My kids are the best

Hey 👋🏼 I'm Greg.

I'm a guy on the internet with too many interests. Most of them orbit around learning and writing and software and kids and books and business. This is the place I come to try to string words and ideas together and hold myself accountable.
Credentials are sooo boring. I like this list better.
  • 3 amazing kids and 1 amazing wife
  • Still goes to church
  • Splits time between Maryland and Delaware
  • 43 and feels like a wide-eyed little kid
  • Wrote software or led software teams for a living for 20 years, including some fun machine learning and model training stuff
  • Bought our 2nd house at the beach 5 years ago and paid it off
  • Drove from Maryland to California and back with the family to see the country and have a blast in a rented RV
  • Runs a lot
  • Will choose a beer and cigar with friends over nearly any other activity
  • Like Erasmus, would choose books first over food and clothes
  • Raced cars and taught other people how to race cars
  • Has 3 half-written messes that look like novels if you squint.. at some point a finished novel will be on this list!
  • Helped build a company from 2 to 250+
  • Loves building things out of (wood | words | code | ideas)

Things I've Written

  • A Model of Charity - Time and Treasure

    I was talking recently with a friend about all the amazing things we want to do with our lives. I’m intoxicated by my own ideas, just like everyone else, and so most of my list looks like a bunch of…

    March 11, 2024
  • Big Numbers and Natural Theology

    I want to talk about two really big numbers. I know, math. Bear with me though because these two numbers are pretty wild. And they give us a good lesson about reality and the revealed nature of God…

    February 12, 2024
  • 10%

    Congratulations! You’ve made it 10% of the way through 2024. Time moves quickly from hey!-it’s-a-brand-new-year to slipsliding right on through it. At 10%, I’m checkpointing a couple of my goals with…

    February 06, 2024
  • 2024 - Du muĂźt dein Leben ändern.

    I recently had the privilege to encounter a new poem that relieved me of both my breath and my attention. That poem is called Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rilke. I had to read it over and over and over…

    January 06, 2024
  • 2023 Review

    Well this has been a year! Some wins and plenty of L’s too. One way to think about goals is to consider them as stated preferences - almost an explanation of parts of how you identify. Then, at the…

    January 04, 2024
  • Best Books of 2023

    2023 is over and it was a heck of a year for reading. Perhaps too good, but more on that in 2024. Here it is by the numbers: 64 books 41 nonfiction 23 fiction 7 re-reads 5 started and unfinished (not…

    January 01, 2024

There's plenty more to read too

Things I'm Reading

That's 8 books so far this year.

  • Projects

    • CollegeValue - Compare colleges and majors based on how much money graduates make versus how much debt they accrue. Based on open-source data from the Department of Education.
    • Technology For Parents - Charting a course for parents to navigate technology for their children - coming soon!
    • Slower Lower Charcuterie - coming soon!
  • Things I'm Wondering

    • How are phones and technology changing the way we grow up?
    • What do people actually need out of college?
    • How can more people enjoy two houses?
    • How can work on small projects drive family revenue?
    • What does it take to write a spy novel?
  • Workouts I've Killed

    • 3.4 Mile Walk, a day ago
      60:04 at 17:40 pace
    • 0 Mile WeightTraining, 2 days ago
      25:00 minutes
    • 2 Mile Run, 2 days ago
      22:00 at 11:1 pace
    • 0 Mile WeightTraining, 3 days ago
      40:00 minutes
    • 3.32 Mile Run, 4 days ago
      42:00 at 12:39 pace
  • Quotes Newly Discovered

    • “When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
      -CS Lewis
    • “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the pro-cess, are able to prevent it.”
      -George Orwell
    • “Referring to James C. Scott’s work on “legibility”, Nguyen writes that large-scale institutions create metrics that are “narrowed by design” and “trade away informational nuance, richness, and contextual sensitivity” so that individuals are easier to track and the data is usable at scale. The “richness” of any single user’s needs is not important.”
      -Trung Pham
    • "We read in the greatest of texts that God is Love, but we do not read anywhere that God is Sentimentalism."
      -GK Chesterton