You can’t tell your own stories if you’re too busy refuting the terrible stories told by others. You have to give yourself both the space—and the silence—to dream.

Mandy Brown, Storytelling as practice

Watched Stay the Night with Andrea Bang. 🎬 We loved the thoughtful take on the rom com and coming of age genres. And perfect Toronto vibes.

My Old Ass 🎬 with Aubry Plaza and a Canadian cast surprised with the hard-hitting sentimentality of embracing the present and accepting the future (i.e. we all cried).

Started reading Handmade by Gary Rogowski because, until yesterday, it was free on Audible. 📚 I struggled through the start where he proclaimed he mastery of woodworking for ten minutes and then the first several chapters recounting his college life, but eventually it settled into a memoir on the craft similar to Peter Korn’s or even Nick Offerman’s. Definitely reminiscent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the melding of philosophy and craft.

Breakfast with Nikki

With great excitement we just started reading: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by Tj Klune 📚 It’s a prequel to the classic The House in the Cerulean Sea.

Finished reading: I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue 📚 A lovely office rom-com about finding empathy for yourself and others. Set in Calgary. ❤️

A rainbow over a lake, seen out a window and through a small forest of maple, birch and cedar trees.

Currently reading: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 📚 🐈☕️

Finished reading: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick 📚 I thought this was a great primer on where we’re at with AI and what it can do for us. For the last year I’ve been using AI as a super-charged code completion with GitHub Copilot and a web documentation librarian with my MDN subscription. I’ve just scratched the surface of what I can do and I haven’t yet delved into the more conversational modes of AI. Mollick gave some interesting tips on prompt engineering — like giving the AI a persona for more insightful responses. Huh. Overall I like how Mollick encourages us to keep probing the frontiers of AI in our daily work and adopting it intentionally — much better than using it blindly or even ignoring it altogether.

Jason Bent has a video tutorial on making a mortise and tenon with the Shaper Origin. I’m starting to think that (money aside) this isn’t a terrible option for the home woodshop. It does lots of joinery plus lots of CNC-type work in a systainer-sized machine that doesn’t require making lots of jigs and having the waste of temporary templates. 🪚

I’m loving the upgrade from the 12 Pro camera to the iPhone 16 Pro. Portrait mode-ing all the things. I’ve been using the “Natural” photo styling a lot too.

A tabby cat sitting in profile, yawning with a wide open mouth in a sunbeam.

Quick update on the iPhone transfer saga. The iPhone 16 Pro still crashed and behaved oddly. I ended up doing a clean restore, this time transferring directly from the old iPhone 12. Everything seems super happy since. That the original iCloud restore was buggy is concerning, but 🤷

The camera control “button” is interesting. I don’t feel at all fast using it yet, like I do with the physical controls on a Canon, so I assume I need to practice and build muscle memory for switching between settings.

The initial upgrade process to the iPhone 16 was weirdly buggy. After iCloud transfer from the old phone, it’d freeze up randomly. It turns out there was an iOS 18 update specifically for the iPhones 16 and everything has been perfect since. It’s still labeled as iOS 18.0 though.

Finished reading: How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra 📚 It starts out nerdy, but grows into a profound message about the social role of public infrastructure. Highly recommended.

I’m starting to dig in on the new OS features. One peculiarity of Sonoma is that my cursor won’t be visible on wake or sometimes when switching spaces. But once I do something like an exposé gesture it’ll show. 🤷‍♂️

Today’s a very expensive day. iPhone preorder, then off to Hunter Douglas to get better and safer blinds for the nursery. Adulting.

After some paper prototyping I chickened out and didn’t get the Max size as discussed. The size of the 12 Pro I’m used to is too good. And there’s a ton of MagSafe power banks out there. So anyways, if all goes well, I’ll get pictures of our newborn with a 16 Pro!

I think I’ll order an iPhone 16 Pro Max oddly enough after realizing that my 12 Pro does most of what I want except for the battery life. Go all-in on battery and maybe another 3 or 4 year service life will be reasonable?