Recent content from bradbice.com
Twenty-six days, 115 commits, and 70 closed issues later, this site is faster, more accessible, and depends on almost nothing. A little over a year ago I wrote about vibe coding some improvements to this place after years of neglect. That was a handful of features over a few evenings. This was something else: I pointed Claude Code at the whole site and worked through it from top to bottom in some…
“in more concrete terms, consumers dislike ‘AI’ when it shows up in products, and it makes them actively mistrust the brands that employ it” Great piece (as usual) by Ethan Marcotte: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/against-stocking-frames/
Well shoot, I have a new astrological sign: Pisces. I thought I was an Aries this whole time. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/upshot/zodiac-signs.html
A hard rebuke against Trump’s attempt to create a national design studio, and their inaccessible and inconsiderate initial offering: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/a-notional-design-studio/
Using AI to “vibe code” some improvements to this place after a good number of years of neglect. Here are some of the projects that GitHub Copilot and Anthropic Claude have helped me accomplish, with no more than an hour devoted to each: Added a light/dark theme switcher to the entire site, that respects a user’s system setting and allows them to override it Added micro blog…
Ok, so I recently have used a combination of GitHub Copilot and Anthropic Claude to take on some longstanding items on my website todo lists. And… wow. Selecting an area and typing “Do this thing here” and having it do it (quite successfully, more so on Claude’s part, btw) is simply amazing. I’m not learning anything, but I’m accomplishing a lot?
My blog posts are now all intermingling, and will all be displayed in one column now. Yes, it took me 2 years to do this.
I’ve collected concert and tour posters from all of the concerts I’ve ever attended - a remarkably pitiful list! As a part of my recent efforts to expand my Library , I’ve added all of the concerts I’ve ever attended, and also collected tour posters from many of them to display as well. Some didn’t exist or couldn’t be found, so the next best things were…
I added an archive of all of my Twitter posts from 2012-2022 at https://www.bradbice.com/library/twitter/ .
Wow, definitely never moving to Florida. What an absolute sinkhole of progression or just decent human standards. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/politics/ron-desantis-ap-african-american-studies/index.html
Twitter has ended API access for all 3rd-party apps that exceed 100k users. The latest in petty tactics by their new petulant dictator. Mastodon is a much better place to be.
Moving to change from Swarm to Day One for all location check-ins.
Testing cross posting from my blog to other services
A question I get often, and often struggle with answering, is: “So what do you do for work?” I am currently Principal Product Designer, Design System at Pluralsight . I work on design systems, which are basically groups of tools, resources, principles, and libraries that designers and developers use to create digital products. Tools include color palettes, design program setups, and…
I’m happy to announce I have started as Principal Product Designer, Design System at Pluralsight! After 7 years and 3 months at Cars.com , I began a new position with Pluralsight in May of this year as Principal Product Designer on the Design Operations team. I’ll be working on the Design System team with two very experienced and talented engineers (and hopefully more members soon) as…
Time for some more groups of ratings, folks! In these series of posts, similar to the last one , I post groups of related movies I’ve watched and compare their ratings. This time I’m going to add some other stats as well. Batman movies Average score: 58.43% 80s/90s movies average: 45.25% Nolan trilogy average: 76% Batman 84% Batman Returns 48% Batman Forever 41% Batman & Robin 17%…
Newly added ratings in TV and Movies for June 2022 As always, all ratings are in the Library . Movies Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 78% Dune 88% “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” was a great popcorn movie. There was enough craziness and special effects to forgive a less-than-stellar plot (and Benedict Cumberbatch’s stiff acting, he does much better in…
Newly added ratings for TV and Movies As always, all ratings are in the Library . Movies The Lighthouse 85% Spider-Man: No Way Home 64% “The Lighthouse” was a “beautiful in a creepy way” telling of a classic going-mad tale. Willem Dafoe is brilliant as always, underscoring my new appreciation for his acting prowess. The film style lends to the drama and suspense as well,…
It was time for some cleanup around these parts, so here’s a list of what was fixed. I spent some time this winter diving deep into this website and cleaning up what was initially a lot of add-on, messy, and less-than-optimally organized code. I also made some design updates and basically rounded off a lot of sharp edges. Here’s a roundup, for posterity: Design changes Standardized…
Rating groups of movies, just for fun. Let’s bring up some groups of movies and compare their ratings, ok? Christopher Nolan movies Memento 96% Insomnia 93% Batman Begins 82% The Prestige 100% The Dark Knight 97% Inception 82% The Dark Knight Rises 61% Interstellar 94% Quentin Tarrantino movies Reservoir Dogs 95% Pulp Fiction 94% Jackie Brown 95% Kill Bill: Vol. 1 89% Kill Bill: Vol. 2 87%…
On your birthday, a goodbye letter that’s a year overdue. When someone from my direct family leaves us, I usually have the opportunity to stand up and say a few words from my heart about what that person has meant to me, what they’ve meant to all of us, and the lasting impression they will leave now that they are gone. I wasn’t exactly given that opportunity in a formal setting,…
I was fairly behind Bernie going into last night, but Elizabeth Warren may have swayed me. She’s a little more genuine, convincing, and has much more of a stage impact which will play better this Fall. Will support any Dem candidate obvi, but Warren has my vote thus far.
This Presidential impeachment ultimately signifies the complete failure of our system of checks and balances, on both sides of the aisle: partisan impeachment, partisan acquittal. Party politics and tribalism are all we have now, with little-to-no impartiality to be found practically anywhere. Sad!
Switching back to duckduckgo.com for search. Google has become a wasteland of deceitful ad design.
Here are my favorite holiday movies, and how I’ve rated them. The criteria for the rating system is explained here , and does not necessarily take into account which is the best holiday movie. This list is fairly accurate however. As you can see, guilty pleasures like “The Holiday” and “Love Actually” represent the corny – yet necessary – side of the…
I’ve added a dark mode to bradbice.com, as well as some quick and simple ratings comparisons. Dark mode My website has been a little too bright lately, so I’ve implemented a dark mode which will activate according to your OS settings. Thanks to CSS custom properties and the (prefers-color-scheme: dark) media query, this was really simple to do and was completed in about 30 minutes and…
Duke is definitely the most boring G.I. Joe #waitingforpizzathoughts
My take on this year’s “iPhone event”, Apple’s yearly event to showcase their new hardware. I didn’t mean for this to be my first full blog post since last year’s event (almost to the day), but here we are. iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max I was generally warm on this year’s model after seeing it revealed at the event. THe focus is mostly on the…
Apple event hot take: The always on Apple Watch looks great. This might be the first year where I skip out on the newest iPhone (my XS camera is fine). TV+ is a no-brainer at $4.99/month and Arcade is worth a try.
It’s been 6 years since Apple’s “flattening” of the UI with iOS 7. Six years before that was the iPhone’s debut.
The Apple earnings news is hopefully good news for consumers: they’ll fix what needs fixing now and stop pushing the envelope.
Hello from the iOS Shortcuts app! Micro-blogging to my site from the bus, copying to Twitter. #OwnYourContent
Today’s Apple Event is dubbed “an ‘S’ year”, so the big reveals weren’t groundbreaking, but there’s some real substance there. Here’s my take: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR I will likely stick to my iPhone X this year. No really compelling reason to upgrade to a XS. Speed, slight camera spec bump, gold, larger size… none are needs or even big…
A lot can happen when you’re sick and the wife and child are away. Movie ratings are here. I’ve had a bit of an upper-respiratory infection (undiagnosed) this weekend, and the wife and child are away for a couple of days, so I’ve had a lot of time to sit around the house. This also has meant watching a few movies I normally wouldn’t have. I’ve long wanted to add movie…
After thinking it over for the past few weeks, I’ve finally pulled the plug and deactivated my Facebook account. I haven’t fully deleted my account just yet, in case there’s some reason I’m forgetting that I should maintain it. Deactivating it just means people can’t see my timeline or search for me. I’m also assuming it means advertisers can’t access my…
Windows XP as art Windows XP as art The local Walgreens uses the default Windows XP wallpaper as art pieces near their pharmacy areas. ¯\ (ツ) /¯
Okay campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ‘cause it’s cooooold out there today! On a frigid February 2nd, we celebrate one of my favorite non-holidays — Groundhog Day! This year’s results, appropriately posted by AP_oddities Climate change has most certainly had an effect on Punxsutawney Phil’s sleep cycle over the years, as he’s only not seen his shadow for 13%…
I’m seeing what seems to be an exponential increase in people watching TV shows/Movies/YouTube videos while riding the train or bus lately. Are most people downloading this content to their device before watching it? Or obliterating their data plans? For those that are downloading at home before heading out: it harkens back to Netflix of old, where you had to receive TV seasons on DVD, one or two…
I’m a daily user of Twitter, but it has some problems. Luckily, there’s hope in an alternative: Micro.blog . I love using Twitter on a daily basis for my topic-specific news and to follow interesting people on the web. I make the most of the mess that is Twitter by sticking to a few specific methods: Follow people, not companies — I’ve had much more “success” on…
I’ve redesigned and re-launched my website multiple times. Let’s go again! Inspired by years of frustration of having my content fragmented across multiple websites and social networks, and the timely tweet above, I’ve spent the last few months pulling together this new project. I’ve finally come to a place where I’m happy enough (but still embarrassed) to deploy my…
Today was one of the most highly anticipated of the now legendary (and infamous, in some circles) Apple Events in recent years. I have taken the time to watch these events every year since 2007 and the introduction of the original iPhone (which at times involves some strategic lunch planning or side-by-side windows on my computer at work.) I was pretty excited to see all of the new offerings,…
At first I went in and changed the setting for the iPhone 7 home button to unlock my phone by testing my finger on the Touch ID sensor. It more closely resembled how I used my iPhone 6s with the mechanical home button. Now, after a few weeks of use, I have reverted that setting, requiring a “push” of the button to unlock the phone. This is because I use Notification Center much more…
After eight months of contracting/freelancing, I have accepted a position with Cars.com as a Visual Designer. I’ll be working with the Visual Design and Interactive Design teams to create working prototypes of new functionality and website layouts. These may be used in user testing and other facets. So far the company is very large and intricate but everyone has been very welcoming. It will be a…
After a great year working with Medtelligent and Panopta, I’ve moved away to begin working on projects on my own. This summer I’ve worked mainly with Agency EA, an experiential and event marketing agency. With them I’ve worked on digital brochures for both GE/Synchrony and Hilton , as well as a new website for Agency EA themselves. In between projects I have been exploring…
I was a huge fan of the Chicago Divvy Bike system ( http://www.divvybikes.com ) when it was introduced last summer. It provided a very convenient, cheap, personally beneficial and eco-friendly method of transportation in a city where those criteria can usually never be completely or concurrently fulfilled. I quickly signed up for an annual membership at $75, and used the system sparingly but…
I use Twitter every single day of my life, and have my live stream of tweets open on either my computer when working or at home, or on my phone when I’m commuting or waiting in line somewhere. A lot of people ask what Twitter is used for, and why they would need to know when someone is “eating dinner or going to the bathroom.” Twitter started out that way, yes. It was a simple,…
From July 2008 until July 2011 I lived alone, in 2 cities and 2 separate single-bedroom apartments. What set it off was a breakup with my girlfriend of 3 years, something I initiated. The details of that breakup are portrayed from the other side in multiple blog posts and published in a book(!), all of which don’t really paint me in the best of lights. To sum it up, I came to a very quick…
I’ve done a few job interviews over the summer as I’ve transitioned between roles. Each interview has similar questions, one of them being: “What is your ideal role?” I often begin explaining that I would like a role that offers a bit of web design and web development mixed into one. I am proficient in graphic design and I am slightly more advanced in writing HTML/CSS code.…
Having recently gotten married, I’ve gone through a few months of hectic planning and the attempt to organize tasks, assignments (from the wife-to-be) and various to-dos that come along with joining in holy matrimony. I tried out pretty much every to-do app available for iOS/iPhone/iPad, as well as a few web-based systems. Update 2019-04-03 Finally updating this to remove the broken link to…
I make it no secret that I hate the Miami Heat. And I hate Lebron James. And I hate the star-system that has taken over and ruled the NBA ever since Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen joined the Celtics in 2008. But I can deal with it all in some fashion or another. However I can’t deal with my absolute hatred of Dwyane Wade and the miserable human being he is. This is a pretty close summarization…