Virginia ABC only sells one bottle of Eagle Rare (Aged 10 Years) to one customer a day. I decided to buy a 375-mL bottle for $30 just to give it a shot.

Eagle Rare (Aged 10 Years) has a nice aroma of toffee with hints of herbs. At 90 proof, the palate is smooth and bold with a strong oak finish. The oakiness is a bit overpowering. Adding a cube of ice brought out the rich cocoa flavor though.

Eagle Rare is not too sweet for a bourbon whiskey, which I appreciate. I don’t dislike it, but it is neither a must-have for me.

This is my first taste of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book. I enjoyed the beginning part of the book, in which he quoted Rakim. Coates has a message for young writers:

Much of the current hoopla about “book bans” and “censorship” gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about writers to come—the boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions. I can’t say I knew it, that first day walking into Lorton, but in my time teaching it soon became clear that becoming a good writer would not be enough. We needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell, or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire, as Mary had been set on fire since college: by words on a page.

By the fourth essay, which is half of the book, Coates gets into the weeds of politics. He delves into the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was too much for me. I am getting tired of politics.

Ethan Marcotte relaunched his personal website. It looks marvelous. The layout, the colors, the types are coherent and pleasing. Everything is handcrafted and nothing is IA generated. Great job, Mr. Responsive Web Design.

My current supervisor will be retiring at the end of this month. The Law School hired him four years ago to run the newly created communications office. My role as director of design and web services was reassigned under his office.

His first order of business was to completely abolish our website and content management system. He was willing to pay a huge amount to an outside vendor to redesign our site and migrated to a commercial CMS. The project took over two years to complete and it is still a mess.

The CMS is fine, but the frontend codes are still horrendous. I worked with the vendor to optimize the HTML and simplify the CSS, and the bill went way up. We had to stick with what they provided to us. After the new site launched, I had to go back and clean up as much as I could, but it was still nowhere near my expectation.

Other than the website, he and I got along fine. Since I was reporting to him, I had to get on the bandwagon. He worked remotely most of the time. I worked closely with my web developer and content specialist to keep the site up to date. Since we have always been independent, we will be fine after he’s retired.

Thankfully he was very flexible and hands-off. He never had any issue when I requested time off. Then again, I still have plenty of paid leaves. Since he didn’t micromanage me, I began documenting my work. In a few months, I would send him a PDF of what I had worked on. At the end of the fiscal year, I would have 30 to 50 pages of what I had done. I then incorporated everything into my self-evaluation for performance review.

In the short time working under his supervision, I learned two important lessons. I learned to get go of my own work. Before he came on board, the Law School website was my baby. I nurtured it for eleven years. I wrote every line of HTML and CSS. I knew the CMS inside out. I took care of each page to make sure it was usable and accessible. After the site was out of my hands, there was nothing I could do, but to let it go.

In addition, I learned to document my work in bullet lists before Elon Musk made federal employees submit five bullet points every week. I enjoyed writing anyway; therefore, I didn’t mind doing that. I didn’t mind him being my supervisor either. I had a much worse supervisor in the past. I wish him all the best with his retirement.

I am not sure when Mandy Brown changed her site, but I am loving it. The new design focuses on the reading experience. The main typeface is still Chaparral, designed by Carol Twombly. By moving the navigation to the bottom, the site opens up with so much white space for comfortable reading. The site is simple yet has human quality in the detail. It is definitely not created by AI.

Mason Campus News:

George Mason University’s Board of Visitors has extended the contract of President Gregory Washington through June 30, 2031. Washington, who became George Mason’s eighth president on July 1, 2020, was previously set to serve through June 30, 2027.

Congratulations, President Washington!

Mason Campus News:

George Mason University has named Daniel B. Kelly the next dean of the Antonin Scalia Law School, effective June 25, 2026. Kelly is a nationally recognized legal scholar and academic leader with expertise in property law, real estate, and law and economics.

Congratulations, Dean Kelly!

On Saturday, I brought a bottle of Nikka From the Barrel to share with friends over our camping trip. A female friend and I drank most of it.

At 102.8 proof, Nikka From the Barrel is a bold, blended Japanese whisky that goes down smoothly. It has a slightly sweet taste with oaky texture. For $80, Nikka From the Barrel is nice bottle to enjoy with family and friends on special occasions or to kick back and relax by yourself with some piano jazz, preferably Thelonious Monk’s.

Nikka From the Barrel has a unique blocky-yet-slick bottle. The label is nothing but black text on a gray-textured background. It’s simple and elegant—a classic design.

I find that carving on a longboard is similar to carving on a snowboard, but a bit more challenging. On a snowboard, my feet are strapped into the bindings; therefore, my position can be more forgiving. On a longboard, if my center of mass isn’t on the deck, I would get wiped out. It took me a while to keep my feet on the longboard when I initiated my turns. Once I found my balance, however, I felt like riding a snowboard. Summer practice will definitely improve my snowboard carving. Is the summer over yet?

Kyle Chayka writes for the New Yorker (“The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet”):

In the early days of the internet, HTML code and the need to design simple, small-size sites downloadable on dial-up led many hosts to adhere to a strict, basic palette. Eventually, website-building services such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix offered templates that became popular clichés of their own (think of sans-serif text over full-bleed splash images). But A.I. tools instill a particularly swift and stubborn genericism. Anthropic concedes as much in its guidance documents, noting that, when left to its own devices, Claude’s model “has strong design instincts, with a consistent default house style.… This default is persistent.” Not coincidentally, this default has a lot in common with Anthropic’s own branding—beigey backgrounds, off-red highlight colors, big typefaces, lots of serifs and underlines. The company notes that giving the program “generic instructions” such as “don’t use cream” is likely to “shift the model to a different fixed palette rather than producing variety.” In other words, the user has to fight to produce visuals that stray from the formula. As Ström-Awn put it, “The preferences and tendencies and aesthetics are deeply baked into its machinery; it is always going to struggle to produce something that doesn’t look like A.I.”

A.I. isn’t competing with me because I still handcraft my HTML and CSS to create a unique design. A.I. definitely competes with website-building services such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. I tried all three of these services and they weren’t not intuitive to use at all. The interfaces were janky. The markups were spaghetti. Even WordPress’s Gutenberg is so horrendous that I am still using the Classic Editor for this blog as well as the network of Scalia Law Sites. My only hope is that WordPress won’t abandon the Classic Editor.