I happened upon this benedicto by Edward Abbey while perusing my copy of Campfire Stories: Tales from America’s National Parks . May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering...

In June, Kellie and I flew back to Tennessee to celebrate our fathers, visit friends, and spend some time in Chattanooga. The original plan was to spend most of the week hiking and rock climbing. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire trip so we spent the week exploring the city. Here are my highlights from the...

A not so merry post. In memory of George. June 1, 2015 — April 15, 2023. I lost my cat George in April. Over the years, he’d been dealing with a heart murmor and then late last year he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. It was very rough at first but the treatment was going really well. In April, I noticed...

On this day, I stopped drinking alcohol. This is an experiment to see how it impacts my health. I will likely partake again at some point but I want to mark this day so that I don’t forget it.

Over the pandemic, I picked up wood working as a fun hobby. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time; the act of creating a physical thing is very compelling to someone who works with intangible bits every day. The social distancing and isolation offered an opportunity to finally dive in head first....

Living in California during the pandemic definitely has me missing home. I thought it would be helpful to put together a list of my favorite spots back in Music City. Food & Drinks Hattie B’s Hot Chicken Martin’s Bar-B-Cue Joint Five Points Pizza DeSano Pizza The Patterson House M.L. Rose Kayne Prime Steakhouse...

Recently, I wrote a series of Swift tips over at my company’s blog . This started out as a simple CocoaHeads talk where I was sharing my own personal best practices with the group. Striving for Smallness Documentation Organization Access Control Early Exits Closure-Based CollectionType APIs Property Configuration...

I’ve lamented about my love/hate relationship with Evernote but I never followed up about my solution to this problem. For now, I’ve given up on my dream of a custom built solution in favor of Bear , a simple yet beautiful note taking solution. It even checks off many of the boxes from my wish list: Powered by plain...

I’ve been a long time Evernote user. With few exceptions, I dump everything that I think or discover into my Evernote database. I’ve even been a premium member until recently. And yet, I’ve never loved Evernote. I feel like we have always been at odds. Things never work quite how I want them to and a lot of minor...

We all knew what was coming and it was still a doozy. The rumor mill basically got everything correct and this was still one of the best keynotes in a long time. I plan on writing more in depth about each major topic but for now, here are my first impressions. Lack of “Status Updates” In the past, Apple has kicked...

Speaking of Swift, I delivered a presentation on scripting with Swift at Nashville CocoaHeads at the end of January, earlier this year. Check out the video and head over to the Github repository for the source code and more information.

I’m really excited about the changes to Swift in the current Xcode 6.3 beta. Apple has answered several of my biggest gripes with Swift. Here are some of the highlights: Incremental builds for increased build performance Native Set collection class that bridges to NSSet, joining Array/NSArray and...