America 2020
On Election Day 2020 I rewrote Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” verse by verse—the same road-trip frame, a much darker 2020 mirror—after reading Daniel Levitin on songs that force us to humanize instead of demonize.…
Project Leroy - Lessons Learned Part 3
Three camera enclosures for a backyard AI rig: fragile bare module, wobbly printable arm, then a proper housing with tripod legs that finally survived kids, pets, and Minnesota weather.…
Project Leroy - Lessons Learned Part 2
Survival tactics for a Pi 3 running OpenCV in a tight loop: swallow exceptions with logging, refuse saves when disk crosses 95%, resize frames for inference while mapping boxes back to full-res captures, and wire it up as a systemd service.…
Project Leroy - Lessons Learned Part 1
Why classifying whole frames failed, how object detection plus bounding-box cutouts fixed it, and which two Coral models I paired for “is there a bird?” then “which bird?”…
Vacation 2020
Three tent nights off the grid with the kids: black widows safely avoided, daddy longlegs dramatized, and a cold stream that became “our” hideout away from screens.…
Project Leroy
Named for a grandfather who loved feeders and cuckoo clocks: Raspberry Pi, Google Coral USB, and a camera trying to learn which visitors are actually birds—and which photos are worth posting.…
Halloween
Phoebe Bridgers’ “Halloween,” from Punisher, nails the thrill of trying on a new self; for us it became an anthem for molting old routines and chasing a more adventurous geography.…
Chickens
Three barred rocks, one Ayam Cemani, and a kids’ clubhouse repurposed into a coop—we’re officially chicken people, with fencing and winter water still on the to-do list.…
Black Lives Matter
Black. Lives. Matter.…
Farewell Finland
Closing the Finland arc: stillness, birch pancakes, risky solo drives, and recordings that picked up room reverb, riverbed hiss, and stomps on pine floors—cheap therapy with a metronome.…