Do you ever have a dream where you wake up and some fact or thing just keeps rattling around your brain and when you wake up, you are convinced it’s either totally true or the best (or worst) thing in the world and you just have to do something about it? Yeah that happened to me last night. When I woke up, I had the phrase “Curly Brace Face” stuck in my head. In my half…
I’ve lived in Florida my whole life (other than a brief 3 months stint in New Jersey for a work thing). And while this state has many great qualities, and many not so great qualities cough our entire state government especially the Governor *cough , the one constant has always been the heat and humidity. If you live here, you’re used to it of course - the 82 degrees at 5am and how…
As I’m a cat person, I figured that sharing a pic and some info about my four cats might be something that folks enjoy (the internet does love cats after all). Bisque (5 years old) I originally intended to just get Bisque from the Humane Society because at the time my son wanted an “orange boy cat” but Elton John ended up coming home as well when he came up to me in the…
Back in June, I traveled with my family to Atlanta to attend a World Cup game. FIFA is, without a doubt, one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet. But as a soccer fan, the World Cup is a huge deal and is always enjoyable. So, I set my morals briefly aside and secured 4 tickets (for me, my dad, my son and my brother) as this could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to attend. Rather…
I was reading Mark Zuckerberg’s AI treatise and the thing that I can’t get over with all of the people who are so in love with AI is the general loss of humanity that embracing AI brings: AI makes us more productive - Great, so we offload tasks to a robot that is sometimes right, sometimes not. And what do we do with that “extra” time? More work! So we should embrace AI…
My son starts high school this week, a bizarre sentence to type that I’m sure any parent can relate to. It felt like just yesterday I was dropping him off for pre-K and now here he is, taking the first step on the last step towards adulthood. High school wasn’t great for me - I was small, quiet and most of my friends from middle school went to a different high school than I did,…
I like to spend my weekend afternoons watching TV, and lord knows I have enough streaming services (like most people) to be able to do that. Some I pay for due to just the volume of stuff to watch and/or for the kids (Netflix, Disney+), some I have through a swap with family members (my Paramount + for my parents HBO Max) and some just because I got a good deal (Peacock) and the comfort food they…
I spend most of my driving time or when I’m outside doing yardwork listening to podcasts, so I thought it might be worth sharing what is on my weekly rotation. I use Pocket Casts to listen, as I paid for it years ago to get the browser player version, and despite trying some other apps, keep coming back to it as my go to just put something on and listen. On to the podcasts! 404 Media Podcast…
I love weather. More specifically, I love tracking and following and looking at weather. I’m terrible at math and have a beginner’s level skill set in meteorology with terms and reading charts, but in general it just fascinates me. Even though in Florida, we basically have 9 months of heat, humidity and rain and the weather doesn’t change that much day to day, checking the…
This is a personal blog, but isn’t super personal about me so I thought I’d use this entry in Blaugust to share a few interesting and/or fun facts about me. In 2001, I sank my car - Coming home with a friend during a lingering tropical storm at night, I didn’t see the road had washed out and ended up floating off the road in my Prius into a ditch, the car blocking a sewer grate…
As my son has gotten older (he’s a teenager now), it’s been a real pleasure to introduce him to shows and movies that I enjoyed in the past, and either watch them fresh with him or revisit old favorites. Lately, it’s been watching The Office from the beginning (up to season 5 now), usually a few episodes a night. Some of the early episodes are just as cringey as I remember, but…
Our brains can be real jerks sometimes. Sure, they are great for, you know, solving math and painting and keeping our bodies functioning, but they can also totally mess with us. Sometimes they’ll make us forget what we were doing and make us get distracted by something else, or make us say something immediately (triggered by some random memory/experience) that we would never say if we paused for a…
The always amazing Aubrey posted yesterday about not using her blog for primarily tech things, and the larger point of having hobbies away from the computer. I can really identify with this because, after almost 30 years as a developer, the idea of sitting down at the computer for “fun” is just…not that appealing anymore. Aubrey says that she feels pressure to make her blog…
My grandmother passed away, at aged 92, back on July 18. It wasn’t terribly surprising - she lived on her own till she was 90 but a series of falls and brief illnesses wore her down so that she then moved to independent living, then assisted living till finally transitioning to hospice. There wasn’t any specific cause of death, no pain at the time of her passing - it was “natural…
A few weeks back, I saw some calls on Mastodon to cancel Micro.blog (the service I use to publish this) because they started allowing publishing on Twitter (it will never be X to me). This after a big hullabaloo over Proton and their CEO’s donations/support for a right-wing party in Europe. Wordpress is a dumpster fire of petty bickering and bizarre choices in leadership. And if you keep…
I recently switched over from Spotify to Apple Music. There were a myriad of reasons, the biggest being financial - long story short, I was already paying for most of the Apple One services offered (but not Apple Music) so by dropping Spotify and switching to Apple Music, I’m basically saving about $5 a month. I know there are better services out there that help support artists, like Tidal…
I’ve updated my Uses page with a new RSS reader and Office Suite, Unread and Libre Office respectively. I’m a firm believer in RSS as a way to discover new and interesting, tailored content, and in the constant firehose of information coming at us daily, especially try to keep up with world events, RSS is a calm and curated way to consume that (for more info on the many benefits of…
I spend more time in the browser than anywhere else, building and styling sites. So I just want a browser that will help me, will be a usable tool that does what I ask of it (what we should ask of any tool really) and nothing more. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, so I made of list of common things I want in a browser. I just want a browser that… …is actively developed.…
I’ve never seen such a obsequious embrace of technology by “geeks” as I have with AI. It feels like the entire tech world suddenly woke up one day and decided that not only should AI be the answer to everything, but that we all just have to be excited about it. That’s bullshit and reeks of insecurity to me. It’s not that tech folks don’t go hard into the things…
This week, while on a lull between starting projects at work, I decided to check back in on the latest Bluesky drama (because there is always Bluesky drama). I setup an account a while ago and set all my previous follows from Twitter but due to just running out of free time, neglected reading it in favor of Mastodon and my RSS feed. The official Bluesky app was a no go for me because of its data…
Inspired by my former coworker and great friend Aubrey over on her blog (who was also inspired by her friend B ), I’m finally willing to acknowledge that this blog needs more posts and I should blog more. Every blog post doesn’t have to be a big Think Piece (which is what I tried for in the past), blogging is sometimes best when it’s just random missives here and there about…
As a web developer who spends 40+ hours a week building sites for someone else, I know I am not alone in finding it difficult to muster up the motivation to build something for yourself. Sometimes, the last thing I want to do is stay at the keyboard and redesign my own site, because I know all the work that usually entails. And so it becomes an exercise in “I’ll get to it soon”…
Back in mid 2004, I got a beta invite to Gmail from a friend of mine (Google famously launched Gmail on April 1, but it wasn’t one of their notorious April Fool’s Day jokes, just bad timing for a launch). When I got access to it, I set my email as something simple - adamvarn at gmail.com. I’ve used other emails since then, but have (probably far too many) accounts tied to that…
Five years ago this week, I lost a good friend, Gerald “Cozmo” Guido. Like myself, Cozmo (or Coz as we all called him) was a web developer who came into my life when I was still a teenager and hadn’t even decided that web development was where I wanted to go with a career, yet had an immeasurable impact on me and my younger life at the time. Coz was about 18 years older than me…
In January 2023, when Twitter killed off third party apps, I had intended to write a blog post about the solution I found, via RSS, to still follow the people I wanted without using the Twitter app or website (because fuck Musk). I never got around to it and now, once again, things have changed with the upcoming shut down of the Twitter API. I’m 100% all in on Mastodon and the Fediverse now,…
This week I was working on transferring the designs for the project I am on from Figma to a Drupal theme, when I came across a CSS property I’d never encountered before: mix-blend-mode . WTF is mix-blend-mode? Even though I’ve been doing front-end work for over 20 years, in my defense there are at least 520 different CSS properties , so coming across a new one shouldn’t be that…