The Cheap Fix Card
1 min read
A log you never reread is a diary. Here is the five-slot card I use to turn an entry into something that actually gets seen again.
Read →Notes on building, learning, and helping people put AI to work.
Why You Should Keep One
1 min readChecking your AI's work is the part nobody has a method for. A running log is the cheapest one I have found, and you can start it this afternoon.
Read →What the Pattern Says
1 min readSorting a month of AI near-misses into classes turned up one that keeps repeating, and it is not the one I expected.
Read →What a Cheap Fix Is
1 min readA cheap fix is a small change you earn from something that nearly went wrong. Here is the bar I hold them to, and two that made it.
Read →The Fix Was Framing, Not Editing
1 min readOur avatar dissolved on light backgrounds. Boosting the contrast made it worse. A moss-green disc behind it fixed the problem without touching the artwork at all.
Read →Any Folder Can Be Its Own Vault
1 min readMy Obsidian vault holds about eight hundred notes. To build this project in public I needed to show eighteen of them. A vault is just a folder, so I pointed it at one.
Read →I Was Wrong About My Own Files
1 min readMy AI assistant flagged two files as migration casualties, on the evidence that one was newer and twice the size of its replacement. We opened them. Both were fine.
Read →Two Wrong Numbers: One I Caught, One I Nearly Published
1 min readFour bugs passed review and died on live data. One reported zero licensed businesses in Oregon and was caught in a minute. The other looked completely reasonable.
Read →A Messenger Who Moves at the Speed of the Data
1 min readOur analyst is a snail. Hermes is fast; Oregon's cannabis data reports monthly and harvests once a year. An honest messenger moves at the speed of its subject.
Read →Nobody Is Reading Oregon's Homework
1 min readOregon publishes its cannabis market data free through an open API. The price dataset had 77 views and 15 downloads in its lifetime. Not locked away — just unread.
Read →One Tool, and What It Missed
1 min readVideoI ran a free accessibility checker over two sites I own. One came back with a single problem and no warnings; the other had eleven. They failed differently, and the useful part is what the tool could not tell me either way.
Read →Two Numbers That Do Not Fit Together
1 min readPeople are asking AI tools for local recommendations. People almost never click the links inside an AI answer. Both of those were measured, and neither one cancels the other out.
Read →That Deadline Email Is Not About Your Shop
1 min readIf you got an email warning that a federal web accessibility deadline is coming for your business, there is a good chance it was describing a real rule that does not apply to you. Here is how to tell.
Read →One URL, No Login, Nothing Found
1 min readI ran a free accessibility check on my own site and it found nothing at all. That is not the same as passing, the tool says so itself, and then it hands you ten things it cannot check.
Read →Forty Thousand Letters, One Candle
1 min readEvery night before 1840, London clerks held letters up to a candle to see how many sheets were inside, because the price depended on it. The reform that followed did not speed that up — it deleted it.
Read →The Robots Stopped and Nobody Told Me
1 min readI am building the systems I run my own work on one piece at a time. The newest two caught three older ones quietly failing within a week.
Read →My Site Was Lying to People
1 min readVideoI stopped adding things to my side project and audited what was already there. It had been telling visitors two things that weren't true.
Read →The Bird With Human Hands
1 min readMy illustrated seagull kept sprouting human hands. The fix was not a better prompt — it was noticing which question I had left the tool to answer.
Read →Foundations, and Starting From Zero
1 min readFoundations is $75 for sixty minutes, and it assumes nothing. What an hour covers, what you leave with, and why the back office does not have to be your trade.
Read →What Actually Happens on the Free Call
1 min readA free first call is not a favor, it is the estimate. Here is the whole agenda for the thirty minutes, including the part where I tell you that you do not need me.
Read →The Giveback
1 min readThe part of my practice I care about more than the pricing page: for every 12 hours of paid coaching, you earn a free session for a nonprofit you choose.
Read →How I Work
1 min readNever hired a coach before? Here's the whole arc, no mystery — from the free intro call to the point where AI is just part of your daily toolkit.
Read →The Night My Routine Caught Its Own Bug
1 min readI recorded 49 minutes of my laptop working by itself. The most useful two minutes were the ones where nothing appeared to be happening — five lessons from a night of watching AI automation run.
Read →Who Is Ernest?
1 min readFrom foraging wild edibles in the Indiana Dunes to coaching AI in Oregon — the story behind how I teach, and the three mantras that carry across kitchens, gardens, and keyboards.
Read →A Human-Centered Approach to AI
1 min readWhat 'human-centered' really means to me — I show up, work with your own tools, and help you solve a real problem. AI is a tool for people, and tools should make our lives and our planet better.
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