Taking Stock as a Skill mtift Tue, 07/21/2026 - 18:36 Marnie and I have been taking stock now that we’re empty nesters. With one kid in college and another in grad school, life is different. We’ve been talking about how to spend our days, how much to travel, and what our next house projects should be. That’s one...

The Movie I Lost and the Software I Found mtift Tue, 07/14/2026 - 08:45 My Daughter’s First DaysShortly after my daughter was born, near the beginning of my year as a stay-at-home dad, I made a short video of her first days using iMovie. This was long before phones could shoot video with a tap or apps auto-generated...

You Don't Need Four Specialists mtift Tue, 07/07/2026 - 07:37 One of the statements that I often say before savasana, near the end of a yoga class, is: “we’ve done meditation, breathing, postures, and now it’s time for relaxation.” I’ve said a similar version of that sentence for years, and it’s a reference not just...

We Don't Have to Hit the Accept Button on Life mtift Tue, 06/30/2026 - 08:22 You know the moment when a website loads and that box appears asking you to “accept all” cookies. If there is an option to say no, it is probably hidden behind a few more clicks. So you accept. Most of us do this countless times a week...

Glitter Blessings: Practicing Seva at Pride mtift Tue, 06/23/2026 - 11:31 Last summer, Marnie and I spent a day volunteering at the Twin Cities Pride Festival. We worked the booth for the Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance (MUUSJA), and we had our own special UU-flavored offering: “Glitter...

The Wonderful and Amazing Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge mtift Tue, 06/16/2026 - 07:58 Over the weekend Marnie and I drove up to Duluth to celebrate her birthday at our favorite bed and breakfast on Park Point. We’ve spent a lot of time in Duluth and have done all the touristy things with our kids, but she planned a...

From Lando to DDEV: Replacing Custom Shell Scripts with Drainpipe mtift Wed, 06/10/2026 - 13:41 This article was originally published on Lullabot.comLong-running Drupal projects accumulate local development debt. For example, say you start using Lando for local development. You likely have a .lando.yml file and a...

Winter Camping and the Four Requisites mtift Tue, 06/09/2026 - 08:21 My daughter is off at grad school now, and she left a few tubs of her things in our basement. Over the weekend she came home to sort through them, and somehow the whole family ended up down there, each of us digging through our own boxes. I spent a...

Joy in the Arboretum, Joy Inside mtift Tue, 06/02/2026 - 08:45 A lot of people have been asking me what’s happening with yoga at the Arboretum. I wish I had a happier answer.The Arboretum is one of my favorite places to teach yoga. My first class at the Minnesota Arboretum was memorable because I was greeted by a...

Use Any Means or Method mtift Tue, 05/26/2026 - 08:13 Last Thursday night, I asked a Tibetan monk if we should keep using the same practices in a world where the political climate feels unstable and AI threatens to change everything. He chuckled at the mention of AI, paused, and then said to use whatever tools...

When the Mind Stops Updating mtift Fri, 05/15/2026 - 08:14 There’s a new large language model (LLM) on the block, and it got me thinking about why I practice meditation.The model is called Talkie, and it’s not like the other models. Talkie is a 13-billion-parameter (i.e. “small”) model, trained on 260 billion tokens...

Goblins in the Machine and Goblins in the Mind Monster by one of my kids. Its name is ghost. mtift Wed, 05/13/2026 - 18:30 GPT had a goblin problem. Yep, you read that right. The model kept mentioning goblins and other creatures in its responses, even when nobody asked. I felt amused the first time I read OpenAI’s...