Shoveling out a parking spot is a pain, and many snowy places have a culture where when you leave you put some kind of "space saver" (aka "parking chair", "dibs", etc) to reserve the space for when you come back. While you don't have a legal right to the space, there's common knowledge that if you park in someone's spot you're running a significant risk of them vandalizing your car.

Aside from depending on the implicit threat of property damage, it's a bad system: it only works if everyone uses cars with the same commuting pattern. My sister works in early childhood intervention, which is one of several professions where you're traveling to people's houses during the day. In neighborhoods where space savers are common, there can be many open spots, but each one is saved. Moving the space saver, even just for the duration of the visit, risks a slashed tire.

I recently got a Thermal Master P1 infrared camera attachment for my phone. The goal was a house project, but it's also a great toy, especially with the kids. Getting a room pitch black but still being able to 'see' with the phone was fun for a bit. The real fun, though, was in exploring to observe all these thermal properties we'd never thought about.

This post has spoilers for My Neighbor Totoro, Frozen, Bambi, and the Lion King

People at different stages of development enjoy different things in movies. Some of the best children's movies are able to make things scary or intense for the adults without being too much for little kids.

For example, in My Neighbor Totoro everyone is worried that a small child may have fallen in the lake: she's gone missing, they find a sandal floating in the pond, you see people dredging the pond looking for her, and it's very clear to adults and older kids that the worry is she has drowned. But to a little kid it's much less obvious; the actual dialog only says that they found a sandal. This gives a very intense and emotional scene, but only for people who can handle it.

Very few people have been on a plane performing a barrel roll, but we could fix this. Commercial aircraft could roll in revenue service, and if you had your window shade down you wouldn't even notice it.

While there are many ways to roll an airplane that would cause complete havoc inside the cabin, a barrel roll can be performed as a "1g" maneuver. With careful control of the aircraft, the forces can be balanced so that you only ever feel close to 1g of apparent gravity, and it always is pulling you down into your seat.

It's a holiday. The cousins are over, and the kids are having a great time. Unfortunately, that includes rampaging through the kitchen. We're trying to cook, so there's a "no cutting through the kitchen" rule. Imagine enforcement looks like:

Kid: [dashes into kitchen, pursued by cousin]
Adult: Out of the kitchen!
Kid: Sorry! [Continues their path, leaving through the other door; escapes pursuit from more rule-abiding cousin]

This doesn't work! The kid got what they wanted out of this interaction, and isn't going to change their behavior. Instead, I need to make it be not worth their while:

The "dance weekend" is a very common pattern for contra dance communities around the country. I think of the central example as something like:

• Two bands, two callers.
• Dancing (with short breaks) Friday 7pm-11pm, Saturday 10am-11pm, Sunday 10am-3pm.
• Saturday and Sunday daytime are a mixture of regular dances and workshops, sometimes with parallel tracks.

Examples, from my 2025 calendar: Beantown Stomp, Chehalis, Dance in the Desert, Dancing Fish, Five Borough Fling, Fleur de Lis Fling, Hashdance, and Summer Soiree.

I've seen a bunch of misunderstandings that come from people not being on the same page about what is normal: many dance weekends are organized by volunteers, some of which are doing it for the first time; performers often are new to this as well. As someone who has both played for and organized dance weekends, I thought it might be helpful to try and write down what I think of as typical if an event is bringing in a band or caller from out of town.

Note that I'm trying to document the status quo here, saying "this is" and not "this is what should be". I would be sad if in places where the status quo isn't great people pointed at this doc and said "Jeff says it's supposed to be that way"; this post is not doing that! Additionally, performers and events are of course free to agree on something that isn't the most common arrangement!

As of the beginning of 2026, here's what I think of as the most common arrangement: