Today I discovered onthegomap.com for planning out running and walking routes. Free, simple, no-ads. It’s amazing!
Posts in "microblogs"
I was calling cleaning services and just had my first AI voice call. It was eerie. I didn’t notice it was AI until maybe 20 seconds in. It sounded very real. The AI even stutters, makes mistakes, or says “um” like a real person would. But there was something off about the perfectly consistent vocal inflections and it said “okay” the exact same, very curt way after each of my responses. I’m guessing in 5 years I won’t be able to tell if I’m talking to a person or AI.
Went to Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park yesterday with some friends. I can’t believe I haven’t been before! It was a lot of fun and is a marvel of planning and construction. The space is MASSIVE in an old factory. I’m looking forward to going back! My phone died, so here’s a pic I found online. It’s hard to do it justice with one picture though, there are so many different rooms and narrow passageways to ride between.
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
A really inspiring mini-documentary (10 minutes) about a young man with cerebral palsy overcoming obstacles to complete a marathon.
I just discovered skyrunner.com and it is an epic throwback to early 2000s personal websites. Very simple, kind of confusing, completely unique. And the people of the r/running Reddit community love this post on The Screw Shoe.
I’m thinking about critics and creatives. Most criticism comes from critics, of course. A criticism is a critic-ism. But ironically, their criticism matters least. A critic is a fallen creative. And who can criticize a creative but an equal or greater creative?
With the new year I was ready for a change to my site. I switched to a new, more minimal black and white theme, simplified the main navigation, and added all of the site pages to the footer to make them more discoverable than they were before.
Here’s an example of poor design from the YouVersion browser app. Snackbar notifications should not stack on each other, otherwise you get this and the screen becomes non interactive… Their mobile app does not trigger these snack bar notifications, so the experience is much better than in the browser.
Reading this makes me want to vibe code my own bookshelf.
A Jersey Mike’s just opened down the road from our house. I placed my first order at the new location today, and was delighted to discover that the Jersey Mike’s website is awesome! You can tell they put a lot of care into the user experience. Adding an item to the “bag” (cart) is very satisfying. A little image of the item flies over to the bag and disappears inside while the bag bounces up and down. Do they need those animations? No. But it makes for a delightful little ordering experience. Well done Jersey Mike’s.