007 Newsletter - March 1, 2026

It's been two weeks since my last newsletter. These are some of the things I did or saw during that time.

Claude Excel Automation

On February 18th I was excited to see the following newsletter article from Directionally Correct: Claude in Excel is insane!

Because I subscribed to Claude, I immediately set up the connections via Microsoft to Claude AI in Excel.

• It took me about ten minutes to set up the connection for the first time.
• It then took me another ten minutes to generate a 500-row sample data.
• Finally it took just five minutes for the AI to generate a formatted Excel dashboard + scenario modelling tool

This is basically doing the kind of work a reporting analyst paid a six figure annual salary might do!

An audio reactive app

The capstone project of my sabbatical in March 2024 was creating a tent that reacts to music. It took me weeks of research to learn out how to configure the Rhino components Firefly, Weaverbird etc.

The amazing part was that it was possible to vibe code a similar audio reactive tent in about 20 minutes in Gemini! I merely fed it the sample screenshot and asked it to generate the code, which it did in HTML with JavaScript.

Florida Vacation

Eileen and I spent a week with her sister Karen at Davenport, half-hour drive from Disney Orlando. We thoroughly enjoyed our trip there. We visited a lake, a concert in Orlando, Disney Springs, Cape Canaveral, and Saint Augustine. We were pampered and enjoyed delicious home-cooked meals, as well as Spanish, Chinese, and Indian cuisine.

Click Thumbnails to view larger image

Karen's husband Jose is from Spain, so they converse in Spanish. Jose is a wine expert who uses AI extensively to create videos, images, podcasts etc. He introduced me to Perplexity, Grok, and shared some super agent prompts he developed. I thought I was a geek with 6TB storage on my gaming PC, till I realized that Jose has 60TB in storage connected to his computer!!

We also took two days out to look at homes in that neighborhood, as a place to retire in. After looking at 3 homes that were few years old, we realized we prefer a new build home for our final forever home.

We found a home in one community that looked ideal. It had all the bells and whistles, and a very reasonable price of about $380K and we verbally committed to that. In Florida, single family homes are very densely packed and they are called zero lot homes, with typically just 5 feet clearance on either side of the home to the fence. When we got home we realized the railroad track behind our chosen lot has 10-12 trains every day, including about 8 freight trains! Obviously vibration and noise would be issues for us and for any subsequent buyer when the home has to be resold.

We finally understood the meaning of the realtor's phrase: "location, location, location."

We chose a new home

We really liked one of the model homes we saw in the Hartford community of Davenport, just a mile away from Eileen's sister Karen. Because going up and down the stairs constantly in our three-story townhouse in Princeton is becoming tiring as we get older, we wanted a single-story home.

During our tour of the model home I used an app called CubiCasa to scan the home and make a floor plan of it. The floor plan we chose is shown in a separate blog post.

I made a wire-transfer deposit of $20,000 for the new home, which is expected to be built by August this year. The new home cost, including some upgrades we chose, on a "premium lot" with a open space and view to community playground/pool at the back would be just under $450K.

Now that we are back in New Jersey, we have a lot of cleaning up and throwing out of old accumulated stuff to do in our townhome which we plan to sell. It's going to be an extremely busy few months, so I suspect the frequency of my newsletters / blog will slow down a lot temporarily.

I trust this gave you a good sense of my busy and enjoyable past two weeks. Moving to Florida and retiring there will be quite a lifestyle change. However being just a half-hour drive to the Disney World in Orlando, possibly some of you may get a chance to visit there and we can meet.