dMagy

A copier becomes an MFD. A TV becomes an IFP. Can you find 12 familiar office objects hidden behind technical terminology? Plus a few thoughts on speaking human.

I arrived ready to run a card party after Lydia and Camden’s rehearsal dinner. By 8:30, the evening was already going wonderfully—and Rose wasn’t quite ready to accept that we wouldn’t be playing.

The Munchkin card trays began while I was still working on a different game. My Hues and Cues accessories were beginning to come together, and everything fit neatly inside the box. It was satisfying to see the scoring frame, cards, and player pieces organized instead of scattered everywhere….

A couple of weeks ago, Amy was playing Hues and Cues with our grandkids. The game asks players to find a particular color on a large board based on verbal clues. Once everyone has placed their pieces, a scoring frame goes around the target color. The closer a…

Around 1994, we were living in Ames, Iowa. Amy’s morning preparations took about 45 minutes. One morning, as she stood in the bathroom finishing her routine, she exclaimed with some shock, “I almost forgot to curl my eyelashes!”—as though she had narrowly avoided leaving the house only partially…

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….