A collection of 33 posts
What can I say? The Daily Photo Project suffered some setbacks over the summer. I’ve continued to take photos, but the numbers have plummeted. What happened? Why so few?
There are too many excuses to name. Relocation and laziness top most lists, but there’s one more subtle factor.
I lost my muse.
Now, this project was never entirely inspired by a person. The goals I set were goals I aspired to achieve. I wanted to learn my camera, and I have. I wanted to learn which lens to use in which situation, and I’ve definitely improved. I
I’m rebuilding my computer. Why? A game, of course.
Like so many others in the geeky computer gaming world, I’m impatiently awaiting the August 12th release of No Man’s Sky. This appears to be, in every way, my kind of game. Thoughtful, strategic, fantastical, multiplayer but not too dependent on other players. It’s been too long since I last idled away a day lost in a gaming world. I’m too old and slow to be any good at first person shooters, and I’ve never made an effort to analyze weapon and resource matchups in
More than a decade ago, my world collapsed.
A marriage crumbled. Undesired change attacked from every direction. Powerless to stop it, too shocked and confused to be anything but reactionary, I limped along, wounded but not quite dead. I couldn’t pay my bills. I nearly lost my house. I’d been a stay-at-home dad for years, and all my former business connections lived hundreds of miles away on distant coasts, so I struggled to find work, to make money. I cashed in 401ks. I borrowed money from family. I racked up debt I never thought I’d pay off.
In anticipation of a move, I’ve put new carpet and paint in my living room. No big deal, right?
Wrong. The living room is where my books live.
Floor to ceiling books. A full wall of shelves. Stacks of books congregating on an end table. Books I’ve loved. Books I haven’t read. College textbooks. Coffee table books. Collectibles, sentimental keepsakes, nostalgia inducing paperbacks, bargain priced classics I’ll never get around to reading. Walls of memories. Walls of adventure. Walls of sadness and romance and heartache and saving the world from evil. It’s quite the room.
Some time around 2011, I stopped writing code. I was a full stack .NET developer with a preference for front-end work. That meant HTML, CSS, and Javascript at the time, with a bit of AJAX (and awful .NET ajax containers).
Our tiny company had doubled in size. Our core product (a multifamily apartment marketing tool) was taking off. I had taken over design responsibilities, because I was decent at it, and being the primary front-end developer it was easy for me to tweek designs as I built. But one thing lead to another, the team grew, I took on management
“Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” - Golda Meir
A new year. A new set of objectives. Well, technically, an old set of objectives refreshed in honor of the obsolete tradition of pinning a new calendar on the wall.
Everything learned and studied and pursued the past few years begins to bubble to the surface, accompanied by the ways and means to apply those hard-earned insights to creative endeavors.
I seem to finally understand what’s required to create instead of merely consume. Words. Photos. Movies. Apps. They’re
In seventh grade, my English teacher assigned The Hobbit as reading material. I hated reading books for school. I either read too slowly or I had too little patience for the lengthy bouts of reading necessary to finish on schedule. I don’t remember how much I read, but I can’t imagine I made it as far as Mirkwood. I simply wasn’t interested.
Two years later, my sister had the same English teacher, and during winter break it was my sister’s turn to accompany Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain. Somehow, we found ourselves in a battle to