Things I've done recently

Saturday we worked for hours up at the church helping to remove the black rubber mulch from one of the playgrounds (it was going to be relocated to another, lesser-used playground on the campus) and installing new, lighter colored (thus less heat absorbing/radiating) and non-tracking (to avoid marking shoes and floors; they're about to put new flooring in the preschool building) mulch. There was a LOT of mulch on that playground! It was a lot of hot, hard work! 

Sunday night I moved a console piano from our living room to the ex-dining room. Shouldn't have been a huge deal except that the casters on this old piano don't work properly, so we had to first put it on furniture sliders and then slide it from one room to the next. We rearranged a little more furniture, too. We're turning the ex-dining room into a sitting and music room/study. It's exciting! 

Yesterday I took an old leather sofa to Goodwill. It's a 5 part thing: 2 seats center section, two storage sections, and two recliner end pieces. Loaded into the back of the truck solo. Fortunately the Goodwill workers helped with the unloading. 

Over the weekend I also managed to get Ollama properly running on my Windows machine to serve LLMs on my local network (by default it only serves to the machine it's running on, not over the network). I then set up a Raspberry PI mini computer and hooked up "nanobot" on it, pointed at my Ollama, and set up a Discord script for it and connected it to a private Discord server that my boys and I are on. Now we have a chat that includes a locally-hosted AI in the mix. Nothing spectacular has come from it so far, but it's an interesting exercise. 

I've also been working on my "AI book generation engine" (running the local LLM for the AI); I think it may be at a point where I'm ready to dive into the manual editing process (i.e., it's finally produced reasonably viable first draft copy). I'll let you know when the final product is available. That engine itself was built with AI from an iterative process. 

Later this week I'm taking a Penske truck to Atlanta to pick up living room furniture, bringing it back here, swapping it out with my current LR furniture, and taking that up to my daughter's place north of Hattiesburg, then going to church with my youngest Sunday, when he's going to be preaching his first sermon that evening. 

What a week!

Why Is Polestar Losing U.S. Market Access While Volvo Isn’t?

Note: This article reflects my analysis and opinion based on publicly available information. It should not be interpreted as an official determination by the U.S. Commerce Department.

Polestar and Volvo: two brands, two lineages, one parent company — Geely, a Chinese automaker. Yet only one of them is losing the ability to sell new vehicles in the United States.

Volvo stays.
Polestar goes.
And if you’re an EV enthusiast (or an automotive enthusiast in general), it feels like the Commerce Department just kneecapped one of the most interesting electric brands on the market.

On paper, the rule that restricts Polestar should apply equally to both companies. In practice, it doesn’t — and the reason appears to have far more to do with political optics than with technology.

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TL;DR

Polestar and Volvo share the same parent company (Geely), but the U.S. Commerce Department treats them differently under the Connected Vehicle Rule.

Volvo received authorization because its connected‑vehicle data systems are governed and operated in Europe. Polestar did not, because its backend architecture and data governance remain tightly integrated with Geely's systems.

This article examines how the rule's definition of "control" allows similar ownership structures to receive different outcomes — and why Polestar's U.S. future is effectively being phased out while Volvo's continues.

A Year of AI Experiments, Failures, and Surprises

What I've learned using AI over the last year or so.

AI is powerful, but it’s not magic. It’s a tool that rewards clarity, structure, and iteration. Over the last year I’ve used it for coding, cooking, writing, and even building autonomous agents — and the pattern is always the same: the more intentional the workflow, the better the results. AI saves time, but only after you invest time. And that’s the real lesson.

Shameless Plug: I Wrote Some Books

See all my books on Amazon .

So, I am an author now. Or, at least I like to think I am. Yes, I already mentioned that I have been a published author for a long time (in my The Dogs of Draaken post), but this time I actually get paid for my books. Well, if anyone would buy them, I would; but I only make about $1 or so per copy, so I won't be buying a yacht just yet!

I've launched four titles so far. Three of them are children's books (but at least Tabletop Dinoland, if not all of them, is pretty much for any age kid, from one to ninety-two as the Christmas Song says):

• Tabletop Dinoland - the one that started it all (well, recently re-started my authorship)
• Tabletop Dinoland: The Dino Alphabet Book: Yes, P is for Pterodactyl. I know it's technically a pterosaur and not a dinosaur, but what self-respecting dinosaur alphabet book could resist?
• Bitty the Algorithm: Hopefully the first in a series that teaches kids about logic and problem-solving in fun ways.

And one for the adults: