The #4 album this week is the solo debut of Raekwon, a founding member of Wu-Tang Clan. Like the last album I reviewed by a Wu-Tang Clan member, my summary is that while I recognize that Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is an important and well-regarded rap album, it's not my preference. I will almost certainly never listen to it again.

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I used to do a photography project I called "A Day In The Life," where I would take photos all throughout a single day of what I did and where I went. Photos of everyday things like buildings, street scenes, people, and the like. I haven't done one in quite a long time, mostly because my days now include my children, and I don't want to plaster them all over the internet.

I ride with a GPS cyclocomputer that I've configured to record a lap every kilometer, which includes an alerting beep and a brief status screen that shows me how long I took to ride that kilometer. I started doing this when I lived in San Diego because there was a section of rolling road in Rancho Santa Fe that I would challenge myself to maintain 30 kph (or greater) on. Instead of doing mental arithmetic while hypoxic, the cyclocomputer did the math for me.

I decided to combine these two things into a "Ride In The Life," where I would take a photo of the road ahead of me every kilometer when my GPS beeped. Well, not every kilometer precisely, only when I felt safe to pull out my phone and take a picture. I didn't take any photos while descending at high speed, and if cars were passing me closely, I delayed the photo until I felt safe. The ride was one week ago and it was into the mountains west of Boulder; here is the GPS trace. I'm not sure how interesting this is, but since I went through the effort to take dozens of photos, I'm seeing it through to post them here. I hope you find them interesting!

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I'm a few days late on this review. Oh well!

There's only one song off the #1 album this week worth listening to: 1st of Tha Month. It's one of the songs I play to wake up anyone who needs waking up. My last.fm play history has only one play after 10am, and it was when I listened to this album for 30 Years On. It's fun that even after 30 years the overall last.fm play history for the song shows a spike in plays at the beginning of each month:

My advice is to ignore the album, but 1st of Tha Month is forever.

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Some (many!) years ago I posted a few images showing my riding history in California (in 2008) and Colorado (in 2012). While they are interesting, these are static images and cannot be explored.

Thirteen years have passed and technology has improved. Today I added a new page showing my entire cycling history since I started using GPS over twenty years ago. Instead of separate static images, it uses dynamic web technology™️ on a single map. As before, color shows how frequently I ride past a point on the map. However, I changed the logic: my previous maps used counts of observations near points, my new map uses counts of distinct rides that pass each point on the map. Instead of where I've done the most laps or my GPS has recorded the most times (for whatever reason), this is more indicative of where I ride the most.

For the most immersive experience, here is the full screen version.

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Released four months after Selena's murder, Dreaming Of You shot to #1 upon release. I remember being aware of her murder from the news when it happened, but that really was the extent of my knowledge of her and her music.

The only interesting thing I can say about this album is that the single song I recognize is in Spanish, not English. It's Amor Prohibido, which originally appeared on her 1994 album of the same name, and therefore isn't really off this album.

I have no strong feelings about this album. I'll almost certainly never listen to it again.

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I'm dismayed to discover that as of this writing there is no harmonica emoji. This feels like a huge omission and should be rectified with great haste. If there was a harmonica emoji, I could visually represent what it's like to listen to Blues Traveler by inserting it in this text. Instead, I'll have to make do with the musical instrument emoji we do have, and you'll have to imagine it's a harmonica.

Released in September 1994, four by Blues Traveler 🎸 is at #9 this week, one spot lower than 🪗 it will eventually peak at #8. If you were alive in 🥁 the mid-90s you will remember that 🪈 the two big singles off this album, Run-Around and Hook, were everywhere on the 🎹 radio to the point that I got a bit tired of them.

Thirty years later I am 🎻 not as bothered by the songs. I think 🎷 Blues Traveler is fine; their music 🎺 feels very much of the era in the mid-90s, along with Dave Matthews Band and Hootie & 🪕 the Blowfish. Blues Traveler wasn't my 🪘 favorite band at the time, and that 🪉 hasn't changed. I don't dislike their 🪇 music, and sometimes I'm in 🪕 the mood for it, but 🎸 not often. In summary, if 🪇 you're in the mood for 🪉 to Blues Traveler, this is 🪗 the album to listen to.

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July 2007 to July 23, 2025.

She was a good cat.

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The top un-reviewed album this week is not The Woman In Me by Shania Twain at #7, it's the Batman Forever Soundtrack at #5. However, I cannot find the full album on any streaming service. Many of the songs can be found on other albums, but not all, and I don't care enough to look any harder than that. Therefore, it's Shania Twain's debut album we'll listen to this week!

One of my favorite television shows is (the first three seasons of) Arrested Development. One of the characters, Tobias Fünke, wrote a book called The Man Inside Me. I can't help but think of that book, which is used in various funny ways, when I read the title for this album. This is not a complementary thing for the album.

Reading Shania Twain's Wiki page, it turns out that she's married to the ex-husband of her former best friend who had an affair with Twain's first husband. All that's missing from that soap opera is an evil twin, babies switched at birth, and someone appearing (with convenient dramatic timing) previously believed to be dead.

I have no strong opinions about the music on the album itself. It sold quite well, and I can believe that many people like it, but it's not for me. I'll almost certainly never listen to it again.

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Today I took a drive to Greely, Colorado to see the biggest operational steam locomotive in the world. The Union Pacific 4014, aka "Big Boy", was on a short trip from Cheyenne to Denver and made a single "whistle stop" in Greely. The Big Boy is a remarkable locomotive. It was on static display for decades before being pulled to the Union Pacific shop in Cheyenne and returned to running condition in 2019. It's hard to overstate just how huge this thing is. As you can see from the photos and video below, this massive locomotive draws crowds wherever it goes. It was fun to see!

A few things to note as you look through the media:

• There were Starlink antennae on a few of the passenger cars
• A couple engineers wrote "Big Boy" using chalk on the front of the 4014, surely to reference the origin story of the name "Big Boy"
• The Big Boy always travels with a diesel locomotive companion in case of malfunction so that the train will not be stranded on an operational freight line
• The police seen in a few shots are railroad police, not local police
• As far as I could tell, only a few of the passenger cars being pulled had anyone in it, most cars had their window shades drawn closed
• The video does not translate just how loud the engine is, you have to be near it to experience it

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This week's #5 album is just one of Neil Young's 55 studio albums. While I like some of his work, such as After the Gold Rush and Harvest, I am not a big enough fan of his to listen to all of his work. As far as I can recall, I have not heard any of the songs on this album prior to today.

Apparently this album was recorded with Pearl Jam. I didn't learn this fact until after I listened and I couldn't have guessed it. I guess it's kind of grungey, but only if you think to listen for it.

Doing this project I've noticed that albums like this, made by musicians past their prime, have very short periods near the top of the charts. My guess is that because they were so well known, a fixed set of fans will always buy a copy as soon as it comes out. However, because the fan base isn't growing, there's no long tail of purchases. Many albums in the top sales list have been in the charts for a year or more. In one month, Mirror Ball will drop to #48, and in two months to #96, almost out of the listing entirely.

As far as this album goes, it's decent. According to this ranking, it's his thirteenth best album, which makes it above average. That list puts After the Gold Rush and Harvest at #1 and #2, which, duh. I guess if you are really into Neil Young you could do worse than Mirror Ball.

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Here is the 2025 page for the Tour Pool I've been a part of for 18 years. I'm on team Florky which are in second to last place as I write this. Which is pretty typical (so typical that this post from one year ago team Florky was also in second to last place!).

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By 1995 Michael Jackson's popular image had already been damaged following the 1993 child sexual abuse allegations. Nevertheless, he was still a huge star and HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I shot to #1 upon release. This is a double album: the first half is a greatest hits collection and the second half new material.

I'm pretty sure I have heard all the songs in the first half before. Jackson had thirteen songs hit #1 which alone is enough for a greatest hits album. As a greatest hits collection the first half of the album works well and is a good way to listen to some Michael Jackson, if you're in the mood.

Regarding the second half of the album, I can honestly say I don't think I've ever heard any of the songs except for You Are Not Alone (which was written and produced by R. Kelly, speaking of child sexual abuse allegations). This was Jackon's final #1 hit and if I recall correctly received decent radio airplay.

Personally, I think that Jackson's earlier work is far and away better than his later work. He became a big star for a reason: the earlier songs are excellent. I think he got away from that in his later work. This album highlights that change from the first half to the second. My recommendation is to skip the second half of this album.

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I have never seen the animated movie Pocahontas, therefore the #2 album this week is particularly meaningless to me. There are some movie soundtracks that have one or two hit songs that make big radio airplay. I do not recognize any of the songs off this album.

I'll make it short and easy: I don't care about this album, and I don't think you should or will, either.

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The first step of data science when working with new a dataset is to understand the high-level facts and relationships within the data. This is often done by exploring the data interactively by using something like Python, R, or Matlab.

Recently I've been exploring a new dataset. It's a pretty big dataset: a few hundred gigabytes of data in compressed Parquet format. A rule of thumb is that reading data off disk into memory takes ten or twenty times the memory than the storage the data uses on disk. For this dataset, that could equal more than ten terabytes of memory, which in 2025 is still a pretty ridiculous amount of memory on a single machine. It is for this reason that working with data this size requires tools that allow you to work with the data without loading all of it into memory at once.

One of these tools is Polars. Quoting the Polars home page: "Want to process large data sets that are bigger than your memory? Our streaming API allows you to process your results efficiently, eliminating the need to keep all data in memory." It's still a bit rough around the edges with some unfinished and missing features, but overall it's a powerful and capable tool for data analysis. Lately I've been using Polars more and more, taking advantage of this "streaming" ability.

On the other hand, sometimes it's easiest to do things directly and skip all the low-memory "streaming" tricks. If I can get an answer more quickly by simply using lots of memory, especially if it's something I'm doing only once and not putting into a repeated process, then this can be the right choice. Polars can do "streaming" analysis, but at a certain point it has to coalesce things into an answer, and sometimes that answer can use a significant amount of memory.

There are many negative aspects of cloud computing that I won't get into here. However, there are some good things, and one of them is that you can scale up and down resources as needed. All cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform offer many services and in particular Virtual Machines. When running a virtual machine you can choose the hardware specifications in terms of CPU kind and core count, amount of RAM, and other features like network speeds, GPUs, or SSDs. A virtual machine can be booted on one hardware configuration, shut down, and the rebooted on a different configuration as needed. It's as if you took the hard drive out of your laptop and put it in a big workstation. All your data and settings are still there, but you've upgraded the hardware. This is something I take advantage of frequently!

I was attempting to do a certain analysis of the new dataset on an EC2 virtual machine and I kept running out of memory. Instead of switching to some low-memory tricks, I decided to see if I could save some time by simply rebooting my virtual machine on one of the larger instances AWS offers: a r7i.48xlarge. This has 192 CPU cores and 1,536 GB of RAM. It costs $12.70 per hour. I get paid more than $12.70 per hour, so if booting up a huge machine like this saves me even a little time, it's worth it.

Above is a screenshot of btop running on the r7i.48xlarge instance while I attempted to run my analysis. If you click on the image, you'll see the full size screenshot. You'll see that I'm about to run out of memory: 1.41TB used of 1.45TB. You'll also see that I'm using all 192 cores at 100% load (the cores are labeled 0-191). Unfortunately, throwing all this memory at the problem didn't work, I ran out of memory, and I had to resort to being more clever. Being clever took more time, of course, but if the high-RAM instance had worked, it would have paid off.

Playing with various server configuration tools (like this one) shows that the r7i.48xlarge would cost at least $60,000. This is not something that I need very often, and purchasing something this large would be ridiculous. However, renting it for half an hour, if it saves me a few hours, is definitely worth it. Also, it's kind of fun to say "yeah, I used 1.5TB of memory and 192 cores and it wasn't enough."

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I believe that Pulse by Pink Floyd is the first double album I've reviewed so far. Despite having the high price of $34.99 (~$76 in 2025), it debuted at #1.

Pulse is a live album which I often have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, they can have different energy than a studio album, but they can also go awry with bad mixing or extended and aimless modifications to songs. This album is kind of neither of those. I don't think the energy of the songs is improved compared to the studio versions, and there aren't that many changes to the live songs. Pink Floyd was a Progressive Rock band which are known for their extended solos in live performances. This album lacks those for the most part, which I'm grateful for, but lacking changes to the songs removes the point of a live album.

According to the internet's brain, early versions of the CD album included a battery-powered flashing LED. A pulsing LED, one would say.

I don't think that this album amounts to much. If you like Pink Floyd, you might as well check it out, but I wouldn't cancel any other plans you have to listen to it.

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