§ Hello there
§ On Tuesday I gave a presentation about exhibit design to a nearby school group. This required creating a slideshow deck which is a task I find surprisingly rewarding—probably because I only have to do it once a year at most.
Here are some personal guidelines I try to follow:
- Choose a font size that feels uncomfortably large and then double it
- This will necessitate using fewer words per slide. That is a good thing.
- Make bespoke hand-drawn diagrams whenever possible
§ On Thursday, the Cleveland area more or less shut down after a nasty overnight snow storm descend on the city. It was the most snow I’ve seen since 2022. I’m thankful that I have a job that lets me easily work from home on occasion.
§ I spent Saturday morning with the FIRST Robotics team I’ve been mentoring. We made good progress in just a few hours building a working prototype of a rubber ball intake mechanism.
§ My recent self-hosting experiments have been successful enough that I took another step and installed Navidrome, a server for hosting my downloaded music. Coincidentally, James Reeves has been working on an MP3 player app of his own recently. It must be something in the air.
For the time being I’ve successfully resisted getting a NAS to store all of these files but it is basically inevitable if this hobby continues.
§ Don’t worry, I promise this will not become a technology blog.
§ Speaking of music, I’ve been listening to two particularly interesting indie R&B albums from late last year: “The Passionate Ones” by Nourished by Time and “Baby” by Dijon. Even if you, like me, don’t consider yourself a particularly avid R&B fan I would encourage you to give these two records a shot—there is something special going on in the Baltimore music scene right now.
§ I’ve also been really enjoying two specific acoustic Latin albums this week: “Cancionera” by Natalia Lafourcade and “Los Ángeles” by Rosalía. This is another entirely new-to-me genre. Maybe there is something about the quiet and contemplative atmosphere of deep-winter that makes me more receptive to new music.
