The Audio Blog of Steven Sirski

Making a list and checking it twice! What do you need to do before you leave? Daly Burger chili burger done and had! Another one checked off the list! Cleaning up the books, doing some accounting of what I’ve bought and used, cut expenses by half! And working on that book, what’s the crossover between book writing, podcasting and video making?! Donate to the show! PayPal link below! https://www.pa...

Warming up in Winnipeg! Did I miss all of the winter activities? Skip an hour ahead! Did you lose an hour this weekend? I didn’t. Slept till 9.30! Neat new remotion tool using Claude! But still hitting limits! Thinking… May You Make Your Movie… could be AI animation?? And looks like I don’t need to go to Toronto, visa-free entry is enough! https://toronto.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/zytzxx/202602/t...

Slower day today, seems people are getting sick. Apparently the Chinese students don’t go back until next week. Still some students looking to take IELTS so they can avoid going to class! Markets getting hit, but some are not… or at least they are rebounding already. (Chinese stocks, Constellation Software, Intuit.) To the library to get some books, marketing and more decluttering. (Finished Pico...

Gold falling? But there’s a war on! Where’s the safe haven trade? Guess the Chinese are selling?? Workout in! Forgot to tell you, but I got a crossover skip! Progress on that book for the language vlog. Of course using ChatGPT to organize it. Is my office subscription over? And is podcaster John C Dvorak in the hospital?? (Should I talk about money and the stock market if I want donations??) Donat...

Knackered! Did my circuit work today and did a proper number of sets, but this time I differentiated the exercises rather than trying to do one set after another. Got another rough website done with a form submission. The goal is a landing page where people can submit their speaking or writing and then that gets processed with OpenAI, then sent out as an email. Not sure if I want a full blown mini...

Early show, how did it sound? Never made it to the office today, getting busy with some things I can only get done here in Canada. Markets getting CRUSHED! Hold the line, watch your stops, get ready for more. CHINESE! GOLD! BROAD MARKET STONKS KEEERRRUUSSSHHHEEDD! Blame Trump! Is this some sort of deal to help Canadian oil and energy? What about Chinese?! A quick note about the 1-year income rule...

Sick again?? Re-listening to last year’s podcasts around the time I changed jobs, when did I quit my job? (Just before Spring Festival 2025, but I didn’t talk about it until the Friday February 7, 2025. New week, new month! Reading The Art of Swedish Death Cleaning! How’s your penmanship? What stuff are you keeping? What’s useful? What’s worth it? How much? And Where? And a note about my lunch wit...

End of week, end of month, time flies! Spent the day eating! Workout in! Shoulders and back, I gotta say, I am running less, not only that, a lot of the older people I know who were active throughout their lives… all undergoing surgeries. Seems like you can’t escape it. Would you rather read an AI article (which is meant to be scanned, not read in depth), or someone who’s written huge paragraphs,...

Wow, did not know it was the first time in 46 years that Team USA won the Olympic gold in hockey. Aaaaand politics. Oh America. You just can’t let it go. (They got a call from Trump! How dare they!) https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7068426/2026/02/24/usa-mens-olympics-hockey-gold-donald-trump/ Meanwhile, in Britain, the even is just reported with little fanfare. https://www.bbc.com/sport/ice-hocke...

New video editor on deck? What’s it worth? Descript troubles! Refunded, but cancelled for next year… can I build this myself? Claude Code/Cowork, OpenClaw, and what’s next? Is it even worth it to learn these things? And what about security concerns? Playing around with Claude Code… it’s doing stuff I wanted to automate anyway. File renaming, picture sorting, etc. Is it safe? Is this the future of...

In pain! Workouts working hard! Lucky I’m not involved with Ramadan. Legs are sore to day from yesterday’s MONSTER session. Today was CHEST! How is that collagen going? Notice any difference? Getting charged double, how to dispute? Is it even possible? Can I automate what Descript does? Compiling books, which ones stay, which ones go? And ALIENS ARE REAL! Trump presidency to release more informati...

Back to the grind! Start of the week and end of the month! Olympics are over! How did we do? -Men’s curling… we win! (Against Great Britain… didn’t even know they had a team!) -Women’s curling…. bronze! -Men’s hockey... we lost. :( Team USA wins gold in overtime. Canada finishes with 21 medals total, 9 bronze, 7 silver, and 5 gold. USA at number 2 with 33 total medals behind Norway with 40 medals....

What did you think of the Substack article? Written in a much more modern way, innit? That is, shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. Contrast that with my typical writing style of lots of words bunched together in a paragraph. Which one is better? These AI-edited articles don’t really lend themselves to a book, but they do lay the foundation. Reading Pico Iyer’s The Half Known Life: In Search...

Too long, Steve! Too long! How was that summary of China? Some automation success! Getting closer to a better blog-writing workflow. DaVinci title success! Chinese captions done and did completely within DaVinci! Still not a smooth workflow, but it’s something to start with. A simple truth about AI: It’s a tool. If you like being a gear head, then ya, you’ll be cool. But it’s a tool like anything...

Oh the Olympics! How stressful! Men’s hockey! Women’s hockey! Relay Speed Skating! Curling! OMG what a stressful game! Women play for gold tomorrow! (And why does the camera guy open the door after the goal? SHUT THE DAMN THING! IT’S UNSAFE! Aaaaand Czechia had SIX PLAYERS on the ice when they scored?! Workout in and one of the best and hardest to date! THREE ROUNDS! Should I start Crossfit? And C...

So much to do, so… lots of time? Website, AI, Chinese, family get togethers, gym, imagine if what I try to do during the day was my job? No fines at the library? But replacement costs after 21 days! How’s the book reading going? Aaaand all these ideas of creating language learning materials from your own content… has been done before. Dogme, anyone? Donate to the show! PayPal link below! https://w...

Happy Long Weekend! It’s Louis Riel Day! Who was he?! -Founder of Manitoba (only declared in 1992) -One of the Métis = French+First Nations marriages -Led a couple of rebellions -Was hanged Olympics continue, too bad I couldn’t live in a city where I could see the Olympics! Canada going for gold, women’s hockey team to play the US! Off to China? Thirty days free! What’s the catch? To the Leaf! The...

It’s the long weekend! Louis Riel Day here in Manitoba, Family Day in other parts of the country, aaaaaannnddd….Spring Festival! Markets closed until the 24th. (Hope you sold.) Happy Valentine’s Day! Update on that credit card idea. how much interest would you have paid over the last 18 years? (Interesting to note that one of the websites I looked at differentiated between credit card balance and...

Workout in! Including shovelling! Had to get it done cause the weather was nice. World’s best burger in 2026? Toad in the Hole Winnipeg? Hey, can I do that? What about for a podcast? Talking to people, met a guy from the office, from Eritrea/Sudan, came to Canada 20 year ago, church sponsorship, stay at home Dad. But so is his wife? And what about buying a house? What does JL Collins say? https://...

Workout in, empty gym! Thinking… Wednesday is often circuit day, what if I split these up over the week? At work, it was a networking event. Alllll women. Social media account people. What do I know? Well, apparently, quite a bit about the content creation tools. FCP, DaVinci, Zapier, etc. Interesting conversations. Wordpress success, time to renovate? Not gonna lie, kinda wonder if and why not ca...

Out with the fam for Dad’s memorial lunch. Hug your loved ones! Canadian women’s lose to the USA 5-0! What does it mean? How are the Olympics going? James JL Collins on money, investing, and following the rules: https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/ -you’re financially free when you can live off of 4% of your investment income. He assumed people kept jobs or that the income could keep steady. I to...

SEATTLE WINS! LET THE BULL MARKET CONTINUE! But they were also in the AFC for a while? DOESN’T MATTER! What the Superbowl Indicator tells us. (Couple this with the Midterm Election Year and January Barometer.) First client through an ad, what next? Workout in! And Chinese Aiyi’s are the reason for the gold move! … Or so they say. https://www.wsj.com/finance/commodities-futures/the-chinese-auntie-i...

Feeling much better, but still stuffy. Hopefully this is it. Workout in, though a tame one at that. Neat little APP called “One Thing” that puts a little reminder in your menu bar. What do I have to be reminded of? HSK 6 flash cards. Also working through HSK 1-5, spending about 30 minutes a day so far. I hope to keep this up as it’s something that needs to be done. Should I join a competition to m...

Feeling better, but not out of the woods just yet. If TRUMP is saying the US will build a strategic reserve of rare earths, which names are there in the space? TROX, AVL.to, AMY.v, MN.v, LAC.to, REMX among others. Preparing Episode 70 of the language vlog podcast… is this the year I split it up, or do I keep it together? No one’s reading my newsletter! Should I continue?? Yes. There are other reas...

Feel like garbage! My apologies about yesterday’s mis-uploading! New idea for the daily summaries: interactive Chinese subtitles?! (A la Mandarin Bean and DuChinese). Next week is Spring Festival, will this be the first one I’ve missed in HOW LONG?! GOLD, SILVER and the USD, where will it go? Coming up to the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Donate to the show! PayPal link be...