2016 has been a most­ly good year in my life, but it’s been a dif­fi­cult one in our nation and our world. Memes abound anthro­po­mor­phiz­ing 2016, and it seems like most peo­ple will be glad to see the year end.… Read more2016 roundup

I’ve been mak­ing music since I was a small child. It start­ed with singing, then includ­ed piano, flute, and dou­ble bass, and now I most­ly just sing and play piano. Lis­ten­ing to music is a great plea­sure, but mak­ing music… Read morewhy I make music (and why I prac­tice)

I bought the Drinks by the Dram Whisky Advent Cal­en­dar this year, and it’s amaz­ing. Each day, I’ll update this post with the one I’ve tast­ed. Twen­­ty-four drams of deli­cious­ness. Here we go! 1 Dec: The Lost Dis­til­leries Blend Batch… Read moreWhisky Advent Cal­en­dar

I went to Leaky­Con in Octo­ber and had a FANTASTIC time. My friend Austin and I cel­e­brat­ed our way through the week­end. I cos­played each day, some days with mul­ti­ple cos­tumes. The first day, I was Luna Love­g­ood, and once… Read moreHar­ry Pot­ter cos­play at Leaky­Con

I’ve been play­ing a num­ber of games over the past few months, some new ones and some not-so-new ones. Canalis: We played this game with 4 play­ers a cou­ple times over the week­end. It’s part of the Tem­pest uni­verse (which… Read moreDecem­ber gam­ing edi­tion

We have now been in Utah for a full year. We’re feel­ing set­tled and are hav­ing fun here. We’ve learned our way around, found friends, com­mu­ni­ties, vol­un­teer oppor­tu­ni­ties, I found a job (!), we’ve done some out­doorsy activ­i­ties (though not… Read moreliv­ing in Utah — one year lat­er

I’m at Leaky­Con in Bur­bank, CA right now, and yes­ter­day I pre­sent­ed a talk about law, moral­i­ty, and rebel­lion in Har­ry Pot­ter. It went bet­ter than I expect­ed, and though I wish I had been bet­ter pre­pared (and had prac­ticed it… Read moreRatio­nal Rebel­lion: Moral­i­ty and the Rule of Law in Har­ry Pot­ter

From this recent project I’ve been dis­cussing, I have one more point. Our cus­tomers can make trans­fers into oth­er accounts. The ven­dor told us that it would “hard fail” if the cus­tomer tried to go over their bal­ance. “Hard fail”… Read morehand-wav­ing and sub­ject mat­ter exper­tise

On a recent project, the ven­dor’s soft­ware was going to be embed­ded in our web­site through an iframe. After a quick tuto­r­i­al from my hus­band (a soft­ware archi­tect who had done a lot of research on the secu­ri­ty of iframes… Read morewhy testers need to be involved from the begin­ning

It’s been a long time since I’ve post­ed some­thing on a Fri­day, and there have been a num­ber of games I’ve played recent­ly. I’ve been to two board game con­ven­tions and have played a lot of games with friends. This… Read moreSep­tem­ber gam­ing edi­tion