[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager kno … | Continue reading
Last week, the Eames Institute Digital Product team got together at the newly-opened Eames Archives in Richmond, CA and the currently-under-renovation Ranch in Petaluma, CA. Llisa Demetrios – one of the Eames grandchildren, a founder of the Eames Institute, and our Chief Curator … | Continue reading
Why do whitecaps seem almost still when you’re 1000 feet in the air looking down at the ocean? | Continue reading
Read “Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools” on 404 Media. What a huge bummer. Instead of writing a ton more here, will point you to this post by tante which reflects my thoughts. Will probably keep my self-hosted WordPress site for a good while longer, but t … | Continue reading
The Eames Institute team is checking out some frameworks and static site generators for a project, and I wanted to see how Eleventy and Astro compare in terms of build time. Zach Leatherman’s 2022 article “Which generator builds Markdown the fastest?” is probably the most thoroug … | Continue reading
We visited Dia Beacon for the first time, with B. Great place. This is Dan Flavin’s untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b from 1978. B’s favorite was Louise Bourgeois’s spider, I think, or maybe Arena by Rita McBride. It was fun stumbling across Occasional Papers’ Explorer in the bo … | Continue reading
B’s first snowman, about two feet tall. We couldn’t find much else for the eyes and mouth, and I can’t stop laughing at it. | Continue reading
Just read through “You sound like a bot” by Adi Robertson in the Verge. I hadn’t really put my finger on the right word for my feelings about AI until reading that article but that’s it: it feels very mediocre. If you want to get a rough overview of how the average frontend engin … | Continue reading
The Eames Archives is open! 🎉 Visit the Eames Institute website to book a tour. The new Visit page on the site hints at our major overhaul of EI’s digital presence and tooling, currently in progress under the direction of Eric Li. More to come… | Continue reading
🎶 On the sec-ond day of Christ-mas 🎶 🎶 My true love* gave to me: 🎶 🎶 A dou-ble_ eye in-fec-tion_ 🎶 * My son. I was going to also write, “At least he’s not sick!” But that is false as of the wee hours of this morning, poor little dud … | Continue reading
Can’t remember how we got talking about it, but another member of the Brooklyn Conservatory Chorale told me that she’s very in to English Change Ringing. I thought I hadn’t heard of it before, but I have heard it, many times since I lived over there for 10 years. Listen to an exa … | Continue reading
Most of the NYC crew from the Eames Institute took a little field trip to 101 Spring Street yesterday. There was a lot I found beautiful, and a few things that gave me pause. But one of the things I most enjoyed inspecting was Donald Judd’s big 14-seater whitewood table in the ki … | Continue reading
EL introduced me to contrast.tools recently, it uses the Advanced Perception of Color Algorithm (APCA) to check the accessibility of your text based on the desired colors and the font weight + size. But importantly, it also provides a lookup table to verify how you should (possib … | Continue reading
A few recent happenings. I started working with the excellent Eames Institute last week as Engineering Lead. 🎉 It’s been good fun so far, and seems like a great team. A heck of a lot of things I care about are rolled up in that one role. B is a gorgeous ball of wants and… | Continue reading
A while back, Manuel Moreale asked me to take part in People and Blogs, a “series where [he asks] interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs”. After a very major delay on my part, I finally answered his questions. If you want to find out more than you probably ev … | Continue reading
I just remembered… Another one of my favorites from the Kronos Quartet anniversary concert was Laurie Anderson’s piece “Nothing Left but Their Names”. I knew I would like it, but I didn’t expect to also learn another verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I wish I’d written it dow … | Continue reading
I was delighted to accompany DB last-minute to Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary gig at Carnegie Hall on Friday night. This was the set. Severiano Briseño, “El Sinaloense (The Man from Sinaloa)” (2001; arr. Osvaldo Golijov) Gabriella Smith, “Keep Going” (2023, co-commissioned by … | Continue reading
Makes about 8-10 servings, depends on how you’re serving it. Takes about 10-15 minutes prep to chop and mince, then about 1½ hours of relatively hands-off cooking. Heat a large pot over medium-high heat. Add about 2 TBSP of oil of your choosing, and then two sliced onions. Cook t … | Continue reading
Been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” a lot (again) recently. Tonight, I came across Jeremy Keith’s journal post “Decision time” and instantly thought, “Yes, and I wonder if he’s read that essay…” I was going to recommend it, but wanted to re … | Continue reading
We took a little day trip up to Storm King with some friends this past weekend on the most terrifyingly summery day of Autumn. B seemed to love it. Of what we saw, I think that Calder’s The Arch and Noguchi’s Momo Taro were his favorites. I think he was just bowled over by the… | Continue reading
I gave up too soon! Emerson from Flywheel did more digging in the Fastly cache documentation and realized that we could tweak the NGINX config to fully support content negotiation. He added a Vary header to the necessary URLs et voilà, everything started working properly. Now, co … | Continue reading
I recently moved my hosting from NFSN to Flywheel. NFSN had served me beautifully for years, very economically, but I just don’t have as much time for admin anymore and Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting was a useful move to cut down on that stress. Alongside the hosting move, … | Continue reading
It’s been an awful, heartbreaking October. I don’t really know what to say about the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Part of it is that I don’t feel like I know enough. Both about all of the micro and macro events that have led up to this, and what’s going on in this moment. And… | Continue reading
Finally went ahead and joined Bluesky, @piperhaywood.bsky.social (missed out on @piper, ah well). Thx for the code, Sam. 😘 Definitely not planning to leave Mastodon any time soon, but it felt like it was time to give it a go. IDK, Mastodon has started to feel… very pessim … | Continue reading
I’ve been working on a little side project recently that has been in the backlog for ages. I finally have a moment to pull it together, and it’s helping me brush up on a few Next.js 13 features I haven’t had the chance to play with yet. As part of that, I’m doing a lot… | Continue reading
See Dave Rupert’s post on scroll shadows with animation-timeline. Browser support isn’t quite there yet so it’s more of a progressive enhancement, but this is a great use case example. He wrote that off the back of Bramus’s scroll-driven animation exploration, and wow. So many of … | Continue reading
Currently listening to Transatlanticism 🐦 by Death Cab for Cutie. One of my best friends from college just invited me to the Death Cab + Postal Service 20th anniversary gig at Madison Square Garden on the 20th. I am SO pumped. Listening to Transatlanticism is giving me ma … | Continue reading
Turns out B is a biiiiiiig fan of Jonathan Richman. Wheels on the Bus, Afternoon, Ice Cream Man, Tandem Jump. Gonna try some more this weekend. | Continue reading
ooh.directory is “a collection of 2,018 blogs about every topic”. Pretty cool, and useful at a time when the major search engines seem to be totally whacked. And, my site is on it! Found out about it from Sam. ❤️ This led me in turn to its creator Phil Gyford’s personal site. Lov … | Continue reading
All of the birthdays in our little family fall within a 15 day period in the middle of the summer. There was a lot of cake around for nearly a month. And then we went to the UK to visit family who kindly wanted to celebrate all of our birthdays, so we did it all… | Continue reading
Counterpoint to yesterday’s post: “Kill your personas: How persona spectrums champion real user needs” by Margaret Price at Microsoft. A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It … | Continue reading
If you’re a designer or engineer and have never dug in to accessibility personas or cognitive walkthroughs before, I’d recommend checking out GDS’s accessibility persona homepages and their accompanying blog post about how they use persona profiles to test accessibility. As of ri … | Continue reading
It’s been a wild few months professionally. Earlier this year, I was asked to be the Engineering Manager at SuperHi and started in that role in May. That same month, I gave a talk at Parsons on the invitation of Eric Li and Michael Fehrenbach for their Typography and Interaction … | Continue reading
This is my Grandma Piper’s classic white frosting recipe that she always used on the family recipe for white layer cake. Her notes: “This frosting is super. It never hardens on the cake. BUT, it is only enough for sides and top. So must use a filling.” I just doubled it for B’s b … | Continue reading
It’s such a stereotype. But there really is a moment when suddenly they’re not a baby anymore. You open up your phone to look for particular photo and notice it’s automatically made a memories album of your kid. So you click and watch, and realize you missed the moment, whenever … | Continue reading
Context This recipe was in the cookbook that my Grandma Piper customized for me. This is apparently the cake that the Piper family always made for weddings (so my great-grandma’s recipe on my Grandpa’s side, I think), and my Grandma made it for birthday parties. I made this for t … | Continue reading
This post by Peter Richardson is wild. I considered doing something like this a few years ago but A) the tech didn’t exist / wasn’t easily accessible, and B) I’ve been sort of afraid of how deep the rabbit hole is. | Continue reading
My favorite season as a kid was summer (obvi). Then autumn in my 20s, maybe because I actually started experiencing it then. Now it’s spring. You get all of the excitement and anticipation of summer without the humidity and mosquitos. Not sure it will ever be winter, but who know … | Continue reading
I think it’s time to get in to macrame. The big girl version of my childhood friendship bracelet habit. F**k It, bring back friendship bracelets too! | Continue reading
My grandma’s cheesecake is truly the best around in my opinion, and it has been a huge hit on the extremely rare occasions I have made it for friends. It is a little involved to make, you really need to follow the instructions and ingredients quite carefully in order for this to … | Continue reading
This is a re-written version of my grandma’s recipe. I inhaled this as a kid. It’s basically a really massive “drop” biscuit that you then slice in to portions and drown in strawberries + milk. It is one of the quickest and easiest things to make, a must between May and June. You … | Continue reading
I think you could do a ton of great variations on this recipe. Like a crushed gingersnap base with chocolate ice cream and butterscotch chips instead of chocolate chips. Or a Biscoff cookie base with coffee ice cream. Or a graham cracker base with quality, real vanilla ice cream. … | Continue reading
This site is ‘bout to become a recipe blog for a hot second… The SuperHi crew was talking about favorite cakes recently, and I have a lot of family recipes to share. | Continue reading
So apparently you can’t set your iPhone to show AM and PM alongside the 12-hour time. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s a pretty significant accessibility issue. My grandpa is 100 years old, we just celebrated his birthday in March. He’s doing pretty darn well f … | Continue reading
Ingredients 1¼ c (112 g) rolled oats 1¼ c (250 g) unsweetened apple sauce ¼ c (50 g) sugar ½ c (118 mL) milk (oat milk works too) 4 T coconut oil (melted butter works too) 1 t vanilla extract 1 large egg 1 c (130 g) whole wheat flour 1 t baking powder ¾… | Continue reading
We made it up to the northernmost stanza stone with B. He wasn’t thrilled about the whole walk, but he did love squishing his boots in the mud and chowing down on a vegan Greggs sausage roll. During lunch one day, we heard an insane screeching in front of my sister-in-law’s house … | Continue reading