I survived one pointless war in the Middle East, and I have no interest in sending my sons to another pointless war in the Middle East.
We all understand that the world is full of bad actors, and no one would defend the actions of those who seek to terrorize the majority of people in the world who are peaceful. But our elected representatives have a duty to deal with bad actors using the least force necessary.
There is no indication that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States or our allies. Last June, the White House told us — in detail — that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.”1 The President, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the IAEA, and independent nuclear experts all confirmed it. If that was true then, what imminent threat justifies a new war now? If it wasn’t true, then the administration misled us. Either way, we deserve an answer.
The White House, “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News,” June 25, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-facilities-have-been-obliterated-and-suggestions-otherwise-are-fake-news/ ↩
I took a lot of photographs in 2025. It makes sense. I took an unusually large number of photos of the local Masonic Temple before and during its demolition. We spent three weeks driving Route 66. My oldest son was married. I was involved with some political campaigns. And, I was working on building a portfolio of photos that could become commercial prints.
The chart doesn’t reflect it, but I set a personal record for the number of pictures taken in 2025. This is the first year that I filtered my retrospective chart. I excluded the digital photos that I took for reference purposes. When we traveled Route 66 I snapped pictures of signs and other details that I wanted to refer back to when editing our travel videos. I also took a lot of photos of the Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex III as I performed a complete rebuild of it. Without filtering the EOS RP and iPhone 13 would be in the second and third spots, respectively, on the list. And, we wouldn’t want two digital cameras in the top three positions, would we?
I finally found the right circumstances to take a long summer trip with Heather. Thanks to the shaky economy I was able to pull away from work for a bit, Heather was naturally on summer break, and my boys were home to watch the dogs. As you already know from the title, this trip would be on the famous Route 66.
We traveled all 2,400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica. Along the way we took over 1,000 photos and videos. No one wants to sit through a slide show that long, so I have distilled it down to 25 photos. With this collection I have tried to balance showcasing my favorite individual photos with giving an overall impression that matches the road trip.
The former Masonic Temple in downtown Barberton is within walking distance from my home, which makes it a convenient subject when testing cameras. So, I have quite a few pictures of its exterior, and I have photographed it with all of my favorite cameras. Now that the building has been demolished, I thought that I should share some of those pictures, including some of the demolition process.
I’ll miss having this interesting old building around to photograph. But, if I’m entirely honest, the exterior of the building was a little boring. I have seen this building in every season and every lighting condition, and yet almost every decent picture I have of it centers around the northwest front door and the railing leading up to it. Perhaps the understated nature of the temple matches the ethos of its builders; I’m not a Mason, so I can’t say for sure.
It’s the time of year to reflect. Since photographs preserve brief moments they can refresh one’s memory of lived experiences. Reviewing photographs from the past year can aid in reflecting upon the details, but it is often useful to consider the broader strokes. Since photography is the main thing that I do when I am not working, I like to consider how I approached photography and how that approach has evolved. And, considering which tools I used helps me focus on the larger themes.
My approach to photography has continued to evolve as I learn more about the craft. An example of that is that I picked up my first spot meter in 2024. First two spot meters, actually. I thrifted a spot meter off of ebay, and it was not even close to accurate. There was no chance of calibrating it, so I went back to the well. I ended up finding a great deal on a Soligor Spot Sensor II, and thankfully it seems to be reasonably accurate.
In my last video I talked about how Bloomfilter was implementing chains of large language models to more accurately accomplish difficult tasks. For AI implementors this is often know as an agentic workflows. Andrew Ng has described four approaches to Agentic Workflows: Reflection, Tool use, Planning and Multi-agent collaboration. At Bloomfilter we are currently implementing tool use and multi-agent collaboration, and our use of agent collaboration is in its early stages. We do plan on expanding our capabilities to take advantage of each of these approaches.
There are a few no-code tools for implementing agents workflows — CrewAI, and CasidyAI are a couple examples. We are implementing our agents, and their assistants, in code; we do this because we are relying heavily upon the code and models that we have already built for use in our SaaS application. Today I want to walk through how we are implementing these agents. My use case for this discussion will be eliminating tedious tasks from my routine — exactly what we hope AI would do for us. The specific case I have in mind is using AI — to use Bloomfilter — to pull the data needed to fill in my weekly KPIs.
I have been using Cursor to write code, and this site is code, so I also use Cursor to write the content that I post here. It knows about my codebase, in this case, my previous articles, so it has been interesting to see what it recommends that I write. As I was updating the pages about me, it suggested what I should write about my past. It was wrong, of course, but close enough to be thought-provoking. Here is what the AI suggested I write:
stollee is a nickname I picked up in Iraq in 2004. I was working as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Army in Baghdad when I started a blog called “The Daily Show on Iraq”. I was a big fan of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, and I thought it would be funny to do a daily show from Iraq. I soon learned that funny is not easy to capture in writing, and I’m not sure I succeeded, but I did manage to capture a bit of the absurdity of the situation. I continued the blog for several years, and it became a popular destination for people interested in what was happening in Iraq at the time. I also started a podcast called “The Iraq Podcast”, which I continued for several years. I also wrote a book called “My Iraq War”, which is a collection of my writings from the blog and podcast.
In this video, I discuss AI and how Bloomfilter is incorporating it into its product. In future sessions, I will cover how the Bloomfilter team integrates AI into our SDLC and dive deep into how we implement AI in our codebase — including a short coding session to demonstrate how we actually code it. But today, I just want to talk about our product’s relationship with AI.
I started this conversation because of the cringe looks I get from some of my friends when I tell them we are building AI into our platform. There’s been so much hype around AI lately that some people in the industry — especially practitioners and implementers of technology — are becoming exhausted by it. And I understand that. Many products are simply adding AI prompt-to-content generators — often with dubious value — just to claim they have an AI-enabled platform.
