Blog
Every post from both sides of the site. New here? Start with these five. Only want one side? See At work or At home.
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River's French homework: a fire escape plan
River's French class sent home a fire safety project for the weekend. We made our family escape plan in French, and then I had it animated with River in it.
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River and the Nightjar: a midnight train adventure
A storybook game in eleven chapters. A train that lays its own rails of light stops on our street, and River rides it north to a city of lanterns. Here is what is in it and where it falls short.
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A typo on the front of the bus, and no software to fix it
One of our route signs had an extra L in it. The editing software was long gone. AI read the sign's raw file, found the two bad spots and swapped the letters without disturbing anything else.
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River's Rocket Works
A rocket game I built for River. Design a rocket, fly twelve missions from first launch to a wormhole, and race the whole family around the solar system.
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Putting our buses on the map, live
How I turned the GPS units already on our buses into a GTFS Realtime feed, and a live map for the public.
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Making a Sunfish faster without breaking the rules
My tuning notes for the Sunfish: the four sail controls, a few ideas I want to test, and the only class-legal way to rig a vang.
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A driving game set on our real bus routes
A 3D driving game in the browser built from real route data, real streets and about 40,000 real building footprints. It started as a trolley simulator and kept growing.
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A sailing simulator you steer with your hands
A browser sailing game that watches your hands through the webcam. Pick a Sunfish, an Optimist or a pirate ship.
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A dispatch board for when a driver calls in
An eight-week driver rotation in a spreadsheet, plus a one-page board that works out who covers which route when someone calls in.
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Replacing the paratransit spreadsheets
A small web app for booking paratransit rides, assigning drivers and producing the reports, built with Node.js, Express and SQLite.
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A countdown sign for bus stops, built from a $32 board
Commercial e-paper bus stop signs cost thousands of dollars each. I'm building a single-stop prototype around a $32 e-paper board and a long-range radio.
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A wizard that fills out the procurement forms
A single-page tool that asks plain questions about a purchase and produces the right determination form, with the checks that are easy to forget.
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Color a bus, then watch it save the day
A printable coloring page and a small story app that puts a kid's own hand-colored bus into an adventure, ending with a certificate.
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A free week of sailing lessons every June
I'm the commodore of our local yacht club, and every June we teach people to sail for free. Here's what the week is and why we do it.
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How to score a race when the boats don't match
Club races put fast boats and slow boats on the same course. The Portsmouth yardstick is the simple math that makes it fair.
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F1 wings for a two-seat go-kart
River loves Formula 1, so the Thunder Kart I'm rebuilding is getting a front wing, a rear wing and sidepods. Plywood, PVC pipe and about $50.
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Formula 1 keeps showing up in everything I build
A kart racer, a go-kart with wings and a Grand Prix hidden inside a bus simulator. A short tour of how one kid's favorite sport took over my projects.
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Comics and picture books starring River
Two picture books about our family and a three-part space comic that sneaks in relativity and quantum mechanics.
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How this site got built
A domain, a free host, no framework and four rounds of me saying "I don't like it yet." Notes on building r3ai.dev with Claude.
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27 ways I actually use AI
A list of every kind of thing I have used AI for, at work and at home, with a short post on each. Start here.
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Getting a straight answer on a regulation
Four small federal funding and accessibility questions that can each eat an afternoon, and how I ask them now.
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A sanity check before you call the attorney
A church invited us to bring a bus to a community event. I used AI to understand the question before I took it to legal.
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Turning what you see in the field into a business case
We keep meeting riders we cannot talk to. Here is how a real problem at the bus door became a funding memo Finance could approve.
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Asking AI what a document is missing
I had a morning meeting about an old scope of work for a backup generator. I asked one question: what is wrong with this, and what is not in it?
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Everyday email: tone, humor and the question you forgot to answer
I asked AI to make two emails funnier. It did, and it also noticed that one of them never answered the question I was asked.
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Writing a careful public reply
When a resident asks whether a rumor is true, the wording matters. Here is how I draft those replies, including the time the AI got ahead of the facts.
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Checklists, flyers and forms in an afternoon
Cleaning checklists, a fare flyer, a staff reference sheet, a fillable form and an anonymous suggestion box. None of it is glamorous. All of it used to wait.
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Building a procedure library and closing audit findings
A federal review left us with findings and a deadline. Here is how AI helped turn scattered old documents into procedures we can actually follow.
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Untangling grant money before a deadline
Several older grants, a handful of invoices and a date after which the money goes away. AI did the matching and found the invoices that did not fit.
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Turning a policy into a tool
I wanted to save our purchasing staff some work on small purchases. That turned into a memo, then a form, then a wizard that writes the paperwork.
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A consultant-grade plan from documents already on hand
A consultant asked for our transit plan. We did not have a stand-alone one. Here is how the documents we did have became a 14-page plan.
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Building the case for a new service, then rebuilding it
I spent weeks on a presentation about on-demand transit. Then one of my assumptions turned out to be wrong, and the whole thing had to be rebuilt as something else.
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Preparing for a hard meeting in an hour
I had a disagreement over how a written policy should be read, and a meeting in sixty minutes. I asked AI to argue the other side.
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Checking the numbers before you reply
Someone sent me a total. Before I agreed or disagreed, I had AI read the rulebook and recount.
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Building custom software without being a professional developer
I taught myself to build web pages. With AI doing a large share of the typing, I now build the tools my division needs when nothing off the shelf fits.
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Organizing the work itself
Before my assistant manager and I sat down to sort out everything on our plates, I asked AI how to run that meeting.
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Community partnerships and a coloring app
Transit is a public service, and the public should like it. Two small examples of using AI for the community side of the job.
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When the AI is wrong, and when it says no
The most useful post in this series. The mistakes I caught, the ones I nearly did not, and the requests the AI turned down.
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Building games for my kid
I am not a game developer. Here is how one request became a twelve-mission space game with our whole family in it, and what I learned about directing an AI.
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A hometown bus simulator from real map data
It started as a toy trolley on a made-up grid. It became a driving game on our real streets, with real routes and tens of thousands of real buildings.
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A father-son comic book about physics
River wrote a space adventure about the biggest unsolved problem in physics. We are turning it into a real printed comic book.
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Standing up a website in a weekend
This site is brand new. Here is what I did, what the AI did, and why I could not load my own website the day it went live.
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Pure fun: a goat racer trailer and texts to my dad
Not everything has to be useful. A 30-second movie trailer made from one photo, and a running joke about my dad's car.
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Small life questions
A benefits document, a scraped bumper and a strange name on a restaurant. Three everyday questions and what I learned from asking them.
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Hobbies and volunteering: sailing scores and a club website
I race small sailboats and help run a yacht club. AI now does the race arithmetic and some of the homework a volunteer board never has time for.
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Chasing a big idea, and letting AI poke holes in it
I have a concept for helping local governments modernize. The most valuable thing AI did was make my own numbers smaller.
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Following curiosity into hard math
I am not a mathematician. I spent many hours with an AI on one of the most famous unsolved problems anyway.
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Sloth Rocket Grand Prix: a kart racer in one HTML file
I asked an AI for a kart racer themed on Formula 1, rockets, pirates, libraries and sloths. Here is what came back, how to play it and where it falls short.
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What goes in the work section
A short note on what I plan to write about from the transit side, and what I'll leave out.
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