4.1.25
I finally attended my first Atlanta United game of the season last Saturday (which was their fourth home game this year) when they took on New York City FC. We almost never win against the New York teams, even at home. We gave up a goal early, but then scored an equalizer just before halftime.

Hope quickly vanished, however, when NYC scored two more goals in the first ten minutes of the second half (one of them on a penalty kick), leaving us down by two. A few minutes later, after a pressing score attempt by Atlanta, NYC scored an own-goal, putting us back within one, and Miguel Almiron headed a ball in with 15 minutes left in the match to tie the game up again.

Atlanta has a habit of losing steam offensively and becoming undisciplined defensively at the end of games, so I was just hoping to hold on for a draw. But we scored one more goal with about 5 minutes left in regulation, and we held on to that one goal lead until the full 90 minutes were up. However, the ref added 8 minutes of stoppage time (the second longest stoppage time I can remember in my 8 years of going to games).

The team remarkably kept their focus, and we were able to come away with a win in a game where we didn't hold the lead until the very end of the match and where we came back after being down two goals. It's going to take a full season to convince me that this team is back in a way that resembles those exciting teams from the first few years of the franchise's existence (especially because this was only our second win in six games, the first coming in our opening match in February). But this game had some positive signs.

4.2.25
For the past year or so, my institution has been talking about implementing a new Student Information System (SIS), and over the past month, I've had interviews with several outside consultants and members of the internal implementation team to talk about the requirements and wishlist items for my division.

And while I wouldn't really mind a new SIS, the fact is that any combination student/staff/HR/finance system is going to be inadequate to my office's needs, which is why we moved away from the SIS to purpose-built systems for our daily work. Most people in our office only login to the SIS for things like filing expense reports or putting in for leave days, not to actually do their real work. We have daily automated interfaces that run between our primary system and the SIS so we're still following proper data governance guidelines, etc., and it wouldn't be too hard to shift those over to a new system.

But even though my office and my team wouldn't have to do a lot of work to implement a new SIS, it seems like a colossal waste of time and money to me. They are currently estimating that it would take two years to fully transition to the new system across all the business units and functional areas, and that it would cost $40-$50 million, including the licensing costs and all of the hours for the configuration and conversion efforts.

But I've been through these changes before, and I can almost guarantee that the cost will end up being at least double what they are estimating, and that the actual time to move to a new system would be closer to five years than two years (especially because this isn't just for the university—the current system is also used by the medical/hospital side of our enterprise, which makes moving over the blended areas like HR and finance even more complex).

And here's the thing: if moving to a new system would dramatically improve things, then it might be worth all that trouble. Because our current system DOES suck, being that it was originally designed for corporate use, not for higher ed and medical purposes, and it's also trying to be all things to all people and rarely being the thing that any of its multiple and various customer bases actually needs to do their work most efficiently (which is why many other offices have followed our lead and moved their primary operations to specialized systems that talk to the SIS rather than use the SIS directly).

However, there is no system on the market that was designed to do what we need a system to do; all of the choices we're looking at are just like the one we already have, where they are designed for a corporate environment and have to be shoehorned to function semi-adequately in industries like ours. So even if there would be some improvements, those would be balanced out by some things also being worse than they are now, and on the whole, everyone would end up disliking a new system just as much as the dislike the current one, only we will have wasted tens of millions of dollars and years of time getting to that new-but-not-any-better world.

4.3.25
When I was visiting my parents in North Carolina in February, I noticed that my dad was reading Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, a 1959 book by Alfred Lansing about Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated attempt the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. I read a lot of non-fiction and history, and I knew virtually nothing about this expedition, so I put it on my list to read.

I finally got around to reading it several weeks later, and holy hell, it's hard to believe that everything in there really happened. The entire crew should have died several times over—I kept waiting for the first death, which would inevitably lead to the second death and then spiral deeper from there—but incredibly, all 28 men lived through the various harrowing episodes of their two years in a frozen wasteland, with no way to communicate to ask for rescue or resupply.

If this was published as a work of fiction, it would be criticized for being too fantastical. And yet it all really happened (Lansing had access to all of the crew diaries from the expedition, and was also able to spend hours interviewing those who were still alive by the time he began research for the book), and remarkably happened without serious instances of mutiny or anyone going completely mad despite the miserable, frustrating, and often hopeless conditions.

If you're into history at all and don't know this story, I highly recommend picking up this book. It's truly one of the most astonishing stories of survival against all odds in human history.

4.15.25
My birthday this year fell on the Friday before we took a short spring break trip to Asheville NC, but even though I don't usually like to make a big deal about that, Julie and Will made sure we packed in a lot of fun stuff over the course of the weekend.

It started with a surprise dinner on Thursday night at the Melting Pot, a chain fondue restaurant that I haven't been to in years but which used to be my and Julie's special occasion dinner restaurant when we were in college (it's where I proposed to her on the anniversary of our first date, exactly a year before we got married). Will had never been, but he seemed to enjoy the experience. It was more complicated keeping track of all the cooking times, etc., but it was fun, and it was a nice memory to revisit.

On Friday night Will went to the opening of the Minecraft movie with his friends, so Julie and I spent the afternoon and evening together after work doing things that I enjoyed, including taking a trip up to a record store outside the Perimeter that I don't get to visit often and having dinner at Kura, a revolving sushi restaurant that is a favorite in our family. And then Saturday we were all able to go to the Atlanta United game together after one of my friends who I have a block of season tickets with gave me both of his seats.

My main present was a ceramic owl that Will had painted at one of those paint-your-pottery places (I've gotten kind of obsessed with owls over the past couple of years, especially a particular style of blue and white ceramic owls that we've come across in vintage stores). It was a good birthday overall, and I'm glad I got out to do all that stuff despite my anxieties.

4.16.25
Because we've had several unexpected expenses this year and we're a little tight on our budget, we decided to do a scaled back trip for Will's spring break this year, doing half week in Asheville NC instead of a bigger, weeklong trip like a cruise or a multi-state trip to see the eclipse like we did last year. Julie and I visited Asheville for a long weekend while Will was away on a school trip in January (it was my first time going there, and Julie hadn't been since a school trip when she was a kid), and we enjoyed it enough and left enough unseen that we knew it would be a good new experience for Will and a nice re-visit for us with much nicer weather and a better sense of fun things to do.

We did a lot of the same stuff we did on our first trip (that's a very old habit of mine—I tend to imprint on new places and do the same things when I come back, and even to this day, I still visit some of my earliest experiences in Atlanta on a regular basis), including a trip to the Biltmore estate and going back to several of the shops and restaurants that we had enjoyed on our first visit. I also got to spend a healthy amount of time in the art gallery where I had bought a piece back in January—we found it about half an hour before they closed, and I didn't even have time to finish looking at all the artists upstairs, much less the entire downstairs level.

We did a bunch of new stuff too, including a lot of Asian restaurants, all of which were great, and we also spent an afternoon at the NC Arboretum, which was pretty cool even though a lot of the trails were blocked off as they were still cleaning up downed and damaged trees from Hurricane Helene. They also had a cool little bonsai garden, but because it was still early in the season, it was too cool for the bonsais to live outside, so there weren't any on display yet.

It was a fun visit, and although I really enjoyed both our trips this year, I feel like we've come close to exhausting Asheville as tourists. I'm sure we'll be back at some point, but it might take two or three years before it would seem compelling again (although I can almost guarantee that if I were a local, I'd have an annual membership to the Biltmore estate and would be out there a couple of times a month when the weather was decent).

4.17.25
We got back from Asheville on Thursday of last week, and I was looking forward to a few days off where I didn't have any responsibilities and could do whatever I wanted to do. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we got back, I got sick and was kind of out of it until it was time to go back to work on Monday.

One of the things I had wanted to do with my weekend was go to one of my favorite Atlanta record stores, Fantasyland, on Saturday for the annual Record Store Day, where they release exclusive limited titles. I had a decent list of albums I wanted, but only a couple that I was desperate for, and I was bummed when I realized that, with the way I was feeling, it wasn't a good idea to 1) be around other people or 2) hang out in relatively cold temperatures outdoors for a couple of hours in line.

Luckily there's an online site for a Cincinnati record store that gets a ton of inventory and also has a really efficient ordering system, and they put all of their stock that didn't sell to in-person customers on Saturday for sale online on Sunday morning. I prepped the night before, opening tabs for each of the titles I wanted and making sure I could quickly go through and add them to my cart as soon as they went live. I ended up getting every title I wanted except for one, and it was so limited that I doubt I would have gotten it in-person unless I had been one of the first ten people in line (and maybe not even then, as most stores that received the title only got one or two copies).

My team is shifting into summer project mode now, so I was able to ease back into work without too much stress after a week off. There's still a decent amount of stuff to do for this cycle over the next six weeks, but a lot of the major milestones are behind us, and we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel for this academic year.

4.22.25
I finally got my friends together to do another evening of team trivia for the first time in almost two years. It was a relatively small gathering for our group with only four of us after a couple of people had to cancel at the last minute, but it was nice to get together with folks I hadn't seen in a while and have some beers in between answering trivia questions.

We did pretty well overall, finishing with 105 points and tying for third (in the past, anything over 100 points has usually put us in the top 3). Since there's still a small gift certificate for the third place team, we had to do a tiebreaker, and both teams got that one right. The final one was asking for a year, and while we were only off by one year, the other team got it exactly, so they won the prize.

Hopefully it won't be another two years before we meet up again. I'm typically the one who does the organizing, and since I can run hot and cold on hanging out with people these days, even people I like, the mood has to hit me at the right time AND everyone's calendars have to line up.

4.23.25
Last Thursday, Will unexpectedly informed us that he wanted to go to his school's prom dance...which was on Friday night. Will didn't have a suit or anything decent to wear to something like that, so there was a mad rush on Thursday night to get him out to Men's Wearhouse, where they got him measured and fitted for a suit bundle that also included a couple of dress shirts and ties (Will chose a bow tie). They had to do some adjustments, so it wasn't ready to pick up until Friday afternoon, but we got everything back in time and he went to the dance with a couple of his friends (his current school is pretty small, so this prom was actually a joint prom between three or four schools like his).

Saturday was pretty normal until after midnight, when Will woke up complaining about his arm really hurting. Julie took him to the emergency room because he was in such pain, where they took scans just to be sure, and the diagnosis was that he had a pulled muscle or was having muscle spasms. Either way, the remedy was to take Advil and let it rest.

They didn't get home until around 3, so we were a little late in getting up on Easter morning to have our traditional egg hunt and Easter basket for Will. But he was in good spirits, so much so that he went out to see the Minecraft movie for a friend's birthday that evening and had a great time.

4.24.25
Will is pretty into gaming, and he's had a Nintendo Switch for several years and still plays it regularly. So when they announced the Switch 2 a few months ago, he let us know that's what he'd really like to have as his birthday present this year.

The preorders were originally supposed to happen in the US in early April, but thanks to the uncertainty caused by Trump's illegal tariffs, they pushed it back until last night at midnight so they could make sure the pricing was appropriate given the new economic climate (because despite the lies Trump is telling to his delusional followers, it is absolutely Americans who will pay the prices of these tariffs, not the countries selling us goods that he is imposing tariffs on).

Anyway. Knowing that months-long inventory shortages are part and parcel of new console launches, I knew our best chance to get one in time for Will's birthday would be to get online as soon as preorders went live and hope that I could make it through the mess of limited availability and crashing payment processing systems, so I prepped as best as I could for the midnight presales from Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. I had three separate browser windows open, one for each online store, and I made sure beforehand that I was logged in and my address and payment methods were up to date.

It was a bit of a mess, as expected. Walmart put me into a queue, which seemed promising at first, but I still hadn't been given the chance to buy an hour later, and I'm pretty sure they were already sold out at that point anyway. Best Buy kept having it go in and out of stock too quickly for me to complete the purchase process, and Target said it was already sold out right at midnight.

But I kept refreshing both the Target and Best Buy sites, and about 20 minutes after midnight, Target suddenly had them in stock. It took about 10 minutes to get through the whole process, including multiple times having to go through the address verification and payment confirmation screens, but I finally successfully completed the purchasing process, including an email confirmation and order number.

So hopefully Will will have a new Switch 2 on or near June 5, the official launch date. And although his birthday isn't until mid-July, we'll absolutely let him start using it as soon as he receives it.

4.29.25
Last Friday we went to Oakland Cemetery for a limited time event called Illumine, where they decorate and illuminate parts of the cemetery and also feature live music and drinks. We've been to the cemetery a couple of times over the years for service projects, but we've never been at night, and we also hadn't seen the new visitors center they built across the street from the main entrance.

It was a pretty cool experience, although the chattering crowds sometimes interfered with the experience—even with interactive art sculptures and light displays, there's something about a graveyard that calls for silence and tranquility. But we still found little pockets where it felt like we were the only people there, and it was interesting to see it at night, where the dramatic lighting further enhanced the eerie vibes of the most imposing mausoleums. We all enjoyed it enough that it seems likely that we'll return next year if they do it again.

4.30.25
Despite having tickets to several shows in the interim, I haven't actually made it out to a concert since seeing Robyn Hitchcock in late February. But I finally got out again on Tuesday night to see the supposedly final tour of legendary punk band Gang of Four, who are playing their still-vital debut album Entertainment! in full before playing a second set of hits and fan favorites.

I've seen Gang of Four once before, but not this incarnation of the band. See, there were two primary creative forces for the original version of this band, singer/lyricist Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill, and although these two were still performing together until 2012, they split, and at that point, each went on to front different versions of the band, both still using the Gang of Four name.

The version I saw in 2016 was one lead by Andy Gill with a new vocalist, and they were great. The one I saw earlier this week was lead by Jon King (Gill sadly passed away in 2020), with original drummer Hugo Burnham, bassist Gail Greenwood (Belly and L7), and guitarist Ted Leo (who was spectacular filling in for Gill). So even though I've seen them twice, and both shows were great, I've never actually seen the original lineup.

The band has been having local musicians sit in for a song or two each stop on this tour, and for the Atlanta show, it was Mike Mills (who is most likely to be the "special guest" at a rock show in Atlanta or Athens). He played guitar on "What We All Want" and then came out again for the encore when the band played a cover of "Sweet Jane".

The final song was their best known track, "Damaged Goods", which they had already played once during the Entertainment! part of the set. But it didn't matter—no fan is going to object to hearing that played twice in one evening, and it was a great way to close out the set on what the band is saying will be their final tour.