I’m a product design generalist based in Richmond, VA. I love learning from people, crafting lovely designs, and building useful tools.
When did summer arrive? The last few months have flown by. Summer is my least favorite time of year, and also the season that feels like it drags on the longest. The excessive heat and humidity keep me mostly indoors, making exercise a lot harder and less enjoyable. We do enjoy visits to the nearby pool with friends, at least. A long expected trip We are freshly back from a two-week family…
I’ve toyed around with a handful of static site generators over the years. Even before the current style of static site generator, I tended to prefer either writing my own static sites by hand or using CMSes that output static pages. The first few versions of my early web sites were simple static HTML files linked by hand. Then, in the early 2000s, I used Greymatter and then Movable Type , which…
Another busy week so I'm posting the Friday Fave on Saturday. I wonder if I should rename it the Saturday Special. Honestly, I don’t know how I’ve made it this far into my Friday Faves without mentioning the Great British Bake Off . Or Great British Baking Show, in the US, for some reason. Or Bake Off. Or just GBBO. (I actually had to check that I hadn’t because it was one of the first things that…
Ugh, that friggin’ sucks. I’m so sorry that this happened to you. It’s not fair. It’s a bunch of bull honky. It’s complete crap. (Feel free to insert your own choice curses if that helps.) It’s not your fault. I want you to know that. You didn’t cause this. There was nothing you could have done to stop it. Unless you were caught embezzling or being a real jerk. In which case, well, maybe this…
Whoops, this week’s Friday Fave got bumped to Saturday because it’s been a busy week! Okay, here’s a hypothetical scenario. You’re watching a movie or TV show. An actress or actor enters the scene and they seem familiar. You can’t quite place them, though. Where else have you seen them? What do you do? Me? I have to immediately know what else they’ve been in, or I cannot continue to enjoy the…
I don’t remember when I first played Settlers of Catan . It was sometime in high school or college. I know that it was still called by the full name then, though. Later editions have since dropped the “Settlers of” and just go by “Catan.” We would play with a few friends occasionally when my wife and I first got married, but we stopped playing for several years when our little one was born. For…
Over the last few years, I’ve found myself reaching for Cmd-+ more and more often in applications to make things larger and easier to read. Sometimes I rely on it to account for small font sizes. Other times it’s because of a low-contrast color choice. And sometimes I just need to zoom in on an image to see or read specific details. (One thing that constantly frustrates me is being unable to…
Almost a decade ago, I developed pretty severe plantar fasciitis on both of my feet. Walking even a few dozen feet from my bed to the bathroom in the morning was excruciating. I was able to get better over time with physical therapy and some modifications to footwear. I thankfully hadn’t had it flare back up for a long time. My wife had similar plantar fasciitis a year or two ago. Her podiatrist…
A common refrain in business and product circles goes along the lines of “ What gets measured gets managed ” or “ You can’t manage what you don’t measure. ” The gist is that measurable data should be the driving force behind decisions. Otherwise you can’t determine the return on investment (or the business impact) of those decisions. Numbers are everywhere these days. In analytics, we track the…
Apparently I was very excited about EPCOT as a kid. Gosh, that outfit screams 80s. I went to Disney World once as a kid, at some point in elementary school. I only have vague memories of it. Magic Kingdom and EPCOT were the only parks that existed at the time, and EPCOT was only a couple years old. The majority of things I vaguely remember were all from EPCOT: Captain EO. Universe of Energy.…
Once upon a time, I was an early adopter of any and every interesting social media app or site. I had a Facebook account when you still needed an edu address to sign up. I created an Instagram account in the first month (and secured a three character username). I tweeted before it was called a tweet. Over the years, my approach to social media has gone through ups and downs. More recently, I’ve…
I first read through The Lord of the Rings during a summer vacation at my grandparents’ river house in middle school. It was already a cultural phenomenon, at least among the geeks who were my people even then. It was not perhaps quite the juggernaut that Peter Jackson catapulted it into a decade later with the release of the movies. But I still enjoyed the series so much that I reread it every…
A quick note a couple days after originally posting this: I sat down to write my thoughts on the current moment in politics, technology, and the world at large on a Saturday morning. Whenever possible, I try to take the optimistic and hopeful viewpoint that life bends toward justice, equity, and progress. But I also know that some forces want to steer away from that, and I wanted to remind myself…
This week’s Friday Fave is for the web nerds out there. Many folks who makes web sites rely on content management systems to update their sites. (And some still make their sites with plain old HTML. Respect.) I’ve used tons of CMSes in my time, but Craft CMS has been the one I’ve stuck with the longest. ( Build Awesome née 11ty has also been vying for my interest in recent years, but I’ll talk…
There were tons of cute chalk drawings scattered all over EPCOT during the Festival of the Arts, including this cute one of Figment. We’re only two and a half months in, and 2026 has already had lots of ups and downs. Disney FARTS (Festival of the Arts) It started with a long weekend trip to Disney World. We stayed at the Boardwalk Resort, a first for us. Situated right behind EPCOT and in walking…
My wife Kristen took this lovely photo of the conservatory at Lewis Ginter from the rose garden. I honestly don’t remember the first time I went to Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens . I may have been in middle school. It may have been for their holiday light festivities, or just a random trip with my mom or friends. The first time I can clearly remember was going for my great aunt and uncle’s 50th…
I had most of this written by yesterday but didn’t have time to finish it and post. So we’ll still call it a Friday Fave even though it’s technically a Saturday Self-Indulgence. I’ve written about Stardew Valley before but I wanted to share it for my second Friday Fave, because it has been such an important coping mechanism for me through multiple crises. We (my wife and I) started playing Stardew…
I was reading a post on Marcin Wichary’s prolific blog about taking screenshots and the history of the keyboard shortcuts for doing so on the Mac. He ends by talking about a delightful feature built into Acorn . I took this screenshot, but you can't tell what applications I had open or what was in my menu bar. Neat! By pressing Cmd-Shift-7 with Acorn open, you can automatically capture a layered…
This weekend, I wrapped up the last of a planned batch of changes to this site. I’ve never really thought of having a road map for a personal site before. But I’ve been thinking of these changes as an “Exploration” milestone. You know, to fit with my yearly theme . I wanted to offer paths to delve deeply on my site as well as routes to discover other great websites. So here’s what I’ve spent the…
I’m starting something new here. Call it a little dose of positivity. Things seem bleak out there some days, and I want to share what brings me joy on a regular basis. I’m calling this Friday Faves because I want to make this a weekly thing … and because I like alliteration. I won’t promise I’ll hit every Friday, but I’ll do my best. I think we could all use a little more joy. Image courtesy of…
We’ve been playing Ticket to Ride as a family for a decade or more, starting with the original game using a map of the United States. We also picked up the Europe edition shortly after, which added train stations, ferries, and tunnels. We even picked up Ticket to Ride: First Journey to play with the kiddo when it came out. That edition didn’t last long before we went back to the regular editions,…
Ice (and ICE) has dominated both the local and national news over the past week. We’ve been mostly trapped at home for the better part of the past week after a huge ice storm dumped several inches of snow then sleet then freezing rain over last weekend. And consistently freezing temperatures have left us blanketed in a multi-inch thick sheet of ice that’s only removable with serious effort and…
As part of my exploration theme for this year, I wanted to try some new approaches and new applications to solve some of my current needs. I thought it would be worth documenting what I’m currently using now to see what might change by next year. I have a more detailed look at hardware and major software on my Uses page . General apps 💾 Backups: Backblaze 💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Really…
Some years my annual theme is just obvious before the year even starts. It might be a slight struggle to identify the best word to define it, but the theme is there underneath the surface, easily visible the whole time. The past few years have been relatively easy: Rebuild , Rekindle , Revive . It’s been a lot of recovery. Recovering from burnout, from a pandemic, from taking care of ailing…
The funny thing I discovered when I started 3D printing is just how many projects I made FOR my 3D printer. I spent a good portion of my first month printing new things to make it easier to clean, use, or organize my 3D printer. Following are a handful of the many projects I printed specifically to improve 3D printing. Helpful tools There are tons of helpful tools you can find if you dig hard…
Some years feel like sequels. This was one of those years. After a rough 2024, I was hoping to rest and recover this year. My theme for the year was Revive. I wanted to restore some of my health and recover from burnout (personal and professional). I wanted to reconnect with friends and family. And I wanted to find more opportunities for joy and embracing life. Overall and in spite of a rough…
It’s that stretch of time between Christmas and New Years. I’m back at work this week after taking the last week off to rest, clean house, wrap packages, and just as quickly unwrap them again. We had a nice, quiet, relaxing family Christmas. Just the three of us and the dogs. Everything leading up to that felt chaotic, but in a good way. The first weekend of December, we got together with some…
I purchased a 3D printer at the beginning of this year. Specifically I got the Bambu Lab P1S model with an AMS (Automatic Material System) combo . I’d seen a lot of reviews online across social media, YouTube, Reddit, and blog posts talking up just how much easier the Bambu Lab systems were to use than older 3D printers. So I decided to give 3D printing another try. My Failed First Printer Close…
While I was moving content to the new version of my site and got to My Favorite Podcasts post from 2019, it occurred to me that some of them had changed. I’ve added quite a few and stopped listening to a couple others. Without further ado, here are the new shows I have added to my rotation: Critical Role This is by far the biggest addition to my listening since 2019. I started shortly before the…
I was making some small tweaks to this site over the weekend. One of those tweaks was to add more distinct visual styles for visited links. I started playing around with style variations using opacity (to visually “dim” the colors so visited links didn’t stand out as much), boldness, and a thinner underline. Oddly, none of those style tweaks seemed to work properly. At first, I thought I had a…
One of the more uniquely Richmond things is our weird but fun obsession with tacky Christmas lights. Yes, many cities can point to a house or business here or there that goes all out on decorating for the holiday season. Here though, tacky lights are a thriving industry at this time of year. Scores (if not hundreds) of limousines, party buses, and other vehicles drive from one house to another…
Wow, November already. The trees in our backyard have been full of color for a couple weeks. Some trees are starting to look bare while others are holding on. An unexpected storm blew through last night, which blew a hefty pile down. A bolt of lightning struck really close so I’ll have to look today to see if it hit somewhere in our woods. The beginning of November marked the first anniversary of…
Some days it feels like AI is consuming the whole of our collective attention in the same way that its servers and crawlers are consuming so much of our network and energy grid. It’s hard to have conversations with friends, family, or coworkers without the topic inevitably coming up. Talk may veer toward how the technology has made some aspect of life easier, but just as often it swerves hard…
Ratings are subjective. Everyone has their own system for rating things, from a simple thumbs up or thumbs down all the way to 100 point (or more?) scales. For the media section of my site, I wanted to show how things I’ve read, watched, or played have impacted me. I decided on a pretty standard 5 star system, without half stars. That gives a decent range of ratings without being overly detailed.…
Last weekend we drove two hours west for a whirlwind weekend. Over some rivers, through some woods, to my grandmother’s birth and burial place we went. We went to bury my mom’s ashes and to visit my old university. And we snuck in some educational entertainment as well. A burial My grandparents are both buried in the cemetery of my grandmother’s tiny hometown of Dayton, Virginia . Even most native…
I am overwhelmed and thankful to every wonderful person who donated to St. Jude through my campaign this year. Thanks to them, we managed to raise just over $1000, helping Relay raise over $725,000 so far this year! The last batch of stickers and magnets went in the mail yesterday. I sent stickers to multiple states in the US as well as Austria, Canada, and the United Kingdom. (I had to learn how…
Yesterday on Mastodon, Dave Rupert made this statement : We probably need a better metaphor than "packages" because that makes it sound like something you got from a Better Business Bureau retailer (you didn't) and you opened the box (you didn't) and you know what's inside (you don't). I’m fairly certain he said this in response to the recent major security incidents involving NPM packages being…
We’ve donated to St. Jude for the past few years as part of the Relay campaign they run every September. One of our close friends is a host on the network , and my wife and I both enjoy a bunch of their podcasts . Their annual Podcastathon is always an amazing event to watch. Last year, I discovered that several Relay members also run additional campaigns, and I enjoyed participating in some of…
If you’re reading this post, my new site is live. It’s been several months in the making and several years in the planning. Over the past few months, I squirreled away time in the evenings and on weekends writing CSS, creating twig templates, and tweaking various things to rethink my site from the ground up. I kept most of the content, but a lot of it has been updated and cleaned up. Nitty gritty…
Tomorrow is the first day of school for the kiddo. And not just any first day … the first day of high school. It’s still hard to believe that we’ve already come this far. It still feels like just yesterday we were terrified new parents coming home from the hospital with this newborn that we had no clue how to care for. (We still have no clue, but we’ve gotten just a little better at faking it some…
Ever since I first discovered RSS Club , I knew I wanted to participate on my site. Secret categories, clandestine RSS feeds, posts that no one sees unless they’re in the know? I love everything about it. (There are whole sections of my site that I play around with and nobody ever sees ...) I have lots of ideas for posts to stash in this secret drawer. But this is the first. I’m writing it mostly…
Since starting a new full-time UX role in the healthcare industry last year, I’ve been busy learning a lot. I have talked with numerous clinicians and inventory folks in hospitals large and small. I've observed live medical procedures to learn how nurses document them. I've shadowed inventory specialists restocking vital supplies used in surgery. I've also spent the last couple years assisting an…
Last weekend, we did something we’ve talked about doing for years. On Friday morning, we hopped on a train and rode up to New York City for a brief weekend trip. We are planning a longer trip there later this year, but one of the shows we most wanted to see was ending before then. So we decided to go up early to catch the show and get a small taste of New York before our longer trip. The Train…
The world has gotten kind of arches an eyebrow and gestures all around lately, you know. Even before last year’s absolutely gut-wrenching election results leading into this year’s worse mayhem, we’ve dealt with several major family medical crises for the past few years. It’s been a lot, for longer than I care to consider. One of the things that has helped me (and us) cope has been cozy, calm…
With everything that happened last year , my theme ( Rebuild ) kind of took a back seat to taking care of my family first. I did get some time early in the year to work on creative things that I enjoyed immensely, but the back half of the year was a blur of appointments, health care, and focusing on what had to get done next. This year, I want to get back to basics. To rest. To recover. To focus…
Who could resist those puppy dog eyes? We couldn't. I should have posted this months ago, but life was a bit busy. We got a puppy last July, a little floofy Samoyed puffball that we affectionately named Kaladin. Yes, we named him after the character from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. We call him Kal for short. He’s a stoic sweetheart with a curious, goofy attitude. His head and…
I’ve seen this challenge making the rounds on a bunch of sites: Ethan Marcotte , Rachel Andrew , Jon Hicks , Lynn Fisher , Naz Hamid , Jeremy Keith , Zach Leatherman , and Matt Haughey . It made me a bit nostalgic, so I thought it would be fun to answer here as well. Why did you start blogging in the first place? From the late 90s, I just enjoyed writing things and putting them on the web. A…
Yes, I’m posting my 2024 year in review a month into the next year. Last year was one of the hardest years of my life, and I’m only just now starting to get back into a “normal” rhythm. So here goes … In brief? I started the year unemployed, having been laid off in December 2023 along with many of my coworkers. I spent the first four months frantically job hunting, working and reworking my…
My mom passed away on November 2 of last year. The last couple years were rough on her, starting with a stroke in December 2022. The stroke affected her left side, particularly her vision. The loss of dexterity and ability to see fully made a huge impact on her ability to do the things she loved most: sewing, scrapbooking, painting, and crafting in general. In April of last year, she was diagnosed…
I had the opportunity to watch some of the videos from XOXO this past August over the weekend. And goodness, the ones I watched were amazing. Heartfelt, inspiring, challenging, and everything in between. I will certainly be dipping back to watch more as I have time, but following are the few that I‘ve seen so far: Erin Kissane talked about her work on the COVID Tracking Project, how our modern…