September was another big month for my life, mostly for me offline. Another good month for bicycle riding, seeing more of the trails on Randalls and Wards Islands.The New York area has taught me a few things about islands and one of them is that they're very fungible. On a map, Randalls and Wards Islands look one...

I skipped August's Recently because this summer has been relentless, mostly in the positive sense. July and August were filled with bike rides, 5K races, friends in town, life changes and logistics.For a friend's birthday, we rode the rickety Coney Island Cyclone, which was faster and more intense than I remembered...

Context: Placemark is a tool that lets you view, create, and edit geospatial (map) data. I ran it as a company for a while and open sourced it when I shut down that company.Yesterday Placemark got a pretty big PR from Birk Skyum, replacing its dependency on Mapbox GL JS with MapLibre, along with some other...

Back in 2022, I wrote Web technology optimism hour, highlighting the things I thought were cool about the state of technology. Time flies. Let's do it again.It's still easy to be pessimistic, but it's nice to mine your feelings for the positive ones. The elephant in the room is AI, but I don't feel like throwing...

I'm still writing my journals on paper. Makes it about a decade of notebooks, most of them Field Notes, kept in the archival wooden boxes[1]. Writing by hand helps me remember and process life. Finishing notebooks give me the feeling of closing a chapter on those problems, at least for a moment.Paper notebooks are...

June was a big month: I went to Porto & Lisbon, and had a lot of life stuff happen. I'll get into the trip once I get my rolls of film developed. Three rolls at a new photo developing place: fingers crossed!ReadingI finished reading Intermezzo (of the bag) and it was fantastic. I've always liked Sally Rooney's books...

A section of trail in SwitzerlandMay was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg.A farm in Bodenseeufer, GermanyWe passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other...

I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs. I've been trying to read the dialog with an Irish accent in...

I spent a lot of time outside in April. The first two weekends I did long bike rides: from Brooklyn to Tarrytown along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, and out to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge & Cross Bay Memorial Bridge.Then, I ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon. I wrote some notes about the...

When I started this blog in 2011, I built it using Jekyll. Jekyll served me well for fifteen years. It was fast enough, and though it would take me an hour or two to get the system reinstalled when I switched laptops, it mostly just worked. But late last year, I was in the midst of updating all of my local...

The mascot of ATmosphereConf is a goose, accompanied by the motto we can just do things. I thought about this line often while I was in Vancouver for the event. Everyone was active: writing, managing communities, building side projects or businesses on Bluesky, and building Bluesky itself. The energy was fertile and...

I have a bunch that I want to write about this month, but that'll all be in different posts. Just got back from Atmosphere Conf in Vancouver and settling into a false Brooklyn summer.ReadingI read so much this month but have little to share here. Despite trying to keep a rich, diverse information diet, a lot of the...