Hey gang,

Here in Indianapolis we are down to the last three days of having a sunset occur past Cody’s 10 and under bedtime and occasionally my self imposed 40 and under bedtime – 8 PM. How will you be using these final 3 days of late evening sunshine? Me, I’ve got a full card of baseball, softball, tennis, and other practices and games to attend – I’m not actually doing any of the athletics but it makes me feel athletic to simply be able to mention them.

Gang, I was thinking recently of you all and wondering if you were thinking of me.  I almost wrote a 1980’s-style soft rock song about that feeling but realized halfway through thinking about it that I had neither the skill to write such a song nor a willing audience to listen to it.  So here we are, stuck with my words alone.  To set the mood, imagine a Foreigner-esque jam band blasting through the airwaves of a 1980-era stereo these punch-worthy (both for the beat and the person that wrote them) lyrics.

It’s been too long 
And it’s been real hot

This summer’s time is nearly shot

I need to reach my gang with pace
And send these words out to their face…s

I’m missing you, you gotta know it’s true
All the things that we used to get into
Me on the keyboard…typing some words
And sometimes you’d read them…as your time allows!

I’m not sure about that last line – it seems a bit too on the nose, and not at all rhyming.  But I do have a single frame of the music video I would have developed…

My daughter, Adelaide (known colloquially (and also non-colloquially) as Addie), turns thirteen this coming week.  And funny enough, Google remembered (how sweet) and sent a very interesting email celebrating this new burgeoning data mine opportunity (my daughter). It seems they have been waiting on this day quite patiently…like a stalking killer, so they could begin harvesting her online essence.  It seems the magic of a young child turning 13 can now be legally celebrated by the quintillionaire behemoth and they couldn’t wait to tell me about it.

In a truly miraculous melody of capitalism, the song (in their silicon heart) they sang of welcoming and love brought a tear to my eye.  As I read their (real) email to me detailing their new relationship with a girl that was just a day before, a mere child that could not enter into a new contractual relationship with Google without my permission, I remember the first 12 years of my child’s life, reminiscing on how quickly they grow to understand incredibly complex privacy policies.  Thanks Google, we love you too and can’t wait to take our next step into the abyss of data privacy mismanagement with you!

The Work

The summer was chock full of work.  We worked on a ton of nonprofit web designs, for-profit web designs, and even a couple of unprofitable web designs (these were mostly thing I did for fun).  But I think my favorite of the entire summer was doing some digital marketing work on a website we didn’t design but have worked to help people find via search and Ads.

Local to Indianapolis and started by an amazing husband and wife team more than 20 years ago, Kids First Adoption provide a truly critical service by helping build families and supporting both expectant and hopeful mothers.  As I often say, much of the web design work we do goes away the instant the electricity goes out, but if we can be a small part of helping birth parents and potential adoptive parents connect, then that is something that makes a forever difference.  Since we begun working with them several months ago, their monthly website search traffic has increased 35% and more importantly, they have increased the number of people reaching our for their help substantially.

One More Thing

Interested in that image I used above for my faux ‘music video’?  Probably not, until you learn that it is one-of-a-kind and entirely created by AI (I have no artistic talent at all).  I used a product I pay for, currently in beta called Jasper Art to create images entirely created by my text and a neural net artificial intelligence.  For that image, I simply wrote – ‘1980’s pop rock, stereo shown, loud music blaring out speakers’.  Interested in seeing some other images I’ve created using the service?  This tech is honestly mind blowing and will change the world in the years to come.

Finally

As always, thanks for reading and if you have time, reach out and let me know how things are going in your life.

Cody