# Hi, I'm Bill. This is my personal website for things I've made, noticed, enjoyed, or wanted to tell others. No ads, no monetization, and no (intentional) tracking. ## Start here **[[getting sh-t done|Getting Sh-t Done]]** A pleasantly simple approach to productivity: no apps, no subscriptions, no Sunday evenings spent organizing things. It's been used by people from teachers to documentary producers to astronauts. **[[palm mirror|Palm Mirror]]** A tongue-in-cheek app I wrote to make the Palm Pilot screen reflective so you could see yourself in it. Somehow, it ended up being downloaded over a million times. **[[too damn tall|Too damn tall]]** Ever since my late teens, I've been too tall. For the longest time it was all fun and games, but lately I'm kind of done with it all. And no, I don't play basketball. **[[dixie westerman artist|Mom's art]] and [[bill westerman artist|Dad's art]]** Both of my parents are artists, and I grew up surrounded by art and creativity. They don't have their own websites, so I've created pages here for their work. **[[street art|Street art appreciation]]** One of my favorite things to do when traveling is look for small bits of street art. I've geotagged a bunch of them so you can try to find them yourself, assuming they're still there. **[[beer-list|Thirty years of beers]]** An opinionated, likely 'wrong' in places, and extensive list of beers that I've enjoyed over the past 30-some years. If you like darker and more complex beers, you might like this list. ## Things I've made Playing around with atoms and electrons. Useful, silly, and otherwise. - **[[game-of-strife|The game of strife]]**: A tiny interactive soap opera built upon Conway’s Game of Life - **[[bespoke text editor|A plaintext journey]]**: I tried 20 note-taking apps, gave up, wrote a bespoke text editor, settled on Obsidian, found LLMs, wrote a bunch of editors, and then settled on Obsidian again - **[[last-penny|The last penny]]**: a 3D-printed keychain that holds the last lucky penny I found on the street; to be replaced when (increasingly rarely) I find another lucky penny - **[[galaxy fold keyboard|Typing on the go]]**: reusing an old iPad Mini keyboard case with a Samsung Galaxy Fold via a 3D-printed insert ## Tech hacks, histories, and stories - **[[hacking a wii cable|Hacking a Nintendo Wii cable]]** from cardboard and twist ties to save a milestone birthday - **[[octel lookup|Octel Lookup]]**, a skunkworks corporate directory I wrote with a few friends in the 1990s that became the de facto way to find people inside Andersen Consulting for years - **[[powerbook 12|The Apple PowerBook 12-inch]]**, quite possibly the most perfect laptop ever - **[[fortune files|Login fortunes]]** were a cheeky way to start your terminal session or show a little personality back in the mainframe/BBS days - **[[transcontinental|My first transcontinental message]]**, when I first realized viscerally how the internet was going to connect the world - **[[kindle battery life|Kindle battery life]]**: Amazon's magical-thinking bar charts, but not magical batteries - **[[the little garmin|The little GPS that couldn't]]**: an early Garmin that gave up in the middle of a cloverleaf - **[[amazon ewaste|Amazon e-waste]]**: Amazon killed half a million CloudCams, so I took one apart in homage - **[[squeeek|Squeeek]]**: my friend D didn't like fingerprints on his monitor, so I did the next best thing ## On driving - **[[the flipside of autonomy|The flipside of autonomy]]**: Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Mercedes-Benz, everyone is chasing the self-driving car. But have we collectively stopped to think about the flipside of autonomy? - **[[1967 galaxie|Living large in a Galaxie 500]]**: A dip into classic American family cars from the 1960s - **[[july fourth massacre|July 4th Massacre]]**: That very same Galaxie 500 nearly turning a parade into a nightmare - **[[bare knuckled|Bare-knuckled in the snow]]**: The Mercury Zephyr that did not drive like a gentle breeze - **[[dark and stormy|It was a dark and stormy night]]**: My Ford Custom, flooded roads, and a massive explosion - **[[tech bro versus traffic|Tech bro versus traffic]]**: The joy of watching a traffic bully get what he deserves ## Things I like - **[[galaxy fold|Samsung Galaxy Fold]]** phones, which have largely stopped me from even looking at other things in the market (although I've paused at the Fold6 for now) - **[[android apps|Useful Android apps]]** that I’ve found over time - **[[evil overlord|The Evil Overlord ringtone]]** from the T-Mobile Sidekick, which I still use to this day ## Things I've written - **[[hidden massive small|Hidden, massive, small]]**: Why hidden rooms, enormous structures, and tightly designed spaces all fascinate me - **[[2023 earthquake|46,000 voices, silenced.]]**: The human scale of the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake - **[[perpetual sundown|Perpetual sundown]]**: If we're going to make the time change permanent, let's do it right - **[[gas to electric|Gas to electric]]** \[AI\]: A madcap thought experiment on how to heat my water ## Elsewhere - Other things on the web worth [[elsewhere|checking out]]