I flew though LAX yesterday and forgot how hostile free airport WiFi used to be in the mid-2000s. LAX uses Boingo Wireless (aka Earthlink dialup's follow-up venture) which first tries to sell you a $15/mo plan (that used to be adopted by other airports). To get | Continue reading
You've probably seen the tone-deaf ad from Apple about their new super thin iPad. I get the concept they were going for—it's like a thousand devices rolled into one, but the way the ad was shot revels in destruction of beloved things and really | Continue reading
The thing I remember most about your first few days on this planet was the anxiety. The actual birth was an ordeal in and of itself, but barely 24 hours later nurses were shoving us out of the hospital, giving two young adults with the least amount of experience around | Continue reading
I mentioned a book I was planning to write in my "Embrace the weird" post a couple weeks ago. The book idea is definitely weird, as it's a super niche one. I'm writing a guidebook to the fourteen different stadiums that make up the | Continue reading
After writing my previous post about my dream blogging content management system, the folks over at Shop Talk asked me to come on and discuss it more. It’s on their site here and I’ve uploaded the episode MP3 directly here as well. Shoptalkshow 612 0:00 | Continue reading
Back in the Summer of 2019, I was in Seattle doing customer interviews for work, and I stopped by a friend's apartment in downtown Seattle. I spent a few hours there while using his wifi along with a spare desk. Nothing was too unusual until I went to | Continue reading
The other day I was complaining to a friend how I've been spinning my wheels lately, having trouble finding any projects or gigs I could work on. He came back with a quick, short, smart response: Who cares? Just make weird shit. It hit me like a ton | Continue reading
I'm a big fan of food and I'm always looking out for new places to eat, especially in Portland, Oregon where lots of new food places regularly spring up in food carts and restaurant pop-ups.Over the past few years I've also grown fond of TikTok/Instagram Reels about food | Continue reading
Today's total solar eclipse features four minutes of totality stretching from Texas to Vermont, but I didn‘t make travel plans to head out to the midwest this time around. I wish I could see it but I feel ok missing it because I got to live | Continue reading
Ever since I changed over from Wordpress to Ghost to power this site, I've gotten emails and replies asking me if Ghost is really good and worth making the jump from any other blogging engines. My answer is this: it's currently the least bad one out | Continue reading
Every year around late March/early April I check out the Woodburn Tulip Farm website to see what their field report is looking like. For the past few weeks I've been obsessively watching cherry blossoms on trees instead and totally forgot about the tulip farm until I saw | Continue reading
Instead of a rundown of every game in week 2 of the NWSL season, I thought I'd instead mention a few high points and low points from the weekend full of games. The Good The Washington Spirit vs. Bay FC game was tied 1-1 and scoreless for the | Continue reading
Since the pandemic began, I've been taking lots of solo road trips around the western US in lieu of flying anywhere. And after 20,000 miles of trips in the last couple years, I thought I'd write up some tips I picked up along the way. | Continue reading
Women's pro soccer in the US finally kicked off their 2024 season this past weekend and so I did a quick recap after watching the first seven games. San Diego Wave vs. NY/NJ Gotham: Challenge Cup In the past, the NWSL kicked off each season with a | Continue reading
It all started innocently enough. I bought a new lawn mower and searched YouTube to figure out how to use it well. I'd only ever mowed a tiny patch before and figured I should know what real landscaping people do in their jobs so I could replicate it. | Continue reading
Our pets have small ailments right now and we're giving pills to both a cat and dog and there is a difference in how that goes. Tricking a cat into eating a pill is like sitting down to chess with a world-ranked grandmaster. 👨🏻 pspspsps hey buddy, | Continue reading
I was glad to hear President Biden mention a minimum income tax rate for billionaires of 25% in his recent State of the Union address. Honestly, I don't think it goes far enough, but I wanted to write down some reasons why I think it's a | Continue reading
PJ Vogt started one of my favorite podcasts on earth, Reply All, and before that, did one that was also great for On The Media at NPR. A couple years ago, he did a podcast series on crypto, but last year returned to covering the weirdest corners of the internet | Continue reading
I've ridden bikes all my life, and pretty seriously on the road and dirt since the early 2000s. I try out a lot of bike gear to get things lighter, stronger, and more comfortable. I figured I might as well write up some quick reviews of things that have made | Continue reading
At various points in my life, I've tried to maintain a hobby/indulgence of going to a movie theater once a week to see a new film. I love movies and can never get enough of them, but setting aside 2-3 hours and $20 each week to keep it up | Continue reading
The other day I was thinking about all the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of hours of YouTube I've watched in the past year and how one unexpected video stuck with me for weeks later was this one, about how to enjoy poetry.All my 51 years, I've had a fraught relationship | Continue reading
The other day I had to grab a USB-A to USB-C cable to use CarPlay in my spouse's car that I was borrowing, and I grabbed the first one I could find in my house which was weirdly only 6 inches long. I honestly don't know why I own such | Continue reading
Last week I drove about 2,000 miles from northwestern Oregon down to Southern California and back. It was about 15 hours each way and I saw a lot and took a few notes along the way.Nothing beats dead straight roads for audiobooksI've done this trip close to | Continue reading
The NWSL is the pro women's soccer league here in America, and I've followed the league pretty closely since about 2015 (2013 was their first season). I also love typography and design, so every year I eagerly await the slow rollout of new kits. Thankfully for 2024, today was the | Continue reading
In no particular order:Click the screenshot to watch it on YouTubeClick the screenshot to watch it on YouTube | Continue reading
Cory Doctorow’s newest book, The Bezzle, is a second installment in his Martin Hench, tech-nerd, forensic accountant series. It was released Tuesday and I got my Kickstarter-backed audiobook onto my phone the same day. Yesterday, I started a 12-hour road trip to California … | Continue reading
Every couple years I set aside a whole day for riding my bike outside of Portland, Oregon on the Banks-Vernonia trail. I think I've done it four times now.It's about 22 miles between the two towns, and I always park at the Banks trailhead, pull out my bike, and | Continue reading
I spent nearly 7 years working at Slack on a variety of marketing projects, but eventually I honed in on writing about customer education, hoping to answer the most popular question I got regularly, which was "How should I be using Slack? And how can I get better at | Continue reading
I'm a huge fan of women's sports. My favorite sport on earth is women's pro soccer, both domestic and international. I also wake up at 5am many winter mornings to watch live bike races streaming from Europe, all so I can see how the | Continue reading
As I mentioned in my previous post, it was no small task to migrate an old blog from one system to another. A few people asked how I did it, so I'm sharing some notes I wrote along the way.Why leave Wordpress.com?I've used Wordpress for over a | Continue reading
I started working on MetaFilter in the Fall of 1998, but just before launching it I realized the new blog I built was for a community, not just me. So I built a little blog engine to power my personal domain starting in Summer of 1999.my first personal blog | Continue reading
Back in 2019, I bought the first turntable I’d touched since the early 1980s as a kid. It was super fun at first, because it was analog and lacking all the features I’d had in MP3 players for the past two decades. You just put the needle down and consume a whole album without int … | Continue reading
I watch a ton of YouTube, on the order of an hour or two each day and I can honestly say the no-ads premium family account on YouTube is one of the best bargains on the internet for everyone in my house. Lately, YouTube creators are going through a reckoning, and I think it’s unf … | Continue reading
Today I got an instagram comment on a very old photo, so I popped over to see it was spam and deleted it. But then I noticed I linked to my cousin by name in the photo, and he died unexpectedly a few years ago, so I went to his profile to check it out. … Continue reading "Move fa … | Continue reading
Today I got a call from a legit looking number: 877-255-5923 and since I was parked in my car, I had time to google it while on the call to see it was the Apple Card Goldman Sachs official phone number. A guy on the line said he was in the fraud department at Goldman … Continue r … | Continue reading
Last week I was in LA to get some sun after a dismal cold winter in Oregon. I hung out with my aunt and while she’s been a massive Dodgers fan since she was a kid, in the last couple seasons I’ve followed the Dodgers too so I could keep our daily text chain going. … Continue read … | Continue reading
I take a lot of road trips, but I never knew Weather on the Way existed until this week and it’s a simple concept. Put in an address for where you’d like to go and the app plots the route using Apple Maps then looks up the weather along the way as well as highlights … Continue re … | Continue reading
Time keeps marching on and as we collectively age, I thought it’d be helpful to drop a few tips I’ve learned after being on this planet for over 50 years, and using a computer for most of them. In no particular order, here they are: Get the largest screen possible, but run a lowe … | Continue reading
For the last ten years, I’ve been a big fan of wifi garage doors because you don’t have to carry an extra key or controller and you can automate things once the garage opens (like turn on lights in your house). I’ve had Chamberlain/LiftMaster doors for years now in two different … | Continue reading
Volvo has a new small pure electric compact crossover coming out soon called the EX30, and from early reviews it’s going to be a killer small city EV, about a foot and a half shorter than most crossovers while having similar interior space, and can run for 200-250 miles on a char … | Continue reading
20 years ago, I joined the Hertz gold program back before Uber/Lyft existed and you had to have a car in almost every American city you flew to. Fast forward to 2023 and I hadn’t regularly rented cars in a decade but recently I grabbed one and forgot how useful they could be, esp … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I finished a major project at work and they gave our entire wing of the company a day in October of our own choosing to take off as a reward for the extra hours and long nights. I picked a random Thursday in the middle of October and spent the day … Continue read … | Continue reading
I cannot WAIT for this new film to come out on Peacock. I have grown to love the Please Don’t Destroy video shorts on SNL and love their writing (a slightly nerdier Lonely Island-type vibe). This trailer looks a bit like a Superbad-crossed-with-Goonies film but I’m still on board … | Continue reading
I’m a big fan of women’s pro soccer and followed the sport for years. One of my favorite players is Carson Pickett, who I first noticed from her expert defending against my favorite team. She’s great at set pieces and can place a corner kick perfectly in the box ready for any tea … | Continue reading
Back in 2010, I was traveling internationally a couple times a year and I decided to go through the process of getting a Global Entry card from the TSA. It’s like a magic pass that lets you run through customs in almost any country in just a few minutes, skipping lines and inspec … | Continue reading
Yesterday, I went on the Louisville Slugger factory tour, mostly to enjoy the smell of fresh wood bats in their factory. After I got my tickets, I realized I also went on the very same tour the first time I visited Kentucky back in 2013. On the 2013 tour, pro bats were 100% handm … | Continue reading
Last week I stumbled on some automotive news that Ford released their entire library of concept cars going back to the 1950s. It’s a simple site that lets you search and if you put in Ford model names of popular cars, you’ll be rewarded with weird concepts throughout the years. M … | Continue reading
I loved the Barbie movie so much I saw it twice. It’s so much better than it had any right to be, and covered all sorts of thorny subjects like patriarchy and misogyny with wit and humor that it’s certainly going to open up a lot of people’s eyes (especially men). The look of the … | Continue reading