Interesting links for Mar 4 2026

Note: This is the third post in a regular series of things I’m reading, watching, or learning about over the last week or two. I’ll share a link that has caught my attention, and sometimes also put my thoughts there.  

• VIDEO: Construction of a Mountain-Side Getaway Home. As you can imagine, there are a lot of home construction videos on YouTube. Some are more educational, where they take you through each and every detail, and others are more for entertainment, which is how I’d class this one. This is some guys building a custom home in the hills of Bryson City, NC. It’s a blessing to be able to find people you clearly enjoy working with, like these guys.

• VIDEO: Spec House Full Build Series. And more in the ‘educational’ category of custom home building, I’ve been making my way through this series. With 181 videos in the playlist there’s much more explaining and detail. One big takeaway from this series is that I need to visit Douglas County, Oregon, sometime. Beautiful!

  
  Why the custom home videos? Every now and then I have thought experiments about building a house... somewhere. And to be crystal clear, by ‘building a house’ I mean shopping for a lot, consulting on the blueprints, and then writing a giant check… it would be a bad idea to give me a hammer or ask me about footers or whatever.

  In service of that, a few years now I started a Google Doc called “Custom Home Wish List” that lists things to remember if we ever do build a house. About half of the list is electrical stuff, things like ‘Extra circuit for induction cooktop’ or ‘Outside outlet for holiday lights’, but there are also misc things like “Not too close to train crossing or highway” and “Consider wildfire chances when planning landscaping” and whatnot.
  p.s. You can view (and even add on to!) the list if you want. Be nice!
  

• VIDEO: Traffic Accident at the stupid Target. There’s a terrible intersection here in Holly Springs that I try to avoid. For this reason. This is from December 26. The left side of the video is my front camera, the right is my back. All drivers were fine. My car spent a month at the collision shop; hers was totaled. The dashcam video made things pretty cut and dry with the police officer. I don’t have a good sense for whether her car couldn’t stop in time, or if she was distracted. Doesn’t matter much now.

• VIDEO: Paul McCartney Man on the Run. If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch this for free. “Man on the Run is an intimate portrait of Paul McCartney’s journey after The Beatles, as he and wife Linda form Wings. Directed by Oscar-winner Morgan Neville, the film explores McCartney’s reinvention through rare archival footage, capturing both the struggles and triumphs of redefining himself in a new musical era.” I’ve been watching this off and on mixed in with the home-building videos. :)