With a handful of vacation days to use, we wanted to take a short, local family vacation. After evaluating the options, we decided to make the short drive down to Monterey to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium and see the beach. We haven’t had many family vacations. In fact, we have only done overnights away […]
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My Potted Garden Graveyard
I have struggled tremendously to keep plants alive. Despite the power of nature to thrive in all sorts of environments, I am consistently able to take them out. I’m not alone in this. The internet is filled with house plant memes. I don’t quite identify with the obsessive streak, but I do know how difficult […]
A few months, my coworkers and I were chatting around the lunch table about the merits of various desserts. What’s the best ice cream flavor? Does bubble milk tea count as a dessert? When the conversation got serious, we drew up a March Madness-style bracket to find the winning dessert. The details of the bracket […]
Depending on who you ask, ChatGPT (and other similar LLM chatbots) might be impressive, dangerous, misunderstood, or one of many other things. However, it and other recent generative AI have created plenty of entertaining content. Crossing over my interests between tabletop RPGs and computing, I read an article about playing D&D with ChatGPT as the […]
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What I Cooked in 2022
Since we had our first child, I have taken far more photos than ever before. I’m glad to have digital cameras because many of the photos are terrible. Sometimes I just miss a funny moment, sometimes it’s blurry, or sometimes it looked better in the moment. These mistakes bother me, so I regularly go through […]
From 2022, my recommendations span games, viewing, cooking, and reading. Video Game: Super Mario Galaxy I didn’t grow up with any gaming consoles, so although I played many great PC gaming franchises, I never played the likes of Final Fantasy, Zelda, or GTA. Recently, I tried out Super Mario Odyssey, and I couldn’t put it […]
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My 2023 Goals
For a few years, I used Alex Vermeer’s 8,760 Hours to do my annual review. The process covered twelve life areas (like fitness, social, money, etc.) with mind mapping to detail a snapshot of life, what next year could be, and a summary of a few goals. It was thorough and consistently led to insights, […]
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Building My First PC (Part 2)
Last time, I wrote about how I decided to build a PC and got through purchasing all of the parts. I’ll pick up from there with actually putting it together. Building My experience with building was about 20 years out of date, and even then, I hadn’t done it from scratch. I just tinkered with […]
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Building My First PC (Part 1)
For years, I have considered building a gaming PC. From the cost to the high-minded desire to not play more games, I have always found reasons to not do it. On the flip side, I never found a good enough reason to do it. Until this past year. A few months ago, we watched the […]
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2022 Goals Review
For the past several years, I have set New Years Goals and reviewed them. The magic number recently has been three goals, so let’s see how they went. Play “Happy Birthday” on Ukulele every day At the end of 2021, I started learning to play the ukulele because I wanted share music with my daughter. […]