Life, new and improved

BUY QUALITY PRODUCTS FROM COMPANIES THAT BACK THEM UP My experience with the Jr. Vornado Fan A pretty small purchase in the bigger picture but this has been in my top 10 purchases of the past few years.  Just think about the amount of hours something like this spends actually on, running, working constantly.  1000's of hours just chugging along being a silent rockstar in the background of your life. We had one of the hottest summers on record here in Portland a few years back.  I lived in a small south side closet of a room in a friends house.  Wasn't making a ton of money but did my research to find something reliable and aesthetically pleasing. (The curse of being a designer of course) What I found wasn't a 10 dollar box fan, and admittedly that is your better bet for moving lots of air quickly for a season or two.  The results were strongly biased towards small, sturdy, well built fans such as Vornado brand fans.  These lil' guy...

Halfway checkpoint. . . For those unfamiliar with my journey, I am in the middle of a 6 month code school boot camp style program.  What does that mean exactly? . . .  I'm trying to fit 2+ years of school into what you could comparatively say is one season on "the ice" from my previous life.  This may sound crazy to some people as an adult with a mortgage and bills, but compare that to the alternative of part time nights and weekends for 2 to 4 years for a similar level of experience. Now don't get me wrong, there are certainly short comings in both directions of education but few things can give me this much actually on screen computer coding time with actual people and problems at such a regular and intense pace.  I feel fortunate that I have done some actual language training not all that different from this before but that was 10 years ago.  My brain certainly took a while to warm up to this speed and even some days still shuts down by 2 or 3pm. Initi...

I can honestly tell you I never thought that much about lip balm.  Other than the fact that I needed it in my possession at all times.  Or if it wasn't that I needed to stop and buy some.  The reality was that over the years it had become really the one true item that I had to have with me or I wouldn't make it very long.  Sure there were days I probably didn't use it much, but even just the thought of it not being available made my lips start to feel chapped.  The thing is, when you get to that level of need in any product you become a slave to it. I wanted to be free but honestly couldn't find much information to help me.  I had tried half heartedly many times before to stop using the stuff, but in the end I would reach a point of uncomfortableness or pain that just didn't seem worth giving up the luscious amazing feeling of well balmed lips.  I did find a handful of blogs and posts here and there about how others have quit and I took what I could...

I started this road a few years back, and now I find myself in the crazy throws of constant stress and worry about if I'm making the right choice... Here's the thing, it doesn't really matter.  I'm a resourceful and talented "young" man (not in the coding world) who will figure it out one way or another.  Maybe that means I don't succeed at a code school boot camp.  I would really like to think that I certainly can.  But here's what's important, we try, we grow.  Even in the thick of it I find my mind is expanding.  My wiring is changing and I'm becoming someone who understands a little bit about a part of the world that I had NO idea about before.   My situation is that my financial life and my personal life have not had too terribly many conflicts over the years.  I have never made a ton of money, nor have I ever needed a ton of money.  Now sure it would be nice now and then to have been able to have more "means" to do some thin...

While the name is a bit of a mouth full, the products are well worth the time it takes to type  in... or at least copy paste. It seemed silly to me to buy a product marketed as a "trekking umbrella".  But here's the thing, whether you use it for that or not this is an entirely different level of product.  Like eons beyond your store bought umbrella.  Basically everything on their website is true but I'll give you my bullet points here. -YES it is actually made of almost all flexible strong materials.  Very little metal is used and that does NOT make it cheap.  They use high grade products that are designed and utilized to bend and stuff into and do whatever awful things you do to this umbrella without it breaking or deforming. -It telescopes out a third farther than any normal umbrella handle does with the extra extension.  Now this is actually designed to clip to your backpack and hover above you with no hands for shade or rain protection all...

It's hard to even explain how innovative and yet simply this has been pulled off. To start, Live Photos by Apple was an amazing advancement in how pictures are captured, viewed and shared.  The release of this technology however had some undeniable drawbacks.  It was shaky and hard to utilize after the fact.  If you didn't specifically plan to use a Live Photo as such it was hard to ever find one that didn't start or end with the camera in your pocket or hand or a swift blur of the screen as you moved to the next shot.  The shots stitched together were inconsistent and generally not an appealing experience you wanted to share with anyone let alone upload to social media.  Lest we forget to mention that they also didn't give you any real way to export them outside the Apple ecosystem as a gif or video without a third party app. Motion Still by Google was the last thing I expected.  Google making my iphone even better?  And on top of that with a featu...