2026/09/14
Autumn is here, and for me that means that we’re done with all that 7s silliness and it’s time for rugby 15s season. This year our club has a new coaching staff and we’ve got a lot of new faces around the men’s team due to new people moving into the area and several moving away. We’re intense as far as most amateur athletics go, but even still it’s only four hours a week in the same place, and due to various life commitments it’s rare for all of our typical starters to be together. So, like most every business I’ve been a part of through my career, we have to build our culture remotely. We still get together outside of practice in various sized groups for everything from volunteering to socializing, and of course during match days we’re all together, but that’s only 12-15 Saturday’s a year. We’ve got a couple Whatsapp groups for sharing highlights from matches, a bit of healthy trash talking about our favorite teams during the International windows, details of day to day operations of the club, and of course some general banter.
2026/09/03
There’s been no lack of pixels pushed talking about the current job market, and I don’t know how much I’ll add to it. But Im enjoying writing again, so… talking with people on all sides, there are some interesting, and weird, things at play. Everyone is acting in their own best interest and doing things that are reasonable, meanwhile it is not working well for anyone.
Locally rational, globally dysfunctional systems are tough to solve.
2026/08/18
It’s interesting how a lot of old are new again. And I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to see the similarity in things that have longer cycle times. Strategy doesn’t always repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Looking at things through the eyes of a relatively well seasoned technology executive it’s hard not to see the same patterns emerge just with a slightly different flavor to them. The advances in AI are, without a doubt, going to change the way a lot of things work. But we’re seeing the same knee jerk reaction of creating executive titles with “AI” in the name, similar to what we saw with executive titles with “Data” in them, not too long ago. Sometimes it’s the right call at the time and can really be useful in helping an organization get its feet under it in a new area or a new way of working by making a new seat at the leadership table to advocate for it and educate about it.
2026/01/30
I’m a long time novice user of LaTeX. For a while I was using a pipeline from emacs org-mode to pdf that used LaTeX as an intermediate format, and I even used it as part of typesetting a cookbook a few years ago. But theres no denying that it’s pretty cryptic to use and not the most welcoming syntax. Its the kind of thing that it’d have to “relearn” every time I had a gap between using it in projects.
2025/06/01
Hilton Head Rugby recently closed out our men’s XV 2024/2025 season. We had some wins, had some losses, had to deal with both hurricanes and ice storm related weather issues during it, ending the season with a playoff berth in our union. Along the way we’ve got the foundations of a great women’s XV team coming together, had a very successful first season of youth flag rugby program in partnership with our local recreation center, and provided quite a few volunteer hours for various local causes.
