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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 Building My experience with building was about 20 years out of date, and even then, I hadn’t done it from scratch.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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
A few weeks ago, I reached a streak of 1000 days of Duolingo. After almost three years of consistently studying Mandarin every day (except for the stray streak freezes), I then quit with no intention of continuing. Here’s my story with Duolingo.