Family Photo: No Place Like Home I attended DynamicsCon 2026 last week. This year's event was in Las Vegas, which apparently piqued my dad's interest in Microsoft's enterprise SaaS offerings...so we drove out and attended the event together. One evening, after learning the latest about inventory costing, demand planning, and Power BI administration, we headed off property to watch The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere. Outside The Sphere. The Sphere is a monument to immersive entertainment. Its dome...
8 days ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Commit Calvin started futsal this season. It's our first foray into team sports. The new activity comes with new calendar commitments: practices every Monday, games on Wednesdays or Fridays depending on the whims of whoever's in charge of those decisions. Calvin's the youngest kid on his 1st/2nd grade team. He's enjoying it, and his indoor soccer skills are improving. It helps that all his teammates are nice. I don't know if that's a statistical anomaly. Maybe kids are just...
17 days ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Forts What's stronger: the urge to build a fort, or dig a tunnel? It feels like Calvin and Lawrence are building forts everywhere these days. Building materials range from couch cushions and blankets and pillows to cardboard bricks and cardboard boxes and storage containers. This weekend they built a fort out of the neighbor's mulch pile. Last month, we built a snow fort together up in Truckee. When the cousins visited a couple weeks ago, they all built a mixed-media fort that...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: Easter Puzzle For Easter, Luana wanted to give each kid a big Easter present instead of the usual collection of chocolate eggs, fun-size candy bars, and Chuck E. Cheese prize-counter-schlock stuffed into plastic eggs. We came up with the idea of a puzzle: I coaxed ChatGPT into creating an Easter puzzle picture, we sliced it into a grid, fit the pieces into Easter eggs, and hid the eggs around the yard. We wrote a message on the back of the puzzle. After Calvin and Lawrence found...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Family Photo: At the Movies Calvin's friend had a birthday party at the movies, so we all saw Super Mario Galaxy together. I will spare you the spoilers, but the movie plot was about as nuanced as an 8-bit videogame. The kids loved it though. And watching them watch the movie was magical. The movie watching experience itself has greatly improved since I was a kid, whether or not the content has. The chairs are packed with electric motors that unfold them into beds. They have a little red...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Family Photo: Moon Lawrence and Calvin watching the Artemis II launch on April 1st. With the Artemis II mission, there were a lot of good reasons to look up at the night sky this month. If you're unfamiliar with the Artemis II astronauts' trajectory, I'd encourage you to give this a watch: Or, if you really want to nerd-out, you can build the a visual of Artemis II's trajectory from NASA's raw data with this how-to video. -- This month, Calvin's teacher assigned a moon journal to his class....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: Ants The other day, Calvin watched a LEGO YouTuber build a LEGO Ant Farm. Naturally, the next day he went outside with a little cup and tried to gather ants into his own ant farm. It was the same day we were leaving on our spring break trip to Truckee: Me: Cavlin, don't collect the ants. We're going on a trip and can't take them with us.Calvin: Why can't we take them with us?Me: Um, because then they'll be far from their home. Calvin: Maybe we can take them to the forest and...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Family Photo: 6-7 Calvin and Lawrence challenged each other to yell 6-7 out the window all the way home. Your familiarity with 6-7 is a good litmus test for the degrees of separation between you and a six or seven year old. (or is it ligma?) In case you need to catch up: 6-7 was a line in a rap song, which was used in the mixtape of a professional basketball player (who was 6'7"). Another basketball player (not a professional, but big on YouTube) kept forcing 6-7 into video interviews, along...
4 months ago • 7 min read
Family Photo: Hold On Calvin and Lawrence were playing on the spinny thing at the park. Lawrence wrapped his arms around the middle bit while Calvin ran around gripping the outside bits, kicking his legs up to swing freely from the catharpins or whatever those bits are called. Part of me wanted him to be more cautious. The spinny thing spins up some pretty good momentum. If he let go, I didn't envy my future self returning home to explain how Calvin got scuffed up by centrifugal force. Part...
4 months ago • 3 min read