Roundabout
I have many memories from when I was a child of road trips with my mom. We lived in Calgary and would head off in whatever direction. Maybe to Drumheller, where I’d indulge in my love of dinosaurs and gawk at hoodoos. Or towards Banff, into the Rocky Mountains. My mom said I always made a fantastic road trip companion as I usually fell asleep along the way. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was do...
Blogging Queue and Eh
I’ve been enjoying blogs a lot more, especially as a way of staying connected and up to date with friends, a slew of which have been tagging each other to write up their answers to some blogging questions. Susan tagged me and thus, here’s my entry. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I started getting into developing web sites professionally in 1999 and would write down so...
My Travel Tips
I just read through Kevin Kelly’s 50 Years of Travel Tips and it’s a solid list. I don’t know that I have any tips. People travel differently. My ex loves cruises. I see the appeal but it’s not my preferred type of travel. Neither is sitting on a beach (“earning 20%”) for a week. Although, in this -20º weather, sipping margaritas at a swim-up bar is very enticing. My prefere...
Utility Knife
I recently subscribed to Robb Knight’s blog and came across a post on utility knives. In a small bit of serendipity, I recently rediscovered my favourite utility knife. Having a little knife for opening up boxes and whatnot always felt like an unnecessary purchase. I usually just flip open a pair of scissors and use a side to slice through the box. It’s mildly unwieldy but sufficient. ...
On Approach
I came across these Guiding Principles for my website and it has me thinking what my principles or tenets or guiding lights might be for my own site. The initial tagline for my site was “tips, tricks, and bookmarks on web development”. I like to think that described the site rather well. Casual but professional, where even the personal posts were more often than not about professional matte...
Eloquent
I have a desire to write better. I’m self aware to the extent that I know—or believe I know—that my writing is simplistic. My sentences are short and direct. There isn’t much flourish. This can be handy when describing a technical topic in a blog post but not very handy when describing a technical topic in what should be a 500 page book. It’s also not very handy when wanting to...
Who Knows You
They say success is all about who you know but I’d argue—especially in our loosely connected world—it’s all about who knows you. One path to success—and I believe there are many—is to put content out there to gain an audience. Some of them are easy to do, some are harder. Here’s a quick list of ideas: Blog posts Magazine articles YouTube vids Twitch streaming CodePen ...
Time Scales
I stumbled across an old screenshot of text, heavily aged by its multi-generational jpeg artifacts—like looking at the stippled grain of film, telling the story from a dog’s perspective, living an entire lifetime and only catching a small span of its owner’s life. From there, I thought of the life of those that far exceed those of human life—like a tree. What must a human’s existence...