20250301

new calendar, who dis

I redesigned the front page of mattkirkland.com, and added the stupidest, most fun easter egg: an always-updated playlist of the birds that are migrating through my part of the country.

I’ve always loved websites that communicate some sense of time passing, some orientation in place or time. Things like: automatically switching between light and dark mode based on the time of day. Or an indication of the weather at the author’s location. Or Matt Webb’s blog that shifts color slowly as you sit on the page. Or this solar-powered website that goes offline in bad weather. The idea of a time-sensitive display has always struck me as a great opportunity of the web: computers know what time it is! Let’s make them do something!

(In fact, this semester I made my Interaction Design students start the semester by designing a new kind of calendar or clock or compass).

I’m also really interested in ambient, glanceable information. We can look up any fact we want, at any time. But that’s a pull - we have to take some action to go get that information. And we have pushes as well - notifications, alerts, etc. I can look up the score of the last Kansas Jayhawk game, or I can have my phone interrupt me to tell me the score. But a glanceable, ambient display would be more like a clock - I just look at it when I want to check a score.

A few years back someone had designed a speculative ‘smart’ umbrella with a glowing handle. You would leave it by your door, and on days when it is likely to rain, it would pulse its glowing LED - reminding you that today is a good day to bring along an umbrella. If I am remembering this correctly, this was before the cost of those components made this feasible. But it’s absolutely doable now!

What things change?

Anyway: I wanted to play with something like this. What kind of things around me change? I think it’s more interesting if they’re variable and not just changing on a repeating pattern. And I also want this ‘changing thing’ to have… a data source? And I want to choose something that is interesting - what kind of thing do I want to pay more attention to, or be more oriented towards?

I thought about:

• Phases of the moon. Every day when I sign out of our company slack, I post a moon emoji to signal ‘goodnight’. I’m careful to choose the actual correct moon emoji for the time: 🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘, as is appropriate to the day. I don’t know why, except I like the idea of incepting my coworkers with some kind of moon-sense. But for my site, I wanted something more specific to my spot in the world - and the moon is a global phenomenon.
• Tides. This might be great for someone who lives on a coast. They’re seasonable but variable, and change both in time and place. But I live in the midwest, nearly as far from a tide as you can.
• Temperature. The local temperature would be fine? Just uninispiring.
• Sunspots! A cool idea, but also global.
• Meteor Showers! Fun, but is there a data source?
• Pollen count? Maybe be more interesting if I had allergies.
• Atmospheric CO2 concentrations? AQI? Depressing.
• Stock Market variation? Meh.
• Migration patterns? Bingo.

OK, birds.

I’m at that special age in life when one begins to think: could I get into birdwatching?

I don’t really know much about birds and birdwatching. But I definitely enjoy paying attention to birds more than I used to (thanks, 2020 Covid year). I can recognize a lot more birds than I could a few years ago.

And even better, I’ve learned that I live on the border between the Central Flyway and the Mississippi Flyway, two major bird migration arteries in the US. That means there is a large seasonal change in what birds are around. I could imagine a future Matt in which I know what time of year it is based on which birds are nearby!

AND - there’s a data source! The eBird API is a rich dataset where birders post what they’ve sighted lately.

So yes, I could just list this which birds are nearby. But I also want some part of the experience of the site to reinforce this. Ambient, glanceable.

So.

So: with some help from chatGPT, I now have a little easter egg on my site. The site queries the eBird database, and builds a list of the top ten most sighted birds in Douglas County Kansas, over the last two weeks. THEN assigns a proportional amount of time in a playlist (based on the preponderance of sightings), and makes a single two minute playlist of songs and calls from those birds. Eg, if 27% of the sightings in the last two weeks are the Red-Winged Blackbird, then 27% of the two minutes will be audio from a Red-Winged Blackbird.

Now of course I should actually design this. But I’ve been playing this little two-minute playlist every day for a few months now, and it definitely is helping me learn more about what birds are around. A lot of ducks in the winter, for example!

20250110

2024 Recap

I’m bad at remembering things so it’s helpful to write stuff down. Thus: a recap post for 2024.

2024 was great, and went weirdly according to plan, I think.

January

• My grandpa passed away right after Christmas, so we went right back to St Louis for the funeral. Lots of feelings there.
• BNB retreat to New Orleans, Erika came along and it was fun. I’d never been. Cold and rainy but warmer than LFK! We saw the first parade of Mardi Gras season (the Joan of Arc) and it was a revelation about what a parade could look like.
• We continued to move the Local Crush Penny Press around Lawrence
• Felix played in the Sousa Honor Band at the Lied Center
• Erika and I started doing weekly ‘family meetings’
• We found F&T on google street view (walking home from school!)

February

• We went to go see some symphony performers in KC at a coffee shop
• We went to see the KC Symphony for the first time (doing Phil Collins songs! Which was fine except they had terrible cruise-ship-level singers doing vocals!)
• We started to really hone in our plans for #europe2024, including the join-up-with friends segment we lovingly called #scandimania and/or #rizzsommar
• Our family profile in Euronews!
• F had a small surgery for his ear, just a tubes thing, but they decided then, that he’d need some bigger work later this year
• F competed in the county Youth Entrepreneurship thing and won 1st place (and some big $)
• Went to Sheyda’s book launch party

March

• E & kids went to visit friends in Des Moines for part of their spring break
• T started on a kids rock-climbing team, although the coach was such a flake half the time it was just unstructured climbing time :upside-down-smiling-face.
• We went to STL for Easter. Sunday service at K&B’s church, where we’d never visited before!
• E & I looked VERY hard at buying an old karate studio to use for big weird art projects.

April

• Total Solar Eclipse! I had this on my calendar since the last one. We drove to southern missouri to stay at a glampground, run by a friend of E’s. Other friends joined us. The eclipse was amazing.
• We found out that our month-long airbnb in Munich was canceled and so we had to scramble to book other accommodation.
• I went straight from STL to DC for a few days of planning with the institute team. Met up with Eric and saw Sir Chloe & Daffo.
• Felix went to the state Youth Entrepreneurship thing at K State, we were very impressed with that operation.
• F & I saw the new STL soccer team against SportingKC
• T & F were both in the spring play at LMCMS
• Felix did the Douglas County pitch event (everybody else was an adult!)
• I got my first physical in years, and a heart scan (uh oh) and one of those bodyfat scans too. We’ll throw some diet and exercise at this and see where we are in a year.
• We built a new ‘rustic’ firepit in the backyard, inspired by the glampground

May

• I saw the chamber music group ‘Chanticleer’
• BNB went to Detroit for RailsConf. We met a lot of rails people!
• We saw the Northern Lights! In Kansas!
• We went to Europe! This was a big thing we’d planned for a long time. Erika documented this extensively. But the big plan was: a month in Munich (with some side trips) and then 2 weeks in Scandinavia. Trudy’s online school and my work continued thru the Germany part, so we did a lot of coworking late in the evening. I had one pretzel and one beer per day, MINIMUM.
• First week was in Munich in the Mildred-Scheel-Bogen neighborhood, which we loved.

June

• Switched locations to more southern edge of Munich.
• Spent a long weekend in Paris!
• Drove down to see Guedelon castle, which was a low-key obsession of mine during the pandemic. Very cool to see it in real life!
• Switched to Kochel am See, south of Munich
• Switched locations to a holiday inn in the city center.
• Saw Erika’s aunt Karin
• Watched some of the Euro soccer games - from a viewing area by one of our hotels and one big Germany game from a fanzone in Olympic Park
• Felix did an online class to knock out his first high school credits.
• Flew to Stockholm to meet friends!
• We were there for Midsommar and it was light til midnight, and then from 3am onwards. Nuts.
• Took a train to Oslo, stayed in a lake-house-type spot on an island in the south harbor.

July

• Took a ferry to Copenhagen, got rental cars, drove to Bilund
• Saw the Jelling stones!
• Went to Lego House
• Drove to Copenhagen
• Flew to Reyjkavik for a 36 hour stopover. Blue Lagoon hotel - a big splurge - including driving across the active volcano spill near Grindavik.
• NY friends came to visit Lawrence!
• Felix had ear surgery
• Saw a Mates of State reunion show at the Record Bar
• Erika started new job at Connect
• SD friends came to Lawrence to visit! Grays, Geitgeys, Clarks! Hung out, did the lake, fireworks, etc. County fair demolition derby!

August

• STL trip. Cardinals game with DNA! City Museum!
• F started HIGH SCHOOL at LHS
• T started 8th at Sora & LMCMS
• F started with the soccer team. Got C team at tryouts but immediately rostered up to JV. Played most of the minutes of every game.

September

• BNB retreat to Lawrence, which means just a few people traveling but we get to do a bunch of stuff locally.
• Saw Abby Holiday show at the bottleneck
• A lot of school activities - choir and soccer and stuff

October

• I volunteered at the Douglas County CORE entrepreneurship / pitch, doing some UX and strategy help for participants.
• F played in the pep band at some football games
• E & I did another round of Growth Group at church on Fridays
• Went to Bob’s book launch party!
• Saw the Northern Lights from Lawrence, again. This time from our front porch.
• A reall strikingly beautiful autumn colors.
• Halloween!

November

• Dad retired, had lowkey celebration in STL
• E & I went to Brooklyn for a big birthday weekend. Saw Kacey Musgraves live, and never went to Manhattan. Highlights for me was a highball at a japanese-style bar followed by Anora at BAM.
• T in the school musical (emma!)
• DNA came to visit
• Saw the Hokusai exhibit at the Nelson
• Pie Night in STL
• Thanksgiving in Chicago, our usual circuit and fun with the crew there

December

• BNB retreat to Austin. Actually Dripping Springs, outside Austin.
• intentionally had a very low-key advent; trying to really dial in the ‘quiet waiting’ part of this season. We used a lot of candles around the house.
• hosted Growth Group party
• STL for Christmas
• Erika went to Rochester MN with a friend over New Year’s

Overall

10/10, would do it again.

20250101

Found 2024

Every year the Kirkland family keeps a jar of ‘found’ coins - and once per year I do the accounting.

This year: Sheesh, really seems like the decline of a cash-based society is rearing its head here. We spent the summer in Germany and Scandinavia, where we walked 20,000 steps a day in major cities. Ten years ago, that would have been a goldmine for found change. But not in northern Europe? In fact, the only cash I saw in Norway at all was rattling around a junk drawer in an airBNB.

On the other hand; maybe we were looking UP at the cities around us.

But - still not a bad haul for the year. Only $8.35 total in USD and €0.65 in EUR, but 160 individual coins (plus this 10,000 peso bill). Not bad. As usual, one day this will be a part of the Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.

20241230

A very wobbly font

This summer, I visited Oslo for the first time - including dropping in at the Oslo Cathedral. There in the choir loft is a series of stained glass windows, with some incredible hand-lettered text.

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It was blobby, wobbly, and perfectly suited for its task - letting in as much light as possible, while still being readable. It had such a unique character - I photographed a bunch of reference images.

Introducing Oslo

In fact - I loved it so much, I made a real working font out of it.

Thus: OSLO is a wild display font, based on the stained-glass windows in Oslo Cathedral. It’s got a wobbly, hand-drawn feel, as suited to its original context. It looks great jammed up together with text, and in high-contrast situations.

The original letterforms were designed and painted by the Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland, who created the entire stained glass windows in the cathedral choir area. (His brother Gustav was a prolific sculptor, too!)

OSLO is a single-case display typeface. It has only uppercase letters, numbers, and most (but not all) punctuation and symbols. It’s got a handful of accented characters as well! It’s definitely not your choice for big sections of body text, but it’s a bold choice for fun display situations.

And you can get it, too. I put it up here with more examples, and you can buy yourself a copy (for cheap!) if you ever need a very wobbly, but weirdly modern display font.

20241229

The year, unboxed

This year I made a little minisite celebrating the work we did at Brand New Box this year! Like the new year’s cards and badges, I kept with the composition book theme. I’ll probably write more process stuff on the main BNB blog. But until then: 2024 Unboxed!