What I’m Working On Now

I’m again experimenting with having a “now” page. I posted the first installment here a couple months ago and there is enough new that feels worth sharing.

Travel Again

In news that should surprise nobody, I’ve been travelling again lately. There’s a bunch that’s new on my travel blog. Some highlights:

• A Week in Utah in March
• A Week in California in April. On this trip, I flew down early for a conference and made time to visit the beautiful Pinnacles National Park a few hours south of the Bay Area.

And there’s more to come soon:

• I’ll be in New York City next month for an event with my team at Adobe.
• I’ll be in Australia 🇦🇺 mid-summer (their winter) for a vacation with my daughter.

146 Parks Is Up and Running for 2025!

As I write this, I am on my way home from a trip to eastern Washington in which I picked up my state parks project. There are two new parks on the list:

• #134: Camp Wooten, a former CCC project turned group retreat center nestled in the mountains of southeastern Washington.
• #135: Spokane River Centennial State Park Trail, a nearly 40-mile bike and hiking trail through the Spokane metro area.

Digging Back Through the Archives

I’ve been on a years-long project to revisit and re-edit my full photo library. This means every so often I get to post old new things to my travel blog from trips I took long ago. There are some fun ones that I’ve recently published:

• Europe in 2013. That summer I was able to work in Hamburg, Germany, and bring my family along. We had a very wide-ranging exploration of the continent with 30 new travel stories to share.
• An Eastern Oregon Road Trip – July 2011
• Got My Kicks On … (Route 66, of course) – October 2011

Still (Mostly) Off Social Media

(I put this in my first “now page” and I think it’s still relevant. I’m still questioning my relationship to the hive mind.)

I still have accounts on several of the social media properties (see links at the bottom of this page), but – across the board – they’re not as fun as they used to be. I’m spending less and less time there these days.

Consider this part of a general trend for me to find ways to interact a bit more directly. If you’re nearby, consider this an invitation to say hi and set up an in-person get-together.

Work Projects

• My work in the Creator Assertions Working Group (CAWG), now in partnership with Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) is approaching a major milestone, ratification of its 1.1 version.
• I’m still working on building an open-source SDK for the CAWG identity assertion to help content creators bind their online identities to the content that they create.

Personal / Art

• I finished with retrofitting my web sites to use a CDN for still images. You shouldn’t see anything different, but my sites will keep working after Netlify eventually closes their Large Media service.

Quote I’m Pondering

What I learned most of all is that the thing you’re afraid of, doing the thing undoes the fear. It truly does. One of those things I said yes to was difficult conversations, because I used to avoid them like the plague. I always feel like peace is now on the other side of a difficult conversation, so you have to say yes to having the difficult conversation no matter what that conversation is.

– Shonda Rhimes, creator of Bridgerton, Grey’s Anatomy, and many other popular TV series, interviewed on the Work Life podcast with Adam Grant.

This is a lesson that’s presented itself in a few different ways recently and it feels important for me. A difficult conversation (pointedly not one that is for the sake of being difficult) feels like an investment in the long-term health of a relationship. I like the frame that Rhimes uses … peace lies ahead if you face the conversation.

So What Is A “Now” Page, Anyhow?

(Repeating from the first edition of my “now” page. Still feeling my way around this space.)

Many thanks to David Sparks for the prompt to do this. Near the end of Mac Power Users episode #785, he and Stephen Hackett described the concept of a “now” page. It’s a decade-old concept, but new to me. They describe it as how you would answer the “what are you up to these days?” question to a friend you haven’t seen in months or years.