exploring the Huron County portion of the North Coast Inland Trail was absolutely amazing! The terrain was not quite as meticulously maintained as Montour but it’s truly a beautiful, flat, unbelievably straight stretch of rail trail in northern Ohio that comprises part of U.S. Bicycle Route 30.

🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week

• How I Ran the Length of Every Street in Pittsburgh: Pac Tom
  • This is just delightful! It’s not new but it’s very well-done and it gives you really cool insight into my hometown. I love finding people who put this kind of effort into completing and sharing cool personal projects.
• KSON: A 💌 to the humans maintaining computer configurations
  • The problems described on kson.org are real and relatable. It’s neat that KSON is a superset of JSON.
• Killer Shell - Exam Simulators
  • I don’t have experience with these yet but they seem cool. I hear that the CKA simulator on killer.sh is tougher than the actual exam.
• Why I’m not speaking at CPDP (Hint: it’s the privacy-washing, stupid!)
  • I think Aral Balkan’s piece is worth a read. I was gobsmacked to learn that Palantir was a sponsor of the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference.
• The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

🌱 Gardening

I got a final batch of seeds planted this week.

The wind and rain have made for a miserable time in the garden. The poor weather is ongoing so the number of flowers lost to the misery remains unknown.

🎥 Movies

I watched my 🔟 tenth movie of 2026 this week. (I have a goal of watching 26 movies in 2026.)

• The Rip, 2026 (Watched: 2026-05-20)

I really wanted to love this movie. Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in an action-filled heist movie? It should have been so good. It was entertaining enough but the ending was saccharine I scoffed as the credits rolled. I was like “OK, what was the point?”. While I expect it will take continued effort on my part to get to 26 movies, I care deeply about what goes on the list. I don’t regret choosing this film but I do hope to learn how to better vet movies.

🎵 Music

💿 1001 Albums

• Tuesday: Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire De Melody Nelson
  • Rating: ███░░
• Wednesday: 10cc - Sheet Music
  • Rating: ███░░
• Thursday: T. Rex - Electric Warrior
  • did not listen
• Friday: Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove
  • Rating: did not listen

📊 Stats

I listened to 278 tracks this week.

🦄 Unique tracks: 213 | Unique albums: 27 | Unique artists: 27

My listening this week was dominated by the excellence that is Seeed — especially their Live album, which I rated and reviewed on record.club this week.

Top Artists

• Seeed (89 plays)
• Volker Bertelmann (28 plays)
• The Smashing Pumpkins (23 plays)
• Drake (23 plays)
• Ludwig Göransson (16 plays)
• Daft Punk (14 plays)
• Kendrick Lamar (11 plays)
• 10cc (10 plays)
• Thelonious Monk (8 plays)
• Muse (8 plays)

Top Albums

• Seeed - Live (50 plays)
• Seeed - New Dubby Conquerors (39 plays)
• Volker Bertelmann - The Count of Monte Cristo (Original Series Soundtrack) (28 plays)

Top Tracks

• Papa Noah (5 plays)
• Walk Upright (4 plays)
• Dancehall Caballeros (4 plays)

📘 Reading

Books In Progress:

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Progress: 50% of 1276 pages)

I’m continuing to enjoy this book I chose for book club. I also enjoy considering which parts of the book are most likely to have been omitted from the abridged edition. Readers of this book might find similarities between the Count of Monte Cristo and Bruce Wayne. It is all much easier if you believe he’s infinitely wealthy and unendingly knowledgeable.

Social Reading

🙌 The list at brie.dev/books is up-to-date.

I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet. I track every book I read as @bbrie on Hardcover and as brie on Rambling Readers. I also track each IRL Book Club pick.

🕹️ Gaming

The weather has been cold enough that it feels like I should be gaming more but it is, in fact, May.

🕵️ Ingress

🪙 I earned the silver Orion medal in Ingress this week and I’m super excited about that. I knew that I’d need to rely on special campaigns to get there because the daily bounties don’t quite provide enough tokens. As a result, I was happy with the bronze medal. Getting to silver is super exciting!

🐾 Movement

• Time Split: Foot 0% ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Bike 100%

• Distance Split: Foot 0% ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Bike 100%

• Thursday: 🤭 Montour Minute 🚲

• Sunday: 🌫️ North Coast Inland Trail: Huron County 🚲

The approach I was taking to reviewing every bike ride over on biking.by.brie.dev stopped suiting me a while ago. This week, I made some little adjustments to help clarify - for myself and visitors - my approach going forward. I plan to write about notable rides on trails I ride often. I still hope to write a review each time I ride a particular trail for the first time.

✍️ Writing

I have been very busy writing something that’s important to me. I am very pleased with how I organized and structured my writing. I had enough structure to write a lot without feeling overwhelmed and letting quality suffer as a result. I really enjoy writing and having a bit of extra time this over the long holiday to focus on writing has been fantastic. The thing I’d like to practice the most is writing short pieces like character sketches or single scenes.

📯 Social

Most of my social media activity happens on Mastodon where I am @brie on social.lol and on infosec.exchange. I am brie.rocks on bsky but that’s mostly for the cool handle.

🐈‍⬛ brie biker-ranza 🚲

• I lamented in response to pesky birds beginning to breakfast on my seedlings. I’m at peace with it now but it is sad.
• I described my new approach on brie.dev to make it clear that I write my blog posts by hand in “brain-only” mode.

Plop

• Plop celebrated Caturday by wondering what you’re up to.

Thanks!

— Brie