“Vaccine hesitancy” (a euphemism I abhor) is absolutely from the worst, darkest, and dumbest timeline.

The pandemic forced a change. I was no longer commuting a mile to an office each day for work, work happened at home. I lived that life before I moved to Baltimore, but at that time Elsa and I lived together in a small one bedroom condo and my desk was in the bedroom. Working from my bedroom was not always great. But this time, we had a large house and I could set myself up at home. Previously, I had a small desk on the top floor where Elsa kept her office. Working from home full time meant making a more permanent space, hopefully with greater separation between Elsa and myself.

So we made an adjustment I had thought about for some time, moving all of our gym equipment out from one of the smaller bedrooms and up to the loft where my desk was. Down went my desk into the bedroom and I now had a dedicated room at home for me. It is clearly my office, but it also opened up another opportunity.

From the time I was 14 until college, I played guitar for hours every day. Slowly through college, I played a bit less all the time– it’s hard to be loud in dorms and apartments, but I still played all the time and was deeply invested in my identity as a guitar player. But grad school came, and so did work, and suddenly I basically stopped, almost entirely. I know that this happens to a lot of folks, but to this day I remain surprised. Guitar was a huge part of my identity, not just a thing I did sometimes. I played in bands all throughout high school. I obsessed over gear. I used to drive to find new guitar shops or even return to ones I frequent to see what new used equipment was there and play for hours. But a part of living is shedding parts of ourselves to make room for new things and somehow guitar was a casualty.

Like many folks who rediscovered hobbies during the pandemic, guitar crept back into my life. In this instance, however, I’m not so sure how much of my playing was about having time. I think a fair bit of my resurgence came from having space. As I put together my office, rather than fill the walls just with art or furniture, I hung my primary electric and acoustic guitars. They were now right behind, in reach, in a room with a door. Just that difference was enough to start me playing a bit again.

I’ve never taken up guitar like I used to–there’s very little which I can dedicate even one hour a day to. But I’ve been more consistent than in years. Some weeks it may only be twenty minutes of noodling, other weeks I pick it up for a bit every day. Slowly, I’ve at least started to redevelop and maintain my calluses. I don’t play nearly as well as I used to– I can feel the difference in my dexterity and confidence– but I’m getting to passably close to where I was.

For the first time in over a decade, I’m starting to play with other people again. The last few Saturday afternoons I’ve piled into a small basement with my guitar and amp and hung out playing with a drummer, two keyboardist/synth players, and another guitarist. And we’ve been improvising over a few things and writing some new music. It’s music I’d listen to, and I’m having a blast. Yesterday we played for almost 15 minutes straight off of a small riff I wrote in April of 2020. It was just something I recorded to my phone because it sounded cooler than I expected. I was playing it to practice my picking and timing, and now I’ve got my own song (really our song now– it’s gone so much beyond my start point) stuck in my head.

It’s funny. My senior year of high school I went to the gym to lift weights at least a couple of times a week. I was playing volleyball every day after school in the spring. And most weekends, and even some weekdays, I got together with friends and played guitar and wrote music. Twenty plus years later, I’m going to the gym 3 days a week to lift weights. I’m playing volleyball 2-3 nights a week. And most weekends, I am getting together with friends and playing guitar and writing music.

I am not sure if the 20 years I spent (largely) away from these things would have been better if I tried to keep it up. I think it was important for me to grow out of the things I loved to do for a while. But about 6 years ago I started lifting weights again. And about 3 years ago I started playing volleyball again. And although I started playing guitar at home a bit more starting 4 years ago as well, it’s really just the last few months I’ve started playing with other people and writing music again. All of these things are utterly recreational. I can do them entirely with a joy and ease that I didn’t have when I was younger. I have returned to them all way more willing to be silly and without expectations. And I’m just having so much fun.

I have a 2x 6V6 22W amp with a master volume. I can barely go past when the amp becomes audible and I’m perfectly balanced with a drummer, another guitarist, and two keyboard players. Why the hell do 100W tube amps exist?

(I have owned 100W tube amps)

All of the news has been about emulators, but do these new Apple guidelines mean that non-Safari browsers can have extensions on iOS now?

Apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini apps and mini games, streaming games, chatbots, and plug-ins.

This story of fixing a Windows PC that seems completely haunted will not go where you expect.

If all days looked like this.

How in the world is it acceptable that starring a track just causes Apple Music to sputter out and stop playback and lose song position? Come on, people.

I have had so many conversations about how hard it is to do a masonry layout without Javascript that I don’t want to deal with. Apple’s WebKit team is asking for the web design community to weigh in on the value of adding grid-template-rows: masonry; to the next version of grid.

I’ve been tracking my sleep since the Apple Watch has supported it and I have to tell you— when I get less than 7 hrs 15 mins a few days in a row my body feels it. And if I’m not getting more than 2hrs of deep sleep, it’s even worse.

I can hear John Sterling’s voice on the radio calling the Yankees games without even closing my eyes. It was the sound of my childhood, something I listened to as I was falling asleep when games ran late. It’s wild he’ll never call another game.

It’s almost like the pandemic was a unique time frame where we were under a lot of stress an despair that changed how people behaved and interacted with each other, and, absent that pressure cooker, the world is reverting to it’s previous state.

Every time I open Threads I’m just bombarded with unhinged media opinions about the MCU and Star Wars. Like I get that Facebook knows I’m a nerdy late 30s white guy but jeez.

I have everything about my new blog design figured out except for my index and menu. Which basically means I’m nowhere, since those are kind of important.

Side-by-side preview of what I’m toying with.

Ok, I think I have at least part of my idea for the redesign decided– front page, full content of all posts for the last 7 days only, no pagination. Just like now– reverse chronological by day, chronological within day. Now figuring out what it should look like.

A Partial Redesign

Site redesign is at least partially done. I realized right now that my idea of only showing seven days of posts on my home page doesn’t quite work.

1. I’m not really sure how to filter to the last seven days of content effectively.
2. I don’t post every day, and the site won’t be rebuilt if I don’t post.

Still, I like the idea of having seven days on my home page, with some days just saying “No posts were written on this day” for any previous days and “No posts have been written yet today.” for the current day.

There’s almost certainly a way to do this with date math in Hugo and triggering regular builds, but I don’t think it’s worth it. This is an idea I’ll keep in mind. Much like my desire to have working URLs for things like /year/ showing all posts in that year, /year/month showing all posts in that year-month, and /year/month/day showing all posts on that day, this is one of those Hugo limitations that makes me consider writing my own CMS.

Notable Changes Around Here

I have been playing with this design locally for a while. I came to like it so much, I swapped to this color scheme on the site like 6 months ago. Today, I decided things were at least “close enough” to move things to the main site.

The primary changes are:

• I am using a fixed width font now across the whole site for all content. This font is Berkeley Mono, which I paid for and have used as a my main fixed-width font locally for quite a while. Please don’t steal it from my site– you need a license to use it, which you can purchase from US Graphics.
• I am using background colors on my headers. I like them so much, I hope it’ll encourage me to write posts worthy of having headers down to H4.
• I’ve added some block drawing/block characters to the dates on the homepage, taking advantage of some of Berkeley Mono’s cool built in stuff. I have also switched from a more human “April 14, 2024” to ISO8601 (2024-04-14) dates to continue with my retro, almost brutalist flair.

Pages that Flex the Design

I think my Archive, which I’m not generally fond of, looks great now. I’m also happy with Uses. One of my favorite posts, Delimited files are hell also looks pretty good. I think it shows off how nicely code blocks blend with and stick out from the rest of the site. This was a major concern of mine going to a fixed-width font everywhere.

Where it falls down

I still don’t love my index page. It feels crowded. I know how much work has gone into it over time, but it’s still not quite right. One idea I’m playing with is removing the site title entirely and possibly moving the navigation to the bottom or to a menu button. Neither seems quite right.

Ideas and criticism welcome

My design skill is the worst– I have enough taste to know things aren’t as polished or “correct” as I’d like, but not enough skill with CSS or design to get that final spit shine. So I’m more than happy to take ideas on how to improve things. I am glad to have moved almost entirely to using a few CSS variables versus all the hand tweaked sizes I had splattered all over the place. It’s not a solid as I’d like, but with a bit of help from some online calculators, this is about the prettiest top-of-the-CSS file I’ve ever written:

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:root {
  --color-primary: #21A179;
  --color-content: #ffffff;
  --color-background: #1E1E24;
  --color-links: #8093f1;
  --color-visited: #ef476f;
  --color-inactive: #81ae9d;
  --size-step-0: clamp(1rem, calc(0.96rem + 0.22vw), 1.13rem);
  --size-step-1: clamp(1.25rem, calc(1.16rem + 0.43vw), 1.5rem);
  --size-step-2: clamp(1.56rem, calc(1.41rem + 0.76vw), 2rem);
  --size-step-3: clamp(1.95rem, calc(1.71rem + 1.24vw), 2.66rem);
  --size-step-4: clamp(2.44rem, calc(2.05rem + 1.93vw), 3.55rem);
}

And yes, this section is partially to have a code block in this post because reasons.

Today I learned about the :has selector. This is helping me keep times aligned on my index page when some posts have titles and some do not. Posts without titles get margin-top: var(--size-step-4) for the time stamps. But using this handy selector, I can set the margin to the next size of H1 elements when there’s a title:

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.date:has(+ .post-title) {
  margin-top: var(--size-step-4);
}

My house in Baltimore is about 3.25× the size of the condo we had in Providence. According to Redfin, it’s only worth about 35% more these days.

Location, location, location.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but my sleep quality at home is fantastically higher than anywhere else.

It is really hard to redesign software. Very often, no matter how much you have a new understanding of the problem, you tend yourself seeing the same problems facing the same choices and understanding making the same compromises over and over again.

I still covet the Levittown Loews pristine Revenge of the Jedi poster. Hell, all the posters they had at that theater were incredible. I suspect they’ve taken them all down, but it had the best collection.

Great, unsurprising news that removing parking minimums results in fewer parking spots, more housing, and less growth in rents. Even better on such a gorgeous web site.

It’s ok for some infrastructure to be old and boring and changed infrequently. But if I were an SF resident, I’d be afraid they’re going to make a choice like the SF school system did with payroll and spend $100M trying to custom build software instead of buying commercial off the shelf stuff.

A decaf coffee is so important after a big, rich, delicious meal.

Pretty excited for a restaurant whose tagline is “Cheese 🧀, swine 🐷, and wine🍷“.