Recent content in About on Chris Woodall
Origin My fiancée Emily and I have been riding our bikes more frequently this year. I’ve had a great start to my season with plenty of early days on my hardtail (Banshee Paradox) and a fun “race/ride” at the Mix Tape event in Freetown, MA. As Emily built up her own riding strength, we wanted to embark on a multi-day trip together. I’ve been interested in bikepacking since…
During the summer of 2023, I took 3 months off from June to September as I transitioned between two jobs. I wanted to experiment with taking some free time to travel, move, and reconnect with my hobbies. I found this time to be very beneficial for my physical and mental health, and I am very grateful to have had the privilege to have been able to take some extended time off from work. I found some…
This year I turned 31, which is not an auspicious year; other than it being the last year that you can represent on one hand counting in binary (2^5-1). So I went down to MetroRock in Essex, VT and spent about 5 hours in the gym getting my 31 climbs together with support from friends and loved ones. To plan I started by listing out some rules: Climb on ropes only or if doing boulders you need to…
The Phoenix Project has been recommended to me by a lot of people over the years. As a book about DevOps in an IT industry a little detached from my current work in motor controls, and software, for electric aviation, I was a little concerned that I might not find a lot that was useful for me; however, the journey The Phoenix Project takes you on was far too familiar, and while the specific…
To Sell Is Human by Daniel H. Pink posits that selling is not some scummy thing car salesmen do, instead, it is a core part of being human. In the modern world, we are all salespeople of our craft, we are all engaged in non-sales selling every day: convincing our partner to go to see a specific movie, dating, and convincing our boss to give us a new project. Whatever it is we are in the role of a…
Recently I started playing bass guitar and working some music after a long period of not working on music too much. I was listening to Them Changes by Thundercat and became somewhat curious about the “wah”/envelope follower effect that he uses heavily throughout the song. This effect is pretty standard in funk, and other genres. However, I became interested in how the effect is…
Obsidian is a wonderful note-taking too, but until mid-2021 there was no official mobile application. I use git to host my Obsidian vaults, and github to store them and sometimes create websites from them using a GitHub Action, GitHub Pages and Neuron. This is how I host my Generative Art Studio page. However, on iOS there is no native support for using git to sync your notes. You can use iCloud,…
What am I doing now? Preparing for a new year with a concentration on my mental and physical health, building community, and improving my communication skills. Working on chord melodies for Autumn Leaves, All of Me, and whatever else strikes my fancy on Mandolin. Playing around with embedded test automation using my Rigol Scope Getting back into skiing, ice climbing, and rock climbing in the gym.…
What am I doing now? Working on electric aircraft at BETA Technologies Continuing to love Obsidian.md Working on generative art Taking notes using Obsidian, generating art using Kotlin and OpenRNDR, and publishing using neuron Getting more into mountain biking Preparing to run a 8k in August and a half-marathon in October Preparing for 2 weeks in the PNW in September Motor Controls! My priorities…
Back in the day, I used to use Sibelius and Finale for music composition, and engraving. MuseScore 3.6 is an open-source, cross-platform music composition tool that fits right in there with the other two. Considering that it is free it punches above its weight class. I first found out about MuseScore when I watched a review of its interface by Tantacrul who ripped the UI to shreds. I thought that…
When I am skiing and I am in a flow state I tend to be able to make all the turns I need to to keep my speed under control, weave through trees and not get flung down a steep mogul field. However, when I am not fully present I will tend to overturn. I can’t link my turns. The anxiety, fear, lack of concentration comes over and under the worst conditions I can end up going backwards down…
Over the past year or so I got a few people asking me about meditation and mindfulness practice and how I would recommend getting started. I am not an expert, monk, or any sort of authority on the subject. I am a beginner, and sometimes a little too proud of my progress. Right now I feel the need to reflect on this information I have gathered, and consolidate some of the texts, advice, and…
What am I doing now? Working on electric aircraft at BETA Technologies Skiing! Playing around with note taking in Obsidian.md Learning a little Rust each day. My priorities are: Building strong habits around going to sleep, waking up, doing deep work, and building new skills Quotes On My Mind Only ideas won by walking have any value – Friedrich Nietzsche Forty hour workweeks are a relic of…
One skill I attempt to practice consistently is the ability to jump through levels of abstraction. This requires having a growing toolkit of abstractions, such as some of those in Shane Parish from Farnam Street’s series on The Great Mental Models . It also requires being able to have emotional awareness and detachment to abandon ways of thinking and move on to more suitable ones. This is a…
What am I doing now? Working at BETA Technologies on electric aviation, still working on electric propulsion. I have been playing mandolin regularly, and making improvements slowly Getting ready for ski and ice season, by climbing at the gym more. My priorities are: Deepening and continuing my practice of Buddhism Treating my body well by exercising and eating nourishing foods Continuing to…
A few years ago, while in the middle of a big product release, I turned to a co-worker and asked them: What is the output of your work? This sounds like a silly question, but I found it to be enlightening to reflect on. Here we were, stressed out about making something. However, what we were really doing was producing the documentation, the knowledge, and the confidence in the product we were…
Recursion by Blake Crouch is an interesting take on a time travel thriller, involving characters and relationships across multiple time lines. It is interesting how some of the characters who at first seem minor become integral parts of the story, developing into more interesting and intelligent characters over their recursions, creating small perturbations leading to different lives, but…
What am I doing now? Reflecting on 2019, it was a crazy year with a lot to learn on a personal level. I am now in Burlington, VT working at BETA Technologies on the future of electric aviation! My main focus is on inverters for controlling motors. This is taking up most of my time. I have been meditating daily (using a combination of Unified Mindfulness and Sam Harris’ Waking Up app), trying…
On Saturday March 10, 2018 Don, Toni and I ventured out to Mt. Avalon. With the NEClimbs Ice Report looking rather pessimistic we deiced to go somewhere with no reported ice condition information. I figured the less we knew about the ice the better off we were. So we woke up bright and early, got ourselves some food at Patches and then leisurely waited for Bear Notch Ski and Snowshoe Rentals to…
I have recently found myself writing a bunch of serialization (and deserialization) functions in C++ for some very basic structs, and classes. Each of these serialization functions has the same basic form which is basically a series of function calls to convert some data of some type into it’s msgpack representation. As the number of structs grows this becomes tedious and hard to upgrade.…
I just got myself the Anker Equipment screw holder for my brand new rack of ice screws. This thing was $45.00 and holds 12 screws. It even has a little pouch in the middle which can fit a 10cm screw, or file depending on what you want to use it for. Generally speaking I found it to be rather compact compared to the BD offering. It fits 12 screws nicely and folds up to a rather compact size.
This summer I went to Squamish from August 11th-18th, 2017 with Alice Chiang, and a group made up of Matt, Lauren, Tiff and Josh. I climbed with Alice throughout the trip and had an awesome time on the splitter and reasonably high-friction granite found at Squamish. I had been once before on 2016 and had an objective in mind I had recruited Alice for: an ascent of the first peak of the Chief via…
A few of my friends have been trying to get me to read a book by Brandon Sanderson for quite some time. Given that I enjoyed Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind, and Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora I thought a good starting place would be Mistborn: The Final Empire, which have a similar setup. The best thing about Mistborn is the world it is set in, and the fascinating and engaging pace with…
Homer’s The Odyssey, as translated by Richard Fagles, is a classic. The Fagles translation reads very naturally to a native English speaker. While I am sure there are some trade-offs when compared to a more literal translation, I felt that this translation was very enjoyable. I read this epic because it is a foundational text of the western literary tradition, and it really shows in…
I started listening to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman while I was in JFK airport in NY. I had missed a connecting flight and was alone in the airport for those early morning hours where the bustling of the airport stops. The ambiance of the airport fit the tone of the book. I really enjoyed the story-telling. Part of it was that the Audible full-cast production was very well done and the…
In college I frequently would go on book reading binges during breaks, but I could not keep myself to a consistent schedule to read for pleasure during classes. This “not enough time” syndrome carried over to after I left college, even though I was not actually particularly busy outside of work. Missing reading I started to gather books I wanted to read, but was having trouble keeping…
The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery is a frightening and enlightening book about global warming. Though it is about 10 years old at this point it had a few major points: The evidence for human linked global warming is very strong (and has only become stronger) The reduction in biodiversity is intense, and probably irreversible; we have changed climates and biomes and there is probably no going…
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin is a fun fantasy novel aimed at young adults and teens. It follows a wizard named Ged/Sparrowhawk as he tries to get rid of an evil he brought into the world through his own arrogance. It is well written and enjoyable, like Left Hand of Darkness the world building is superb and is given to you in little shards as you need to know about it.
What would it be like on a world where everyone was an asexual hermaphrodite 99% of the time? Where gender and sex were not the primary focus of day to day life, because most of the time everyone was the same in this regard? Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin thrusts Genly Ai, a run of the mill male Terran human, into the middle of the planet Winter where the inhabitants fit this…
Nexus by Ramez Naam is a science fiction book which takes place in the near future, where technology has been created to link human minds, and possibly control them. Naam inspects different social impacts of these technologies ranging from the most profound and inspirational uses (such as building new levels of empath and human connection) to the most disturbing and dark abuses (such as making it…
I finally read Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune after avoiding it for a long time. My father gave me a copy after finishing the [Lord of the Rings] during middle-school. At the time I found the book to be slow and overly political, but I came back to it at the perfect time. The world rife with political unrest and I am more capable of dealing the the moral ambiguity of the work.
Beyond The Vertical by Layton Kor follows the climbing career from childhood into old age of the author. The format of the book is a series of short vignettes of different climbing trips from a wide variety of Layton’s partners (including Steve Roper, Jim McCarthy and Royal Robbins) glued together by Layton’s own recounting of his climbing career. The descriptions of their approach to…
Humans are story-tellers, we communicated by telling others about our experiences, about those of others, and most interestingly about things that never even happened. These stories create a shared network of knowledge and information, which allow us to cooperate and form networks of trust, and eventually layer on top of each other to form concepts like money, religion and the nation-state.…
Sebastian Junger’s Tribe is a short but poignant book about the transition from childhood to adulthood and belonging. The book seems to focus on a male perspective, but is not exclusionary so much as just very specific. The focus is on how do humans adapt from being part of groups—such as the military, where they have a strong sense of belonging, purpose and brotherhood—to being single…
[William Finnegan’s] book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life follows the authors obsession with surfing, from his childhood to adulthood with a long section of being a surf bum in between. I have never surfed, but I found myself being dragged into the lingo and culture and really yearning in a way for that open life adventure. For me climbing fits a similar role in my life, I know to some degree…
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of The World by Haruki Murakami involves 2 parallel, seemingly unrelated stories, which become more and more intertwined as the stories develop. One of them takes place in a cyberpunk like future, with humans who act as encryption/decryption services, and the other in a surreal fantasy land where your shadow is removed from you and you can’t leave. The…
Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore is an elegantly written book filled with heady references and a magical-realism which penetrates this abstract reinterpretation of Oedipus Rex. The setting is outstanding, describing not just Japan, but all of the subtly magical pieces of the world. The spiritual becomes an integral part of the novel, and nothing is literal. It stretches your mind as a…