The self has been on standby recently. My unread emails badge is something to behold, the blog is looking cobwebby, the unread books are piling up, the knee is misbehaving. Need to get proactive about this, but also want to be gentle and forgiving while the kids are so young and … | Continue reading
Can’t believe I hadn’t come across Roy McMakin’s furniture before. I was scrolling through Bluesky the other day and Shannon Mattern had shared his article “Some Chests of Drawers I Have Known” on Untapped. His work, and that essay, catches in the throat. | Continue reading
Accidental pocket field recording at our best local pizza place. | Continue reading
Heads up: we’re hiring at the Eames Institute. For the Digital Experience Designer role, we’re looking for someone with a product and/or systems-oriented background that has major typographic, brand, and storytelling sensitivity. Ideally someone with a bit of code experience but … | Continue reading
I came across a sparrow yesterday on the busy corner near B&A’s daycare on the way to pick them up. It looked like a tiny pile of leaves on the concrete, and people kept coming *this close* to stepping on it by accident. I realized what it was in exactly the same moment as a… | Continue reading
BB’s second snowman, just slightly taller than him! I think we’ve come a long way since last year. Next year, we’re going to work on our emotional reaction to the realization that other kids might take the carrot and the snowman will melt eventually. ❤️ | Continue reading
I put BB to bed last night for the first time in a little while and asked him what song he wanted me to sing, as usual. He said, “I don’t want a song.” A little bit of me died. I think it’s because I don’t get to put him to bed often due to… | Continue reading
Whelp. Tuesday did not at all go how I had hoped. A friend of mine lives next to a high school history teacher who posted the text below on one of the big social media sites yesterday. I found it helpful. This one is hard if you wanted Harris to win. Because Trump won fair… | Continue reading
I was walking to the grocery store just now with AB in the carrier. A man bumped me accidentally rushing after a woman about his age, maybe both mid-70s. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to him. “Where are you going?!” Silence. “You want to go home?” She nods. Gently … | Continue reading
It’s been a while! My site has fallen majorly by the wayside which both feels appropriate (see first point below) and makes me a bit sad. There’s a lot I’ve already forgotten. I want to analyze a bit more why I haven’t been posting… but that’s something I need to think a bit more … | Continue reading
This is a mega-post about our daughter AB’s arrival a little over two months ago, with a bit about BB’s birth three years ago thrown in. I wanted to note some of that at the time but never did. It’s mostly so I don’t forget, but maybe someone else will find it useful too. Maybe… | Continue reading
The more time passes, the more I think that establishing relationships, or repairing imperfect ones, is mostly about establishing mutual trust. Friends, work colleagues, family members, anyone really. Obviously a heck of a lot of other factors impact whether or not the relationsh … | Continue reading
[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager kno … | Continue reading
Last week, the Eames Institute Digital Product team got together at the newly-opened Eames Archives in Richmond, CA and the currently-under-renovation Ranch in Petaluma, CA. Llisa Demetrios – one of the Eames grandchildren, a founder of the Eames Institute, and our Chief Curator … | Continue reading
Why do whitecaps seem almost still when you’re 1000 feet in the air looking down at the ocean? | Continue reading
Read “Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools” on 404 Media. What a huge bummer. Instead of writing a ton more here, will point you to this post by tante which reflects my thoughts. Will probably keep my self-hosted WordPress site for a good while longer, but t … | Continue reading
The Eames Institute team is checking out some frameworks and static site generators for a project, and I wanted to see how Eleventy and Astro compare in terms of build time. Zach Leatherman’s 2022 article “Which generator builds Markdown the fastest?” is probably the most thoroug … | Continue reading
We visited Dia Beacon for the first time, with B. Great place. This is Dan Flavin’s untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b from 1978. B’s favorite was Louise Bourgeois’s spider, I think, or maybe Arena by Rita McBride. It was fun stumbling across Occasional Papers’ Explorer in the bo … | Continue reading
B’s first snowman, about two feet tall. We couldn’t find much else for the eyes and mouth, and I can’t stop laughing at it. | Continue reading
Just read through “You sound like a bot” by Adi Robertson in the Verge. I hadn’t really put my finger on the right word for my feelings about AI until reading that article but that’s it: it feels very mediocre. If you want to get a rough overview of how the average frontend engin … | Continue reading
The Eames Archives is open! 🎉 Visit the Eames Institute website to book a tour. The new Visit page on the site hints at our major overhaul of EI’s digital presence and tooling, currently in progress under the direction of Eric Li. More to come… | Continue reading
🎶 On the sec-ond day of Christ-mas 🎶 🎶 My true love* gave to me: 🎶 🎶 A dou-ble_ eye in-fec-tion_ 🎶 * My son. I was going to also write, “At least he’s not sick!” But that is false as of the wee hours of this morning, poor little dud … | Continue reading
Can’t remember how we got talking about it, but another member of the Brooklyn Conservatory Chorale told me that she’s very in to English Change Ringing. I thought I hadn’t heard of it before, but I have heard it, many times since I lived over there for 10 years. Listen to an exa … | Continue reading
Most of the NYC crew from the Eames Institute took a little field trip to 101 Spring Street yesterday. There was a lot I found beautiful, and a few things that gave me pause. But one of the things I most enjoyed inspecting was Donald Judd’s big 14-seater whitewood table in the ki … | Continue reading
EL introduced me to contrast.tools recently, it uses the Advanced Perception of Color Algorithm (APCA) to check the accessibility of your text based on the desired colors and the font weight + size. But importantly, it also provides a lookup table to verify how you should (possib … | Continue reading
A few recent happenings. I started working with the excellent Eames Institute last week as Engineering Lead. 🎉 It’s been good fun so far, and seems like a great team. A heck of a lot of things I care about are rolled up in that one role. B is a gorgeous ball of wants and… | Continue reading
A while back, Manuel Moreale asked me to take part in People and Blogs, a “series where [he asks] interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs”. After a very major delay on my part, I finally answered his questions. If you want to find out more than you probably ev … | Continue reading
I just remembered… Another one of my favorites from the Kronos Quartet anniversary concert was Laurie Anderson’s piece “Nothing Left but Their Names”. I knew I would like it, but I didn’t expect to also learn another verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I wish I’d written it dow … | Continue reading
I was delighted to accompany DB last-minute to Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary gig at Carnegie Hall on Friday night. This was the set. Severiano Briseño, “El Sinaloense (The Man from Sinaloa)” (2001; arr. Osvaldo Golijov) Gabriella Smith, “Keep Going” (2023, co-commissioned by … | Continue reading
Makes about 8-10 servings, depends on how you’re serving it. Takes about 10-15 minutes prep to chop and mince, then about 1½ hours of relatively hands-off cooking. Heat a large pot over medium-high heat. Add about 2 TBSP of oil of your choosing, and then two sliced onions. Cook t … | Continue reading
Been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” a lot (again) recently. Tonight, I came across Jeremy Keith’s journal post “Decision time” and instantly thought, “Yes, and I wonder if he’s read that essay…” I was going to recommend it, but wanted to re … | Continue reading
We took a little day trip up to Storm King with some friends this past weekend on the most terrifyingly summery day of Autumn. B seemed to love it. Of what we saw, I think that Calder’s The Arch and Noguchi’s Momo Taro were his favorites. I think he was just bowled over by the… | Continue reading
I gave up too soon! Emerson from Flywheel did more digging in the Fastly cache documentation and realized that we could tweak the NGINX config to fully support content negotiation. He added a Vary header to the necessary URLs et voilà, everything started working properly. Now, co … | Continue reading
I recently moved my hosting from NFSN to Flywheel. NFSN had served me beautifully for years, very economically, but I just don’t have as much time for admin anymore and Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting was a useful move to cut down on that stress. Alongside the hosting move, … | Continue reading
It’s been an awful, heartbreaking October. I don’t really know what to say about the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Part of it is that I don’t feel like I know enough. Both about all of the micro and macro events that have led up to this, and what’s going on in this moment. And… | Continue reading
Finally went ahead and joined Bluesky, @piperhaywood.bsky.social (missed out on @piper, ah well). Thx for the code, Sam. 😘 Definitely not planning to leave Mastodon any time soon, but it felt like it was time to give it a go. IDK, Mastodon has started to feel… very pessim … | Continue reading
I’ve been working on a little side project recently that has been in the backlog for ages. I finally have a moment to pull it together, and it’s helping me brush up on a few Next.js 13 features I haven’t had the chance to play with yet. As part of that, I’m doing a lot… | Continue reading
See Dave Rupert’s post on scroll shadows with animation-timeline. Browser support isn’t quite there yet so it’s more of a progressive enhancement, but this is a great use case example. He wrote that off the back of Bramus’s scroll-driven animation exploration, and wow. So many of … | Continue reading
Currently listening to Transatlanticism 🐦 by Death Cab for Cutie. One of my best friends from college just invited me to the Death Cab + Postal Service 20th anniversary gig at Madison Square Garden on the 20th. I am SO pumped. Listening to Transatlanticism is giving me ma … | Continue reading
Turns out B is a biiiiiiig fan of Jonathan Richman. Wheels on the Bus, Afternoon, Ice Cream Man, Tandem Jump. Gonna try some more this weekend. | Continue reading
ooh.directory is “a collection of 2,018 blogs about every topic”. Pretty cool, and useful at a time when the major search engines seem to be totally whacked. And, my site is on it! Found out about it from Sam. ❤️ This led me in turn to its creator Phil Gyford’s personal site. Lov … | Continue reading
All of the birthdays in our little family fall within a 15 day period in the middle of the summer. There was a lot of cake around for nearly a month. And then we went to the UK to visit family who kindly wanted to celebrate all of our birthdays, so we did it all… | Continue reading
Counterpoint to yesterday’s post: “Kill your personas: How persona spectrums champion real user needs” by Margaret Price at Microsoft. A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It … | Continue reading
If you’re a designer or engineer and have never dug in to accessibility personas or cognitive walkthroughs before, I’d recommend checking out GDS’s accessibility persona homepages and their accompanying blog post about how they use persona profiles to test accessibility. As of ri … | Continue reading
It’s been a wild few months professionally. Earlier this year, I was asked to be the Engineering Manager at SuperHi and started in that role in May. That same month, I gave a talk at Parsons on the invitation of Eric Li and Michael Fehrenbach for their Typography and Interaction … | Continue reading