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This is my first attempt at publishing on Medium.com. I’m not sure if this will work or even if I want it to work.

This post was done from the command line!

Reading Penny Kim’s Article I Got Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup today on medium, I was reminded of my own experience with ‘Startup’ culture and the business death spiral. First of all, I’ve wrote about this 11 years ago. It was a pretty terrible experience that was definitely similar to Kim’s experience with an unknown statup. She wrote: Between July 21 and Aug 8 we would be told, every day, that our paychecks were coming. The first few days we were told that physical checks were on UPS trucks. They never came. Days after that we were told that the UPS checks were cancelled because they must be lost and Michael would be personally wiring each of us the money. He asked us to write down our bank accounts and routing numbers. Every day, he would be at the bank moving assets around, wiring funds and promising delivery dates that never came. ...

3D printing is pretty common at the Digital Whimsy Lab. I’ve always wanted to have one at home if for no other reason than to just mess around. I found the Jakks Pacific 3D Character Creator at Target for $11.99 (down from ~$40) and thought it would be fun. The product is a hot wax mold injector that works with a plastic skeleton system. You place the skeleton pieces in the mold, place the mold on the melter and then inject the hot wax into the mold. After it cools, you pop it open and have a tiny action figure. ...

Thanks to a recent sale at Walmart, my family is now the proud owner of all the Star Wars Disney Infinity Figures. I know what you’re thinking, “Wow, congrats… that is a big accomplishment!” Ok, you may not be thinking that but Disney Infinity was the best video game system on the market. Why do I keep referring to it as a system? Because it was really an Operating System for video game hardware. Sure, you could buy it for the PlayStations, the XBoxes, and Wii family of systems but it was a uniform experience across all of them. Each version of Infinity allowed for playets which were small self contained games that keep my young kids (and me) entertained. With the release of Disney Infinity 3, the developers released other kinds of games that use the characters in new ways (fighting, racing) and really extended what the game could do. In fact, we haven’t taken out the Infinity Game discs since they first came out. This game OS has been all we’ve needed for video game fun. ...

Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Stonehenge. Due to my work in design research, I have a hard time not seeing the world through the lens of artifact analysis. Stonehenge itself is one giant artifact of something we know little about. Researchers have a pretty good sense of what Stonehenge was used for but are not too sure as to why it exisied. In other words, we have the thing, but, we don’t have the context to know why the thing existed. ...

I moved hosts today. I was tired of paying $20/month so I switched to Go Daddy. I’m not sure if it is better, but, it is certainly cheaper.

In an ongoing attempt to use Linux as my regular OS, I just bought an older Lenovo X201 laptop/tablet to run Ubuntu on. The first version I installed was the Gnome version, followed by the full version. Edited: 08/23/2016 Besides having to buy a better battery, everything has been working well. The keyboard is a bit small comapred to the T500 series but I like it overall.

That feeling of panic struck me as I realized I had no wallet. “I must have put it down somewhere,” I thought. I kept looking and looking around my office for it. Just to be clear, my office is a mess as I’m waiting to move to a new office so I keep thinking “Why bother?” I walked out into the hallway and back in the room to find it. I noticed that I had left the hallway door and my door open to walk down the hall to talk to my colleagues. My stomach sank as I realized it must have been stolen. ...

I often receive e-mails from people who want to know how to get a job in the UX field. This is usually preceded with “I saw your post on X about the your students who got a job at Y.” It’s true that UBalt’s MS in IDIA places graduates at some really interesting places, like Google or eBay or Federal work. But our success hasn’t been magical in any way. We follow a simple model to help students get the kinds of jobs they want: Skills, experience, and portfolios. I’m going to explain these three elements and why each one is important to potential employers. ...