Late last year my wife started a new podcast called 

I built her a website. It was not good. It worked, but brought us both great shame.

To be fair, at the time there wasn’t a lot of content, and most of what she needed/wanted from it was theoretical. But, time has passed, and now there’s 38 episodes with many more to come, a blog, and a newsletter.

Beyond a visual refresh, the back-end of the site was changed from pulling episode content from 

 which means content isn’t living in two places. Storyblok is still in play for page content and blog posts. It’s also still a 

Late last year my wife started a new podcast called [Shelf Love](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shelf-love-a-romance-novel-book-club/id1480593827). I built her a website. It was not good. It worked, but brought us both great shame.

Shelf Love Podcast

I probably broke some stuff too, so if you see something, say something.

Moved everything out of Contentful and Pocket to being pulled from local Markdown files.

Testing, testing

There’s a bookmark folder in Safari across all of my devices titled “HTML/CSS”. I don’t use bookmarks that much, but I did when I was first getting interested in web development. I’ve gone back to Safari on all of my devices lately, mostly to use handoff and have consistent sharing options, and I thought it was time to take a look at those bookmarks and see what was worth keeping.

 The WebPlatform project, supported by various stewards between 2012 and 2015, has been 

Grid is a great learning tool but no longer supported.

Bookmark memory lane

I set a goal to read 40 books in 2019. I didn’t hit it.

I did come a lot closer than I thought I would though, ending up at 30 books, with two in progress as I write this, one of which I 

 finish by the end of the year. Some notes on what helped me read way more this year than the year before:

Alright, let’s move on to the books I actually read.

This is, fortunately, a relatively short list.

I’m not sure these need to be separated out, but these ones all have pictures with the words.

Read but I suggest you just read the Wikipedia entry instead

All of these are perfectly good books, but they’re a lot of words around a main point that’s maybe a five paragraph essay.

There’s a few books in this category that I started but have not finished nor given up on (

 being the big one), a lot of work related books I read in very short sessions when I’m looking for something specifically relevant to what I’m doing.

I set a goal to read 40 books in 2019. I didn’t hit it. I did come a lot closer than I thought I would though, ending up at 30 books, with two in progress as I write this, one of which I *might* finish by the end of the year.  Some notes on what helped me read way more this year than the year before.

No pizza for me

This week is my last week as a software developer at Education First. I’m off to something new, but before going I wanted to take a look back at my first EF trip. I went on two trips while working at EF (Spain first, then 

), but my very first one was as a customer, back in high school, when my Latin class went to Italy on a tour now called 

When I went looking for some sort of evidence of that trip to Italy, I realized all of the pictures I took had never made it to any form of modern computing storage — they were still saved on some floppy disks back at my parent’s house. The timing was fortunate though, my parents were coming up for Thanksgiving anyway, all I needed to do was order a USB disk reader off of Amazon.

 The floppy disks are from Mystic Color Lab, where we got all of our film processed, circa 1999 (take that, Y2K!). The pictures were processed then scanned, and saved at a 

 600×400 resolution. If I remember correctly that was close to what you got from a low end digital camera at the time, and it probably gave them some overhead to always fit 1 roll of film on 1 floppy disk. I think our computer at the time had a 800x600 display so I’m sure they looked great on it. Impressively, all of the 20 year old disks could be read without issue, but sadly no one seems to know where the printed copies of these photos are, so 600×400 might be the best I’m ever going to have of these. Also worth mentioning, two years later I had a digital camera that took pictures at 1280×960 and Mystic Color Lab was out of business.

Of course I’m not in any of these pictures, so there’s no proof that I really went except for me having these random pictures of Italy, but I assure you I did. It was maybe the most memorable experience from high school, even before finding these photos I knew what was on all of them, and it was one of the primary motivations for wanting to work at EF. I’m sad to go, but I’m excited about what’s next, and I’m betting that they’ll pop back up in my life when my daughter is old enough to travel.

kids playing soccer in an alley in Venice, which is peak Italy as I remember it

light from the center hole in the Pantheon

the picture every Latin student has to take, from Pompeii

the countryside around, if I remember correctly, Assisi

Floppy Memories

 at the local theatre today, part of the 

 , reshowing the films on big(ish) screens. Some thoughts:

My daughter, I think because Halloween is coming up, started listing the things she isn’t afraid of the other day, which went something like “not ghosts, not goblins, not alligators but I am afraid of crocodiles a little bit” and I guess she can add her parents turning into pigs on there with the Nile crocodiles now.

The only other movie we got to see this year for the Ghibli Fest was 

. It was definitely the better pick to see with a 4 year old, but even in that one there’s an extended scene where everyone thinks Mei has drowned, and while Totoro is fuzzy he’s far from 

 but I’d like to watch it with her at some point, I recall it being the most Americanized of them, but who knows what parts I’ve forgotten that she’ll find strange.

I took my daughter to see _Spirited Away_ at the local theatre today, part of the [Studio Ghibli Fest 2019](https://www.ghiblifest.com/) , reshowing the films on big(ish) screens.

Spirited Away - Studio Ghibli Fest 2019

 from my iPhone 3G that just keeps on giving every time I open Photos.

We were joking at work the other day about how dealing with timezones will only be worse once space travel is common, but imagine getting someone results for the closest pizza place on the wrong planet. Also, I couldn't find what you call geotagging on Mars (maybe still geotagging since geo usually relates to lower-case earth not Earth), but fortunately there's 

This was a great bug from my iPhone 3G that just keeps on giving every time I open Photos.

That time I went to Kyrgyzstan

Definitely my favorite thing in the library, finding random things used as bookmarks. Notecards with lists on them are a common one, but this is another level. Who is this person? Why did they make this list? Why did they read this book!

Definitely my favorite thing in the library, finding random things used as bookmarks.

The best part of the library is the random bookmarks

When you think, "oh, I have an idea for something I can code," and you Google it and there's a 

This is Amazing!

 is a great show to begin with but this one really killed me because I bowled in a league for many years, and it's a nearly one-to-one spoof of 

 which every bowling nerd watched when it came out. Spoof might not even be the right word, the source material is as ridiculous as the 

 version, with the exception of way more Alf references. I think. Honestly if the Alf stuff was in the original and I just forgot I wouldn't be supris

If you watched "Any Given Saturday Afternoon" and weren't familiar with who Tim Robinson and Michael C. Hall were portraying you'd miss out on most of the humor. 

 is worth watching, but if you're short on time Tim Robinson's character, Rick Kenmore, is an almost unaltered portrayl of Pete Weber, and you can understand Pete Weber from this amazing, 26 second long YouTube video entitled "PETE WEBER GOD DAMMIT I DID IT WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE".