dMagy

Around 2015, I got tired of tablecloths moving. People would pull on them, they would bunch up, and cards could slide right off the table. I was also using binder clips to hold ordinary tablecloths in place, which worked, but took time to set up and did not…

I recently changed my company affiliation on LinkedIn from St. Vrain Valley Schools to dMagy. That may sound like a small profile update, but it made me look at dMagy.com differently. If I was going to place dMagy more prominently beside my name, I wanted to be expressive—and…

A wooden map without a legend records where Dan and Amy have traveled, lived and built a family history together. But telling its story revealed something the map itself already knew: shared history requires more than one person’s memories.

About fifteen years ago, I realized I was dropping the F-bomb too often. Nobody complained. Nobody pulled me aside. I wasn’t embarrassing myself at parties or making sailors uncomfortable. I just started hearing myself. I’ve never used a lot of foul language, but somehow the F-bomb had crept…

I was trying to solve a much smaller problem. For years, I have occasionally hosted tabletop game events. I enjoyed them, but they happened sporadically. I wanted a better rhythm, something more intentional. Since our card parties already had their own cadence, I thought I could schedule tabletop…

For years I worked on the Help Desk, so people assumed they knew which side I’d take whenever a disagreement arose between an end user and the security team. After all, I worked with the users every day. I understood their frustrations. I wanted to help them get…

Ziva Every morning, Amy and I walk our dogs. Gracie, our Golden Retriever, spends the walk reading the morning news through her nose. Every few feet there’s another scent that absolutely requires investigation. Ziva is different. She’s our “petite Pyrenees.” Calm with people. Wildly opinionated around other dogs….

A few years ago, Amy and I had about 3,000 digital pictures. Like most families, they lived in folders. They were organized well enough. They were backed up. If a hard drive failed, we wouldn’t lose them. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we weren’t looking…

Around 2010, I realized Amy and I were headed toward a future that, on paper, looked perfectly acceptable. Our daughter had left home. Our son would graduate high school the following year. We were between churches. We are both introverts by nature. I could picture our weekends years…

This article wasn’t written from an outline. It emerged from a conversation. Before writing a single paragraph, I asked AI to ask me one question at a time until it understood the story well enough to draft an article. About a dozen questions later, we had an article….

In Brief A Conversation with a Librarian Ceran began with a conversation. One day, Coal Ridge Middle School librarian Sue Ahlberg told me about a new math program available to middle school students. What struck me was not the program itself, but how she learned about it. She…

The first large card party in our new house was wonderful. It was also deafening. Twenty-four people gathered in our basement to play cards. The room was doing exactly what Amy and I had hoped it would do. People were laughing, talking, and enjoying themselves. The problem was…

The names visible in this image are not real. The original mugs are personalized for actual DTS retirees. The longest-serving employee in DTS is retiring this month. Greg started in 1990, ten years before I joined the department. His retirement mug contains 177 names. Most people look at…

When I moved into my new shared office, I discovered a problem I hadn’t anticipated. I couldn’t always tell when my office mate, Jason, was on a phone call. That sounds obvious in retrospect, but when you’re focused on your own work, it’s surprisingly easy to misread what’s…

Most photo apps are built around a simple assumption:your photos are disposable, searchable blobs meant to be scrolled past, liked, and forgotten. Mine aren’t. I’m building a small set of macOS apps—starting with dMagy Picture Prep (dMPP) and dMagy Picture Show (dMPS)—for people who care about their photos…

Here is a designed based on my belief than common courtesy, common knowledge and common sense are not common. And, assuming that they are will lead to mistakes. dMagy designs

For years, there has been an inner part of me that I never allowed to fully emerge. Wearing a hat felt like an extravagance, something others might pull off, but not little old me. I was determined to ensure that no one noticed the wallflower I was supposed…

Just having a little fun with the local schools’ mascots. SHS

Just having a little fun with the local schools’ mascots. SCHS

Just having a little fun with the local schools’ mascots. NHS

Just having a little fun with the local schools’ mascots. MHS

Just having a little fun with the local schools’ mascots. LyHS

Just having a little fun with the local schools’ mascots. LHS