The journal

25 expeditions, 2012–2026, into the systems I use every day. Newest first.

2026
2025
2024
2023
- Summer 2023
  Deep-Fake-Detector
  faceswap detection · ML model
  UTD's summer research class taught machine learning the long way — model architectures, use cases, a detour through reinforcement learning — and ended on a single brief: pick a thing and train a CNN on it. Deep-fake detection picked itself. GAN portraits and InsightFace face-swaps were already trivial to generate, but no one in the room had a binary classifier that could tell a real face from a swapped one. The terrain was a straightforward Conv2D stack; the actual work was upstream — finding a real-people dataset that was actually real, and inventing a deepfake dataset that didn't exist as images.
  Archived
- Summer 2023
  ISAAD
  16 Dallas schools · Web app
  Ms. Newsom and Ms. Allen, admissions directors at The Lamplighter School, ran point on ISAAD — the Independent Schools Admission Association of Dallas, sixteen accredited private and independent schools whose only public face was a tired WordPress build at isaadallas.org. Homepage was a dark-blue info box stacked over a stock photo of kids leaning over tablets in a library; School Search was a grey form with raw dropdowns hiding sixteen schools behind selectors. The ask was a full rebuild aimed at parents shopping schools, with a real map and a search that felt like a search. First real paid web contract, $1,500, summer in Dallas.
  Shipped
2012
- 2012 · open
  Decade of 3D
  3D, as a craft · 3D / Arch viz
  08/22/2012 22:06 — Lego on a playmat, a Spider-man figure in a red car, a phone propped up for the next frame. That timestamp is the start of the thread. From there it ran through Blender's default cube and Andrew Price's donut, into Houdini and ZBrush and Fusion 360, into a low-poly pass at the loft game room that got redone until the JOOLA net read and light beamed through the brick window cutouts. Thirteen years later it's still the same thread — just running through Twinmotion, photogrammetry, MetaHumans, and Gaussian splats now.
  In the field