2026-09-15 08:00:00
It feels like to-do lists peaked about a decade and a half ago. (Perhaps like so many things, but I digress.) It was the heyday of Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero and all the apps you can imagine to manage your items to do, like OmniFocus and—my personal favourite—Things.
I appreciated Things for its design. It was clean and uncluttered and simple. It didn’t overcomplicate things. It’s been my go-to to-do organizer since 2008.
Long gone, for me, are the days of managing a full time job, running an online store, putting on conference talks and workshops, and raising two kids. As such, my list of projects, professionally and personally, have whittled down to very little.
This more simple life has me contemplating a move to Apple Reminders. To be clear, it’s not because Reminders is a better app; it’s not. There a number of design decisions that have me scratching my head. The use of icons, showing notes (and clipping them), the use of colour, the boxes in the sidebar, and the SF Rounded all make the app overly and unnecessarily cluttered.
So why move when Things works just fine?
Goooood question.
I should mention why I use Reminders: collaborative lists and Siri/HomePod integration.
I take advantage of Reminders for its Siri integration, which is great when I’m in the kitchen and want to quickly add something to the Groceries list. Things’ Siri integration hasn’t exactly been smooth and I blame Apple for that. I run into issues constantly with Siri not recognizing third-party apps all that well and timing out, specifically from the HomePods. (I have a number of issues with HomePods in general, to be clear, but that’s another topic for another day.)
If I’m already using Reminders then there’s a (tiny little) small mental load when deciding where to put something new. Throw in Notes, which can do lists, and I’m muddying the waters even more. For example, I have my list of taco restaurants in Notes. I have a list of things I want to buy, like a new kitchen knife, that I keep in Reminders. I’m planning a trip and need to plan flights and hotel and restaurants and I put that in Things. Why any of these go into one place or another feels rather arbitrary.
Getting rid of Things is about simplifying. It’s about reducing noise.
I’ve kept Things on my devices for now while I play around with using Reminders with more regularity. We’ll see if I stick with it.
Jeff Adams mentioned to me on Mastodon that Marco Arment’s Unforgetful works as a front-end for Reminders. I love the idea of apps providing a different view of the underlying data and perhaps an app will come along that has the simplicity of Things while using the data of Reminders. That would provide the best of both worlds, for me. (The urge to learn to make Apple apps is increasing.)
2026-08-26 08:00:00
When I was learning CSS’s grid feature (oh gosh, nearly ten years ago), I posted a few short videos talking about my understanding of the feature and how it worked.
I was surprised to get scolded for sharing inaccurate information, “especially as a teacher”.
Wait, what?! Who, me?!
I get things wrong all the time. That’s part of learning. But it was the teacher remark that threw me because I’ve never considered myself a teacher. Yes, I’ve spoken at conferences and put on workshops but the label of teacher isn’t one that I feel comfortable with.
Perhaps I associate the word with all-knowing authority figures standing in front of a class and I’m far from all-knowing, or an authority, or have much of a figure. I have stood in front of classes, though.
I imagine myself more like Stuart from the Mad TV sketch saying “look what I can do!”
When I first got into web development, I built a web page that displayed a table pulled from a database. When I showed my friend, he wasn’t all that excited. “Is that it?” It was, after all, just a table on a page. (Which, hey, it was 1996. Everything was just a table on a page.)
This blog has been a 25+ year journey of me saying “look what I can do” over and over again. I enjoy the process of learning new things and sharing what I’ve learned. Writing about what I’ve learned helps me learn even more because I build prototypes and test in different browsers as I try to understand all the nuances of something in my effort to write about a topic.
Even with the research and prototypes and testing and writing, I’ll get things wrong but one of the things I have learned is not to admonish people sharing what they’re learning, even if they get it wrong. We should all be forever a student.
2026-08-19 08:00:00
I started up a little project to go to most of the taco joints in town. I say most because I’m not going to every place that has tacos on the menu, like chain restaurants. I’m targeting taquerias and places that feel close to qualify as one.
Ottawa is more known for shawarmas than tacos but I figured this would be a fun little quest. I’ve created a section of the site dedicated to the taco reviews. It even has its own RSS feed, if you feel like following along. I don’t think I’ll be posting more about it here until I’m done the project.
I separated it off into its own thing because most of the people who follow me don’t live in Ottawa. For those that do, or visit Ottawa on occasion, perhaps you’ll discover a place you’d like to try.
This is also giving me an opportunity to play with different design elements including photo presentations. Speaking of, I need to get my opengraph image customizations done at some point. (I have some reading to do.)
2026-08-18 08:00:00
I went out to dinner and a show with a friend the other day, enjoying some pizza and then wandering over to watch a mediocre blues/country/folk band. This friend was my first roommate from when I first moved out at 19. He lamented that being in his fifties, it was harder to develop new friendships.
Around those formative years of my early teens, I moved around quite a bit, from Calgary, to Toronto, to Ottawa. In under two years, I went to four different schools, needing to make new friends each time. It’s not easy being an awkward 13 year old, trying to fit in.
Perhaps trying to make friends can be difficult at any age.
For me, technology has always been a fruitful avenue for connection for much of my adult life. That roommate? I met him on a BBS. Many of the friends I’ve since met have been through technical avenues like work, conferences, and blogging.
Blogging throughout the aughts connected us to others around the world as we shared what we learned through our creative endeavours. Those connections led to employment, career advancement, and friendship.
As we rolled into the 2010s, much of that community had moved to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I say moved because while our sites may have continued to exist, the conversations were no longer happening there. We were blogging less and tweeting more. (E.g. in 2013, I only wrote two blog posts.)
In my head, I have associated social media to a form of advertising. They are a way of continuing to stay top of mind in each other’s lives. “Out of sight, out of mind,” as they say. [Perhaps that feels icky to hear. Nobody likes to be reduced to or thought of as advertising.] The connection isn’t formed by having an account. It’s not even in the follows. It’s the conversations that happen. Social media makes it easier because it allows for social (and parasocial) relationships to develop due to semi-regular volleys back and forth—like a public chatroom.
It’s been frustrating to see these platforms shift away from connecting people and optimize for an algorithm that puts random content in front of me. With the recent transition away from social media—by others and myself—I’ve wondered how to keep those connections and form new ones.
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I’ve realized that in simplifying this blog, I’ve made it harder to create and maintain connections. No comments means it is harder for people to quickly respond to a topic. Sending an email creates enough friction that many people avoid doing it. People don’t necessarily want a one-on-one conversation with someone they’ve never met. It also privatizes the conversation preventing others from joining in. No analytics or webmentions means that I don’t see when other people are responding to me, making it harder for me to reply in kind. No webrings or blog rolls makes it harder for people to discover other people. That hyperlink was and is a foundational part of the web and I’ve not taken advantage of one of the best tools to promote connectivity in this medium.
The simplicity I have created to maintain this blog has made it more difficult to maintain connectivity in the world.
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Is this blog about more than just being a loudmouth, voicing my own thoughts, stories, and opinions into a vacuum? Should I be doing more to build connections? And to be clear, these connections aren’t just for me; they are for you, too. You might find a new site to follow and eventually a new friend because of those links.
Knowing me, I’ll end up somewhere in the middle. I’m not starting a revolution or a movement. I’m not looking to raise my pitchfork and ensure everybody has a blog. There are easier things that can be done, though. I can spin out more tendrils, more links, more connections to others.
It’s about consideration—not in some attempt to recreate a nostalgic past that has been lost. It’s about consideration in how we curate and connect. There are many amazing people, a few of whom I’m grateful to call friends, and this blog (and yours, and others) is one of the ways in which we can build and maintain a space that feels genuine, authentic, and connecting.
2026-08-14 08:00:00
When the pandemic hit and nobody could travel anywhere, I, like many others, found connections through Zoom calls. I had multiple scheduled calls with different groups: a daily morning call, a weekly Friday call, two board game groups, a poker night, a Call of Duty group, and semi-regular calls with various individuals. I am very grateful for the friends I have made over the years and that those friends were there over the pandemic helped avoid the feelings of isolation many felt.
Now that most people have moved back into old (or perhaps new) routines, the regular online calls have mostly disappeared. And with a decision pre-pandemic to stop speaking at conferences, I haven’t been attending them, either. That has meant missing out on one particular avenue of connecting and reconnecting with people that I’ve known for years. Long gone are the days of hanging out in the hallway of a conference chatting with people in between sessions. Or going out for tacos and then to a bar where somebody is dancing in a head-to-toe Batman costume. (Yes, that happened.) But even conference attendance is down.
Pre-pandemic, I’d often be visiting a city and then put out word on Twitter that I’d enjoy meeting up with people and sure enough, I’d be at a table with a handful of fellow web practitioners enjoying a lovely meal and listening to their experiences and sharing mine.
The scattering to the smattering of social networks along with those abandoning social media altogether has made this, too, more difficult. It takes a more concerted effort to stay connected. Yet Another Social Media Site doesn’t seem like it’s going to solve this.
This was one of the factors that spurred me to re-engage with social media: to maintain these loose connections, albeit perhaps more loosely than before.
I have close friends with whom I speak to near daily. I have friends with whom I speak with every few months. And then I have those people with whom I’d normally have connected with in person and those in-person connections are happening less and less.
I don’t know that I have any answers. I don’t know whether this is even a “problem” that needs to be fixed. Perhaps it’s just a fact of life that some connections are lost to time.
2026-08-07 08:00:00
Hey, it’s the inaugural post for the RSS Club on Snook.ca!
I was working away on my site, adding content that I thought might be relevant to some, like an AI statement and a privacy policy. Most people probably don’t care but for those that do, it’s there and it shows that I care about those things, too.
I never really had a name for these types of one-off pages but I came across slash pages and with this redesign, I’ve been considering what felt relevant to include or not include on my own site.
Some of the items like /now seem like they should be actual blog posts. Like this one. This is what I’m thinking about now. My next blog post will be about what I’m thinking about then, which will be now.
Want to know what I’m up to right now? I’m writing now. But when you read this, I’ll no longer be writing this. I’ll be doing something else. Maybe I’m sleeping, or making coffee, or out walking somewhere, or sitting on the toilet.
I realize I’m being silly. Sometimes it’s nice to catch up with what somebody is up to. It’s answering the question, “hey what’re you up to these days?” It’s surfacing information without requiring people to understand the entire lore about what led you to this moment in time.
For example, I subscribe to a couple newsletters that are like a /where page. They update people on their travels while also giving a life update around why they might be on a particular trip, or why they might be at home. Maybe my friends would like to hit up my /where page to see where I might be given all my travels. (I don’t have a /where page.)
For now, I have my slash pages plus a couple undocumented ones like my old /speaking page that remains more like a historic artifact found just under the surface. Today, I added my privacy policy.
I think that’ll be it for now.
