Todd Grooms

The passage of time is omnipresent in my digital life. Photos regularly surfaces memories of past events. I frequently enjoy with these memories, but there are occasional reminders that outline just how much time has passed. A memory and reminder of my nephew’s twentieth birthday hit me especially hard this week.

I had just started college when my brother called me with the news that my nephew was born. My nephew, Dallas, was named after my brother’s favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys. Fittingly, he was born during a Monday Night Football game featuring the Dallas Cowboys. You can’t make this stuff up.

Twenty years feels impossible. I understand that transition period is in the past, but it doesn’t feel possible that it was twenty years in the past. When I think of Dallas, I still think of him as being four or five years old, his age when I graduated college. It’s wild. I was also warned about the speed at which time passes as you age, but even with those frequent warnings, I feel as though I am ill prepared for this experience.

📺 Susan Kare demonstrating the Macintosh Interface in 1984

So much respect for Susan Kare. The amount of thoughtfulness put into the iconography and interface design of the original Macintosh is incredible. I love these time capsules.

🔗 How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?

Interesting perspective. My hometown, Mayfield, Kentucky, has seen a similar change over the years. There have been many immigrants, mostly from Mexico, who have moved there for opportunities and are now part of the community.

Finished reading: Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words 📚

I received a printed copy of this book. The quality of the print is extraordinary. I loved reading it and found the book inspiring.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

Quote from The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, an attempt at capturing a certain Aristotelian sentiment. I ran across the quote this morning while reading Make Something Wonderful. Steve attributed the quote directly to Aristotle, but I found the origination of the quote thanks to Check Your Fact.

Finished reading: Treasure Island - Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth by Robert Louis Stevenson 📚

And you may lay to that.

Third day in a row of spending the majority of my time in my bed. Two negative rapid antigen Covid tests, but you never know. Whatever it is has really taken me down. I was scheduled to travel for work this week. Honestly dejected that I had to cancel, as I had made quite a few plans. C’est la vie.

Localization of dates frequently trips me up. I find myself regularly searching for the following document: Unicode Technical Standard #35 - Part 4: Dates.

Proactively storing this link in my Pinboard for future reference.

After much consternation, I got back on my bicycle last month. Sixteen rides for over eighty-seven miles in August. Just took my first ride of September this morning. Hoping to exceed one hundred miles this month.

📺 The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

An entertaining story about a group of ingenious kids.

📺 “In Search of Excellence” at Apple Computer in 1984

I love the idea of people working together towards a common goal. I find it inspiring.

📺 Apple Computers 1995 Promotional Video “The Martinettis Bring Home a Computer”

Loved watching this infomercial. It makes me nostalgic for mid 90’s computing.

Via 512 Pixels.

🔗 Ten weird NHL facts that bother me more than they should (News+)

That was the year Boston took Joe Thornton with the No. 1 pick, and at some point, the Bruins apparently decided they wanted to have both the first and the last pick of the draft. So they called up the Avalanche and asked if they wanted to move up one pick for free, at which point the Colorado staff presumably rolled their eyes so far into the back of their heads they could see the Nordiques.

Chef’s kiss.

🔗 Shine On, Ride On, Bill Walton

After Bill Walton passed away earlier this year, I read a few articles that touched on his adoration of bicycles and riding bicycles. I recently started riding as a low impact way to exercise. As strange as it sounds, my back feels better after a week on the bike.

Finished reading: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut 📚

Ashley’s suggestion. She’s a Vonnegut fan. I enjoyed it. That happiness is mine.

Finished reading: The Perfect Thing by Steven Levy 📚

Loved the nostalgia. My iPod Mini was my first Apple product and I still occasionally use it. It’s such a fun device and living through this time period was such a fun experience. I just wish I had kept my iPod 5th Gen.

Finished reading: California by Edan Lepucki 📚

Before moving into our current home, we hired an interior decorator to furnish and decorate our living and dining rooms. She purchased this book and put it on our book shelf as a decoration. That was six years ago. I just got around to reading it. I enjoyed it. Wasn’t sure how it was going to wrap up, but it was good.

Finished reading: The Beautiful and the Damned by F Scott Fitzgerald 📚

Why did I waste so much time with this one? Anthony Comstock Patch should have died poor and desolate.

🔗 The Last Kid in Ninth Grade Without an iPhone

An ongoing conversation I’ve had with Ashley is when to introduce certain technologies with the kids. It can be tough to balance.

🔗 8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story

Interesting article outlining those involved in the Transformer research paper that kicked off today’s AI craze.

via Kottke

📘 Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work there, and the sort of philosophies and purpose by which they go about their business. So if Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away and all those people still feel those things and they’re still working to make the next great personal computer, then I will feel that my genes are still in there.

🔗 Firehouse Five and the Cinderella Surprise

I love this post by Cabel Sasser about The Firehouse Five Plus Two. I especially love this reminder:

Also, a Cabel reminder to always buy the music you want to keep forever — these albums can, and will, disappear from streaming services at some point in the future.

🔗 John Graham-Cumming’s blog: The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it?

I love the dedication to restoring such an important document. It’s a bit sad to think of what is lost due to progress and the lack of backwards compatibility.

Going back in time. Finished reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 📚

Max’s school was out of session and he was hanging out in my office when I started repairs on my iPod Mini. He seemed genuinely interested in the little device and asked if he could have one. I laughed it off at first, but after a bit of thinking I realized it wasn’t a terrible idea.

Max has started to develop his own musical taste and has asked to have a way to play music in his bedroom. Ashley and I have considered allowing him to have his iPad in there for playing music, but I do not like the idea of him having access to the internet in his room at the age of nine, potentially unsupervised. I could add internet filters to our home network, but that can be its own can of worms or whack-a-mole. We’ve also considered purchasing him his own HomePod for his bedroom. My initial concern was introducing a potentially always on microphone in his bedroom. Fortunately, it is possible to disable the “Hey Siri” functionality with its always on microphone. There is the risk of Siri misinterpreting the request and playing something completely wrong, which could include explicit content. Thankfully, there are settings to for the HomePod to enable or disable explicit content. My only other concern with a HomePod, would be the noise aspect. The speaker can only be used to play music for the room and not be routed through a headset or headphones. With an iPod, Max could listen to music quietly, without the need for the internet, and would only have access to a pre-approved music library. It honestly doesn’t seem that ridiculous.

As luck would have it, the website I found for purchasing replacement iPod Mini parts also sells refurbished iPods. Not only are there refurbished iPods, but there are custom build iPods, with novelty cases. I decided to give it a try and purchased an iPod Classic 5th generation for Max’s Christmas gift. I also purchased a pair of wired headphones that mimic the design aesthetic of the original iPod earbuds. I plan on buying a few albums and syncing them to the iPod as well so that he’ll be able to enjoy it as soon as he opens it. I like the idea of him also having the chance to explore music with an iPod. I also don’t hate the idea of staving off more internet access and screentime for a little while longer.