Month: January 2024

I’m going back and forth with my friend Nate in our board game group chat.

I cherry-picked a few lines from Julius Caesar there, but I felt like it was a masterstroke. Nate is speechless.

So I bought a smart watch.

I’ve worn a watch for about forty years, and when my last one broke a few months ago, I thought I’d see what it would be like not to have one. The first few days without it, I glanced at my wrist at least a dozen times a day to see the time. Then I’d have to pull my phone out of my pocket to check, and tuck it back in. It was kind of irritating. The weeks passed, and it became a bit more of a habit, but I still felt like a watch would be so much better.

At Christmas, Kyra bought Zack a (relatively) cheap smart watch. It was some weird brand no one’s ever heard of, but it had some cool features. He’d fuss with it and show us some of the features, and I became interested. I already knew I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a smart watch; my budget was around fifty bucks or less. After all, that’s about how much the various Timex watches I’ve worn for the past few decades have cost.

After poking around eBay, I found a used older Samsung watch for $35. Brand new a few years ago, it retailed for about ten times that. I figured it was within my budget, and worth a gander. I bought it, and now I’m wearing it. As it turns out, it’s pretty cool. I can select from hundreds of different watch faces (for now I’m sticking with something simple), and load a few smallish apps onto it. It tracks my steps, heart rate, blood-oxygen level, and even my sleep patterns (although cursory research indicates sleep tracking with wrist devices is pretty questionable). It tells me when I’ve been sitting too long and should get up and move around, and then it congratulates me when I’ve taken a few thousand steps. I can pay for things at stores by waving my watch over the credit-card reader. I can pull up a map of the local area and get directions. I can read text messages, and even send them (it’s kind of painful though).

All in all, it was definitely worth $35. I’m having fun with it, and most importantly I don’t have to drag my phone out whenever I want to know the time.

“First do it, then do it right, then do it better.”

– Addy Osmani

Today I spent a good chunk of the day working on my latest game, Dicee. After many hours of working on artwork and layout, and many more hours putting together the design files to be sent to the print company, I reflected on the process. Zack and I invented Dicee on December 29. Today I shipped it for production. That’s a journey from concept to printing of eight days. Considering that Hexteria (which later became Indio) took over two years for that same journey, I’d say I’m getting better at this.

My little mini-career of designing board games, which continues to be a fun hobby but certainly not professional or income-producing, has been a reminder that doing something over and over will almost certainly make you good at it. The same thing has occurred in my photography work, which now spans decades.

A few years ago, I quoted William Wordsworth: “To begin, begin.” Onward and upward. Better and better.

The kids and I have fun making memes poking fun at one another. I usually stumble across a weird or silly photo on the internet, or perhaps see a meme that can be “adapted” for our family, and do a bit of quick graphics work on it.

Now that I’m meddling with AI art, I’ve been learning more about how to use it effectively, and also adding new “models” to broaden the sorts of work I can do. I figured it was time to turn it loose on our family meme wars. Here’s what I came up with.

Obviously this is a Mario Kart joke. During our time together at Christmas, Kyra, Zack, and I played a bunch of Mario Kart. I think Kyra won every time but once, when Zack eked out a close victory. I was the perennial third-place finisher (and, much to my chagrin, often well below third). I love the game but just don’t play it as well as they do. Thus, the meme.

When I sent this to the kids, Kyra thought I’d just edited her face onto some existing cartoon drawing. Nope, that’s what the computer comes up with when you ask it to draw a “woman driving in Mario Kart on a racetrack”. If you ask me, it’s pretty hilarious.

And it’s only the beginning.

We have about six inches of snow on the ground, and the temperature is hovering around freezing, so the snow won’t be going anywhere for a while. Rather than spend the money to have our plow guy come over and clear our driveway, Pepper and I decided to have a go at it. We pulled out our matching wide-scoop shovels and headed down the blacktop. We clear parallel tracks just wide enough for the car wheels. Luckily the snow wasn’t too wet, although it was hardly powder either. We spent about an hour making tracks and doing extra work on the switchbacks, where it’s particularly treacherous.

After our work, we headed back up. Our security camera caught me trudging past.

It’s hard exercise, which I suppose is a good thing, but sheesh, this driveway…