Blog
-
Fish Report – November 7, 2025: Lost Creek Reservoir – 11 Fish!
Things have been pretty slow in my fishing life lately. Since moving up to Ogden I haven’t been able to go to any of my normal spots. And if there’s one thing I know about fishing, finding “the spot” is like 80% of the battle. I’ve gone to Pineview Reservoir a few times. The first…
-
Ride Report – October 24, 2025: Stansbury Island
Well, I went on a small motorcycle ride last week through trappers’ loop (which was a beautiful, though short road through the mountains) thinking it was going to be the last ride of the season. And then this weekend came, and the weather was still quite nice. So, I decided to go out to Stansbury…
-
Life Update – October 3, 2025
Just wanted to give a life update since a lot has changed in the past couple months. The biggest change is my new employment situation. I’m now working as a software engineer for Borsight in Ogden, Utah. And it has been an amazing opportunity for me. It’s really the best job I could have hoped…
-
My Top Twenty Games of All Time
Well, various people I know are making lists of their top twenty video games of all time. So I thought I would add my list to the discussion. Honorable Mentions It was actually harder than I thought to limit the list to 20 entries. So here is the overflow. Sonic Storybook Games I’m not going…
-
Final Fantasy VII – Game Review
Final Fantasy VII is an amazing game. I just finished playing all the way through it for the first time. And I have a lot of thoughts on it. But above all else I enjoyed playing the game and I would recommend it to others. Also, the first section of this post is spoiler free.…
-
Vacation To Banff
This past week I went on a vacation with my family to Banff National Park in Canada. I just wanted to share some of the things we did. First, the weather there was amazing. In Utah the weather is super hot in July. Going so far north was a great reprieve from the heat. It…
-
Ride Report – July 2, 2025: Rain in Butterfield Canyon
Just a small little ride up one of my favorite places. Butterfield Canyon is great because it has a narrow-paved road with lots of sharp turns. It is close to the valley, but not nearly as crowded as either of the cottonwood canyons. It was cloudy today, and I did get a little rain on…
-
Chess Devlog: Huge Performance Improvements
I just released v2.0.3 of https://github.com/brighamskarda/chess. And it has some huge improvements. It went from taking over 20 seconds to calculate perft 6 from the staring position to taking just 6.5 seconds with profile guided optimization enabled. Here are some of the changes I made. Performance Improvements Remove Square Validation There were three bitboard functions that…
-
Chess Devlog: Perft Testing
Just wanted to give an update on a cool little thing I learned about recently. phaul21 brought to my attention that I had no perft testing in my library. Perft testing is essentially generating a tree of positions based on all the legal moves that can be made. Then by counting the leaf nodes you can compare…
-
Final Fantasy IX – Game Review
Recently I finished playing Final Fantasy IX and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. It’s a game I’ve always wanted to play. Its art style and old-school fantasy theme are things that were always appealing to me. I wanted to see what the game was about and if it stood up to the…