Barry Hess
Barry Hess
Barry Hess
I run the blogging service, Pika, and I have been blogging since 2004. My blog is mostly personal in nature, touching on technical, pop culture, and other things along the way.
Latest Posts
It’s our 26th anniversary today. We had a nice lunch at Jesse's favorite restaurant. Very nice meal. I've never had a banana split and have been trying to get Jesse to share one with me for a couple of years. So we walked to the ice...
The biggest event of the past week? Ava’s college graduation! Truth be told, she graduated last December, but the ceremony was last weekend and it was a great time. Quite a few family were able to make it to Des Moines to spend a fun...
This is a fun brainstorm about snail mail sign-ups. I’ve been trying some snail mail things to thank a handful of Pika customers. Unfortunately it hasn’t been very effective. There’s been almost a complete lack of response. I’m not even...
Since building Pika I’ve wanted to incorporate a “now and then” sort of now page with dynamic history. With the recent flurry of updates to Pika variables, I realized that my dream could now be made reality. It turns out that my recent...
Did you know that the Apple HomePod can recognize alarms in your home and alert you about them? We discovered this a few weeks ago while we were vacationing in Phoenix. While relaxing in the sun, every member of our household received an...
It’s a weird state to be in with my work feeling like a vocation. I love doing it, I love making progress on Pika, and I’m super grateful to be in this position. Yet there are some things I enjoy in life that I can’t seem to find time to...
I did a telehealth call this week about some third-party blood test results. As with most things in your forties, the cure is to lose some weight, exercise, and get better sleep. For whatever reason I feel like this might be the year I...
Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling. We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions...
If you are even a mild St. Vincent fan, I recommend her fantastic new live album: Delta Air Lines…responded to the continuing shutdown by suspending special services for members of Congress, including airport escorts and red coat...
Ava is traveling and shared this from the Victoria and Albert Museum: A lengthy, imperfect article on how much Minnesota mattered this winter. (archive) The challenge of this work week has been trying to figure out a way to streamline...
I learned about Johnny.Decimal from Pika blogger Michael Borland. The last post on his blog clued me in. Sadly he has since passed away. RIP Michael. ❤ I’ve dipped in and out of Getting Things Done (GTD) many times over the years. The...
I’ve been sick for half of this past week, so not much drivel to share this Friday. The core of my love for reading grew through affordable mass market paperbacks. While it’s not new news, it’s a little sad to see them leaving. Still, I...
A couple months ago I put together a fairly lengthy post about getting an old MacBook set up to be a writing machine. It was pretty encouraging, the idea of having a machine that would just be for one thing. At the time of writing that...
I really enjoyed Justin Duke’s thoughts in “The death of software, the A24 of software”. A24 didn't succeed despite the streaming era — they succeeded because of it. The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for...
It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes. I’ve mentioned the photographs of Ragnar Axelsson (Rax) a couple of times here in the past. I recently discovered the availability of the short BBC documentary featuring him: Last Days of the Arctic....