20260301

Three Types of Fun

There’s this idea that fun comes in different types;: ‘fun’ doesn’t always mean the same thing, and it’s useful to distinguish which type of fun you’re having, or intend to have.

Type 1 fun is stuff that’s fun in the actual moment. Watersliding. Eating a bag of Cheetos. Drinks with friends. Laughing at a joke.

To celebrate Brand New Box’s 15th birthday in 2022, we took the whole company and their plus-ones on a rafting trip through Grand Canyon. It was awesome. We started by meeting up in Vegas, we did escape rooms, I encouraged everybody to go to the Meow Wolf installation, we had an evening on the Vegas strip. The next night we watched the Kansas Jayhawks win the national basketball championship. This is classic Type 1 Fun.

The next morning we got up early, caught a charter bus to the launch point, and met our river guides. The weather was beautiful. Gorgeous scenery, lovely float on our new rafts, fun chatting with fellow rafters and guides. The float trip is going to have a lot of Type 1 fun.

This particular Grand Canyon rafting trip is pretty luxurious. Five days of fun rafting, beautiful hiking, and very chill camping. The guides do everything for us, including preparing three square meals a day. Bougie. All we need to do is hang out, help unload the rafts, and sit around the fire in the evening. We brought card games and booze.

At the end of the rafting trip, we’ll hike out of the Grand Canyon - from the river all the way up to the South Rim park. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s a pretty serious hike, all uphill and after a week of camping. We will have to carry all our own stuff, water is only available at a couple of rest stations, and it’s going to be HOT. But this is a work trip - it’s not THAT strenuous. We asked everybody to do a few practice hikes. And we promised: it won’t be that bad. We encouraged everyone to just go at your own pace. Nate said he’d happily bring up the rear, at whatever pace that happened at.

The Greeks call this dramatic irony.

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Type 2 Fun is fun that’s not enjoyable per se. It’s not super fun in the moment, and perhaps it’s difficult. But Type 2 fun is rewarding, even if it’s only rewarding in retrospect. Running a marathon. An all-day hike carrying a heavy backpack. Serious camping. Endurance challenges. Maybe some of our work at BNB is Type 2 Fun!

We had a few doses of Type 2 fun on the river trip. During the first night camping at the beach there was a strong wind all night long, and for about twelve hours straight it felt like were were sitting inside one of those sandblasting cabinets they use to etch glass. But the weather calmed down the next day, and we had gorgeous sunshine the rest of the trip.

The rafting trip is mostly very chill; sitting on a calm raft, enjoying the scenery. The rapids themselves are fun, and could be a little bit Type 2: if you sat in the front, you would get doused with very cold water, and more than one person (me included) barely kept their seat because the powerful waves would push you around with so much force. Camping is always a little bit of Type 2 Fun anyway: wind, weather, sleeping on the ground, no access to showers, cleaning yourself by swimming in the ice-cold river, sharing a single outdoor vault toilet. The usual.

Type 2 started to ramp up when the first people got sick.

First there was one person with an upset stomach, maybe a little diarrhea. Bummer for them, but they were good enough sports, and they muscled through. They weren’t the camping type, and they chalked it up to nerves. Then a second person started feeling it.

The guides gave us stern lectures: drink your electrolytes! Eat more food than you think you need! The rafting trip takes more out of you than you might expect.

But by day three, it was clear: people were getting sick. This wasn’t just a nervous stomach, it was communicable. Nobody was worried though, it was just a drag. Unlucky. People get sick. It’s OK; that’s Type Two Fun. The guides had brought along two covid tests (two! for a party of 28 people! in April 2022!), and one Poor Soul tested positive. I think this was a lingering false positive - this person had recently had covid a few weeks back, and wasn’t feeling too bad. But with a positive covid case, everything ground to a halt.

Poor Covid Soul had to get airlifted out, even though he felt fine by the next morning. We got stuck at the beach for half a day while the guides and national park and the state health service got all their ducks in a row, and then we rafted down to an official Evacuation Beach, and said goodbye to the Covid Sufferer. As a boss, this feels pretty bad: we brought employees on this trip, and then watched them get helicoptered away. Their partner was in tears. There’s no cell service in the canyon, so their partner had say goodbye. We’d meet him at the top, in a couple of days.

In the meantime, it was clear that this illness was spreading FAST. More and more people coming down with it, including some of our guides (who continued to make our food and pilot our rafts).

And it was also clear by now that this was not COVID. It wasn’t respiratory, but it came with a backpack full of other fun symptoms. Fever. Exhaustion. Dizziness. Vomiting. Expelling fluids from any direction. I will remind you that more than twenty people were all sharing a single vault toilet.

By this point we could visualize the graph. Our symptoms were different, but we’d just lived through two years of a coronavirus pandemic. Plus, we’re a tech company. We know what exponential growth is. We joked about the r-value. We washed our hands more vigorously. In the river.

And one-by-one, someone would simply… not show up to the next meal. One more empty space at the campfire. And in the distance, one more sound of some very intense gastrointestinal distress. This was horror movie stuff, except instead of a serial killer it’s a virus.

In the meantime, we were all just trying to drink a lot of fluids and electrolytes, and cram in the calories to help us power through the remainder of the trip. Remember: at the end of this rafting journey is an all-day hike - up from the river to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The next morning was the hike out.

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Type 3 is when you seriously think you might die.

By the last night, everybody was just trying to hang on and salvage some bit of fun. But overnight, the shoreline became a parade of people emptying themselves of whatever solids and fluids they had. It was sad, it was hilarious, and it was definitely gross. Lying under the open desert sky, watching bats chase after insects as they flit through the most beautiful starscape you’ve ever seen - and all around you the sounds of miserable people, retching.

Those that had already been sick a few days were strengthening, a few were at the lowest point, and some just hadn’t got it yet.

I got it on the final evening, and spent all night vomiting. The next morning, sleep-deprived and completely emptied of fluids and calories, it was time to start hiking.

We put on a brave face and just went for it: every man for himself, just get yourself to the top. The guides - who were all pretty sick by now too - told us this was the only way. There’s no backup plan. Just get out of the canyon. One foot in front of the other. I walked with Erika, who never got sick, and she VERY patiently walked alongside me as I hiked at a snails pace. We split into groups.

We straggled our way up the trail, spreading out. At shady points, we stopped to rest (or vomit). We heard trail gossip from the different groups. So-and-so is sick now. Someone else fainted. Someone collapsed. A ranger took a look at one guy and stopped him: there’s no way you’re hiking out. He got airlifted out on another helicopter.

We met more park rangers on the trail. They said, oh, are YOU with the river trip? THAT river trip? The one where everybody is sick? Then we started hearing it from regular hikers we met on the trail. We knew this was getting serious when even casual hikers on the canyon trail had heard about us, and kept their distance.

At one rest point, we met up with Nate’s group. He was feeling fine this morning. He laid down in some shade, and was still lying there when we left.

My little group, encouraged by Erika with infinite patience, plodded our way up. We picked up a few others and a ranger who coached us. One step at a time. In the meantime I was wondering: will any of these people still want to work with us when we get out of here? WILL we get everybody out of here?

I made it to the top.

At the top of the Grand Canyon, your cell phone works again. Service is spotty, but it’s there a bar or two of signal. It’s hard to make a phone call, but you might get a text message.

This became an evening-long coordination problem: how to find the people that have been straggling out of the canyon all evening. Who made it out? Who hasn’t yet? One couple who hadn’t gotten sick had sprinted their way up the canyon, but were now falling ill.

We only had one night booked in the Grand Canyon lodges, and they were totally booked. You couldn’t extend your stay for love nor money. But that was OK: we had a chartered van coming to pick us up in the morning and take us back to Vegas. And Vegas has hotels. And medical facilities. And our airline tickets home. When we found people, we passed along the message: just get to the bus. Help others. Get everybody on that bus in the morning. No man left behind.

We called at least one ambulance that evening. (The victim was OK, just dehydrated and feverish. Give him electrolytes and rest, the medics said.)

By late that night we still hadn’t heard from Nate. His wife had left him at the rest area, under the care of park rangers, and hiked out alone. Then we got a slack message! He was spending the night at the ranger station, and had hacked into their wifi. Go on without me, he said. Just get the team out to Vegas. Get our people home.

And so that’s what we did! I don’t think I would have felt OK leaving an employee or their partner behind. But Nate’s a resourceful guy, and I trust him to take care of himself. We got everybody else on the bus. We got to Vegas. We got on our flights home.

Nate made it out the next day. A ranger helped him hike the rest of the way. At the top he bribed somebody to drive him to Phoenix. He caught a flight home.

It turns out, our illness was just common Norovirus. We were the first of a season of infections, shutting down rafting trips that summer. Over two hundred people got sick. The CDC wrote a paper about us.

(Our group included patient zero: we’re that first bump on the left side of the graph.)

So: it turned out fine. Everybody survived, nobody quit. We definitely all learned about the Three Types of Fun.

But I don’t think any of us have been back to the canyon.

20260213

We still can't design credit card machines

Why does every credit card machine require a little handwritten sign telling me how to operate it?

As someone who studied industrial design in college and now works exclusively in digital interfaces, I LOVE this question.

Physical interfaces are hard to change! Once they’re designed and manufactured, the users are stuck with the designer’s choices. And so we annotate, modify, and otherwise hack the interfaces we have to use.

You’d think we’d have this worked out by now. There are only so many ways to use a credit card, right? But as John Salvatier says: Reality has a surprising amount of detail.

And so, when the designers didn’t give us an interface that matches up with the real world, we improvise.

And this isn’t limited to credit cards either! Once you start looking, you’ll see this everywhere:

The post-it explaining that you have to press X, then the red button, THEN tap your card HERE.

The giant labels reading HOT and COLD on the shower handle (which if you look closely already has labels but are also wrong).

The duct tape covering the switch that SHOULD NEVER BE FLIPPED.

I have a treasured collection of annotated interfaces, and I’m collecting them here. I started this collection focused on credit card readers, but I’m expanding to annotated interfaces anywhere. Spotted one in the wild? Send it to me, I’d love to see it.

20260114

Security / Obscurity

In my ongoing quest to add more easter eggs to my physical environment, I have a new planter set up outside my house.

You may think: Matt, what a weird rock collection you have there!

And if you look closely and choose a rock, you see. Oh. It’s fake. It’s one of those key-hider rocks, meant to blend in with your landscaping, and keep a house key available for emergencies.

But which rock holds the key? Well…

I bought…. every kind of key hiding rock I could find on Amazon. (A few duplicates, yes, but they all had different brand names and different sellers.)

And I also bought a collection of house keys. You can buy old keys by the pound.

So: every one of these rocks is holding a key.

None of them are the keys to my house.

My wife, who is supportive of my many quirks, does not get this. She doesn’t object, she just would like the record to show that she does not understand why this is delightful to me.

I still think it’s great.

20260106

2025 Recap

I’m bad at remembering things so it’s helpful to write stuff down. Thus: a recap post for 2025. I make these by just paging through my calendar and my photo roll a the same time and writing down what happened.

To be super clear: I don’t expect anybody to read this. It’s just for Matt’s memory.

2024 was a big travel year, with work trips and our big summer in Europe. 2025’s goal was to focus up at home, and put my energy into doing a bunch of house projects. The big failure was redoing the carport; after much deliberation I hired a local architect. That didn’t work out, and we still have the same crumbling carport and much less money in our bank account. Oh well, 2026 it is.

January

• Erika went on a road trip with a friend, kids and I rang in the new year together.
• Launched a new class at KU, teaching Design Systems. This was my first class in the new Interaction Design major, which is (a) awesome and (b) long overdue. Fun to work with design students who KNOW they want to do interactive work.
• Tried to design the carport myself, hated everything
• Took on a new project with an old client that involved daily multi-hour meetings at 7am. Shifted my gym schedule to the evening. And started using the Faculty-Only gym on campus (which was fun actually)
• Plumbing backup in the house threatened a huge 5-figure repair job. Got a second opinion and did some labor myself, managed to get it sorted for just a few hundred bucks.
• Mom and Dad came to visit, saw Felix play with the Sousa band.
• started a project to do a clay portrait sculpture every week; again I’m so bad at this that I couldn’t force myself to go much past march. Just one embarrassing sculpture after another, and no pathway to get better. I need a teacher!
• E & I saw the music minister’s band play at the Replay

February

• Relaunched the homepage of mattkirkland.com, with my new obnoxious windows, and automatic updates on the footer, and secret easter egg of bird sounds.
• Made a plan to buy the house next door
• Reorganized the library/office
• Felix competed in the local Youth Entrepreneurship thing again, got 2nd place this time with a pitch to reuse our penny press for wedding events.
• Felix and I got tickets to a KU basketball game
• Felix threw a broski Superbowl party
• Trudy threw an elaborate Galentine’s party
• went on a fun Friday date w E; played hooky and went shopping, to lunch, and to the nelson.

March

• Prepped a plan to launch Dracula Weekly, my paid tier of Dracula Daily.
• took a wood carving workshop that taught how to make kitschy gnomes. Bought equipment and tried to extend this to other figurative sculpture but it’s very hard to make my brain do 3D, especially reductive. Why????
• Went to suburban Detroit with Nate for a client meeting and party; they rented a movie theater and we went curling!
• Felix got his ear surgery! Put in his prosthetic ear bone, which is kind of cool.
• fixed another problem with one of our sump pumps.
• Trudy was in Little Women at her school; she did amazing. Also designed an ironic but actually great poster for it, featuring four monster trucks. The drama teacher was impressed but not pleased.

April

• Vibecoded a silly horoscope site or parents, that just recommends childhood vaccines
• Cut down a medium-sized tree in my backyard, which was SUPER fun. I monkey-climbed it to the top and took it down branch by branch with a small one-handed chainsaw, and then cut the trunk into sections. Extremely satisfying. And now Carola’s got plenty of firewood for next winter.
• I made myself a homemade Yoshinoya beef bowl, which was delightful to only one person in our house. Me.
• E made a very cool hand-cut paper forest backdrop for easter photos at church.
• I got some further traumatic dental work done
• Trudy and I started coworking afternoons, where we’d go to a coffeeshop while she did school and I did work stuff. Why haven’t we been doing this for her entire online school career?
• saw the music minister’s band again at the replay? I forgot we did this twice

May

• St Louis trip. Happened to coincide with the STL book fair near my parents, so I snuck over for an afternoon. It’s just a big library book sale.
• Stevie & Molly’s wedding; at a St Louis winery on a gorgeous evening. Fun to get dressed up with all the Kirkland side of the family.
• Felix and I got a powerwasher and powerwashed the deck. And then anything else we could think of. Restained the deck.
• Felix did the school mud volleyball tournament with friends, which is a very fun event.
• Actually launched the paid Dracula Weekly plan. Shipped out a bunch of goodies to people that signed up. Started writing weekly Dracula Recap posts, which I suspect I will largely recycle each year.
• TK finished middle school! And also won Thespian of the Year :)
• Marched the kids through a great Final Friday of art gallery openings downtown. It was fun actually.
• Finally installed a handrail on our front porch. I thought for years I would need to custom fabricate it but found I could buy one off the shelf that wasn’t hideous.
• I took over the Coffee team at church; been volunteering there for a few months but now I’m the guy who schedules people and makes sure we don’t run out of coffee.

June

• A couple of huge tree branches from our front oak tree fell down, crushing that handrail. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Spent evenings and weekends for two weeks just chopping it up into firewood for Carola. Bought a new handrail and installed it.
• Drove to St Louis by myself and stopped at the Daum Museum in Sedalia. An art museum in a small Missouri town, with a great collection. Been sleeping on this one. Saw a Gisela Colon sculpture that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
• Grad party for Asher including a backyard pig roast!
• BNB work retreat in St Louis; we stayed out by SLU. It was AI themed. We went to the City Museum and ate on the Hill. I haven’t been at the City Museum without kids since… I was a kid. Very fun to amble through it at my own pace and see all the little stuff.
• Bought myself an axe and realized that splitting firewood is EXTREMELY fun.
• Built and launched plotted, my ‘all the best books have maps’ aggregator
• Erika and a friend envisioned an incredible product, prototyped it, and did a photoshoot all in one night. I built an online store that night. They’re not ready to launch it but I think it would KILLLLLL if they did.
• Helped neighbor Conrad harvest his cherry tree.
• Saw some old neighbors in town visiting; we hung out at Winter School.
• Felix and I finally ‘launched’ carbon crimes, but we haven’t really spread the word about it. It actually felt kind of scary with the current… atmosphere.
• went to a big showing of Hundreds of Beavers at Liberty Hall

July

• Built and launched TinyTruckTracker.com, a site to monitor which startup will actually deliver a tiny electric truck in the US. Kind of lost interest and it’s getting a bit stale.
• Kids had other plans so Erika and I went to go watch the fireworks in Eudora. Surprisingly great!
• Lewis & Gosa visit! Had fun hanging out. The teens did official campus tours at KU.
• Kids went up to Chicago with the Lewises.
• EK date to KC and a surprisingly good snack/meal at Bikanervala
• I drove to Chicago to pick up kids. Stopped at the Farnsworth House in Illinois on the way, very fun to see. I really loved a sculpture they had there, David Wallace Haskins ‘Image Continuous’. Fun times in Chicago.
• Went to Cincinnati with the Detroit client, a big meeting of the minds. Cincy was fun, we stuck to the Over the Rhine neighborhood. Went to a few great bars, I had three fun runs. Got chili at the airport.
• Felix went to high school camp
• Grays stopped by for a few days; had fun hanging out and took Nate’s boat out to swim
• Erika doula’d for another lady at church (we all feel like this is one of the things she could make a whole career out of)

August

• Kids back to school: T as a Freshman, F a sophomore
• Erika went to Germany and the Netherlands with her mom
• We both marked a funny turning point - we have now been married longer than we were alive before we were married. Like, we have spent >50% of our days on earth married.
• Erika continued first-wednesday-of-the-month Teen Lunches, which now have like 45 kids descending for lunch.
• Felix played in Marching Band all fall. We went to some football games to see him!
• Felix played soccer again, this time fully on the JV team. Played nearly every minute of the season.
• I joined the board at the Lawrence Arts Center, an organization I love and really want to see thrive

September

• Started building a 10x10 shed in the backyard. Watched a whole lot of youtube. Felix helped a bunch, but otherwise it was just me. Also extremely fun. Framed for the first time, roofed for the first time.
• Went to a preview night at Atlas9, the meow-wolf-y thing in Kansas City. It’s an interdimensional movie theater, and great for its size. Definitely feels like something pulled off by designers instead of artists.
• Went to hear Te Deum do Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil
• Went to a truly notable concert with Erika at the white schoolhouse
• I think it was around here that my dr finally pushed me to start taking some blood pressure medication, which has felt low-key miraculous
• Mom and Dad came to visit, saw a soccer game and the Lawrence High football game with the marching band

October

• Finished that shed. Moved a bunch of junk out of the house and into the shed.
• Rebuilt StudioKirkland.com, with a better portfolio interface and a Shopify store.
• Drove to Denver/Boulder for a BNB retreat. This was RockyMountainRuby and also the Denver Product Summit (which was way better). I really enjoyed a long solo road trip with a stack of audiobooks.
• Went to the Denver Art Museum and the Kirkland Museum, which has been on my list for a while.
• Took a fall break trip to southern Missouri; saw my folks for a bit, then down to Fredrock Glampground again. We played in Johnson Shut-ins - super fun, and just barely warm enough to be in the water (but still quite cold). Stayed in the big teepee, had a big rainstorm. It was great.
• Fixed something else on a different sump pump.
• Erika did her (now annual?) girls trip to St Louis
• Trudy and I saw Welcome to Night Vale live at Liberty Hall

November

• Northern Lights! Noticeable-with-the-naked-eye from our front porch, even with streetlights and traffic.
• T got her learners permit!
• saw Stile Antico perform medieval / renaissance music
• and then saw The Beths at the Truman with Erika
• Pie Night! In St Louis
• and then our usual Thanksgiving trip to Chicago. Great to spend time with friends, and also did some touristy things: beef sandwiches at the restaurant that inspired The Bear (legitimately so good), black Friday shopping, bowling with the boys, a big snowy day
• back home we decorated the house for advent, which E does an amazing job of and makes the living room especially feel special.

December

• Advent! Erika’s got a countdown of activities and treats she runs for the kids; it’s sweet.
• We try to not jam December full of events except for family stuff; it’s a quiet season.
• One special evening: we got dressed up, went to a fancy dinner at Lydia’s in KC, and then to a Christmas concert of Te Deum, the sacred-music-only chamber choir.
• The actual holiday as usual with our Christmas Eve hosting E’s side of the family, Christmas morning around our tree, then drive to STL to see the Kirkland family for a few days. Emily hosted a Cousin Brunch for all the family of my generation, which was great.

Overall

A weird year but just because I tried to intentionally ‘stay close’. Lots of my creative/extracurricular activity was around the house, working on home projects that I don’t really gravitate towards. And with T starting high school, F being busy, and E working, my theme for 2025 was ‘try to pick up some slack’. A little bit boring, actually, but did feel like I was a support for my wonderful family. At least that was the goal!

As the kids grow more independent, we are finding more and more times where they are just out of the house living their lives, and Erika and I are feeling that out. We’re not empty nesters or anything, but we can see it on the horizon. And the days when we are all together doing things feel even more special. We have a little thing we’ve discussed at the end of a special day: This could be it. That’s shorthand for a longer discussion: When I’m very old, if I could go back and time and relive just one day from my life, I could choose this day. This one could be it. We had a handful of those days in 2025; I think that’s something to be grateful for.

20260101

Found 2025

Every year the Kirkland family keeps a jar of ‘found’ coins - and once per year I do the accounting. Previously: 2024, 2023, (no 2022 post?), 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017. We’ve been doing this since 2004.

Here’s what we found in 2025!

Even fewer coins than last year; I think the approaching cashless world is cutting into this, plus our family now has two very independent teenagers. We’re not taking as many slow ambling walks as we did back when they were in elementary school.

Plus: the abolition of the penny finally happened this year. Who knows how this will affect this!

We did still pick up 147 individual coins, which adds up to $11.82, plus some miscellaneous euro Erika found in Germany and the Netherlands this summer. Tracked in our ongoing spreadsheet, of course.

As always: these coins are stored in the archive for the one-day future Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.