Now_

Currently Working On

I shipped hybrid semantic and lexical retrieval at work. Now I’m on query understanding: a search box can mean fifty different things, and the retrieval is easy once I know what to retrieve.

Outside work, I’m playing around with being a content creator. The Instagram is @hybrid.uncle. Still figuring out what that means in practice.

Training For

Run Melbourne and Sydney Marathon are both done. Next up is the Melbourne Marathon Festival on 11 October, running the half this time. Two weeks out, so this is the taper: short and sharp, and resisting the urge to test fitness I should be saving for race day.

Then a change of shape. Hyrox Melbourne runs 9 to 13 December and I’m in for both the Singles and the Doubles. Eight kilometres of running broken up by eight stations, so the running base carries over but the sled and the wall balls do not. Strength work moves from side dish to main course.

Fundraising

Run Melbourne is done, and the fundraiser for Running for Premature Babies with it. The money goes toward neonatal equipment for hospitals in Australia.

Thanks to everyone who chipped in through my Grassrootz page. It made the early mornings easier to justify.

Reading

Cixin Liu, Death’s End, the third and final book of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, the series everyone calls Three-Body. The scope keeps widening with every book, and by this point the human characters are mostly there to give the universe something to be indifferent to.

Reading it slowly. Partly because of the physics, mostly because I don’t want it to end.

Cooking

Done with heo quay. The marinade got there eventually: less sugar, more fragrance.

Next is hủ tiếu. Teochew origin, developed in Phnom Penh by the Triều Châu community, brought south to the Mekong Delta and Saigon in the 1950s. Southern cooks adapted it again: sweeter broth, more generous garnish.

The bowl I grew up eating is already several versions removed from the original. Haven’t decided which version to start with.