There are no words I can use

A dear family I know and love has lost a child in a tragic accident over the weekend. There are no words I can use to express myself adequately. So I leave a poem my wife found and shared with me, a poem that I feel best captures what I wish I could express. For my words fail me.

When You Meet Someone Deep In Grief

Slip off your needs
and set them by the door.

Enter barefoot
this darkened chapel

hollowed by loss
hallowed by sorrow

it’s gray stone walls
and floor.

You, congregation
of one

are here to listen
not to sing.

Kneel in the back pew.
Make no sound,

let the candles
speak.

Patricia McKernon Runkle

In memory of Lydia.

An Event Apart Seattle 2018

I’m back from the An Event Apart Conference which is really awesome – if you work in or around the web, you should go sometime. A great mix of speakers, great range of topics, and how cool is it to have dinner with Eric Meyer? This is the guy behind the famous CSS reference book CSS: The Definitive Guide from O’reilley (now on it’s 4th addition) and he was a major influencer in helping get browsers to adopt CSS as a standard. I also got to have breakfast with Jeffery Zeldman – a major force behind the Web Standards Project which led the way to why we even *have* web standards now. I love his gruff, honest personality and approachability. It was a blast just hanging out and learning with a bunch of my peers across the amazingly diverse web industry. I highly recommend the An Event Apart conferences. I hope to post more on some of the things I learned at this conference.

A brief Friday break…

It’s been crazy busy at work the last 2 months and I’ve got a bunch of projects nearing completion. But it’s reached a point where right when I start to try and focus on one project to wrap up the remaining issues, some other project’s issue pops up (or even a completely new project), and I have to divert away again and focus on that.

It finally reached a point where I had to take a day off so I could mentally decompress.

My Friday break day was a really fun one – I got to paint up some models (which was very relaxing), eat brunch and go shopping with my wife, and just have a “normal” day without having to deal with “shifting focus” every hour or so.