I’ll be returning to wine reviews shortly, but in the meantime, here’s a non-wine-related post for you.

Lately, there hasn’t been much time for me to think about wine. I’ve been busy spoiling my son like a good father should. Playground after playground, event after event, it can seem like an endless stream of activities to make your child happy. Sometimes we must stop and ask ourselves: are we doing these activities because they want to, or because we think they should want to? It’s a classic chicken-or-the-egg situation for me. How can he know if he wants to do something if he doesn’t even know it exists?

Like most parents, I do my best to keep up with the events happening in my area. However, between work, school, and life in general, it can be hard not to let some things slip through the cracks. It’s particularly frustrating when I see a social media post about an event I’ve never heard of that just happened over the weekend—an event that either myself or my family would have greatly enjoyed. Even more annoying is when I discover it only happens once a year, and now I’ll have to wait until next year and hope I don’t miss it again!

Every time this happened, I’d tell myself that I needed to figure out a way to easily locate these events before they happen to make sure I don’t miss out on things I want to see.

Professionally, I’ve been utilizing various forms of machine learning and AI over the past several years and felt that maybe there was a way I could use it to help solve my problem here.

So, on an off day, I decided to write a microservice that would use AI to help me find events in my area for topics I was interested in, ensuring I didn’t miss out on anything important.

After using this for myself for a while, I recently decided to take it one step further and built out a way to let others use this service as well.

I’d like to introduce you to SocialBug.ai, my new website, where you can join and receive weekly emails about events in your area. I plan to limit subscriptions to a small number for now so that it doesn’t grow too large too fast. This also allows me to test things further and ensure everything works as smoothly as it has for me.

For now, it is only a sign-up form, but I’m planning to implement a full login feature eventually, along with a way to edit your information.

To sign up, head over to https://socialbug.ai and fill out the form. You’ll need to include your email address, the nearest town or city you’d like to get events about, and a paragraph describing what you are interested in. This final item is very important for my AI software to determine which events you are most interested in when it sends your weekly email, which I plan to launch to the public soon.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.