My head is full of songs, my fingers spilling letters, my eyes lost in landscapes →
Latest Writing
Metric at South Side Ballroom, Dallas TX
Well, that was easily the best show I’ve been to in the last two years.
I’ve seen Metric play five times now, more than any other artist, and they never disappoint. From that first show in 2004 at some upstairs lounge area to South Side Ballroom’s 4,000-head warehouse situation, this band has been consistently tight and entertaining. They just killed it with every song. I think this may have been the most synth-intensive set I’ve seen them play as well. Jimmy had some monstrous patch bay or something up on stage and frequently twiddled knobs to extract some truly badass sounds. On some songs, he, Josh, and Emily were all on the keys playing one part or another. They played a lot less songs from the new album than I expected, but that’s okay because it left room for all the hits from their back catalog. “Lost Kitten” was a choice, but the rest of the setlist was a blowtorch. When they played the “last” song and my wife asked if the show was over, I said “No, they haven’t played ‘Black Sheep’ yet.” And sure enough, the last song of the encore was indeed “Black Sheep”. W move.
Featured Work
Roxo Delivery Bot Touchscreen App
DEKA is a research and development company that has been working with FedEx to create Roxo, an autonomous delivery robot. Build atop DEKA’s iBot wheelchair base, Roxo will be able to easily navigate urban terrain like sidewalks, curbs, and even stairs.
Roxo has a 6-inch touchscreen for use by both employees who will prepare Roxo to make a delivery and ordinary folks who will be receiving deliveries. Users will either type a PIN code or scan a QR code to securely open Roxo’s doors. DEKA’s strength lies in its talented hardware development teams, so in order to produce a user-friendly proof of concept touchscreen application for FedEx to use in its initial delivery tests, they reached out to my employer.
Over the course of 3 months, I worked with DEKA’s Roxo team to produce an optimal user experience for both user types. This project was really fun and presented challenges that I hadn’t come across before. For example, Roxo will be used in a variety of lighting environments, from dim, indoor fluorescent lights to full-on sunshine, necessitating some branching of the FedEx design system to increase the size and contrast of text and buttons.
Latest Links
Your brain is an asshole.
Greg Storey: “Make like no one cares because you don't care what they think anymore. Do this enough and confidence shows up. So do the opportunities. More importantly, you'll be making instead of secretly worrying.”
The Courage to Stop
Jeffrey Zeldman: “The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise. Learn to be quiet on purpose.”
A website to destroy all websites.
A fantastic essay by Henry Desroches that deserves a complete reading, but that culminates as so: “Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will. The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans: it’s personal websites.” (Also, massive appreesh for the home page banner: “Trans women are women. Trans rights are human rights. Fix your heart or die.” Forever and ever, amen.)
The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer
Joan Westenberg: “We have ‘growth hackers’ but no ‘stability hackers.’ We have ‘disruptors’ but no ‘preservers.’ The entire vocabulary of modern business is oriented toward the new, the unprecedented, the revolutionary. What we lack is language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.”
Holy Hell: Tanya Donelly Talks About Belly (20 Years Later!)
I was looking up articles about Belly after seeing them play live, and ran across this gem from 2013. I never knew that Star was originally supposed to be the second Breeders album! Tanya Donnelly: “The genesis of that band was going to be that Kim [Deal] would have an album and then the next one would be my songs. And in fact all of the demos for Star say “The Breeders” on them. Like, on the reels and on the boxes. Because that was supposed to be the second Breeders album originally.” What??? I'm glad the universe or whatever intervened, because it gave us TWO seminal 90s albums: Star and Last Splash.
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