Dabbling

These are some of the sorts of things I engage with in any "free time" that magically comes my way. Links here mostly go to sections of my other website, at phrenopolis.com.

Halloween

I love Halloween, there's something about the charming creepiness of it that really appeals to me. I decorate the inside of my house to make it look like some sort of mad scientist family lives there, and then on Halloween night we host a storytelling event. This has been running annually since 2004, and most years I write an original short story for it (as do other guests).

Also most years I carve some sort of interesting jack-o-lantern. It's the part of my website that gets by far the most traffic, and you can find it HERE.

Cooking

I'm not a chef or anything, just your average home cook, but I really came to enjoy making food once I started to see it as a creative activity, using tools and techniques to transform materials into something good to eat. Lately I've been learning about bread and improving my pizza game.

Bicycles

I've been on bicycles pretty much all my life. It's my preferred form of exercise, and also a pretty great way to travel. I once rode up the coast from San Francisco to Canada, which was amazing. On Saturdays in summer I hitch up both a tandem attachment and a trailer, one behind the other, and my son and I ride around town to garage sales.

Bocce

I captain a bocce team called Zuppa di Zucca (pumpkin soup). We play in a league in San Rafael. Watch for us in the Olympics someday...

Verse

I haven't done this much since my son was born, but for 19 years I sat down once a week and wrote some sort of a funny poem about whatever happened to be on my mind. You can find some of those HERE.

Clocks

Some years back I invented, only semi-jokingly, "International Color Time," as a silly but genuinely useful solution to the woes of people doing business globally and having to deal with the madness of time zones. Also I take the opportunity twice a year to complain about Daylight Saving and how changing the clocks back and forth causes even more trouble.

Coding and Web Development

My original gateway to everything I do professionally now was an interest in computers and making them do what I wanted. I like coding, and continue to indulge it as a hobby. I built and published an Android app for International Color Time. I do a fair amount of web development, usually from the ground up with php, css, javascript, mysql, and ordinary html, but occasionally also using some sort of package like Phaser or PHPAuth. Things I've built for the web include a store that works like an adventure game, a statistics tracking site for my bocce team, a cookbook with user authentication, a demo for a game that tests your knowledge of Python operators (this used Phaser), and a gamemaster console for a paper game based on the Art of War (HTML5). Most of the things I just listed are not public and not linked here for reasons of either privacy or NDA, but I can show them off if you like. Also, both this site and the one at phrenopolis.com were built from scratch without a CMS or template.

Public Access Television

This is many years ago now, but for some years in the 90s I made a show called Fiction by Louie on Marin County public access cable television. It was a sort of long-form sketch comedy show, we wrote scripts and shot them in the field. I also served a year on the public access advisory board that helped establish the facility that still exists in Marin today.