Weeknotes 25:35

September 1, 2025

Week of August 24–30

Aquarium

My wife and I hung out at the Tennessee Aquarium with our youngest to celebrate her birthday on Sunday. We always enjoy going to the Aquarium. Our favorite building is the ocean building. We enjoy seeing the penguins up close and personal. It is always fun to spend time at the touch tank and get to touch rays and sharks. And then it is always mesmerizing to watch all the fish, sharks, rays, and turtles in the reef exhibit. I could sit there for hours just watching the sea life swim in and out of view. I love seeing the eagle rays which I first saw in the exhibit last year.

There are a lot of different rays in this video including one my favorites, an eagle ray at the end

Walking again

After five weeks of not walking, I finally got back out again this week. It helped that the temperatures dropped into the low 80s and were in the high 70s with a nice cool breeze when I walked at night. I listened to Shop Talk Show on one of the walks. I listened to music on a couple of the other walks and then spent some time in prayer or just thinking on my Saturday walk. It was nice to get out again and I hope to build it back into a habit. I would like to walk 3-4 times a week to get in between 12-16 miles each week.

I enjoyed several beautiful sunsets on my nightly walks last week.

Anchor positioning

I have been spending time recently learning about anchor positioning. I have been working through Oddbird’s email course on anchor positioning. This week I read Ahmad Shadeed’s interactive article on the subject, The Basics of Anchor Positioning. And finally, I read Temani Afif’s article, Fancy Menu Navigation Using Anchor Positioning on CSS Tricks.

I used what I learned from Temani’s article to refactor a solution I mentioned last week for a donation form. I recreated the UI element on Codepen and progressively enhanced it to use anchor positioning to transition the background element between the two donation options. It was a great way to practice what I have been learning and get more familiar with how it works.

Smashing Meets: AI

On Wednesday, I attended the free online get together hosted by Smashing Magazine. The topic for this Meet was AI. We heard three great talks. Vitaly kicked us off by discussing UX patterns for AI-first software. He showed us several examples of products that are using different interface elements other than the much used “chat” interface. He also talked a lot about value and impact–these are the things that users care about. Will this tool add value to my life?

Scott Hanselman helped us to better understand how LLMs work. He showed us how the model determines the answer that it gives–it is all based on probabilities that the model was trained on. The talk uncovered a lot of the biases these models have based on the statistical model that they are trained on.

“AI is not a fact machine. It is Family Feud.”

“These are not PhD level humans but 3 year olds just smart enough to be dangerous.”

Finally, we heard from Lisanne Buik about ethics in AI. She is founder of Gracious AI. As a speculative designer, she is thinking about the future. She envisions a future where we can seize this moment of radical disruption as a catalyst for sustainable innovation and business resilience.

All of the talks have been posted online.

LEGO

I recently purchased my son’s Millennium Falcon LEGO set. It is the midi-scale model that is 9′ by 7′ and was released in 2009. He originally got it for his birthday and I helped him to build it the first time. He recently and sorted through his LEGO pieces and thought he had most of the pieces and ordered the missing ones. I set aside some time on Saturday to start building it. I got about halfway through and discovered I was missing a piece so I put it down till I could visit a local LEGO store on Sunday.

The original build in February 2010
My wife captured my build on Saturday
My progress on my first day of building it. I was missing a dark gray piece on the left side of the back.

Articles I read

What I listened to

What I watched

Books I am reading

Walking – 16.18 miles

  • Monday – 4.28 miles in 1 hour 23 minutes
  • Tuesday – 4.2 miles in 1 hour 18 minutes
  • Friday – 3.63 miles in 1 hour 10 minutes
  • Saturday – 4.07 miles in 1 hour 16 minutes

What I played

MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 4-0 to restart the season after the AllStar break.

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