Skip to main content

Pretty Good Hat

A brown, cedar-sided house enveloped in deep snow. The sidewalk and stairs have been cleared, leaving piles of snow on either side, and the driveway is cleared but covered in a light dusting of new snow, and snow is swirling in the air.

The official snowfall at the airport near us was 17+ inches in this storm. We got all shoveled out without needing to get the snowblower fired up, but the forecast is calling for another twelve to eighteen inches in the next two days. Gonna have to stay limber.

This Iris is my first split and ortholinear keyboard, and I’m slowly, gradually getting used to typing on it. Getting back to work tomorrow will be interesting!

A top down view of a split ergonomic keyboard, the Keeb.io Iris. It has backlit keys on a white plastic top plate and dark blue keys with cyan legends. Beside the keyboard is a mug of coffee with a swirl of frothed milk on top, and an Apple Magic Trackpad sits next to the coffee.

A set of bright red windowpanes frame a reflection in the glass of a photographer with a silver camera to hit face. He is wearing a yellow knit hat and yellow leather gloves. Behind the glass several chairs and a long bar counter are visible in warm indoor light.

I did get out for a quick photo walk downtown yesterday before getting rained out. I liked this selfie I shot in the window of a brewpub and I’m really enjoying using my old 35mm Pentax lens on my X-T30 as I get more used to manual focus.

A hand holds a small box titled ‘Inspiracles: photography inspiration cards’ and has fanned three large playing card sized cards. The top card is titled ‘Neon Portrait’ and suggests taking futuristic styled photos with neon lights.

My wife got me this fun and thoughtful photography gift: a deck of photo inspiration cards with prompts for things to look for or styles of photos to make. They’re really neat! I’m going out on a pre-winter-storm walk this morning to try out a few.

I have moved into that very particular Holiday Dad Mode where I check the Christmas tree in the morning and take great personal pride that the tree has drunk a healthy amount of water overnight.

A bright yellow background highlights bold text showing my favorite new-to-my artists this year: Big Thief, Low, Japanese Breakfast, Alvvays, and Courtney Marie Andrews. The hashtag at the bottom of the image reads #tuneR.

A heatmap showing calendar days through twelve months, with light yellow showing ‘light’ listening days shading to purple for the heavist days where I listened to the most music. I listened to a lot of music in Januar, July, October and November.

I dusted off the last.fm data visualizer that I started working on last year around this time. This year I built a couple of fun Spotify-wrapped-like visualizations; why should Spotify users have all the fun?

If you’re a last.fm user, you can try it, too! TuneR is a small Shiny app that you can provide your last.fm username and see your year in music, a comparison of this year to your all-time most-listened artists, and a fun heatmap of your listening activity.