Categories
Personal

building a retro gaming system with Batocera

I grew up in the era of NES and SNES, and have great nostalgia for all those 80s and 90s games. Recently I saw a bunch of handheld gaming systems making the TikTok shop rounds, stocked full of these titles (like the Miyoo Mini+, or the Anbernic RG35XX, or the SNES Classic Mini). I went […]

Categories
Personal

managing tasks

I’ve geeked out on the insanely personal yet ubiquitous problem of task management for 20 years. We’re hit with tasks from a million sources – texts, emails, in person, Facebook, IG DMs, Snapchat, phone or Zoom calls. Work is done from everywhere – many of us are just as likely to be strolling through the […]

Categories
Nonprofit Management Personal

Running Ragnar as an Ultra Team: Ragnar Cape Cod 2018

6 of us ran Ragnar Cape Cod this past Fri/Sat as an Ultra team (6 people, 183.6 miles). 5 of us had participated in a traditional team (12 people) at Ragnar Michigan last year, so we had some familiarity with the event structure. Mandy, our 6th, had never run a Ragnar and joined the team […]

Categories
Entrepreneurship Personal

Begin Again: Why I’m quitting the tech company I co-founded and going full time against childhood cancer.

My wife Robyn and I’s first born son Ezra died in 2010. He had been diagnosed with cancer on the 400th day of his life, and lived exactly 800 days. Ezra battled cancer half his life. He smiled through most of it. He was funny, curious, and compassionate. He flirted with strangers. He learned to […]

Categories
Personal

Switching to Hyundai

Eventually in this post I’ll get to us switching to Hyundais in the Matthews home! Robyn and I first met Ashley Martin Burnette‘s mom Nicole at the NMTRC Symposium in 2014. She is a vibrant cancer-mom, much like Robyn, and I enjoyed hearing her words as we sat in group discussions around the future and present of […]

Categories
Personal Thoughts

How I’d Like to Live

Over a year ago, I wrote a note on my phone with thoughts on how I’d like our family’s life to look. I was feeling very reactionary, responding to things as they happened and not having a clear written set of goals for how we approach life. Since last April, I look at this list at least […]

Categories
Entrepreneurship Personal

11 Reasons I Love Living and Working in Tampa

Robyn and I moved to Tampa from Seattle in 2005 to help out my family, who’d moved here in 2003. Our plan was always to move home after a few years, and until the last few years that’s what we were gearing up for. Now, we’re loving Tampa, and all in as a part of this […]

Categories
Personal

The Beauty of Uganda

Yesterday, my son Charles and I returned from 2 weeks in Uganda. I wrote some of my thoughts on Uganda‘s culture while there. As we flew 9000 miles to return home, I reflected how much the beauty of eastern Uganda had settled my mind; God’s green brush strokes on a red dirt canvas. We have a tendency, in the states, […]

Categories
Personal

Mbale, Uganda, Africa

tl;dr – I spent two weeks in Uganda this June, and fell in love with the country. Uganda is a burst of color. The brash reddish brown dirt trampled under every public space is matched in vibrancy by the ever-present greens of tropical plant life. Pair these with the proud brightness of the locals’ clothing, […]

Categories
Entrepreneurship Nonprofit Management Personal

8 Things I Learned Working from Home

I started working from home full time in 2008. I was 26, and ModMyi.com (then only a year old) had started making enough for me to quit my “normal person job.” While my wife Robyn worked at the local pie shop (really) to help cover the bills, we were living in a 1000 square foot apartment in […]