🎂🪅🎉

So…. I didn't have a post scheduled for today. The drafts folder is full of half-finished thoughts about organizational readiness and workforce transformation and all the things I normally care deeply about. But it's been an absolutely wild few weeks — workshops in West Virginia and Colorado, client kickoffs, coop interviews, national webinars… and somehow I'm still standing. I think. Just about.

But today is my birthday.

So instead of writing something thoughtful about the future of transit, I spent twenty minutes this morning having fun with AI. To honour myself a bit, you know?

So the only insight I've got for you today is this: life is supposed to be fun.

I spend most of my working life helping transit agencies take AI seriously — building real skills, making real decisions, doing real work with these tools. And I believe in that deeply. But I also think we lose something important when we forget that the first time most of us used ChatGPT, we were giggling. We were asking it silly questions and showing our friends and feeling that little jolt of "wait, this is wild."

That energy isn't unprofessional. I really believe it’s truly the spark that makes people want to keep learning. There’s nothing better than play for learning things; as adults, we kinda tend to forget that.

So if you haven't done something completely pointless with AI recently — generated a ridiculous image of yourself, asked Claude to write your biography as a medieval knight, whatever — go do that. Right now. Maybe even make a little Grok video.

Happy birthday to me. Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

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Go shatter your glass ceiling.