My son beat me in his first-ever game of Unexploded Cow, so it’s a pretty good weekend.

I was a few minutes early for peak alpenglow this morning, but I quite liked the view from my commute cam nonetheless.

Light Freezing Fog sounds like something to make an easy CON saving roll against.

What do you say, friends, let’s work from home this afternoon and have an espresso?

Happy puppy turning a corner in the snow — at speed!

Memorable things I did

Dug into a new role at the j-o-b job

Traveled to Carbondale, Colorado for a good friend’s wedding and was inspired to think of friendship and fishing

Went to Disneyland

Took my son to a lot of swimming lessons and saw him improve day by day

Breakfasts at the Tourist Home and dinners at the Whisk and Whiskey.

The Josh Ritter concert in Flagstaff, a magical night

Almost, almost finished a remodel of our bathroom (soon, please)

Tools and things I used

Micro.blog, and my own self-hosted micropub and media endpoints

Fastmail.fm for email

My Xbox Elite controller (freshly repaired!)

Libby, which opened up ebooks and audiobooks from my library in such a great way.

My Lamy Safari All-Black and Monteverde Sapphire

My Nike Metcons. According to Runkeeper I racked up 137 workouts in these. Might be time for a new pair. (41 spins in my Shimano Click’rs)

Ishtar Commander, Discord, and the100.io for my Destiny 2 community

Fish shell

Leuchtterm 1917 dotted journal, the first journal I have actually maintained for coming up on a full year.

Last year’s original iPhone X, and by the way I remain completely satisfied (even delighted, still) by my first gen Face ID.

My 13-year old Patagonia Half Mass shoulder bag

A good soft, warm wool cap from Ibex, a company that has since gone out of business but which also made my favorite cool-weather shirts.

A rolling adoption and then abandonment, a couple times each, of spacemacs, org-mode, and OneNote for work note taking and organizing.

Cartel Coffee’s espresso series

jq: For all my json parsing, API-crunching needs

Things I enjoyed reading, listening to and playing

Waypoint and its surrounding ecosystem of podcasts and forums were the best things for me to listen to and hang out with this year, for lots more than gaming.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Track Changes, the Postlight podcast, consistently has observations and insights that reflect on my own life in a big enterprise.

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, was the best book I read last year. Also Lands of Lost Borders, by Kate Harris.

Frank Turner and Josh Ritter, whose music always finds ways to get me. Plus lots of old and new music on my turntable.

Destiny 2, still my hobby game and pastime

Other notable games include some Fortnite, Forza Horizon 4, Ashen, Into the Breach, and Celeste.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was just so spectacular (as are the great reserved seats at our new theater)

👍 Liked: Automators 14: Automated Journalling

I had no idea that Day One could now be wired to Shortcuts. I have a creaky Launcher action built on the old Day One URL scheme to make a daily entry template, but this is so much cleaner and easier to work with. 📖 (I also have years of daily integration from other sources via Slogger.)

👍 Liked: Library Extension (for web browsers)

Chrome/Firefox extension that checks for availability of books (including ebooks) at your very own local library.

I realized this morning that I have been on micro.blog for just over a year now. So, happy micro anniversary to me :) I continue to enjoy relationships here and the way m.b enables indieweb infrastructure is a great model. Cheers all, @manton and @macgenie!

Xbox Elite controller: Repaired! Just in time for the weekend, too.

Inspired by what @amit wrote up in ‘Discuss on Micro.Blog’, I have enabled links to the micro.blog permalinks for my posts. This will enable anyone with a (free!) micro.blog account to post comments, without needing their own site to send mentions.

Whosagoodcappuccino? Yooo are.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time today making an automator action to resize and rescale photos that I drop into a folder. It kind of boggles me that Photos can’t do this more easily.

My new year jam is generally going to bed more or less at the normal time, waking early, and enjoying my coffee while the world appears calm and quiet. Happy new year, all.

Seems like I have this conversation about twice per year, but it looks like it is time to go to Lightroom Classic CC. I’m torn because I don’t think I need most of what it does, anymore, but twelve years of old Lightroom history gives me an awful lot of hard-to-overcome inertia.

How do I know my wife loves me so much? She despises oily fish and fish sauce, yet bought me tins of fancy sardines, calamari, mackerel, and this luxurious fancy fish sauce for Christmas. ❤️ & 🐟

This is just to say

I have disabled
the motion smoothing
that was on your TV
by default

and which
you probably
hadn’t even
noticed

Forgive me
it was so offensive
to my sensibilities
Mom & Dad

Feeling a little cranky and anxious, because sometimes holidays with family are like that, I come back inside with the dog, into the kitchen, to find my son – who should have been long in bed – working with excited focus on preparing cookies and milk for Santa. Helping him finish the plate and then get back to bed was the best part of my day. Cheers, friends.

I'm slowly starting to explore Flickr again and am enjoying "catching up" with the handful of active contacts I still have there. My steep downturn in activity surely coincided with feeling like the place had just changed so much from when I first started using it, that the community feel and early-web2.0 vibe of discovering and making a place together, that had made it really special -- just wasn't there anymore.

Scrolling through friends' timelines I'm struck by how much good stuff there still is, there, but I'm also a little sad that most of the people I used to feel a lot of shared affinity with have similarly dropped away. Of those who remain, I sometimes wonder, what's left for them that may not be here for me, anymore? I explore my own timeline and think wow, there's a lot of my own history here, at least history prior to the current part of whatever era my life is in the past couple of years. There were photowalks, 365s (well, attempts thereof), deep dives into groups and attempts at particular communities, documents of life transitions (Seattle for MSR, moving to Flagstaff, moving to our current home), and just lots and lots of photos, almost every one of which sparks a thought of time and place that's still really resonant. It's really something to wade back into that.

On the practical technology side, a tools change probably explains some of my declining use of Flickr, too: I heavily used Lightroom for many years, and had a nicely-tuned process of selecting, editing, and exporting to Flickr, but a year or so ago LR just became unstable and started crashing on me all the time. Eventually I just kept it closed and browsed my photos in the finder. Having never really gone back to iPhoto, I mean Photos, I have used Photostream2Folder to copy everything from my iPhone photostream into a directory that would be auto-imported into LR; since I stopped using LR, that folder just stays open on my desktop all the time so I can scroll through my pics. I copy files from my occasional X100S sessions right into that folder now, too.

Getting back into Flickr may prompt me to re-explore some workflow, once again, at a time where my home Mac use has become pretty simply and unadorned. It's probably a good opportunity to re-establish better cataloguing, meta-data management (groan) and backup practices that I used to center around Lightroom, too. Should that be in Lightroom once again? Or in Photos, or ... maybe there's something even better now for the onetime high-volume enthusiast/hobbyist amateur photographer in me. 

It's winter vacation around here, so just maybe I'll get this figured out before the new year steamrolls in and the wide open horizons of winter days slips away, as it always does. 

I like how season 3 of Travelers is just going screw it, it’s Vancouver, here’s a panoramic shot.

I was absolutely blown away by Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. Wow. It’s really spectacular.

Walking with the dog, behind my parents’ house, on a thin layer of cold snow, great-horned owls hooting at one another between the trees.

Autocorrect just changed my email signature from “Alan” to “Slam” and I think that’s how I’m going to end all my emails, now.