Blog

  • Best movies of all time (bmoat) list

    1. Napoleon Dynamite
    2. Apocalypto
    3. Alien
    4. Lilo and Stitch
    5. Blue Velvet
    6. The Matrix

    [more to come]

  • A good beach day

    Well there’s nothing like spending a 90º summer afternoon in a cool lake with your three kids, all under the age of 12 mind you (that’s key), wrestling and throwing them around in the waves, with high winds whipping up one-footers. Of course it ain’t the Atlantic, but whatryagonnado. We followed it up with some Pad Thai a-la-cart which I’ll post recipe for asap. Altogether an epic day!

  • Depeche Mode

    Always been one of my favorite bands, but their songs are hit or miss. Actually, the segments of their songs are like that. At times they can blow me away with Gahan’s vocals and the layers beneath, and then lose me with a shift into something that’s just not right.

    E.g.:

    http://youtu.be/XfG8O_Fq_vg?t=1m34s

    The chorus there is as good as anything DM has done, but the rest of the song is just eh. Still, I’ll take it.

  • Sabbatical

    So, for my sabbatical rundown of things to do:

    1. Design the icons for the project.
    2. Keep learning wordpress.
    3. Organize the attic, especially all the artwork
    4. ??
  • On "Where the Wild Things Are"

    Too much music. Not enough Sea Monster.

  • Nancy soccer

    She’s the only one on the field without an “uh” sound at the end of her name. The coaches are playing with them in a little scrimmage, and they keep kicking the balls at the girls.

  • Schemarama

    Schemarama

    I finally finished a working version of a Figma plugin I’ve been tweaking for years.

    Figma is one of the coolest pieces of software I’ve ever used, and makes up the majority of my coursework these days.

    When COVID hit, my students were forced to work from home on whatever computers they had access to. I hoped at the time that Adobe – until then the primary tool used in my classes – would release a free license for students. The monthly subscription fee was more than I felt was fair for students, especially for those who were barely able to afford the costs of higher education.

    Figma was a godsend; I was able to transfer my assignments’ requirements easily enough, and students could work anywhere. And it was free.

    What really attracted me to the platform, however, was the presence of a community of developers who could easily contribute plugins and other resources to be shared among all Figma users. This is something that WordPress does so well, and as someone who has contributed for as long as I have, I set out to publish on Figma’s community.

    Easier said than done. While Figma plugins are based on languages I’m familiar with – HTML, CSS, and Javascript – the process was vexing. I had written a basic color picker app that worked in the browser (see https://codepen.io/empireoflight/pen/eYYgGjL) I just could not get it working in Figma’s plugin development environment. I gave up after a while, and used the project as a basic learning tool in my color theory lectures.

    Enter AI. From the minute I saw the capabilities the LLEs had for generating code, I’ve been flying through old projects like Schemarama and bringing them back to life. This morning I cracked open my old Schemarama repo and rebuilt it using Cursor, and just finished submitting it to the Figma plugin review team.

    Fingers are crossed that it gets through, but the learning experience is worth it no matter what the outcome.

    Here’s a sneak preview: