Category: Me

Personal random notes.

entertainment · Me

Cultivating cultivating

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My daughter finds the best shows to watch. She introduced me to the amazing Avatar series. More recently we’re watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, a post-apocalyptic anime series from the 1990’s. 🤩

One thing jumped out to me in episode 17. The cool guy Kaji, who seemed like just a shallow “player” type, introduced his friend Shinji to his secret watermelon garden.

It’s my hobby. Don’t tell anybody, okay?

Shinji was feeling down at the time, and Kaji was trying to lift him up.

It’s great to make something. To grow something. You notice things and figure stuff out. Things you enjoy, for example

Shinji was’t super receptive at the time, but I knew exactly what Kaji was talking about, having experimented with gardening some myself in my tiny urban plot.

There was the early attempt in the pandemic, then everything getting wiped out in the 2021 snowpocalypse. Hints of a natural rebirth, then actively clearing out the dead brush for new growth. This was followed by some small success at growing something you can eat, and then some wild growth this spring.

Right now I’m eating a few bell peppers, tomatoes, jalapeños, and strawberries from my tiny garden. The pesky birds and squirrels have caught on and are usually getting to the good stuff before I do. 😭

Still, I don’t mind feeding the wildlife. I just like to grow stuff. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Me · Practical

In case you notice a change in case

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It struck me recently that I didn’t have a strategy for capitalizing my blog posts. So I’m making a change.

As the sole proprietor of this blog, I hereby decree that henceforth and regressively back to 1 June, year 2021, all blog posts shall follow the Sentence case standard.

Title Case was starting to bug me. It was overly formal and hard to read, as in Who Do You Want to Be On The Other Side Of This Crisis? And it was confusing. Which words do you capitalize, again? I took my best guess on 5 Things You Don’t Need to be Happy, Fulfilled, and Successful.

Plus Capital Case was constantly being dissed up by quotation-titles such as “The only real escape from hell is to conquer it.”

Capital Case also made it hard distinguish Proper Nouns from normal words, as in Favorite Austin Hotel Pools. Was that post about hotel pools in Austin? Or was it about pools at the Austin Hotel?

I’m pretty happy with this change, so much so that I am tempted to go back and fix all the old posts, such as “Favorite Austin Hotel Pools” to “Favorite Austin hotel pools”. But there are 742 of them, and sometimes it’s better to live with your imperfect past anyways.

With that, enjoy all the easier-to-read blog titles, future reader. I’m going to figure out punctuation for quotations next. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Me · Music

“I Want It All” 🎶

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Here is Japanese Breakfast’s perfect companion to The Walkmen singing “Baby, I want everything”.

I want it all.

Japanese Breakfast – Diving Woman

I’m feeling this vibe. I do want it all.

I don’t want six cars, a mansion, a helicopter, or even a fancy watch. Please, no. Just no.

I do want to travel, but not all the time. I could probably spend 1000 years happily just goofing around Central Texas.

But I do want to write a novel, make some music, raise some amazing kids, have a long and challenging career, learn to tell good stories and jokes, improve the world a bit, take care of myself, and be a good friend.

Am I asking too much? We shall see. 😆

We’re only given this one life, so you might as well at least try to make the most of it.

You’ll have it all
I’ll have it all
We’ll have it all

Me

All the “Things” 2020

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I’ve been using the Things app to track all my personal to-do’s and projects for a couple of years now. I love this Mac-assed Mac app and use it all the time.

I recently discovered how to get access to the Things database and took the chance to reflect on how I’m spending my time.

So here are some highlights of all my “Things” in 2020.

Lastly year, I completed 108 personal projects. Each project consists of a number of specific to-do items (tasks). A project can be something small like 🛳 Renew passport (6 tasks) or big like 🎸Convert guest room to a music studio (31 tasks).

I generally include an emoji in my project names because somehow they help motivate me. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Some favorite completed projects of 2020 were:

  • 🗳Vote (3 tasks)
  • 🤹‍♂️Plan for best self (7 tasks)
  • 🦠Corona (5 tasks), my most fitting “project” for 2020

I canceled 9 projects, such as:

  • 🌶Home gardening
  • 🥋Grav Maga
  • 🦃 Holiday family plans, the most fitting cancellation for 2020

I completed 11 projects to “fix” things, including:

  • 🐍Fix that gap under my door (3 tasks)
  • 🥁Fix drums (luckily only 2 tasks and zero dollars)
  • ✍️Blog fix up (6 tasks)

Top project in progress:

  • 📘Write a book (43 tasks completed, many more to go — and growing)

In 2020, I completed about 7 per day on average. This is useful because it tells me how to pace myself.

I canceled about 1.4 per day. Canceling isn’t a bad thing — it’s just the opposite. It’s a conscious choice not to do something you thought you needed to do.

Going into the new year, I have 62 projects in progress. Hmm, it already looks like a busy year coming up. 🤔

Here is one of the SQLite queries I used for this post. 👨🏻‍💻

SELECT title, date(creationDate, 'unixepoch') as start, date(stopDate, 'unixepoch') as stop from TMTask
WHERE type = 1
AND status = 3
AND date(creationDate, 'unixepoch') BETWEEN '2020-01-01' AND '2020-12-31'
ORDER BY creationDate

Me

Three Millions Steps

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My Sweatcoin app, which I had reluctantly decided to allow tracking all my steps, reported to me that in 2019, I had walked over 3 millions steps, or the distance from Lubbock (Texas) to Rochester (New York).

This was cool to know, helped inspire me, and turned out to be a surprisingly delightful experience. 😀 It’s much better than the usual “medal” or fireworks for doing my regular workouts. Granted, there was a full-year buildup for the one.

My only complaint is that the distance shows up in kilometers. I know this is America-centric of me, but srsly, kilometers? 🙄😆 I had to convert them to miles on Google to get any real meaning out of it. 🤷🏻‍♂️ (It’s 1472 miles.)

Me · You

The 50/50 Rule and Why I Blog

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My blog’s current tag line is “This is not a blog.”

Originally, this site was intended as a way to keep track of links to interesting or useful things, like glorified bookmarks. But since then, it has evolved to serve another purpose: to make me think and communicate about stuff.

See, as I was bookmarking stuff, I found myself adding little bits about why I liked the link or context about how I found it. Over time, I found that when I would link to an article, I would sometimes want to add a summary about the article to help me process it and remember it better.

A better way to learn, process, retain and remember information is to learn half the time, and share half the time.

If I take two seconds to effortlessly save a bookmark, then the information is saved and soon forgotten. If I add even a quick post about it, giving it a title and some context or a summary, then that post is now a part of me. And as a bonus, I get to share it with other people.

So I was happy to see this article, which makes me think I am not wasting my time.

👉 The 50/50 Rule (How to Retain And Remember 90% of Everything You Learn)

It basically says that if you make yourself talk about something, then you come to understand it or appreciate it better. Spend half you time learning and half your time explaining what you learned.

According to the article, I would be serving myself better by writing out my notes by hand. It seems people type too fast for their brain to absorb what they’re doing. And simply by writing that, I now remember that fact. But I’m typing this anyways because you can’t tag, search, and share your paper notebook. 🤷🏻‍♂️

And yes, this article is so meta.

Me · Software Dev

WordPress API

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The recent discovery of the YNAB API has me visualizing some sort of personal client where I can manage my budget and do everything else in my life from one place. Maybe a command-line tool on my Mac terminal? 😆🤓 Why not write and edit blog posts from there too? I mean, it’s possible. I might do it just because it’s so nerdy.

👉 WordPress REST API Handbook

Wait, what if I used the WordPress API to write a blog post about the WordPress API. 🤯😆

Note: there is also a handy interactive API console.