Sunday morning at the conservatory.
The aroid house is the best forty minutes you can spend before brunch. Humid air, painted glass, every leaf a different shape arguing the same case.
Product manager. Navy veteran. Plant person. Curler in winter, photographer in light. This is where I keep what I'm thinking about and what I'm growing.
Personal AI ops system for budgeting and life operations. Two specialists shipped, more on deck.
Two weeks from cigar-shape to full deliciosa fenestration. The slow drama of it doesn't get old.
McGilchrist on attention and the divided brain. Slow read. Pairs unexpectedly well with thinking about specialist voices.
Skip on a four-person team. Still learning weight on a fast sheet. The hammer in the eighth is a humbling place to live.
A curated log. Photographs I took, places I went, plants doing what plants do. Updated when something earns the entry, not on a schedule.
The aroid house is the best forty minutes you can spend before brunch. Humid air, painted glass, every leaf a different shape arguing the same case.
Toasted the pecans longer this time. The wash held the nuttiness without the bitterness. Salt rim still wrong. The smoked Maldon overpowers what the bourbon is doing. Going back to plain Diamond Crystal next round.
Two sizes up, into a terracotta pot that finally fits the root mass. Took an hour and made a mess of the floor.
Held five rocks in the four-foot through the seventh end. Opponent's last stone took out three of them. League is league, but I'll think about that draw for a while.
Forty miles outside Tucson. The cold-desert quiet before the heat shows up.
In water for the patient. In perlite for the eager. Asking which throws a rhizome first by August.
Walked from Russian Hill down to North Beach. Camera out the whole way.
Bigger trips get bigger pages. Each Adventure will live at its own URL, with a layout designed for the photos and the arc of the trip.
Stub. The first Adventure entry goes here. Mexico City, Big Sur, or whichever trip earns the first dedicated page. James picks.
Stub. Each Adventure links to its own page where the photos, notes, and trip arc live. The homepage shows the most recent two or three.
A curated showcase, not a resume. The resume layer is LinkedIn. This is the thinking layer: what was built, why it mattered, what shipped, what was learned.
Stub. The first Career showcase goes here. Scope, problem space, approach, learning. Framed at the level a peer or recruiter would find useful, with no confidential specifics.
James picks the two or three pieces of work to feature. Could be shipped products, organizational changes, internal articles, frameworks, teams built. The unit is "things I'm proud of," not "jobs I've held."
More soon →Stub. The second Career showcase goes here. Same shape as the first: a short page with whatever artifacts can be shared publicly.
Each showcase has its own page at /career/[slug]/. The brief professional bio (Navy to PM to payments, current role at a high level) lives at the top of the /career/ index page, not here.
A personal AI ops system for budgeting decisions, financial goal-tracking, and life operations, organized as a pantheon of named specialists.
Each specialist owns a domain with its own voice, scope, and tool subset, sharing a common catalog of capabilities. Foundational specialists handle system monitoring and audit; discretionary specialists activate selectively as the operator's life calls for them. The interesting design problem is keeping voices distinct as the system grows, which the architecture solves by making voice a per-specialist configuration layer over a shared tool foundation.
Read the case study →Things I return to deliberately. Not lifestyle content. Practices in the older sense: a thing you keep doing because the doing changes you.
Monsteras, philodendrons, a strelitzia that thinks it's outdoors, several ZZs in various states of propagation, one fiddle leaf that is, against my expectations, thriving. I water on Sundays, fertilize once a month, repot when something tells me it's time. Slow work, good work.
Forty-two pounds of polished granite sliding across pebbled ice toward a target a hundred and fifty feet away. The sport rewards patience and punishes overconfidence in equal measure. Sweeping is half the game. Reading ice is the other half.
A Fuji X100 and whatever the walk gives me. No grand project. Just attention as a habit.
Sugar, bitters, whiskey, water, citrus oil. Five inputs and infinite variation.
A Prusa MK4 that runs more than it should. Eight years in uniform before all this. The discipline carries.
I'd love to hear from people building thoughtful things with technology, whether that's a side project, a system you've been quietly refining, or a problem you can't stop thinking about. General hellos are welcome too, especially if you've gone unreasonably deep on something and want to talk about it.