I’m taking a six-week summer grad school class for the first time… and damn, there is a lot of work in a short time.

Spending the morning at the Subaru dealership while they make a warranty repair to our Outback. It’s a pretty nice customer lounge with extremely average coffee.

Luxury experience

A number of years ago, Liz and I celebrated our anniversary in Charleston and stayed at an up and coming hotel — The French Quarter Inn. We loved our stay, the location is perfect, right in the middle of the downtown area. At the time, it was a little expensive, but reasonable for a luxury experience. Liz and I stayed there a few more times for anniversaries and birthdays and each time, we loved our experience. I found a shot I took from our balcony in 2013 with a iPhone:1

View of a church steeple from a hotel in Charleston, SC.

We weren’t the only one who loved the hotel. The French Quarter Inn was honored as one of the best in America by Travel and Leisure. After they were honored, it was tough to get a reservation and the...

Did some grad school work after watching the Andor finale… I had some weird dreams mashing up the two…

Color fonts and signal flags

I’ve been thinking about color fonts lately. Experimenting with the color fonts features in Fontstruct and Glyphs. Trying to better understand how to create color fonts. And while I’m starting to understand how they are made, I’m left with one major question… why?

Why do we need color fonts?

If you don’t know, fonts are typically monochromatic. Black and white only. Color is applied in software like Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Office. The ability to customize is limitless.

Often, the case for color fonts is made for the web. A complex typeface design with color features that can be encapsulated as a vector font and customized via CSS would be appealing. But color web fonts support is inconsistent across browsers. I also think web-based design apps like Canva and Adobe Express that cater to more novice designers might have a use for some pre-colored fonts.

I did think of one application — nautical flags....

On tiredness

I’m tired. It was a long semester — working full time and taking two classes is always challenging. But one of my classes was much more work than I expected. My son’s lacrosse experience was chaotic, poorly scheduled and quite frankly, not fun at all. I’ve failed at my goal to get healthy by my 50th birthday. Things haven’t gone great professionally. The world seems to be burning down around us. I’m tired. Exhausted. I feel it in every bone of my body.

I’ve always thought that the cure for tiredness was rest — and I will get some vacation time in this summer — but I think it’s more than just taking days off and ignoring work emails. I think the “cure” for this type of tiredness is hope. Hope that things will improve. Believing that I’m headed in the right direction. When things seem bleak, it’s easy to feel...

I have no tolerance for people who preach compassion, but have no compassion.

Leo XIV is notably the first person named Bob to become Pope.