Kevin Ludlow is a 45-year-old accomplished software developer, business manager, writer, musician, photographer, world traveler, and serial entrepreneur from Austin, Texas. He is also a former candidate for the Texas House of Representatives.
Please take a moment to view his complete resume for more information.
Note: the entirety of this website was architected and developed from the ground up exclusively by Kevin Ludlow.
Jerry is invited to a birthday party dinner where we first meet Vanessa, played by Lynn Clark. She tells Jerry where she works, but he doesn’t actually get her name or her number. He decides to stake out her office so that he can bump into her and ask her out
We see her again 3 episodes later where the two have clearly been dating and Jerry proposes they spend a weekend together in Vermont. They wind up getting rained-in at their hotel and just as Vanessa feared, they realize they have nothing to talk about.
This is the last time we see Vanessa.
The character of Vanessa was played by Lynn Clark.
Barely a month after her debut on Seinfeld, Lynn was featured as Terri in a B-rated horror movie called Demon Wind. It’s a pretty bad movie, but she gets an on-screen kiss, a true horror scream, and eventually even turns into a demon herself. So, all wins there.
She wound up playing Madeline Armstrong for a good run of 20 episodes on Days of our Lives before being cast in a new show called Grapevine. Unfortunately the show only ran 6 episodes, but she was featured in all of them as Susan Crawford.
She did a few smaller productions before getting a cameo as Danielle in an episode of Friends where she’s introduced as a love interest of Chandler’s as the end credits start rolling
Lynn played Diane Sylvius in an episode of Sliders, a popular 90s sci-fi show that ran for 5 seasons. She was cast as Jack Lemmon’s daughter in the movie “My Fellow Americans”. And played the role of Denise’s attorney in a two-part episode of Melrose Place.
Her final acting credit was actually a throwback to an earlier show she had done. In 2000 CBS rebooted the 1992 version of Grapevine, albeit with a different cast. While Lynn was a cast member of the original, she only appeared in a single episode in the reboot as Heather Brewer.
Alright, let's get started. Season 1 Episode 1, "The Pilot" titled “The Seinfeld Chronicles”, also known as “Good News, Bad News”.
Before we get into it, we should note that this the only episode where Elaine isn’t yet a character, where Kramer is actually named Kessler, and where the famous coffee shop is instead a diner with a waitress named Claire played by Lee Garlington.
The basic plot is that Laura tells Jerry she’s coming into town and wants to stay with him. Jerry and George debate the signals Laura is giving off to try to determine if she’s romantically interested in him. And it appears that she is. But then just as they’re settling onto the couch together, each with a glass of wine in hand, she tells Jerry she’s engaged.
The character of Laura was played by Pamela Brull.
After Seinfeld, Brull was in a short-lived television show called Molloy where she worked with a very young Jennifer Anniston and an even younger Mayim Bialik. Incidentally, Mayim played the younger CC Bloom in Beaches alongside Bette Middler - a role that’s actually referenced later in Seinfeld.
Brull played the role of Jane Kowolski in Silent Cries, a feature film about the Japanese occupation of Singapore during WWII.
She managed to land a small recurring role on the hit series Growing Pains and played a coworker of Maggie Seaver's named Thelma. Maggie Seaver of course played by Joanna Kerns. She also went on to play Amanda Dobbs in an episode of Matlock, Gwen Barrett in an episode of Saved by the Bell: The New Class, and then a handful of smaller roles.
Her last role was in 1997 doing voice work for Extreme Ghostbusters, an animated series that ran for just one season.
After many, many months of code changes, I'm delighted to announce that this site is about to get a pretty massive overhaul. The changes won't necessarily be visible to the end user (eg: it will still look the same), but the infrastructure that powers the site will be significantly different. It will be much more powerful, much faster, and much cheaper for me to operate and maintain. The end result is that there will be a lot more content (which I don't feel like I'm really lacking in the first place).
What's the timeline?
I started working on these software changes in early November of 2021. It's a passion-project so I only work on it when I have some spare time. I wound up taking some time off from the migration in January and early February, but then got back to full speed in early March. Since then, I've managed to get everything more or less where it needs to be. It'll still be a few more weeks before I can actually "flip the switch", but as I've been wanting to make this change for a couple of years now, I couldn't be more thrilled to be getting so close.
What changes are coming?
The short answer is that it's a massive infrastructure overhaul. Without going into too many technical details, all of the backend software, operating system, database, and processing infrastructure has been upgraded. This should result in the site running much faster and should allow me to add several pieces that I've had in the pipe for years (detailed photo statistics, geolocations, and videos, just to name a few). It's also going to result in all of my media being distributed on networks around the world. While this will likely have the result of my site being indexed much more heavily and routinely, it should also reduce media loading times rather significantly. I've been testing them for awhile and everything seems to be on par with what I'd expect.
Which brings me to the change I'm most excited about: I'll finally be able to put my entire video library online! When I first built the original software back in 2006, I thankfully had the foresight to create full video support. That might not seem like a big deal today, but archiving digital videos back in 2006 was an extremely daunting and difficult technical challenge. I continued supporting my video management with several major upgrades over the years, but it eventually got far too difficult to manage. The bottom line was simply that we were creating digital videos at a rate that was just too cumbersome to keep up with. Not to mention, storing videos is expensive. I stopped trying to make all of my videos available some time around 2014 or 2015. That's a pretty big gap now.
Once the migration is completed, I'll finally be able to start putting these online and properly managing them. I've been using YouTube's API for years to automatically place videos on their site, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to do the same with TikTok.
After watching a handful of Instagram and TikTok videos on custom-made art easels, I was asked if I might be able to make a similar one. The ones that I saw, while functional, were ultimately pretty basic. Since I generally like to try and build my projects as nuanced as I can, I decided it would be best to come up with my own plans. Granted, I did use the basic structural idea of the ones I'd seen, but the design elements were entirely my own.
The easel was crafted from Peruvian Walnut, Ambrosia Maple, and a single piece of Curly Maple (for the easel tray itself). It also has a number of hardware adaptations all of which use black oxide finishing. I think the design decisions ultimately turned out a pretty nice looking easel and it made a great gift.
Dimensionally speaking, the easel stands at 72" tall. It has 1-5/8" (40mm) square legs, a 31" wide easel tray, and as noted above, all of the hardware is finished with black oxide. The main structural pivot bolt is 3/8" at 6-1/2" long. The easel tray bolts are 1/4" at 5-1/2" inches long and compress against the front two legs to lock the tray into place. All of the bolts are lined with black oxide steel washers of varying thicknesses and each outer washer has an outermost neoprene washer included to protect the wood.
I've been continuing to amass a collection of song pieces, multi-tracking instrumentals, and other musical bits on my TikTok channel. Here's the latest one I've posted.
Herman Sourdough just after I took it out of the oven
So this is basically the holy grail of sourdough breads. It's a complex process and as I've baked many dozens of breads over the past several months, I naturally wanted to give the most difficult bread a go. And I couldn't be happier that I did. While it was a tedious process that took 15 full days just to prepare the dough, it was well worth it.
Herman Sourdough is still a sourdough and so it still uses a starter that has that unique sour smell to it (like a beer tap), but the twist with Herman is that it's much sweeter. The starter is a careful blend of sugar, milk, and flour. And unlike a typical sourdough starter that specifically requires a warm environment in which to thrive, Herman lives in the fridge. It's an extremely unique bread and has an absolutely delicious flavor profile.
I recorded a few videos shortly after I ate my first slice of it and I'll just go ahead and leave them below.
