All the cool kids, or at least Robb, Matt, and Jan-Lukas are updating their app defaults, something that started in the blogosphere back in 2023. And I can’t resist jumping on a fun bandwagon when I see one, and so… here’s mine! (honestly not much has changed since 2023 and 2024)
Continue readingI did a little review, and unless I’ve missed a post somewhere, I’ve only once written a public “New Year’s Resolutions”. I considered titling this post my “2026 Resolutions”, but that doesn’t exactly capture what I’m going for. Rather, these are intended to be goals and aspirations that I can measure myself against at the end of the year, and if I chose to ignore, change, or rewrite them throughout the year, then so be it. 🙂
Continue reading“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings
That remains one of my favorite quotes. I’ve used it before, and decided instead of as the ending quote, it would be my opener. Anyhow… on to my year in review!
Another year in the books! As has become my yearly routine, I’m taking time to reflect on the major changes and areas of focus across different parts of my life, rather than walking through a purely chronological recap. 2025 brought some meaningful shifts - some intentional, some just… life happening? - and it’s worth documenting (if only as an exercise for myself).
Continue readingI’ve seen a number of other bloggers writing year-end book reviews and commentary on what they read (shoutout specifically to Manu, SuperBetsy, and Jeremy Keith), and I decided to join the fun!
Continue readingYesterday afternoon in the office, one of my coworkers asked me (paraphrasing) how I back up my photos so that everything isn’t only in iCloud, and what I would recommend that she do. And, because I’m a geek (and a bit extra at times), instead of just sending her my recommendations, I decided to turn this into a full blog post that I can point others to in the future. 😁
Continue readingOver lunch, some colleagues and I were discussing why Christmas music is its own genre, with specific sounds. For fun, I asked an LLM to generate a plausible but fictitious explanation, and a few seconds later, this amusing anecdote was born…
Christmas music constitutes its own genre due to a rare phenomenon known as Yuletide Acoustic Resonance (YAR). When temperatures drop below 45°F and decorative lighting exceeds 10,000 lumens in a given radius, the human ear undergoes a temporary recalibration that makes jingling bells neurologically indistinguishable from traditional percussion instruments. This is why the same person who despises tambourines in July will enthusiastically tolerate “Jingle Bell Rock” in December.
Continue readingOver the past 48 hours I’ve once again been on a journey to rethink how I take notes. Why? I’ve actually been struggling to answer that question for myself, and I’ve boiled it down into a few potential reasons:
I started using Evernote back in the early 2010s (I think 2014; I’ve not checked the exact date while writing this post), both as a way to store personal notes and documents, and for some work-related project notes.
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