My Swarm Year In Review is rather bland and uninteresting. I didn't really travel all that much in 2025, so my major destinations were the dog park (at least my dog isn't unhappy 😂), super markets, work, and places that I went to for walks, runs, and just to touch grass. I think the farthest I went was to Maine to drop off a laptop to a colleague who couldn't make it to campus... Maybe 2026 will

Another one of those Year in Reviews, this time it's the Year in Beer from Untappd. Admittedly, I am not a huge beer drinker.  I did go through a phase just before COVID where I tried a lot of different types of brews, but over the years I've cut back.  Untappd is soft of like my "Goodreads" for beers, in other words it's what I use to keep track of what I've tried and what I like in case

I guess I'll kick off this year's parade of "Year in Reviews" with PocketCast's Year in Podcasts.As per usual, I discovered a new podcast this year (I think it was this year) and I ended up binging a lot of their back catalog (can you guess which podcast that was? 😂). Last year it was the Delta Flyers, where two cast members from Star Trek Voyager (Tom and Harry) went through a rewatch and commentary

Since it's the first day of my winter break, I thought I'd post a short note to wish anyone still reading a happy holiday season.  I hope you get an opportunity to rest, recharge your batteries, and greet 2026 with optimism and a renewed energy for doing good in this world. Here's to hoping for some snow in the next three weeks 🌲☃️❄️

Another smartwatch bites the dust....  About three years ago I replaced my Sony Smartwatch 3 with a TicWatch Pro 3.  I would have loved to have kept onto the Sony smartwatch, but the band had rotted away after 5 years of daily use, and the MacGyver method of 3D printing a holder to get a generic band only worked so long (the holder itself broke after a while).  The battery also barely

While I think of gamification, I usually think about it in a teaching and learning context.  It hasn't always been the case, but, with the exception of achievements on the xbox, or on other gaming platforms, gamification for every day tasks has been on my back back back burner.  This past Halloween, Yahoo! decided to dust off ye olde gamification tactics to encourage users to delete unwanted

This is my other November binge on Netflix ;-) I am a huge fan of the Splinter Cell series and got excited when this was announced earlier this year (a game that picks up after Blacklist would be nice, but I guess we'll take this for now!)In this series, the story finds an older Sam Fisher living in isolation in rural Poland, having left the world of espionage behind. His quiet life is interrupted

This was my November binge. It was a short series, so it was a short two week binge, but still a binge. Having played some of Cyberpunk on the xbox one at some point this year, I thought I'd give this a try.  The game was fine, but I was having a hard time getting into it. Maybe the pacing was off, maybe I was too impatient, but I got stuck somewhere early on in the game (after you learn

I saw the entire series in October 2025, mostly to be a completionist about the NCIS universe series.  This series has no raison d'être. It feels stiff, and do we really care about these two characters when they are separated from the NCIS pack?So, what is this series about?  Well, after Ziva resurfaces in 2020, she goes to Paris to meet with Tony and Tali (their kid).  Tony is now

Since it's October, and I live in Salem, why not binge something Witchy?  I came across the Mayfair Witches recently, so this seemed like a good October series to binge.The core plot revolves around Rowan, a medical doctor who is a witch, but doesn't know it. When her mother is in distress, her power manifest themselves (surprise, I guess?), which gets the Talamasca's hackles up.  They are