Weekly Notes 24-25/2026

What's been happening

I wanted to send this note earlier, but the travels and my work meetings kept me occupied and decided to club Week 24 & 25 notes in one chunky post. More about the travel later on.

Last week started okay. Sydney winter has been getting colder but we had some reprieve mid-week.

We went to our usual gym PT sessions and have been focusing on improving our bench press workouts. The second workout has been focused on front squats. I was struggling a lot to get my front squat posture right and I was more or less squatting with the barbell on my biceps rather than with the barbell on my shoulders. My trainer decided it was better for me to stick to back squat so that's that. This trip broke my 72-week streak of heading to the gym every week. Slightly bummed about it, but it's not the end of the world!

The new router is working well as expected, no major issues. With the new router comes a new SSID and I didn't want to sit and reconfigure all my devices. I also have a lot of IoT devices, and having to reconfigure them all would have been a pain, especially my solar and the battery systems. I just set the new router's SSID to the old one and it was all set.

A big part of last weekend was our travel to Bellevue - I was heading there for some meetings and asked Jo if she'd like to join in. Since she had some leaves open, she joined in. The original flight was supposed to be Sydney to Seattle via Los Angeles. Jo was supposed to spend some time with her sister in San Francisco so she decided to book her flights from Seattle to SF for the next day, which is on a Sunday.

As luck would have it, our Saturday started great when I saw the message from Qantas that our flight had been delayed. Now, if a flight is delayed by a few minutes or a few tens of minutes, that's okay - we had a five-hour layover in LA. That should be enough to complete immigration, pick up bags, and do a bag drop. And of course, it was only fitting that Qantas had announced the flight departure from Sydney was delayed by five hours! I think that was the first time that I've ever seen a departure flight from my first leg delayed for so long. The five-hour delay basically meant that there was no way in hell we could make the connection but of course we couldn't do anything till the flight had actually taken off.

I spoke with the Qantas agent when we were checking in and they assured us we'd be re-booked once the flight was in the air and closer to the destination. With the boarding pass in our hand, flight delayed by the 5 hours, we had nothing to do so went over to the Qantas lounge and chilled there till it was time to board.

I didn't travel a lot last year, but my travels from the year before helped me retain Qantas Gold Status (OneWorld Sapphire equivalent). This meant that I had access to the Qantas Business Lounge. Of course it would be better if the lounge was actually functional, which it wasn't. Qantas is doing some lounge upgrades so we had to use the other lounge, which was not that great.

The flight itself was pretty okay. The good thing about leaving late meant that we were pretty exhausted by the time we boarded. I had the dinner service and then after that I just fell asleep. Next thing you know we are like three hours away from landing and all I thought that would be the end of our pain. I was hoping that once we would land in L.A., get the details of the new flight and have enough time to complete immigration and bag claim before boarding for the onward flight. Unfortunately Mr Murphy had more tricks up his sleeve and even though we landed about 30 minutes ahead of scheduled arrival, problems with the aerobridge meant that the plane was on the tarmac for about an hour and killed any chances of making the original flight which took off just as we landed. No worries, we had the rebooked flight which was scheduled for two and a half hours after the scheduled arrival time. We finally got off the plane, and for a change, we completed immigration in about 5 minutes.

Mr Murphy, not letting us be content with the immigration success, threw another curve ball at us - at baggage claim and drop, we were informed that we couldn't do the baggage drop-off the regular way as we'd been rebooked and had to check in with United to do the bag drop. That meant having to exit the terminal, find our departure terminal (which was halfway across the airport), go to the United desk and recheck in the bags because the tags on the bags weren't valid anymore. After a long spirited walk, having reached the terminal, we couldn't check in from the kiosk and had to wait for agent assistance - effectively killing any last hope of making the rebooked flight. Phew.

Thankfully, the United agent was very helpful and got us rebooked again. Jo's travel plans of flying back from Seattle to San Francisco had to be changed as the new flights would mean that she would not have been able to make it, so the agent changed our booking so that Jo would fly directly from Los Angeles to San Francisco while I would go directly to Seattle.

I also asked her if it was going to be a problem since the flight from Seattle to SFO is a round trip and if there would be any problem if she would miss the first hop. We were assured that that's not going to be a problem because the return flight is a completely different thing so it should be all good. Here we were thinking everything would be okay (you'll see later why I mention this).

With our new flights now set to depart the next day, we were stuck in Los Angeles overnight. This brought in lot of memories from two years ago where I was stuck in Los Angeles for 3 days, again due to flight departures but on the return to Sydney. I decided to book at room at the nearby hotel, and thankfully I didn't have any problems. We took the Los Angeles Airport shuttle to the hotel, checked into our room, and went downstairs to the bar just in time to catch Australia play against Turkey and actually score (and later go on to win the game) as our food and drinks arrived.

Having had dinner, extremely tired from the events of the evening and with Jo having an early morning flight, we decided to sleep in early. Jo was able to catch the flight to San Francisco early next day, while my flight to Seattle went smoothly as well. After checking into my hotel in Bellevue, I met up with my product manager for dinner.

The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Jo had a great time meeting her sister, their dog Benny, and explored a bit of San Francisco, sending me plenty of pictures. She spent only two days in San Francisco, returning to Bellevue on Tuesday night and spent Wednesday/Thursday exploring Seattle, Fremont, Bainbridge Island sending me plenty of photos while I was in meetings all day with AWS and my extended team. And of course, the return to Bellevue wasn't without problems for Jo - when she tried to check in for her flight to Bellevue, she got an error message that the journey couldn't be found. Evidently, the change in flights when rebooking meant that Jo's return flight to Bellevue got cancelled. Jeez, I wondered if we could get a break with the travel at all. Thankfully, this again was sorted with a call to United customer care.

With the week being short thanks to the Juneteenth holiday, Karthik made some plans to stay near Mount Rainier and explore the area. We started to our Airbnb in Ashford on Thursday evening, spending the night there and returning back to Bellevue the next evening. I'll have a separate travelogue post on that. The Saturday morning, Jo wanted to check out an American diner so we went over to Chace's Pancake Corral to get our fill of pancakes, biscuits and gravy and then returned to our hotel to check out and head to the airport.

At the airport, we thought everything would be smooth - but of course, Mr Murphy had one last laugh. While I was able to check in and get my boarding pass fine - we had to wait for a really long time (I think close to an hour?) before Jo's boarding pass was printed. Evidently, something United did while rebooking wasn't reflected and they had to wait for something to be done before she could get her boarding pass. I'm being so vague here because the Alaska Airlines agent wasn't being clear on what was happening. But after a tense wait, we got our boarding pass - but only for the first half of the journey from Seattle to Los Angeles. Thankfully, when we landed in Los Angeles, Qantas app showed the digital boarding pass for the Los Angeles - Sydney leg and we finally got back home. Phew what a series of events!

Music of the Week

Thornhill covers Muse's Supermassive Black Hole and boy, what a cover. It starts off pretty average but then they just ramp it up so much, especially on the vocals. Fabulous stuff.

Link of the week

I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models

TLDR: I had 2,207 GoPro videos, and I need to rewatch them to find interesting moments from my cycling journey. I built a project to index them locally on my M1 Max using open-source ML models, search for those moments, and send the best clips straight to my DaVinci Resolve timeline. I indexed 628 videos (668.68 GB, 15h 13m 18s of footage duration), more details in the metrics table in the last section of this article.

Cool post, I might consider doing something like this with the videos from my Insta360

NYC's Smallest Pizzeria: Making Pizza in a Smart Car

Bradley Alvelo makes pizza right from his tiny smart car, on the street in NYC.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.