Welcome to my creative outlet. A place to share ephemera I’ve collected online and offline,
along with some writing.
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.
Dorothy Sayers
This feels like a fitting quote for Black Friday weekend.
I’ve posted Dorothy Sayers before, but her writing contains much wisdom on work and life. Check out her essay Why Work? for more.
I always laugh when I see the sign for this business. Perhaps they named it before every single business or transaction was rated out of 5 stars. Hopefully, it isn’t four out of ten!
Living on the Pacific Northwest, we get a lot of rain (it is a temperate rainforest), especially in late fall. But if you put on your rain gear and get away from the city, it is always so beautiful and peaceful in the woods.
I was reviewing a bin of my old school work and found this gem. It was an acrostic poem based on my name, may not be the most elegant, but it is true 🙂
I’ve always loved electronic music, sadly now renamed EDM and often much worse (or I’m just old). A few years ago my son and I started playing around with Garage Band and made some fun beats – including this dancey one.
Since then I picked up a PO-33 micro sampler and have played around here and there, but not enough to feel competent. Hopefully I’ll be posting some more music in the future. 🕺
Spotted in Washington, it was too good to pass up the photo opportunity.
A Sabbath haiku.
I love to sleep in
Me
Especially on Sunday
Oh no, late for church
Go to the creative gym every day
Jean Jullien
I’ve recently read a few books by artists including Jean Jullien and one thing that stood out is the emphasis each of them placed on practice.
Drawing has always been something I enjoy, but I haven’t had made the time to practice enough to improve or form a meaningful habit. This means the friction to get started was way too high.
Finally a few weeks ago I broke the pattern and have started sketching almost daily. As a bonus, I find that when I draw, my boys are more inspired to draw too. I’m also finding that as I try drawing things I find harder (animals and people) I’m improving – though I still manage to make faces look weird 🙃
I’m not one to be easily bested by a problem. In this case a friend was having a little summer hang out and asked if I could bring my fire pit. I was planning to bike, so this was the solution …
like a blind dog in a meat market
- Going wild, out of control
I don’t recall where I read this phrase, but it immediately stuck because of its strong visual description. I will use it to (somewhat accurately) describe my boys at times.
I did some digging and it seems like it was in use for well over a century, but the origin is unknown.
When walking (or driving), I’m always on the lookout for interesting or funny signs. This one made me laugh, it’s like they didn’t want to offend anyone who was going to pee on their window – so Canadian 😂
…before there can be art there must be memories and before there can be memories there must be experience.
Herbert Read
All art starts with inspiration. It may be a difficult conversation, an overwhelming emotion, a beautiful sunset, or events we don’t even consciously remember. And if done well, the art invites the viewer or reader or listener in, evoking remembrances of places and people and feelings.
But this isn’t easy, and the output we see is often only a small part of the effort. Tolkien spending over a decade on The Lord of the Rings, including appendices. Frank Herbert spent five years travelling and exploring a wide range of ideas before starting his epic novel Dune. J.K. Rowling went through years of difficulty between the idea for Harry Potter and publishing the first book.
Not only that, as participants, we long to know the story behind the art. Who was the love song for? What inspired the book? Why did they choose that movie ending?
I remember the days of buying an album, struggling to remove the plastic wrap, placing the CD in the player and then poring over the booklet. My favorite albums often had pictures, lyrics, and stories from the artist that enhanced the listening experience.
But now we have AI art, and it sucks. Not because it is obviously AI (though often it is) but because it was not created by a human. There was no inspiration, no experiences, no memories behind the work; just trillions of tokens of data with some hallucinations and boom, a song or story or video ready for you. I realize that AI generated art is inevitable, but I will do all I can to avoid it, and I hope you will too.
P.S. Here’s a cartoonist, The Oatmeal, describing their take on AI art (warning, some swears)
It’s 2025 and we’ve pretty much all come to realize how addictive these little (or not so little) devices in our pocket really are, but yet struggle to manage them.
There are a number of dumb phones that have been released recently to address this, trying to provide just enough functionality without the bad stuff, but they aren’t cheap.
I’ve taken an alternate route, making my current phone as dumb as possible, without purchasing another device. Here are six things that seem to help:
My goal isn’t to simply reduce my screen time, but rather to make it harder to waste my time. Overall it’s working fairly well, though I find it necessary to review from time to time, and modify as new distractions sneak in.
Here is a before and after of my phone.
Walking through our neighbourhood in the fall is such a joy; the colors of the leaves are so vibrant, especially in the late afternoon light.
All the leaves below were collected from one tree (and one below the tree).
WordPress is a powerful open source Content Management System (CMS) that makes it easy to run a blog, or any kind of website … including this one. It’s been around since 2003 (which is forever in tech years) and currently powers over 22% of the top 1M websites.
I was first introduced to WordPress around 2009 when building a website for a family member. I’d used some other solutions before including Geocities (old school), Microsoft FrontPage (shudder), and coding straight HTML, however WordPress immediately stood out as a powerful way to publish a website without technical experience.
Since then I’ve built, or worked on, over 30 websites using WordPress. These ranged from vanilla sites, to page builders like Elementor, to themes I hand-coded using Roots. In 2013, I even built my startup Whys Learning (interactive family games) on WordPress, taking advantage of the powerful CMS. It may not have been the most elegant solution, but it allowed me to launch and iterate quickly without extensive coding knowledge.
yak shaving
- Small, tedious tasks you need to complete in order to make progress on your real project
The term Yak Shaving originated in the 1990’s, capturing the frustrating work that you need to do before you can actually do your work. This exists in all domains, but is especially relevant in programming; you follow the instructions to install something which requires installing something else, which breaks something else … until hours later you’re frustrated and have completely forgot what you were originally trying to do.
Here’s a real-life example:
My wife asks for a coffee. Of course I say yes!
Wife asks what I’m doing. “Making coffee, what does it look like!”
This might be extreme, but I find it happens frequently, so happy Yak Shaving 🙃
P.S. Here is a classic video on Yak Shaving from Malcolm in the Middle.
I found this shot in my photos recently; it’s me (many years ago) mourning a batch of homebrew that went bad during the secondary fermentation.
As someone who loves to experiment and make my own things, whether it be kombucha, wine, or coffee – I am reminded that a key to success is embracing failure. This doesn’t mean seeking it out, but rather being okay when something doesn’t turn out right, and being willing to reinvest the energy and time to try again.
I no longer brew beer, but have started making wine from the grapes in our yard. Every year it gets a bit better, but there are always hard lessons too. It is disappointing when you try something after 10 months and realize it’s no good, but that is what the next year is for!
Jordan Klassen is one of my favorite (and I would say underrated) local artists, consistently releasing solid tunes that are laced with emotion. I’ve been listening to his new EP on Spotify and in my hunt for related music videos, found this gem from 2020. Enjoy 🍿
As a technologist, working in the software industry, and as a Christian, thinking deeply about technology, faith, and work – I’ve been closely watching the rise of AI, looking at both the opportunities and the challenges. My goal here is to summarize the biggest issues we as Christians (and everyone concerned with human flourishing) should be aware of.
AI is a very broad category that covers many technologies, however the majority of AI getting news and usage is generative AI, specifically the models and services created by the largest tech firms in the USA (and China to a lesser extent). This will be the focus of the essay.
To help bring clarity, I’ve created a simple framework, corresponding to the process of producing and using generative AI. At each step I’ll highlight the biggest issues I see. Here is the four step framework:
Every time I visit Kelowna I see this sign and want to get a photo. This time I did. Unfortunately I think a lot of turtles don’t make it.
