Songs for the Month of December 2025

I say this with all due respect to every year I've experienced up until this one, but 2025 has been the most challenging year of my life. In what seemed to be cascading waves of strife I have somehow kept afloat of it all and now am trying to find some peace and comfort in where I've landed.

To my credit I don't think I had the gumption to face a year like this one until now: I had to fight quite a bit, take risks I didn't feel comfortable taking, and stood my ground on many occasions where before I would have folded like a napkin. In all I have hope for the future, but like everyone else, I also have private pains that pull at my heart. I want to wish everyone well this holiday season, and I invite 2026 to be a less-challenging year.

For the website this month, I've added a new page Kentucky Traffic Watch that aggregates and displays all open cameras in the state of Kentucky (sourced from KYTC and LFUCG). Originally this project was designed to aggregate camera data for a second stage VLM analysis to report traffic anomalies, but unfortunately the only VLM that had decent results is unavaible on free-tier from any ML providers. I did play around with a handful of others and they work for basic classification (Does this camera provide useful data? what are weather conditions? how congested is the traffic?), but would likely require fine-tuning to match the classifiers we'd really be looking for (stopped traffic, emergency lights, precipitation, road hazards.) You could orchestrate something with YOLO and a light VLM to this effect, but that's likely too involved and costly for my tastes (if it isn't free I'm not doing it.)

Otherwise, did a little project with 3D hard modeling (including getting my hands dirty with a project of my own above: new pedal steel model) and a graphic design project this month, which was nice to break away from thinking about my job all the time.