28 August 2021

How to Play Euchre

Let’s understand gameplay. Euchre is a trick-playing game, which means players take turns laying a card from their hand, and the highest card laid wins the trick. For instance: If 9 of clubs, 10 of clubs, queen of clubs, and ace of clubs are played, the player with the ace wins.
I have a theory that multimedia—props, images, videos, audio clips—can be a crutch for unclear thinking, like copious salt and pepper masking the flavor of a gross dinner. For instance, slide-decks are often plagued by sloppy thinking but are sneakily digestible due to pictures and flashy charts. Although I’m a visual person, I like the challenge of explaining a complex concept with words alone. So, here it goes.

22 August 2021

Don’t Miss Two

This summer, my dad and I visited Carlsbad Caverns. That place is the physical manifestation of cavernous: Cathedral-like ceilings, “bottomless” pits, and rooms the size of city parks. Stalactites and stalagmites decorate these caverns like statues in a museum. Stalagmites (the ones on the ground) are towers that formed one calcium droplet at a time. The plunk, plunk, plunk of the droplets echoed through the caverns—slowly sculpting stalagmites for thousands of years. This commitment was nothing short of awesome. It inspired me: If little droplets could create giant sculptures, why can’t a person write a book?

2 August 2021

Pomodoro

A Machiavellian businesswoman answers her own question: “How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.” A middle-school teacher smiles at a poster beside the whiteboard: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” An old writer pens the advice of her deceased father: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” A book is written one word at a time—nothing novel there. And writing one word isn’t hard at all, yet it’s easy to go days or weeks without penning a damn thing.

28 July 2021

Draft One

thought those plants might eat me after I printed all 276 pages at Office Depot. Months of typing into my computer now manifest in the physical world. Lots of paper, ink, and words. I didn’t know if they were good but holding them gave me a sort of validation. My effort produced something.

1 June 2021

Doorstops

April 2021. Mount Hood, Oregon – A midnight alarm stirs me from my bunk at the Timberline Lodge. There’s a wall of snow outside the window, making the wood-walled chalet especially dark. A prime setting for a Stephen King novel (and incidentally the exterior filming location of The Shining). I fumble for the sink, and when I turn on the light, I cringe—expecting to find REDRUM scrawled on the mirror. Not today, I think, staring at the glass of murder movies. Not today.

25 April 2021

os28

I turned 28 last week. Late-twenties are an odd age—a major fork in life’s road. For some career-oriented urbanites, 30 is the new 20. For other family-oriented suburbanites, the biological clock is ticking. Men’s testosterone declines, s0 the window for fathering healthy kids shrinks. This mindset triggers a domino effect of activities: Marriage, home-ownership, career settling, and so on. While both the Barney Stinson and Marshall Eriksen views on age are valid, it’s a false dichotomy that leaves little room for the nuances that make life interesting. That said, there’s an objectivity to age.

14 April 2021

Death of Default

The Palm Springs of Washington… While Miranda Cosgrove didn’t share this view, I appreciated the analogy. Yakima’s a little desert town, a quick weekend escape from a West Coast metropolis. When my girlfriend and I visited the other weekend, we enjoyed hikes on the rolling hills, a farm-based brewery, and the glacier-fed river that cut through town. I especially enjoyed my experience at a local espresso stand.

8 April 2021

Seven Plus or Minus Two

At work, I inherited this tool to help people use a poorly designed product. While the long-term solution was to address core issues in the product, this supporting tool had low-hanging fruit, such as glaring usability holes. Rather than preach about these gaps, I leveraged the ever-relevant heuristic from writing: Show, don’t tell.

28 March 2021

24-Hour Arcade

Time is the great equalizer. Everyone gets 24 hours per day, 365-366 days per year, 73.2 years in a lifetime. But how much of this time is actually usable on things we want to do? Imagine an arcade filled with game machines. To play, the machines require tokens, and one token is worth one hour of time.

20 March 2021

Honey, We Shrunk the Animals

The other day, I saw a bald eagle’s nest. Masterfully crafted in the tallest tree in a two-mile radius, it summoned images of leathery pterodactyls. This massive, strong structure seemed anachronistic in today’s natural world—a world where nature is fragile and delicate. Yet its architect, the icon of freedom, had somehow persisted through the ages. The bald eagle had survived man.