A blog post for the sake of being able to claim my blog isn’t stale! Wooo! I became a father on August 18, 2025. Our little boy is doing well and I’ve been enjoying being on leave and bonding with him. I’m working on a little chatbot/RAG app using github models and Qdrant to retrieve indexed documents from my Zotero collection, configured with hydra. I might get around to actually writing something up for it once my kid is off to college.
New Job
I accepted a new job doing data science for a healthcare middleman, and will be leaving Pacific Northwest National Laboratory after 7.5 years. Its been an incredible time at the lab, and I’m both sad to leave and excited about the new opportunity. I’ve found there’s a lot of benefit to simply doing something new after a while: I remember when I moved out a house I had lived in for several years in Corvallis, mostly doing nothing while working at a pizza restaurant1 to support myself. I’m pretty sure just the act of moving to a new environment caused me to start exercising more, study harder, eat better, and crew the first manned mission to Mars.
A Sandwich I Made
I have this random childhood memory where one of my older brother’s friends just told us about a BLT he made for like 10 minutes…Well, this is a shorter, blog-post version of that. See Figure 1 for the final product. The sandwich is an impossible patty on ciabatta bread, with an egg, avocado, gouda cheese, mayo and sriracha sauce. Mozzarella sticks and marinara sauce occupy the rest of the plate. It tasted delicious, however the ciabatta bread made the sandwich difficult to keep together as I bit into it. Luckily I, like every other American, have impeccable ability to maintain the integrity of an unruly sandwich while eating it.
Footnotes
Shoutout Papas Pizza (not to be confused with Papa John’s/Murphy’s) in Corvallis.↩︎