Shifting Identities
In a twist on my younger self, I saw a joke recently about what you’d tell your eight year old self. Which reminded me of my mom and her collection of bells. Anybody who knew my mom knew she collected bells and if they wanted to get her a present, it would be a bell. My mom’s collection was getting out of control and she soon told people to stop. We often associate topics or things or idea...
Taking a risk
Back in 1999, I was working as a manager in a retail computer store selling and building PC hardware and software. On the side, my hobby was playing with the web—a nascent technology that had only been around for a few years and becoming increasingly popular. It took me awhile to clue in that there were people making careers with this thing that I was doing for fun. A light bulb went off and I r...
My Younger Self
There’s an exercise where you ask yourself what you’d tell your younger self if you ever had the chance. My answer has been and continues to be that I wouldn’t tell my younger self anything. It would be nice to learn the hard lessons earlier but who’s to say I’d listen to my future self any better than I listened to my past self? Who’s to say there wouldn’t be other lessons or mi...
Lenticular Photos
Growing up, I always loved those lenticular cards—ones that had two photos that transitioned as you rotated from side to side. Maybe it was a hockey player taking a shot or a superhero transforming from mild mannered day job to caped crusader. Since Apple released Live Photos, I’ve always felt like they could be used to create a similar effect and yet, no photo app that I’ve seen has imp...
No Analytics
It was nice to see Rach talk about stripping out analytics. I stripped out my analytics years ago and while I thought I wrote about it, I can’t find where I did so. My apologies if I’m repeating myself. (I’m getting old.) When I was deciding to strip them out, I was in the middle of looking at the performance of my sites and one of the things I realized was that much of the JavaScript I ...
Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease
Europe saw more than 30,000 cases of measles in 2023, compared with 941 in 2022. For many, the success of vaccination meant the effects of the diseases became so insignificant as to become invisible—to the point where the vaccinations themselves become suspect. Why vaccinate for something that isn’t affecting us? It’s a terrible bit of logic but one that we see elsewhere. “Hey, we need ...
Vibing 2
My Vibing playlist slowly builds as I add a track here or there to the list. Here’s a few tracks I’ve added recently. Say What You Want by 33.3 After falling head over heels for Jungle, I instantly clicked with 33.3. But I couldn’t find any information on them and they’ve only got a few tracks released on Apple Music. A Google search brings up a band from the late ‘90s. Then, I cam...
Empty Townhouse
My therapist asked me to think of a happy memory from my childhood. I remembered back to when I was five years old. I only have about four memories from before the age of six and this is one of them. My mom and I lived in this townhouse complex in the northeast end of Calgary. I couldn’t tell you where it was exactly but I remember that much. The beige townhouses were grouped in sections. It was...