A few weeks ago, I updated my about page to move away from a weirdly detailed biography that I'm sure nobody read over to a simple, bulleted list of the things that currently make me feel like "me".¹

The list is the mix of the familial, professional, and personal aspirations that I am working toward right now toward the end of July 2025.

But a bulleted list of stuff that I'm really into feels like ripe content for a blog post, and I'm feeling bloggy lately... so without further ado, here's all the stuff I'm really into at the moment.

My family

This is the most crucial to me right now. I want to build memories with them that'll bond us together forever. We've been kicking this summer's butt with tons of soccer games, zoo visits, swimming pool evenings, early morning walks, parades, camping, all that good stuff.

I do, however, need to set up a date night with my wife. There's never enough one on one time for the two of us to relax and enjoy some laughs together. We've got some good concerts coming up in the fall, but an evening alone (maybe a trip up to Cheapo?) sounds ideal.

Software engineering

I've been building websites for nearly 30 years now, but I can't say I've ever expressly focused on getting really good at engineering.

I find myself at a job where I'm surrounded by exceptional engineers who challenge me daily, and my actual engineering chops have greatly improved since starting. I'm looking forward to deepening my understanding of how machine learning works in a production environment.

I'm also continuing progress on the Kneescraper project. Kneescraper is an LLM-powered tool that grabs data from unstructured post-operative surgical reports and structures it for use in centralized registries. We've received a grant and are finishing up our first published report on the progress, and I am absolutely floored with how cool this tech is.²

Get buff as hell

For decades now, I've said I've wanted to see how it feels to have a six pack.

Shortly before Christmas last year, I decided I was going to do 100 sit-ups every single day. As a result, I've done 22,000 sit-ups, which is pretty damn cool.

On top of that, I started getting into strength training. My first idea (because I'm cheap by training) was to just do 100 burpees a day in my garage. I'm up to 5,500 burpees since May, and again, I think that's pretty damn cool. Almost as cool: my family joined the gym that just opened in our town. I've completed 15 workout classes and have spent nearly every day at the outdoor pool with my wife and kids. (Bonus points!)

All of this exercise results in a physical reflection of the change I want to begin to embody more completely. I'm walking more upright, I'm not groaning when I sit up, I'm able to carry my kids for longer and keep up with them in the playground, which I've always said I want to do.

Now, to progress further down the physical health rabbit hole, I've learned that if you want to have a cut physique, exercise is roughly 25% of the work you need to put in.

The other 75%? Nutrition, of course. (They say abs are made or broken in the kitchen.)

So, for August, I'm going to try a cut. I want to see if I can simultaneously focus on my protein intake and eating healthy. My cut will mostly be cutting sweets and alcohol and all the stuff I know is obviously bad for me. I think that'll be more sustainable than holding to a calorie max.

Oh, and we also bought a blender, so I'm gonna become a protein shake bro. I dunno, why not?

Rebuild the back patio.

My friend Paul has been helping me figure out how to destroy and re-build my back patio.

Long story short: the pavers on my back patio have been busted up and crumbling for years, and the wooden retaining wall that surrounds the pad is rotted. So I decided to do it.

This is a huge step for me, because it's been the first time since moving into this house nearly a decade ago now that I feel like I'm making this place my own. It's exhilarating!

So far, we've removed the old patio and shipped it off in Bagsters. Right now, there's a big mound of sand and gravel in my backyard.

Next up: we're going to build a small retaining wall out of big cinder blocks, and then we're gonna fill it in with more paver base, and then we're gonna lay the pavers.

I want all of this done before the end of August, so let's go! I just need to order the materials, which I will do tomorrow.

Curate the perfect digital garden of music

I decided today (for some reason) that it is time to sink myself back into this.

The actual folders and files which represent my music library of 2400ish albums are all randomly labeled, mistagged, missing album art, all of that... thus beginning the arduous task of going through each album and (a) deciding if I want it anymore or not, and (b) properly tagging it with beets.

I started tonight but got slowed down because I figured I should make a zip backup of everything as it exists right now.

Eventually, I'm hoping all this work makes my janky, vibe-coded music library website project better. Because that's only 10% of my library, and I think I should really approach this with the mindset of "I stand by everything in this library". I really want a bad ass garden where I can both explore new music and find respite in comfortable music. I can't do that with how janky things currently are.³

Read more memoirs

When I head into the office, my commute is one hour either way. Because I listen to a ton of music at work, I like to use my commute time to switch it up and listen to audiobooks.

For whatever reason, I've been entertained by musician memoirs, specifically those narrated by the author. I've completed books from Deryck Whibley (Sum 41), Dave Grohl, Mark Hoppus (Blink 182), and Geddy Lee (Rush).⁴

I might be ready to move beyond musician memoirs though, so I'm gonna start Stone Cold Steve Austin's next. We'll see.

If you have any recommendations for really good memoirs that are in audiobook form (and narrated by the author, preferably), let me know!

Turn the garage into a 70s UFO/alien-themed chill zone

I spent a week carefully going through the garage and cleaning it out back in May/June.

I still have a handful of items that need to be donated or sold or whatever, so I should really prioritize that for next week.

But after that, I have one more corner of the garage to clean up: the kid's corner. This contains a mess of balls, bikes, toys, and all sorts of random junk.

I have a vision for the corner, but I've been so consumed by the patio that I find myself without energy to devote to that.⁵

Anyway, all of that work a month or so ago paid off because the garage is usable now, and we've been using it a lot! I enjoy setting my camping chair at the edge of the door and watching the rain come down. I also do my burpees out there every morning around 6am.

The next project (after the patio, and after organizing the front corner of the garage) is to convert the projector screen we have into something with a motor so I can mount it to the ceiling and automatically raise and lower it.

Cool, so that's what I've got going on in my life right now. If any of that sounded interesting, please reach out! I only talk to my journal about this stuff, so getting to nerd out with others about any of this would absolutely make my day.

I find that having a list like this makes it a lot easier for me to focus. I think these broad categories represent the maximum number of different areas with which I can make meaningful progress. If I have a new opportunity come into my life, I’ll have to first decide what needs to come off this list.

Balancing time to write, with time for partner, kids, or work. Time with my partner, with time for myself. Time for myself with time with myself. For there is a difference. I think of writing as time with myself. Being interrupted while engaging in this act only brings out the worst in me. So I often end up not doing it. Time for myself I can always interrupt without much complaint.

The “being interrupted while engaging in this act” part hits close to home for me. When I’m off on adventures in my own head, nothing makes me more enraged than when I have to dismantle the world I’ve spent hours building because my kid wants to tattle on my other kid.

Life is a balancing act of relationships—and sometimes we forget the most important one is with ourselves. Though my words may bridge toward others, the truth is: I always write with myself in mind. A selfish act. But a worthy one. I am my own therapist. I know what I need to know. I just have to sit and listen.

I wonder how many people blog to understand themselves, or to validate their existence. How many write just to spend time with themselves, while the whole world wants to take its share.

My journal is my lifeline these days. It is a record of exactly how I’m feeling in real time, and something I am sure I’ll appreciate having as I get older, when my memories of this part of my life are viewed with nostalgia-tinted glasses.

But in the present, I often will take my journal entry for the day and paste it into an LLM with no prompt, just to see what it says about me.

And while I am painfully aware of the likelihood of the LLM parroting back a sycophantic answer that puffs me up (which, hey, I’m human and totally not above), I often find that it gives me a connected insight across the day that I otherwise wouldn’t have reached on my own.

Maybe instead of sharing those thoughts with an algorithm, I should share them here. Blog-ust is almost neigh, after all!

But the simple act of getting your thoughts out of your head and into a format that you can read back later is incredibly helpful for reminding you that you’re alive and growing.

Could I switch away from Apple? Sure, I could ditch my iPhone and buy another phone, and I could ditch my Mac and buy a laptop with Linux, I guess. But the only thing I’d be accomplishing is to make life easier for myself, and I’d also stop using software developed by those developers I care about. And also, nobody would care. Because nobody should. Tools are tools; they either do the job you need them to do or they don’t. And the sad reality of this world we live in is that most big companies out there are awful. If you spend some time digging, you’ll find despicable things done by probably 99% of CEOs of big companies.

If I find out that the Volvo CEO is eating babies in their spare time, what should I do? Sell my car? Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.

The first time I bought a MacBook Pro, I remember feeling electric at all the possibilities that lay before me. I knew the processor speed, the amount of RAM I needed, every single spec that powered that beast.

Over time, it’s become almost a non-factor. I don’t even get excited about it; I just buy the one that has the specs I need for the job I need done, and I move on.

At one point in time, I was fully bought in on anything Apple did. I was buying an identity, passage into a community of people who had “taste” and “cared” about things like user experience and design. I’d eagerly watch as much WWDC content as I could, consuming every blog post from John Gruber and podcast from 5by5.

I just don’t care about it anymore. It’s not worth my time anymore. I just wanna build cool things. Is that an okay identity to buy into?

There’s something extremely natural about the ebb and flow of creative practice. Some seasons are for output, when thoughts are flowing and the words come easily. Other seasons are for input – for living, experiencing, gathering the raw material that eventually becomes the next wave of posts.

I used to feel guilty about the quiet periods. Like I was failing some invisible obligation to feed the algorithm, to maintain momentum, to stay visible in the endless scroll. But that’s the beauty of owning your own corner of the web. It doesn’t demand daily feeding. It doesn’t punish you for taking time away. It simply exists, ready for whenever you return.

👋

This idea comes from stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in Meditations:

“Most of what we say and do is not essential. Eliminate it, you’ll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself, is this necessary.”

So why don’t more people follow this advice?

John Maynard Keynes offers an explanation in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

Put simply, writing with AI reduces the maximum strain required from your brain. For many commentators responding to this article, this reality is self-evidently good.“The spreadsheet didn’t kill math; it built billion-dollar industries. Why should we want to keep our brains using the same resources for the same task?”

My response to this reality is split. On the one hand, I think there are contexts in which reducing the strain of writing is a clear benefit. Professional communication in email and reports comes to mind. The writing here is subservient to the larger goal of communicating useful information, so if there’s an easier way to accomplish this goal, then why not use it? 

But in the context of academia, cognitive offloading no longer seems so benign. In a learning environment, the feeling of strain is often a by-product of getting smarter. To minimize this strain is like using an electric scooter to make the marches easier in military boot camp; it will accomplish this goal in the short term, but it defeats the long-term conditioning purposes of the marches.

I wrote many a journal entry in college complaining about this exact point, except we were still arguing about graphing calculator and laptop use.

Now that I’m older, I understand the split that Cal talks about here.

When I’m writing software to accomplish a task for work, then it’s more important for me to spend my brain energy on building the context of the problem in my head.

When I’m writing an essay and trying to prove that I understand a concept, then it’s more important for me to get the words out of my head and onto paper. Then, I can use tools to help me clean it up later.

Maybe this points to a larger problem I’ve had with our education system. Imagine a spectrum of the intent of college. The left end of the spectrum represents “learning how to critically think about ideas”. The right end represents “learning skills that will help you survive in the real world”.

When someone makes fun of a film studies major, it’s because their evaluation of the spectrum is closer to the right end.

When someone makes fun of students using ChatGPT for writing their essays for them, it’s because their evaluation is closer to the left.

In December, I challenged myself to knock out 100 sit-ups every day for 100 consecutive days.

Aside from a four-day battle with the worst flu I’ve ever had, I’ve wedged my toes under the couch and knocked out 100 sit-ups daily for 180 total days.

Five months after starting the sit-up challenge, I decided to step things up and add 100 burpees to this plan. For 39 straight days, I headed to my garage, unrolled a pink mat, turned on some pump up music, and did 100 burpees: drop to the floor, pop up into a squat, jump in the air, repeat.

At the start of June, my family joined a gym. Last Wednesday, I tried a Crossfit-esque class. It absolutely crushed me in the best possible way.

The next morning, I could barely walk. Every step had me limping and groaning.

I needed a break.

So I took one.

But here I am, two days later, and I still feel guilty about breaking my streaks. Even worse, I can't seem to muster up the courage to wedge my feet under the couch to start a new one.

Rest is a crucial part of any fitness plan. It lets muscles repair and grow, and it's included in every workout plan I've followed.

So why do I still feel like a failure?

I'm terrible at coping with failure¹. Failure is a possible outcome to any activity, yet my default response to failure is to shut down and be completely paralyzed by it.

Instead of allowing myself to shut down this time, I am going to take the opportunity to reframe the situation:

I broke my sit-up streak. But I hit 130 straight days (and 180 total). That’s half a year of consistent effort and washboard abs!²

I broke my burpee streak. But I made it 39 days, and my chest hasn't felt this strong in years.

I paused both to rest, and now I feel better than I have in weeks.

None of that is failure. That’s fitness.

Time to get back at it. No drama, no guilt, no shame.

Just the mat, the music, and the work.

Success won't matter if everything is easy. We celebrate big achievements because of the work and sacrifice it takes to succeed.

I watched Faith Kipchoyge’s 4 minute mile attempt today with my daughter and wife.

It was so moving to see the hoopla surrounding the attempt. Millions of people gathered to watch the fastest woman of our entire species attempt to do something impossible.

She didn’t break the 4 minute mark, but you can clearly see how much she put of herself into this singular, focused effort. That’s worth celebrating.

We used to celebrate art, we used to create for the sake of creating. But everything is content now, and there’s pressure for it to be fast and constant and relatable.

Don't forget why you started making art in the first place. Human creativity is vital, and the world needs it now more than ever.

There are many aspects of life that are unproductive and sluggish, and yet necessary. Some want to speed up the unpleasant hoping to make more room for the good stuff. It’s that logic that lead some think that being an interplanetary species make sense. Speed is inherent to growth. What grows achieves its purpose faster with iteration–creatures and machines. But that assumes the purpose is clear. As for websites, bikes, or the fate of our species, it is a matter of opinion. Our ability to be fast in almost everything has, indirectly, left me feeling unfulfilled, lost in the commotion.

I’ve been noticing this site slowing down lately.

It takes longer to render most pages, most noticeably the home page and about pages. It’s because I’ve added the workout streak counters to it.

I almost sprang for an upgraded Linode instance to make it run faster, but as I thought about it, I realized I didn’t actually care that the site took 3 seconds to load rather than 2.

While I wish I’d gone about it differently, I can now see how much I needed the break. A wiser, more patient version of me would have paused to celebrate the first draft instead of barreling into the second. But I didn’t, and now I’m here — nursing my wounds, feeling a little sheepish about it all.

But I’m starting to get restless. I’m feeling stronger. I’m raring to get back out there. Sentences and scenes are dancing in my head again, begging to find their footing on the page.

The sidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, we need the break. It’s helpful to get a wider vantage point, healthy to rest, nice to cheer others on. But it’s also a heck of a lot more fun to play.

Sure, we might fall. We might injure ourselves (or our egos). We might get embarrassed. But we also might score. We might win. We might surprise ourselves. We might have a lot of fun trying.

Much like the last article I shared, this article meets me perfectly with where I’m at in life right now.

In my professional life, I spent all day today learning how to use Turbo and Stimulus. I complained nearly the entire time to myself, sure.¹ But by the end of the day, I was able to serve up that sweet HTML over the wire.

In my personal life, I’ve continuing to maintain my sit-up and burpee streaks while also going to the gym. The biggest surprise is how much more confident I feel throughout the rest of my life because I keep promises to myself in this one area.

I feel like I’ve been watching life from the sidelines for the better part of a decade, and I’m slowly starting to ask the coach to be put in. And it’s… really fulfilling.