Day 1 on Route 66 starts in a rainy Chicago and heads southwest through the classic small towns of Illinois. We hit the Gemini Giant in Wilmington, explore the murals of Pontiac, and end the day in Springfield. These little towns are the heart and soul of Route 66.
📍 Stops: Chicago, IL, Joliet, IL, Wilmington, IL, Gardner, IL, Dwight, IL, Pontiac, IL, Atlanta, IL, Springfield, IL
We’re hitting Route 66 — Chicago to LA — and this is Day Zero. We set up camp near the Indiana Dunes, test out the Subaru camping setup for the first time, and explore the World’s Fair Homes before the real journey begins. Two weeks, one car, zero kids, and a whole lot of road ahead.
📍 Stops: Indiana Dunes, IN, World’s Fair Homes
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.
