When I returned home from this morning’s run, Jilly asked how far I ran.

“I’m not quite sure,” I told her. “I ran through the woods for about an hour and fifteen minutes, so that’s maybe six or seven miles, but I don’t know for sure.”

She didn’t quite understand why I would run if I wasn’t paying attention to how far I ran.

I think all of this boils down to the phase of life I’m currently in. I’m getting older and I’m okay with that. I’m not chasing paces anymore. I’m not chasing mileage volume. I’m not putting pressure on myself to progress at all costs. I don’t get upset if life gets busy and I don’t have time for my daily run. There are no ultramarathons on my docket.

Things are different now.

These days I’m chasing experiences – I want a unique one with each outing, and that’s only possible if I am fully present during each outing. These days I’m chasing future experiences and a level of fitness that will keep me on this planet for a bit longer so someday in the not-too-distant future I can be active with my grandkids.

That’s a different kind of ultra, but it’s the one I’m training for these days.

Bingo. This is me, in every area of my life lately.

This morning, I went for a walk immediately after finishing my burpees. I had my Apple Watch on, and it buzzed, letting me know that there’s been a change in my health activity.

I honest-to-god snort laughed, then immediately took my watch off and moved on with my walk.¹ Of course there’s been a change, I didn’t need my watch to tell me that.

Being present is super hard, especially with the internet doing everything it can to draw me towards it. But thanks to myself skipping the internet today, I got the third corner of my garage cleaned! Only one more to go before I can really start making this area dope as hell.²

Another related observation: an interesting side effect of my desire to collect new music means that each new album has the potential to serve as the background track to this current moment in life.

There are many albums which point me to general moments in my life, not so much specific memories.

If I want to remember what it felt like to drive home from a midnight truck at Best Buy, I pop on The Presets’ Apocalypto.

If I want to remember what it felt like in the early days of dating Shanny, I’ll listen to Ombarrops by The Car is On Fire.

It’s kind of cool to see the intersection and synergy of my two collections.

Local man Paul Campbell confirmed Saturday he was raising his daughter Emma on a variety of media carefully selected to help her cultivate an appreciation for artistic quality, a move that will reportedly put the 12-year-old girl hopelessly out of touch with her generation.

Ouch. An on-point Onion article.

Of course, I do not hesistate to bump the music I want to listen to around the house, which will certainly imprint that music into my kids’ brains, but I also am trying to immerse myself in the media that they enjoy.

Recent examples include Minecraft, the TV show Jessie, YouTubers Mikey & JJ, Chappell Roan, and that “Apt” song.

Pretty sure I’ve shared my love for Tony Hawk on this blog before, but it doesn’t hurt to remind myself every once in a while what a stand up human this guy is.

He surfaced today in the form of a YouTube video as part of Amoeba Record’s “What’s In My Bag?” series, where famous people gather their favorite forms of media from around the store and then talk about why it’s meaningful to them.

From this video alone, I wrote down a bunch of albums that I’m gonna try bumping while on vacation next week, including:

• The Cars - Shake It Up
• The Rezillos - Can’t Stand The Rezillos
• Circle Jerks - Group Sex¹
• Big Audio Dynamite II - The Globe
• Kraftwerk - Techno Pop
• Madonna - Immaculate Collection
• Björk - Debut

After asking Henry Rollins if he is still punk at age 64:

I would have to say yes because it’s the ideology that has stayed with me: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobia, anti-discrimination, and you know, equality, fairness, decency, all of that. To me, that’s punk rock. And I don’t think that’s bad. If I had a kid, I'd say be honest, you know? Find a slow kid in school and become friends with them because people make fun of them. And when people start making fun of him, you know, stick up for him, man, you’ll be a hero, you’ll lead.

(via Naz)

One thing you’re not supposed to admit to: not enjoying basic activities of hygiene maintenance. I get that it’s suspect. I swear to you I do shower enough, but the whole process (the hair removal! the exfoliation, body and facial! the shampoo-rinse-shampoo-rinse-conditioner-rinsing!) is to me tedious at its core, and I know few enough of you all in real life to be able to admit it here.

So: I bought a Bluetooth speaker that claims enough waterproofness for my own plausible deniability to use it in the shower.

This then opens up an important soundtracking opportunity. What is the right music to propel one through the emotional deadness of a shower1?

Maya goes on to recommend froge.mp3 by piri & Tommy Villiers. Listening to it now, I can totally see myself shaving and washing with this album in the background.

It makes me wonder: what albums do y’all recommend for random every day tasks? Like, what are you bumping when you’re folding socks? Or pulling weeds?

I'm beginning the slow process of turning this blog into a digital garden, and on the whole, I'm working on cleaning up the digital messes that have been accumulating for decades.

Over the past year, I spent time almost every day going through my Plex library and my drives which contain nearly every saved file since I've used a computer and deciding what to do with them.

This process has had many fits and starts, which feels correct. In my day job, I don't get many "fits and starts" because I'm being paid to understand a task and deliver it. Pruning a digital garden gives me a chance to be a rookie again, where I can take steps in a direction and learn from my mistakes.

I figured it might be interesting to the IndieWeb to see some ways I'm pruning and using AI to seriously help me.

Previewing Winamp Skins

I have a handful of .wsz files on my drives, and at first glance, I could not remember what a .wsz file even did.

I asked Claude and it helpfully told me that they were Winamp skin files, which were essentially .zip files with a different extension, so I was able to dig around inside to see what they were.

Winamp skins contained a handful of .bmp files that used image spriting, a technique commonly used by devs to optimize memory usage. It's clever, but clever things are often inscrutable twenty years later.

So at first, I went to Claude and asked it to write me an app that took in a .wsz file and showed me what the overall theme looked like. Honestly? Not completely terrible results here for 3 minutes of vibe coding¹:

It turned out that the themes I had on my machine were already represented in the Winamp Skin Museum, so thank god "Darth Maul vs. Ash Ketchem" is still being appreciated here in 2025.

Tagging moods for my favorite albums

I've been working on a way to display my music library on my site, and the basic layout I've been vibe coding for the past few days is here:

You can see the live version of it here. It's kinda neat.

But as you can see on the screenshot, I show a list of an album's genres and styles and moods.

I am not extremely picky about these, but many of them are missing from services like MusicBrainz, so I decided to use Claude and ChatGPT to help me fill in the blanks.

I've got another 30 or so to go, but the page looks a lot better with something in there. I think I'll use this layout to help me consolidate or improve the tags later, which I guess makes it a win for having this layout in the first place.

Another improvement I'd like to make to this is being able to browse by mood. I'd love to have an interface where I am prompted about my general feeling at the moment and have it surface albums to complement that vibe.

Watching Jon Batiste improvise over a song he’s never heard before is magical. If you need a shot of pure joy in the arm today, give this a watch.

Yeah, I know... February's almost over. But I finally sat down and wrote this out this weekend, so good enough, eh?

Family

• My boy is crushing it at swimming lessons.

• The other night during dinner, I unconsciously started drumming on the table. I was startled when my son started singing Imagine Dragon's "Believer," and then my daughter joined in on the drums and vocals as well. It was supremely dope.

• Following an unbelievable burst of motivation, I cleaned out the crawl space in my basement. It honestly didn't take that long (maybe a total of 10 hours), and it is so much more usable now! I'm trying to figure out a way that I can wire up some outlets in there so I can turn it into a little cave for jamming and 3D printing lol

• I get so mad when I'm in flow and my kids come up and interrupt me. I think it's because achieving flow is painfully Sisyphean; it takes so much effort these days to get into that state, and when I'm suddenly yanked from it, the ball rolls to the bottom of the hill and I have to start all over again. It's probably how my kids feel when I make them stop playing Minecraft.

• I was trying to explain the concept of money to my son, and after I stopped talking, he looks at me with the most confused look and says, "Dad, you keep expanding my thinking bubble, and I don't like that." I hear ya, bud.

Recommendations

• I thoroughly enjoyed watching It's In The Game, a documentary about the history of the Madden NFL video game franchise. In one scene, they bring a full body capture setup to the NFL combine and scan every player. As they go in and out of the rig, you can tell how honored these guys are to be included in the game. It reminds me of seeing people use my apps out in the real world. Saying "I see you" is one of the dopest honors we can bestow on our fellow human.

• I highly recommend Puttshack. I was geeking out over the use of technology, it's brilliant.

• The bourbon wings at the Minnesota Burger Company in Apple Valley instantly landed in the top 3 wings I've ever had.¹

Work

• SEO is the digital equivalent of snake oil. I've held this position for more than two decades, and I'm waiting for someone to convince me otherwise.

• You can hit a nail into a board with a hammer, or you can use a nail gun to go faster. But you still need to combine two boards. No tool is going to take that assembly step away, that's simply part of the deal. Similarly, AI isn't going to take my job away; AI is simply a(n extremely powerful) nail gun. It takes the sting out of the parts of my job I find arduous and makes them go faster so I can get back to doing what I enjoy doing: building cool things.

The new car

• 30% of me still feels like a tool for buying a brand new 2024 Toyota Prius. The other 70% is loving it.

• The car is one of my only outlets for anger, and that's not something I'm proud of. It's weird that it took buying a new car to evaluate that, but I guess it's better than continuing to take my anger out while wielding a 10,000 pound death machine.

Self-improvement

• For the first time in my life, I looked up at the stars and noticed that one looked a little different. Turned out to be Mars! For the last several nights, when we get a clear sky, I look up and see if I can find it. That might be the thing I'm the most proud of from this past month.

• A couple years ago, I decided to get back into broomball. I ended up joining a rec league and played every Friday this month. I'm certainly not as fast as I was 20 years ago, but man, the feeling of running on the ice is as exhilarating as ever.²

• I've been walking up to the library near my house to get work done during the week. During one of those walks, it started snowing, and the flakes were huge and fluffy. I stopped and caught a few on my tongue, and it reminded me of when I used to do that during football games.

• Lately, when I go on walks around my block, I've felt like I'm walking with some loved ones who have passed away. I can't explain it, and it could totally be a hallucination... but at the same time, who am I to keep denying my feelings? If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple of years, it's that I need to lean more into my feelings and trust them.

• I wrote this down during a meeting at work: "You listen to the very first thing someone says and then your mind runs wild." Is this normal?

• "I looked in the mirror while showering today and I saw a 37 year old. And I was really proud of him. The dude is happy. He’s out still playing broomball. He plays with computers all day. He listens to a ton of good music, watches interesting/compelling movies, has a sense of purpose and direction, knows what he wants his house to feel like... And I saw the whites in my beard, and I thought it looked pretty damn good. I’m here! I’m aging, and I’m successful, and I’m comfortable, and I will try my hardest to feel this content every day for the rest of my life."

• I saw a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial that said, "We live in a time that you can get into a vehicle and go to a place where you give someone a piece of plastic and they will give you a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup." I think about that all the time.

• This line from Anh's blog feels ironic to post here given how long these posts become, but for future reference: "not every thought needs to be immortalized on my website."

• My only resolution for this year: find more ways to open my heart.

100 sit-ups a day for 100 days Project

• At day 50, I don't feel too terribly different. It still sucks to knock out the first one, and it still rules when I hit the hundredth one.

• The only noticeable improvement so far is that I no longer make old man groans when I get up from a prone position.

Music Clean Up Project

• It's annoyingly hard to let go of things for some reason. Even if it's an MP3 of an artist you never actually liked. Am I mourning the loss of the part of me that really wanted to be into Tiesto?

• The more I prune my digital garden, the more I find myself wanting to spend time in it. The more I hit shuffle on all 28,000 tracks in my library, the less frequently I run into turds.

YouTube Videos I liked that I didn't already link to

Bobby Fingers - Joe Rogan and The Black Keys Diorama

Movies I watched

Saved! (2004)

• Glad I watched it? Yes. It was a lot better than I remember, probably because I have far more context for the religious hypocrisy stuff.
• Will I watch it again? Probably not. I'm finding that if I actually pay attention during a movie and absorb whatever I need to absorb, I can set it aside. No need to carry all this media around with me, right?

Hey Arnold!: The Movie (2002)

• Glad I watched it? Yes.
• Will I watch it again? Unlikely. It was too predictable, but I sure do love Arnold and Gerald and the crew. Makes me excited for our upcoming Nick Resort trip.

Recess: School's Out (2001)

• Glad I watched it? Yes.
• Will I watch it again? Yes. I regret not owning this one. It's fun watching movies I never got to watch as a kid with my own kids.

American Fiction (2023)

• Glad I watched it? Yes.
• Will I watch it again? Yes. Very smart, very funny, exceptionally high-brow. Best enjoyed with a glass of wine in a fancy wine glass.

Music I enjoyed

Current Vibes in January 2025:

Books I read

• Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler. I felt like I could identify with nearly every character's brand of "crazy." Strongly recommend.

I had a blast making this mix CD for my wife for Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, I know, it’s 2025. But who cares? Mix CDs are way cooler than giving someone a playlist (which of course I did).

The process of acquiring a blank CD, meticulously crafting a playlist of songs that made me think of my wife, making the album art in Pixelmator, and handing it to her when I was done gave me the biggest feeling of pride I’ve felt in years.

And yeah, it was just a dumb, impractical CD filled with mushy songs.

But it was fun as hell to make, and that’s what it’s all about.¹

Here’s the track list:

1. The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
2. Seals & Croft - You're the Love
3. The Bird and the Bee - Birthday
4. Kate Nash - I Hate Seagulls
5. Bonny Light Horseman - Lover Take It Easy
6. Donna Lewis - I Love You Always Forever
7. Sonya Spence - Let Love Flow On
8. The Mountain Goats - San Bernardino
9. Lily Allen - Littlest Things
10. Paul Frees - Although I Dropped $100,000
11. Freddie Scott - (You) Got What I Need
12. Hall and Oates - You Make My Dreams
13. Belle and Sebastian - If She Wants Me
14. Exile - Kiss You All Over
15. Stars - My Favourite Book
16. RuPaul, Lawrence Cheney, Bimini Bon-Boulash, Tayce, Ellie Diamond - A Little Bit of Love

This makes me miss playing in an orchestra, and it also makes me miss playing Pokémon as a kid.