I’m out in San Francisco for a few days. We’ve got typical SF weather — big change from the Florida summer suncoast. Got a few meetings to hit, but we’ve got a sailing trip set for Tuesday evening. Hope the weather stays steady.
I’m late getting my November update posted. November (and still, in December) was a rollercoaster of a month. Just so much happening with professional and personal, I’ve hardly had a moment to do much at all — neither focusing on any personal progress goals, nor writing or other fun side deals.
My running performance was pitiful. I did 5 runs, but honestly I’m surprised it was even that many. Feels like I’m totally off the wagon on that. I did alright on my sleep, but I swing too much back and forth to be a healthy pattern. I’ll do a string of 5-6 hour sleep nights, punctuated by sleeping 10 hours the next. The see-saw effect isn’t intentional. Something I need to focus more on building a pattern with.
Public writing didn’t do great, only a few blogs before I fell off and didn’t get any more writing done. I did better on the personal journal, though. At least for the first half the month.
Reading also suffered some. I feel like I didn’t spend any time with a book at all.
As of this weekend, Hurricane Ian is in the Caribbean with a projected track that puts it making landfall this week on the western coast of Florida, not far from where we are. Looks like we’ll be spending some time getting the house prepared for the storm. Doesn’t look like there’ll be an evacuation for us.
We took dad’s 42’ Catalina out this weekend for a sail just on the outside of Clearwater Beach. 6 adults and 7 kids — adults enjoying the sailing, kids complaining to go to an island or go fishing. Soon we’re going to get out and go farther offshore or make some longer runs down the coast. This was a blast, though!
Just this afternoon I finished up another round of scans at Mayo Clinic — my standard regimen of an hour-long MRI of the abdomen and a CT scan of the chest / lungs. Everything went routine and the worry level leading up to it the past couple weeks was as low as its ever been. So that’s a victory.
I was thinking about how many times I’ve actually gone through this process and I’ve lost count. I think it must be around 12 times now, with how often I had to get them done during the first couple years after treatment. I’m sure it’ll be a lifelong procedural activity, so it’s good to make it a routine and get used to it.
Another month is in the books. I had a couple of trips this month, but did slightly better on running. Still pretty far away from the regular habit I used to have.
A list of observations and life tips from Wired’s Kevin Kelly. This entire list is self-highlighting. Fantastic stuff. Worth bookmarking and reading back through monthly.
A few favorites:
No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
There is no such thing as being “on time.” You are either late or you are early. Your choice.
Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.
This month was a weak one on the health front. I think I only got 2 or 3 runs in, and my sleep has been garbage. Maybe I can do better in May. We have plans to join the gym nearby, so that should coerce at least working out semi-weekly. If I could get to 3 runs per week and 2 workout sessions, I’d be happy to build from that.
I did, however, make inroads on eating better and cooking at home, so that’s a plus.
I had this long, wide, high-on-the-wall shelf in my office that was there since we moved in. I had wanted to take it down and do something different, but just left it there while I considered some alternatives. I considered a piece of furniture, moving my desk arrangement, and different variations of shelves that could work. Eventually I decided I wanted some simple, long shelves to give me plenty of space, and to put them up high over the reading chair area.
I wanted to get back to woodworking, and thought this would be a good chance to design something simple and work with some interesting hardwood.
Designing
With no idea exactly what stock to use, I headed to Anderson Lumber in St. Pete. My only requirements were rough dimensions: I wanted 2, each about 6’ long and at least 8-9” of width to work from. Most of what’s available at lumber yards like Anderson is rough sawn, so you have to keep in mind having enough stock to work with to give you enough to meet your finished dimensions after milling, planing, and sanding is done.
I found a single 14’ piece of sapele that fit my needs perfectly, so I had the guys there chop it in half to fit in my car. That gave me a couple of pieces about 7’ long, which gave me plenty of length to work with. Plus getting both pieces from a single stock was great for getting a grain match and color similarity to my two shelves. Sapele is an African species similar to mahogany, so the grain on it was excellent. My plan was to finish with an oil of some kind.
Lumber shopping
For mounting, I wanted to do something simple that would let the wood be the main feature, so I went with some brass brackets I found on Amazon. Really they’re “brass-colored steel”, which isn’t exactly what I wanted, but they look alright; they’re not that visible. If I was going for a design that had more prominent metal components, I’d have looked around more for brass options. I was even considering doing my own brass plating and soldering, but decided this was more about the wood. Though I would like to venture into some metalwork on a future project. All I had to do to get them the way I wanted was cut the upturned outer ends off so I could hide the brackets into routed channels. That way I’d end up with a floating shelf look, with only part of the wall strip visible.
Milling and cutting
The first step in the build process was to get the lumber cut to rough dimension and milled up. With no working jointer I just hand-planed one of the edges to get it as flat as possible and ripped it on the table saw get close to finished width. Then it was onto the planer to smooth out the rough texture and mill to final thickness.
In the office I first mounted the brackets so I had known, firm stud locations with good alignment on the wall location. Then I sat the boards up there to trace out the location for the bracket channels I needed to add with the router. Also, my wall isn’t what you’d call “flat”, so the brackets aren’t perfectly perpendicular. So I wanted to make sure I left enough channel width to have some play in there for positioning. If these shelves ever move to another wall with standard 16” stud separation, they should be easily remountable.
I had this chunk of ipe laying around that I’d grabbed from a scraps bin years ago. Originally I was going to make an iPad stand from it, but never did. So I decided to try out making some breadboard ends to make the shelves a little more interesting, rather than just slabs of lumber. To keep it simple, and because these ends aren’t wide or load-bearing, instead of tenoning them fully onto the ends of the shelves, I just used a biscuit jointer and a couple of biscuits on each end. Without any long enough pipe clamps or straps, the glue-up for the breadboards got interesting:
The ends were left a touch long on each end so we could do a hair-thin ripping pass on the table saw to even everything up.
The ipe provides nice contrast and is such an interesting material when you get it sanded down to a high grit. There’s a green iridescence that comes out when you get it nice and smooth that I love.
After everything was dry, the ends trimmed up, and my channels marked, I set to work on routing those channels to flush inset the brackets underneath. In the shop we built a plywood jig fit special to the palm router with a small straight bit. Proper jig-making is essential to idiot-proofing steps like this in your process. Routers can do hard-to-fix damage to your work if you aren’t careful, so it was worth the half hour we spent measuring everything and making the jig. Once all set, just clamp it on at the edge of the workbench, and follow the edges to eat away the material to make the channels. A few passes and the results were smooth and consistent.
With a final sanding of everything down to the finish grits, it was time for finish.
Finishing
My finish of choice was a Danish oil, which is really a combination of tung/linseed oil, varnish, and mineral spirits. With its thin consistency, you wipe it on in a thick coat and let it soak in for about a half hour, then wipe off the excess. I decided to do 3 coats, with light sanding at 400 grit or buffing with a rag in between each one.
The final product came out beautiful. After curing a day or so, I mounted them up on the wall.
I’m going take a stab at rebooting the monthly progress posts I used to do back when I was diligently tracking several goals through 2019 and 2020. Each month I’d look at how I was tracking against plan for fixed targets like “run 650 miles”.
This time we’re gonna try something different. I’ll include my workout activities, because I still want to note my monthly quantities even if not tracking against a fixed number, books I’m reading, and other media I’ve been consuming, inspired by Julian Lehr’s regular “media consumption” updates.
October was a pretty normal month. The only notable differences from standard pattern of life were my first airline flight since the start of the pandemic (to DC for a company event) and I capped off the month with a visit to the Mayo Clinic for my regular cancer screening scans (MRIs and CTs — all clear!). Ending a month with good news is always energizing for the next one.
Health
Running
Since the summer started I got into a more regular cadence than I had earlier in the year. The move really did a number on my habit patterns, not in a good way for exercise. But now I’m back to it more or less, with better mileage each week.
Activities
Miles
Time
Calories
Avg HR
Avg Pace
7
28.06
4h 9m
3080
156
8:57/mi
The last week with traveling was a bust, but this is much better than my February/March performance.
Sleep & Screen Time
I’ve been tracking my daily screen time and sleep data all year, which I’ll write up a post on sometime soon. Here were the numbers for October.
Last week we did a fun end-of-summer trip across Florida. We procrastinated figuring out a plan for doing something with the kids before school starts back this month.
The kids have never been to any of the famous Central Florida theme parks, so we decided on LEGOLAND in Winter Haven, since it was a bit short notice to do anything at Disney. Everett has been obsessed with the LEGO Mario sets and they both love ‘em, so they had a great time on the rides. The park is great since it’s a combination typical theme park with an attached water park in the back. So we got to do both.
After a couple days at an Airbnb in Orlando (which also had its own mini water park), we drove up to St. Augustine for a couple days on the Atlantic beaches. It may seem weird to vacation at the beach when we live 10 minutes from one, but the beaches on Florida’s east coast are pretty different from the west side. The beaches are mostly hard-packed sand, much wider, with more consistent waves than our West Florida variety. I briefly attempted surfing on Elyse’s board, but didn’t come close to standing up.
Then on the last day we circulated through the Castillo de San Marcos fort near downtown, and took a quick walk through the old city before heading back across the state.
That birthday happened in the middle of the pandemic while we were still (mostly) isolated, she started kindergarten remotely, switched to going in-person, then switched schools at spring break, learned how to ride a bike, broke her arm and had a cast for a month, plus all the other changes kids go through at that age.
Since we moved in March she’s been loving the new school with more classmates in the local neighborhood. Hopefully for the 2021-22 school year it’ll be even closer to fully back to normal again. We’re gradually finding our local attractions in the new locale, but we’ve also got a lot more space to make the house itself a fun hangout for the summer.
When I pumped the brakes on my daily writing routine last year, I had designs on some other interesting projects to spend time on that the daily demand wasn’t giving me space for.
Throughout 2019 and 2020, I’d built a decent muscle for repetition and managing good habits through the accountability of publishing monthly reports on each goal. The first of each month I’d put together my stats on progression. I never shared them widely, but the act of putting it out there on the open web on a regular schedule created a forcing boundary to go through the motions of self-reflection. I was writing a post each day (with a fairly low bar for what constituted a post), running regularly to hit an annual miles target, meditating, and tracking the books I read.
In the fall I started writingRes Extensa, a newsletter project on some deeper themes, which is something I’d wanted to do for a long time on the blog, and occasionally did, but the need for the daily heartbeat of publishing didn’t give me the breathing room to spend much time on longer pieces. Time is precious for most of us, and for me it was all I could do to keep up with the goal commitments I made for myself, without trying to make additional promises about a weekly, biweekly, or hell, even monthly newsletter-writing schedule on top.
For 2021 I decided not to repeat my annual ritual of goal-setting in the same way that I’d done for ‘19 and ‘20. I started to lose steam and wanted to take a breather after I hit the two-year mark. In my November update from last year, I wrote how it was feeling like going through the motions rather than driven by excitement and motivation. To some degree that’s the whole point of accountability forcing functions like this for habit-forming: do the reps even when it’s not fun. But beyond the rep-fatigue of many goals, I’d wanted to try working on some new ideas. While I’m down with being aggressive in pursuit of goals, there’s a thin line between aggressive and overcommitted. Overcommitment results in poor performance on all fronts. Focus, by definition, requires fewer targets.
With reading I’d decided not to set a goal as I had the past 2 years, with a book count target for the year. For obvious reasons it’s sort of imaginary to quantify meaningful reading and learning through a raw count of books. If you measure to hitting 40 books per year, you might shy away from deep, challenging reads in favor of quicker ones just to hit a number. This is the nasty downside of bad measurement — you start performing to the measure rather than in service of an underlying goal. In this case, reading interesting things is the real mission; tracking a count is just a way to keep enough pressure on yourself to spend time on it1.
Running was a goal that I was doing mostly fine with from a time management perspective. Unlike writing or learning, the time input required scales linearly, so it’s easier to fit in. One’s fatigue level isn’t consistent — some days you’re exhausted and really don’t want to do the miles — but at least 30 minutes of time results in 30 minutes of running. 30 minutes of time writing doesn’t guarantee 30 minutes of actual, readable words! My issues with consistent exercise in 2021 so far have been more due to schedule mayhem than anything else. Buying the house and moving earlier this year, plus readjusting and getting settled resulted in not much time left for putting in the miles. I’ve started getting back to it the past few weeks, but exercise is an area I need hard targets for to push myself consistently.
So back to the reboot.
I’m getting back on the horse of writing regularly here, and planning to set some reasonable targets for other goals for the remainder of the year. My thought that eliminating the hard personal goal targets would make space for other things was logical, but paradoxically made me get less done, reducing motivation overall to work on any personal projects. I thought having more time available would make a biweekly newsletter pretty easy, but it’s done the reverse. There’s literature out there on this topic, and many of us have experienced this firsthand: having a compressed schedule of availability focuses our attention on the things that matter most. When we have too much time, things can happen “whenever”, which turns out quite often to be “never”.
In the middle of 2019 when I was hitting all my goals regularly, I don’t remember feeling overwhelmed at all. Time management was better. I wasn’t thrashing my time away with other meaningless activities telling myself “I’ll get to that article later”.
The shift away from hard goals was a worthy experiment to see how much my habit-forming tactics of the previous 2 years worked. It turns out a habit goes away when you stop doing it. I learned that the hard number staring me in the face expecting to be hit is an excellent motivator for me personally, whether I like it or not. It’s okay though, the point of it all is the delicious sausage at the end, not how the sausage gets made.
Inspired by Julian Lehr’s quantified self system, I started to track time spent reading as an alternative to book count, which is actually a more objective-aligned number to work from. Something worth talking about in a future post. I’m nowhere near as advanced as Julian on this, just using a system like this for a few things. ↩
The Summer of Lockdown last year really made us re-think what we want in a house. It hasn’t quite been two years in our current house, and we like the neighborhood and still love St. Pete, but the life changes induced by the pandemic spurred us into buying a new house that fits better with our reoriented priorities.
Four primary motivators:
Closer to the family, both Colette’s and mine — we’re already in the vicinity, but closer makes things easier
A pool! — we thought this wouldn’t be a big deal, until having to spend a Florida summer holed up with the kids with nowhere to go
Closer to (better) schools — our kids are just starting
Shift to perma-remote work makes short commute distance irrelevant — this wasn’t even in the mind at all when we bought the current place, so loosening the geographic requirements opened up the market a lot
We haven’t moved yet other than bringing over some easy-to-move things plus tools and gear to get some projects done ahead of the full move.
The list of pre-move projects started with just a few but has expanded as I dug into the first ones. We decided that several of these things would be easier to just bite the bullet and do before we move all the furniture and difficult-to-displace items into the house to have to work around. What started with removing popcorn ceilings turned into also removing wallpaper (one of the rooms has layers on layers that have been textured and painted on top of), painting ceilings, painting walls, replacing fans. The rooms I’ve got done so far look great, and we didn’t have to stumble around bulky furniture or loads of kids stuff to get these messy projects done.
There’s an expanding list of other side projects coming together, but none that will prevent us from getting moved.
One of my focus goals for the year is to devote more time to home improvement and DIY stuff than I have previously. It requires back-seating some other priorities, but there are a few things in the works that’ll be super satisfying if I can make the time to work on them. One I’m most excited about is an outdoor kitchen-slash-detached micro office space. Once we get moved that’s one we’ll be tackling first, planning to document the process and maybe even make some video along the way.
I’m a few days late in getting around to reviewing how I did on the goals for 2020, but what’s new there in a year full of challenges?
It’s an understatement to say that for anyone that set quantified personal goals at the start of the year had a rude awakening in March. We all encounter setbacks along the progress bar throughout any year, but this one was a doozy, and a protracted one that just kept dragging out.
Luckily here in Florida we’ve been able to have some normal(ish) activities the past few months. Even just taking the kids back to playgrounds again around August was like a weight off the chest. The months of cabin fever dragged down everything for the whole family.
So how’d I do on those goals anyway?
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
650.24 miles
650 miles
650 miles
+0.24
Meditation
1070 minutes
3120 minutes
3120 minutes
—
Reading
31 books
30 books
30 books
+1
Here are my original notes from the start of the year with some comments on each.
Health
✅ Run 650 miles — When I set 500 as a target for 2019, I thought it’d be all I could do to hit that. I ended up landing on 615. With consistent effort (it requires an average 12.5 miles per week) I can definitely hit 650. Feels incremental, slightly uncomfortable, but attainable.
With a couple of days left I crested the running target just barely, 2 free days to spare. Throughout the entire year I don’t think I got more than a couple of miles ahead of the pace marker. I procrastinated way too frequently
❌ Run 2 half marathons — Did one last year, will shoot for one in the spring and one in the fall or winter.
For obvious reasons this one wasn’t possible unless I did them on my own, which would be a long shot for me. I may try one this year, we’ll see.
❌ Deeper meditation — In my takeaways on this from last year, I mentioned the lack of depth with short, frequent sessions. This year I’m going to try doing 2 sessions of at least 30 minutes per week. I’ve read from multiple sources that anything shorter than about that length doesn’t get you all the way to the “present” state that mindfulness techniques are targeting. Half an hour will feel like a long time, but only twice a week should be fine.
2020 would’ve been a great year for improving meditation practice. For no good reason I just couldn’t get myself back into the routine to do it. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this in 2021. I’d rather not put a goal up on the board with no real plan to try at the moment. Can always start anytime without an official goal.
❌ Begin strength training — Shooting for 3 days per week. My plan is to get a setup in the garage to do workouts pre- or post-evening run.
Another one I just never got around to. We just bought a new house (which I’m due to write about, more on that later), so when we move I’m hoping to get a zone set up in the new garage and work this in sometime in the morning after everyone’s in school. Easing into it and getting consistent will be the key.
Reading, Learning, and Writing
✅ Read 30 books — I’m lowering the number this year, but have no plans to read less. I want to prioritize more long-form, deeper books that I’ve got on the shelf.
I notched just over this without trying too hard. I even had a few spells throughout the year with very little reading.
✅ Continue daily posts — I’d also like to force myself to write posts on 1 book per month.
I started 2020 with an intent to keep this going. As it was I made it to the 2-year streak mark in mid-October and put myself on hiatus. It was a good move since it’s given me a little breathing room, with time to spin up what I’ve been doing with the newsletter: Res Extensa.
❌ Study finance — With a half-decade of being heavily involved in the business end of a SaaS company, I’ve gotten a “crash MBA” in budgets, finance, and tons more. I plan to spend more time learning about markets, investing, and economics to have a broader understanding.
Didn’t spend much time here, but I did get some personal budget stuff in order. Not quite done yet.
Professional
❌ Host Fulcrum Live 2020 — The name of the event is TBD, but we’ll be doing another iteration of our user conference that we last did (with success!) in 2017.
Really want to be able to do this (something) sometime in 2021.
✅ Grow the team — Much of my time this year will be focused on team growth. No hard targets yet, but we have some things in the works that’ll be expanding our team.
We grew quite a bit this year, even with the tumultuousness of shifting to full remote.
Other Things
❌ Share more posts from the blog — When I started the daily posting habit in fall of 2018, I made the intentional decision to just put posts out there and see what would happen organically. No expected plan to drive traffic, just post and leave it be — personal journal out in public. One of my main reasons for doing that was to reduce the friction in getting things out there. The idea that every post was getting tweeted or shared could’ve made me overly attentive to perfection and polishing, something I wanted to avoid not only because it’d take longer on net for each new post, but it could make me hesitant about certain things. This year I’ll plan to share more widely the content for feedback and discussion.
I didn’t do as much of this as I’d planned. Footnote to include this one for 2021 goals.
✅ Take a few local weekend trips with the family — There’s a shortlist of places in driving distance I’d like to take the kids to, like on long weekends.
COVID shut us down here. We did get to drive up to the Georgia mountains for a week in late October. Another one that I hope can be resurrected for an improved 2021. All in all I hit the big primary targets.
Whenever I’ve asked him how old he’s turning over the last few weeks, the number has varied from 4 to 6. Clearly he wants to be up there with his sister. He’s changed so much as I look back on the status from a year ago — fully talking, self-sufficient to get his own things in most ways, doing full puzzles, drawing legible pictures. He’s really accelerated to catch up to where his sister was at the same age.
Sitting with Mario
While it’s not the same these days with planning kids’ parties, we’ve sort of adopted a tradition of the zoo on his birthday, or at least I’d call it one after doing it three years in a row. They had a good time as always.
When I watch video clips from February or March, it’s striking how much he’s changed since the start of this quarantine life. Of course we’re not totally quarantined now like we were in the March to July range, but still, he’s had a far-from-normal time for the last several months. He should’ve been in preschool at least at the start of the school year, but we opted to wait it out a little while. Hopefully we’ll send him back soon after the new year, if we can.
On his bunk bed
He and his sister have become pretty attached-at-the-hip with one another during all this time together, though. They don’t know what to do when either of them is alone, but you’d never tell that from all the sibling spats you see when they’re together.
Let’s hope version 3.0 gets a more “normal” existence on his way to 4!
Today we did a morning out with the kids down at The Pier.
The splash pad and playground they have down there are really top-notch, even though the playground is still mostly a bit out of range for Everett to do on his own. The whole area has been a great addition to the cityscape of downtown St. Pete, though. I’ve been doing runs down there a lot lately at night, a great extension of the run and turnaround point for my route.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on improving my sleep. My running workouts have felt terrible lately, which I think is a combination of dehydration and fatigue, primarily from compounding lack of quality sleep.
With the pretty simple life I’ve got — a steady working-from-home schedule, and a quarantine preventing most interesting things from happening — a solid sleep schedule should be easy to build and maintain. Apparently that hasn’t been the case for me.
It’ll surprise no one to say that kids make sleep a challenge. Ours sleep well, but they don’t nap, don’t really sleep in (but don’t wake too early), and stay up fairly late for their ages (8:30-9pm). This means any personal time has to happen past 9pm, which also has to include time to clean up the whirlwind house mess they create, doing chores in the kitchen, or any late errands that need to happen before the next day.
One of my goals is to get enough quality sleep to be able to wake up earlier than the kids to get some work in, whether that means writing, workouts, or reading. This could shift in personal time to the AM when my brain is ready to go, rather then late when I’m tired. 10:30pm bed should allow for enough unwinding before bed if I’m targeting a solid 8 hrs. Once I’m asleep I tend to stay that way, with the exception of occasional kid wake-ups, which aren’t too bad. Usually it means a brief interruption but back to bed pretty quickly.
The thing that’s been brutal with bad sleep, too, is the morning routine after staying up too late. 6 hrs of sleep segues right into getting blasted out of bed exhausted by kids who are shot out of a cannon already tearing up the place.
Here are a few things I’ve started over the past 2 weeks to increase sleep:
Reducing screen time
The Screen Time app was reporting between 4-5 hours of screen time per day. That seems absurd, but believable if you total up all the random 10 minute periods of social media, email, and general “checking in” throughout a day. In the last week I’ve dropped that by a couple hours with nothing but putting my phone down earlier in the evening.
Using the “Downtime” settings, I have my device cutting off access to apps after 9pm (you can see how it disables access in the above screenshot). You can override this to open something quickly, but I find that barrier enough even as a reminder of what I committed to; the little hourglass icons say “it’s time to be done for the day.” It’s worked so far. I’ve done more reading in the past week than the previous month total.
Blue light glasses
You can get these from Amazon for cheap. They’re transparent lenses that block blue light. The body’s circadian rhythm is evolved to key in on the reduction in blue light that happens naturally when the sun sets. With our ubiquitous screens, we don’t get this natural wind-down period. Glasses like this can help cut down on the blue light in the evening before you turn out the lights.
We’ll see how these modifications help get sleep back to the top of the priority list.
I’m quite conscious of the fact that fiddling with apps and settings and equipment is silly when it comes to a habit as simple as sleeping1. I still maintain that my biggest sleep hack is (theoretically) the simplest: just go to bed earlier. Easy to say, but I find it harder to do. Hopefully these few tweaks will help nudge my behavior in a better direction.
The second biggest is “send the kids to their grandma’s house.” That one tends to be pretty effective. ↩
I’ve finally joined the newsletter club! Today I sent out the first issue of a new project, a bi-weekly email newsletter called Res Extensa.
My intent right now is for the newsletter to be a less-frequent companion to the blog, with some highlights of recent things I’ve been reading, writing, or interested in.
As I wrote in the email, I once had an RSS-to-email setup using Mailchimp, for folks who wanted to subscribe to the blog without RSS. It’s a bit clunky, and since I started the daily blogging routine, an overload for inbox delivery.
The name comes from Descartes’s concept of mind-body dualism, as half of a pair of substances: res cogitans and res extensa — translated roughly to “thinking substance” and “extended substance,” respectively. I guess it’s a fitting name; all of the things that extend from my thinking.
It’s been a minute since I put up an update on the kids. I thought Labor Day would be a good marker to put down a quick entry on what we’ve been doing.
Recently we started going to the neighborhood park again, which we hadn’t been to at all since the beginning of March. It’s sparsely used, never more than a couple of other kids there at the same time, typically, so it’s safe enough.
Last weekend I took the kids on a nature hike, a common time-with-dad activity. We went to Upper Tampa Bay Park, one of our old stomping grounds from when we were kids. I’d use the word “hike” generously, considering a large chunk of the trail was inundated from all the rain and high tide when we went. Found some fiddler crabs, saw plenty of birds, a few fish, and did our share of sweating out there.
Made ourselves some walking sticksOn an adventure
I’m hoping to get to take them on more outdoor outings like this as the weather cools down. Usually we start getting reasonable temps around mid-October.
Today was Elyse’s first day of kindergarten. Not the way we imagined her starting her elementary school life, but here we are.
Our school has done their best to try to accommodate the return, but I remain extremely skeptical about how long this will be possible. We’re currently committed to a 9-week start online, after which the school will reassess what to do. At least for K-aged kids, this online learning the way the schools are equipped to do it is a mess and can’t work with the same format. 5+ hours of sitting at a computer with minimal breaks is torture for adults, so I can’t imagine how well it’ll work expecting high engagement from kids.
What I wish they could do is shake up the format to do something shorter during this first couple of months. Even a 2 or 3 hour per day session would be a huge improvement, with the rest made up by parents in the interim while we figure this out (though I get the issues that some parents just don’t have the time to do this).
None of it is ideal, but continuing to try the same old methods of teaching without changing things up is not a solution.
The last time I wrote an update here on my health situation was over a year ago now. Time for a quick one.
Since I was officially declared “NED” (no evidence of disease) back in the beginning of 2018, I’ve been on a regular surveillance schedule with the Mayo Clinic’s oncology group. Every 3 months I have to trek up to Jacksonville — about a 3½ hour drive — for a set of scans, a consult with the doctor, and occasionally other tests. Like recently I had an RNA genetic test done looking for clarity on whether I have Lynch syndrome, a complex disorder that increases cancer risks (spoiler: I don’t have it, or at least only my tumor did… it’s complicated).
The scanning protocol is a full abdomen & pelvis MRI, plus a CT scan of the chest to check lungs. Since the disease was in my gut, they want the hi-res MRI images there, and the lower-res CT is enough to briefly survey any respiratory spread.
This trip was different than previous ones because I went up alone. With the pandemic and lockdowns still on, it didn’t seem sensible for all of us to go. So I holed up in a hotel for one night and got my scans all done. The stress of the waiting game is definitely more challenging when alone. Meditation helps.
The rest of the story is that my scans were all clear. And not only clear, but also a lung nodule they’d seen on previous scans and were monitoring was completely gone.
So with that I get to graduate to an every-6-months schedule for my follow-ups.
Good news like that certainly makes the long drive back more enjoyable.
It’s hard during quarantine times to figure out a fun thing to do. All of your typical birthday venues are either closed or made “unfun” with rules and headcount quotas. Plus the outdoor activities in Florida July are rough since we’ve been in the upper 90s here the last couple weeks.
We decided that since the new St. Pete Pier opened last week that we’d check that out this morning before the afternoon heat started.
They did a fantastic job building a modern destination spot convenient to downtown — a huge improvement over the old, dated inverted pyramid built in the 70s.
I could see making it a new common hangout with the kids, since there’s a beach, splash pad, playground, and plenty of outdoor common space for picnicking and hanging out.
Colette bought an inflatable stand-up paddleboard to use on our beach vacation this week. Neither of us had ever tried one before, but you see them all over the place along the St. Pete shoreline.
As an observer, it certainly looks like a workout with having to stand the whole time. But after using one it turns out that’s an understatement. The lower leg, foot, and ankle workout you get is impressive. I’m sure doing it in the open water of the Gulf makes it more challenging with the chop and swell, but even in the relatively calm morning water it’s still tiring.
It’s a fun workout, though. I’m sure doing it in the canals of the neighborhood or the bay would be a bit more relaxing. Could add another exercise activity to the rotation.
Next week us and the local family will be at Anna Maria Island for what is largely a “staycation” — a week at a beach house about 45 minutes from home.
We’ll see how things work with trying to stay semi-quarantined while off-site away from home. The house we’re staying in is right on the beach about 100 feet from the Gulf, with it’s own section of private beach. If we’re properly provisioned, we should be all set to have a relaxing time for the week1. The forecast looks good, all the kids are ready to go.
Only plans so far (if the kids allow): running, reading, kayaking, fishing, cooking.
At least as relaxed as you can get with 10 kids 10 and under tearing around the property. ↩
I had a great, basic Father’s Day here at the house. Colette made breakfast and the kids made me some cards:
I got the chalkboard finished up and ready to hang tomorrow. We spent most of the day out in the backyard with pool, slide, and playing in the grass. An excellent day!
Colette had this idea to build an outdoor chalkboard for the kids to use, hung on the fence. I went yesterday and bought some materials to put one together. I also found out in drawing up the plan that chalkboard paint exists, which is amazing. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but I bought some and we’ll find out.
It only requires some basic ingredients:
Cement backerboard (like you use for moisture-resistant surfaces)
1x4 boards for frame
Adhesive
Lag screws for hanging
We’ll see how it works out. Should be pretty easy, and I know the kid will enjoy it!
Over the years with my RSS subscriptions I’ve gradually unsubscribed from a lot of “institutional” or corporate blogs and feeds in favor of individuals I’ve found with interesting websites and things to say.
In the early days of blogging it was common to have a “blogroll” in the sidebar to link to friends, colleagues, and your favorite sites, with a focus on other blogs rather than just your favorite websites or products. So I created one with my favorite internet destinations, with all flavors of topics I’m interested in.
I want more people to have their own websites and do their own writing about whatever they’re interested in. More people should get away from Medium blogs, Twitter feeds (though those of course serve a purpose, just not for everything), and other short-form, shallow media. The open web should get bigger, but it’s been getting smaller. I support the open web and want more people to publish.
We’re almost to the three-month mark since the lockdown started here in Pinellas. Pretty quickly all of the public beaches were closed, right in the midst of Spring Break season. For a county with so many of its economic drivers tied to tourism and beachgoers, that specific element of the lockdown was unprecedented, but given the unknown around the virus’s possible impacts, it was the right decision.
Earlier in May the county reopened the beaches, and naturally, the first weekend was mayhem. We’ve gone a few times throughout the month, and it’s certainly been busy, but not a ton busier than it’d be during any other May.
We’ve been to Pass-a-Grille, St Pete Beach, and Sunset Beach, each of them is moderately busy during normal time, but the biggest issue right now has been the artificial limiting of crowds by law enforcement, mostly by limiting permitted parking. The beaches themselves are crowded in pockets, but still far safer and more distanced than some parks and trails I’ve been to. There are officers keeping an eye on things at the beach walkways and helicopters patrolling up and down looking for anything overwhelmingly crowded. I’m glad they’ve been able to manage it without it getting out of hand. My anectodal feedback on the national news coverage of “OMG they’re reopening beaches” is that they’re overblowing it. It’s not near as bad as most of the b-roll beach footage would have you believe.
Overall it seems like the county’s done a good job in a tenuous situation. And for the most part residents have been respectful in mask-wearing and distance-keeping — a lot more than I would’ve predicted. Floridians aren’t well known for compliance and good behavior.
It’s looking like we’re completely lifting restrictions on beaches, playgrounds, and pools next week, as well. Hopefully with appropriate distancing behavior we can gradually get comfortable again with at least outdoor activities, while keeping an eye on the case count figures to be cautious.
After stewing around with it for a month, I finally put up an “About” page for this site. I pulled out a few of favorite posts there, also. Check it out!
I recently added to my Library section to include the books I’m currently reading. At the top of the page now I’ll be including books in the rotation. You’ll notice that I’m always reading multiple things at once. Usually the batch is either a) modal: I’ve got something on Audible, a paper book, maybe a couple e-books, or b) type: nonfiction, fiction, etc.
March 12th was the last time I was at the office. We went full remote starting the next day.
The 13th was Elyse’s last day in person at her school. Spring break was slated for the following week anyway, but she started up “Zoom school” a couple weeks ago. She’s only 4 and in pre-K, so they’re just doing their “circle time” remotely. At least a chance to see her friends on cameras once in a while.
Other than the typical cabin fever of having to be at the house so much, I’m surprised how well the kids are handling it. They’re video calling cousins and friends occasionally, which they enjoy, and haven’t asked too many questions about why we don’t go anywhere anymore. We’ve told Elyse that there’s a sickness going around and we don’t want to get ourselves or others sick, so now when she talks about it she refers to “the sickness” — ”maybe we can go to so-and-so’s house when The Sickness is over.” A biblical way of putting it.
We’ve now been separated for a full month from everyone. It’s surprising how quickly this 4-week period has blazed past, with days smearing together, the same routine more-or-less with kids and work. When every day is almost identical, they’re hard to tell apart. Eugene Wei had a great take on this phenomenon and its possible causes in a recent post:
The reason it feels like driving somewhere takes longer than driving home from that destination, even if both trips take the same amount of time, is that our “attention gate” is wider open on the way there because the directions are unfamiliar to us. We’re looking more carefully at road signs and landmarks to make sure we don’t get lost. On the way back, as we near home, we can flip to autopilot since we’ve done that trip so many times. Our attention gate narrows and our senses absorb less information. The memory of the return trip ends up as a smaller file in our memory banks.
The reason you might look back on a long and monotonous stretch of repetitive workdays and feel like it was just a blur is that our brain can run an efficient version of some compression algorithm on what is a very consistent daily routine of going to the office and sitting at your desk, the way a JPEG algorithm can do wonders with an image that consists of large blocks of the same color.
The similarity between days, even ones on the weekend, provides no clear boundaries or breakpoints. We’ve had a few days where we went on longer walks or bike rides, but other than that it’s the same on repeat.
One thing we have that many don’t have the luxury of is one another, so the 4 of us spend time together. I feel for people that have to be alone during this period (certainly a trade-off, since “incessant” would be a gracious way to describe kids in quarantine).
At this point it doesn’t seem like things will change anytime soon. I think everyone’s still waiting for the curve-bending to show real downward trends so we can loosen this situation a bit over the next month or so.
It’s a weird time right now across the globe. People all over are quarantined, either because of government mandate or self-isolation from others to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus.
I don’t think the world needs more sideline expertise or prognostication about what the virus is doing, how this period will end, or how the economy recovers. There’s already plenty of that out online and in the media — probably way too much.
But I wanted to write something down about this as a personal note for future me to read in the archives.
We’re on day 5 of a self-imposed quarantine, with the family here at home limiting our time out and about, and me working from the house. We’ve been out to the store a couple of times, but mostly we’re spending time here, in the backyard pool, or doing bike rides around the block. All things considered, it hasn’t been too bad. Work is different, but the whole team being remote hasn’t changed that much in productivity levels that I can tell yet.
There doesn’t seem to be a turnaround point hit yet in the rate of new infections. We’ll probably be holed up another few weeks, minimum.
We’re still sane so far, but we’ll see what 2 or 3 more weeks alone in the house with kids does to us.
I just committed to my first race of the year, a 10K in the St. Pete Distance Classic. Sort of a seat-of-the-pants commitment, but should be able to do a competitive personal time (maybe a PR if I feel good enough). I promised to do more races this year, so gotta stick to the plan.
The weather’s cooled down for the weekend, and a 6:30am start time should make it comfortable for a speedy run.
Last year was my first serious attempt at setting goals at the outset with structure and plan to hold myself accountable to each one throughout the course of the year. “Goal orientation” is not my native approach to motivation, but being able to quantify results in data-driven terms (for good or ill) is something I’m compelled by. If, for example, I can’t track a run with Strava, I don’t even want to do it. The inanity of this compulsion is not lost on me, but the way I think about it is that if any strategy keeps you going (even a superficial one), it works. It’s all about the result after all.
In the spirit of 2019, here are the goals for this year. The learnings from last year’s results showed me some ways I want to iterate on certain of the areas, not necessarily to perform better against a metric, but to get deeper meaning out of healthy habits.
Health
Run 650 miles — When I set 500 as a target for 2019, I thought it’d be all I could do to hit that. I ended up landing on 615. With consistent effort (it requires an average 12.5 miles per week) I can definitely hit 650. Feels incremental, slightly uncomfortable, but attainable.
Run 2 half marathons — Did one last year, will shoot for one in the spring and one in the fall or winter.
Deeper meditation — In my takeaways on this from last year, I mentioned the lack of depth with short, frequent sessions. This year I’m going to try doing 2 sessions of at least 30 minutes per week. I’ve read from multiple sources that anything shorter than about that length doesn’t get you all the way to the “present” state that mindfulness techniques are targeting. Half an hour will feel like a long time, but only twice a week should be fine.
Begin strength training — Shooting for 3 days per week. My plan is to get a setup in the garage to do workouts pre- or post-evening run.
Reading, Learning, and Writing
Read 30 books — I’m lowering the number this year, but have no plans to read less. I want to prioritize more long-form, deeper books that I’ve got on the shelf.
Continue daily posts — I’d also like to force myself to write posts on 1 book per month.
Study finance — With a half-decade of being heavily involved in the business end of a SaaS company, I’ve gotten a “crash MBA” in budgets, finance, and tons more. I plan to spend more time learning about markets, investing, and economics to have a broader understanding.
Professional
Host Fulcrum Live 2020 — The name of the event is TBD, but we’ll be doing another iteration of our user conference that we last did (with success!) in 2017.
Grow the team — Much of my time this year will be focused on team growth. No hard targets yet, but we have some things in the works that’ll be expanding our team.
Other Things
Share more posts from the blog — When I started the daily posting habit in fall of 2018, I made the intentional decision to just put posts out there and see what would happen organically. No expected plan to drive traffic, just post and leave it be — personal journal out in public. One of my main reasons for doing that was to reduce the friction in getting things out there. The idea that every post was getting tweeted or shared could’ve made me overly attentive to perfection and polishing, something I wanted to avoid not only because it’d take longer on net for each new post, but it could make me hesitant about certain things. This year I’ll plan to share more widely the content for feedback and discussion.
Take a few local weekend trips with the family — There’s a shortlist of places in driving distance I’d like to take the kids to, like on long weekends.
I’m updating my tracker to include some other things. I’ll be back on this topic with a post-January check-in on my progress.
We celebrated the new year last night with the family during our trip together, a fairly low-key affair. Hard to believe now that we’ve reached a year number that sounds like science fiction: 2020.
I just got back today after a whirlwind Christmas and leaving town right after, so haven’t had time yet to articulate the year’s goals into a post. Hopefully I’ll get that out tomorrow. A few more days off with the family, then the rocket takes off into the new year.
Since I already wrote up my overview of 2019 a couple weeks ago, here are some final notes to close out the year.
I continued the practice of posting here every day this year. I’ve been enjoying it as a means to keep me focused on learning and writing. No intention on stopping!
Worked on some major evolutionary changes to the business that’ll start bearing fruit in 2020.
Continuing my summaries from a couple weeks ago, this post covers some statistics on running throughout 2019.
I track all of my runs with a Garmin fenix 5 watch synced to Strava, but also have been logging each one to a spreadsheet as I complete them. That way I’ve got an easy dataset to work with for analyzing and charting the results.
Here’s the overall breakdown of stats for the year:
Stat
Total
Total Distance
615.55 miles
Total Duration
86 hours, 32 minutes
Total Activities
148
Average Distance
4.16 miles
Average Pace
8:26 minute/mile
Average HR
156 bpm
Total Calories
66,431 cal
Best Month
September (88 miles)
Worst Month
March (39.6 miles)
September was my big training month for the October half marathon (August was decent too, at about 70 miles).
2019 was my best running year by a wide margin. I got the fitness up to the point where 5-6 milers are pretty easy (when pacing), and the half proved that I can go even farther with a little preparation.
I’ve got new marks I’ll be aiming for in 2020, but probably won’t have time to post about the plan until into January a bit. Next up will be the map showing the year’s running coverage.
Today starts the annual family vacation, this year over in the Disney area south of Orlando. To a Floridian the destination isn’t terribly exciting, but we wanted to keep it simple this year. 3 of the cousins are 6 months or younger, so any trip involving lots of on-the-go activity or air travel becomes challenging.
There aren’t any big plans other than relaxing at the house, swimming (yep, in December), and maybe a couple of trips to theme parks with the kids.
For the last couple weeks of the year I’m going to post a few wrap-ups to summarize how I did on hitting personal goals from the beginning of the year. At the beginning I laid out a number of attainable but aggressive targets for myself, having never really done this before in any trackable way. I’ve never been an extremely goal-oriented person, so I thought I’d experiment to see what sort of mental impact this could have and how it helps the habit-forming process.
I’ll briefly run through the targets I set up, with a status on my performance. Let’s see how I did…
Health
✅ Run 500 miles — I wasn’t sure how this one would go down. It seemed like an aggressive number as I went through the first couple of months trying to stay the course, but I ended up way over the mark.
🚫 Eat better — I would say I didn’t do enough here to call it success. Life and other things got in the way of focusing on this very much. It’ll be on the shortlist for the 2020 mission.
✅ Meditate 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week — Hit this one, but it took some effort to force it every day (there are a few days left this year, but I should be able to stay the course). Next year I intend to iterate on this a bit and approach it differently.
Reading, Learning, and Writing
✅ Read 50 books — On track to finish 52, possibly 53. Wasn’t too challenging, surprisingly (I like reading anyway, a lot). Looking forward to a couple of “best of” posts on my favorites. I’ve learned a ton, not only from the books, but also about the kinds of things I prefer and new subjects I’ve found interest in.
🚫 Learn and do some work with R — Didn’t get much time on this one this year. I tinkered around some earlier in the year, but might have more time in the professional context to explore this in 2020.
🚫 Get better with SQL — Same as above. We’re working on some things in Fulcrum that could flex this muscle some more.
✅ Keep working on cartography and keeping up with open source geo — Spent a good amount of time in the late winter and mid-summer on QGIS stuff. I’m satisfied with the time spent here. I still have a cartography project in progress I’d like to keep pushing on.
Professional
✅ Go big with Fulcrum Community — We made a lot of progress here this year. I’m happy with it. We’ve also learned some things that’ll adapt the course going forward to some even more exciting places.
🤷🏽♂️ Launch two new products — I’ll call this one a wash since we changed course intentionally midway through the year on one of them. Half success.
✅ Improve our product narratives all around — Definite success. Even more progress and success in store in first half of 2020.
Other
🚫 Take the kids on a trip — Didn’t do anything spectacular here. Not mad about it. We had plenty of fun and plenty of other things to do.
✅ Buy a new house — Success! Super happy with the new location.
I’ll dig in on some of these in detail in the coming weeks. All told, a successful year. Tracking and measuring the numbers, it turns out, is a pretty big motivator for me.
We had our two family Thanksgivings today, which makes for a hectic but enjoyable day with most of the families. The kids can really go hard on days like this — no idea how they last so long.
The only content feeds I regularly peruse anymore are my RSS subscriptions and Twitter. I’ve been trying to pull away a bit more from looking at Twitter so often. This is a common problem these days that people are responding to in much different ways. You’ve got folks like my co-workers Bill & James coming at it with a sanitization strategy, trying to clean up their feeds in various ways. Then you have those on the “Waldenponding” end of the spectrum (like Cal Newport) — deleting apps, deleting accounts, and fully checking out from the digital firehose.
My approach so far has been to simply be more conscious of how often I reflexively open the app as a muscle memory movement whenever I have slack time. These apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) all feed off of the “in-between” time when sitting on the couch, standing in line, et cetera. Then as happens with most of us, that slack time encroaches on non-slack time and soon we’re scrolling through Instagram while at dinner with someone or playing with the kids. We all do it, and it takes conscious effort to control. What’s helped me lately are the Screen Time reports iOS sends regularly that show the week-over-week trend in device usage and how it breaks down. As a week goes by, I try to remember that every few-minute-long Twitter session accrues against my total and will put me at an increase over last week — a small mental kick toward putting the governor on Twitter usage. Since I always have Kindle books at the ready, with each opening of Twitter a little bug in my brain says “why don’t you read a few pages instead?”
Over the weekend I decided to try out James’s method of using Twitter lists for a more targeted feed1. So I created a private “bestof” list and gradually curated (so far) 43 people into that list. In the Twitter iOS app, a list can be pinned to the main view and becomes a pane you can swipe over to. In two days of usage it’s been an excellent substitute to the main firehose feed of infinite content. Because lists, from what I can tell, don’t display algorithmically-generated feed items, you get a simple reverse-sorted feed of posts from all accounts in the list. If I open it up after 5 or 6 hours have gone by, a minute or so scrolling down gets me back to where I was. I can read all of the posts over that time period. Reaching Twitter “inbox zero” has been impossible since about 2010 — following too many people, but also Twitter is on a mission (understandably) to never let you run out of things to read.
I still plan on keeping the Twitter habit as curbed as possible in favor of higher bandwidth books and papers, but this is a huge step in the right direction for filtering the signal from the noise.
Trying to wrangle the main feed is too much work. I just left it alone. ↩
A while back I started a text file for logging the best quotes I run across. I put up a page to document those here publicly. No sense in keeping good stuff to myself when I can share my favorites.
A few highlights:
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
I’ve been periodically adding new ones from my readings. Now that I have better systems for recording them as I encounter them, I’ll start building up the archive.
We had a good time trick-or-treating with the kids over at a friend’s house in South St. Pete. Elyse and her friend from school had been planning together to do Halloween together, so we had to oblige. Everett will go along with anything with free candy.
Inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, I started posting something every day here last year on October 4th. The 1 year mark passed by and I didn’t even notice. It’s become such a part of my mental routine to keep up with that it’s become pretty painless.
Most of my posts are topics I find interesting or links I run across. I find myself zeroing in on themes that tend to appear in my reading patterns. Through the process I’ve also come up with a few recurring “series” type posts to do regularly:
Weekend Reading — a link list of 3 recent interesting things, posted on Saturdays
Places — a series where I highlight interesting geographies
Best Songs — infrequently logging my personal favorites
Book Reviews — also infrequent, but enjoyable to write when I find the time
Goal Progress — on the 1st of each month, a review of progress against personal goals for the prior month
One healthy side effect of the blogging habit has been a reduction in social media usage. I still flip through Twitter occasionally, but the majority of my reading has converted to books, RSS feeds, and a handful of newsletters. Through this commitment to writing every day, I’ve had to pare down the amount of time I burn on “wasteful” activities — TV/movies, gaming, etc. Knowing that I have a commitment to keep up with a regular blogging pattern forces me to stay on task with relevant writing and reading.
One thing I would like to explore soon is how I might be able to schedule posts to go out. Since I write and publish this site with Jekyll and Netlify, it’s all managed in a git repository, without a good way to schedule future posts. So I’ve forgotten to push my changes a number of times, discovering a day late that I never published something. I’m toying with the idea of moving to something like Ghost for a more full-featured writing environment. I’ll mess around with that over the next couple of months and see if there’s something there.
Even though I hit the 1-year streak, I have no plans to stop the every day publishing. Let’s keep this train moving.
We’ve been exploring options for adding a CMS to our Jekyll-powered website for Fulcrum over the last couple of weeks, looking for ways to add more content editor-friendly capabilities without having to overhaul everything under the hood, or move to a full hosted CMS like Wordpress. The product and design teams responsible for the technical development of the website all prefer the simplicity and flexibility of static site generators, but understand the relative opacity of learning git, command lines, and the vagaries of something like Jekyll for team members just writing content.
One of the options we’ve been looking at is Netlify CMS, along with their deployment and hosting platform as a GitHub Pages replacement. Their CMS is open source, and it’s attractive because of how simple it is to wire up to your static site with a single YAML file. Essentially all you need to do is define your content types in the configuration, then the CMS generates all of the editing UI for creating new or editing existing markdown files.
To kick the tires, I set it up locally for this site, and also ended up migrating the hosting for the entire site over to Netlify. The transition was totally seamless; now I’ve got my site running with the latest and greatest Jekyll and other libraries, added a CMS for when I want to quickly make edits or posts without involving a git workflow, and Netlify’s CDN is blazing fast. I love that none of the rest of my workflow using a git repo, markdown, or Jekyll has to change — all pushes to master trigger automated tests and deploys on Netlify.
There are some other things there I’m going to experiment with, especially the option for post-processing operations like minifying CSS and Javascript, as well as lossless image compression, both in service of page speed performance improvements.
Since I’ve been posting here so frequently, it’s gotten challenging to scroll through the archive to find links to things I wrote about before. Last night I worked on implementing a simple site search page that searches the title, text, and tags of posts to find relevant content. This is a short post on how I put that together.
I use Jekyll to manage the site content and generation, with all of my posts written as markdown files with some custom front-matter to handle things like tagging, search-friendliness, and some other things used in templating the site. There are also a couple of other custom things build using Jekyll’s “collections” feature for other content types, like my Books section.
I ran across a library called Lunr that provides client-side search on an index that generates when your site builds. It’s small and simple, outputting an index as JSON document that then can be combed through from a search to return data from posts or other content types. This provided exactly what I wanted: lightweight and something that would support Jekyll and GitHub hosting that I use without having to change anything, add third-party indexing services, or use clunky Google Site Search to accomplish. I wanted something native to my own site.
The best implementation that I found that matched what I wanted was from Katy DeCorah. Using her version as a starter, I took that and customized to fit my site and index and return the specific data I wanted to appear in search results. The outcome looks nice and is certainly simple to use. Right now it still only supports searching the post archives, but that’s good enough for now. I’m still exploring ways to browse my archives by other dimensions like tags, but I want to do that in a way that’s useful and also as lightweight as possible.
The kids had a great holiday — a beach day with their cousins, lunch on the beach together, then an evening playtime slash barbecue over at a friend’s house for dinner. It was the first beach trip here at home since probably Fathers Day of last year. We need to do it more often on the tail end of the summer.
I even got a 5-mile run in while everyone was napping and relaxing after the beach trip.
A few months ago I joined the advisory board of the Suncoast Developers Guild, a code school and developer community here in St. Pete. Our company has been involved with this group since back when they first launched the Iron Yard campus back in 2014.
We’ve had a successful experience connecting with the local community through this channel, supporting students looking to shift careers into work on software and recruiting them into our team. Currently 5 people from our dev and product teams came out of those cohorts of front-end or full stack development grads.
Through my role as an advisor there, we’re working on a few things that we’re hoping expand the footprint of the Guild and bring more companies into the fold. I’ve long been an advocate for “non-traditional” education paths and hands-on experience over formal education, but many companies are still stuck in the world of looking for those 4-year degrees — they don’t know how to recruit, vet, and measure skillsets without a GPA and letters alongside it (BS / MS).
I wrote this post a number of years ago targeted at people new to or thinking about jobs in the programming world. I’m not a developer myself, but work with them everyday and have spent plenty of time in the community to know how to identify and hire the right skills I look for in creators. Going back and reading this this morning, I still would agree with everything I wrote. Supporting the SDG is part of my effort to have skin in the game on this perspective. Helping match the right core passions and mental tools to the companies than need them is what it’s about, regardless of the path one takes to get there.
I use Fulcrum all the time for collecting data around hobbies of mine. Sometimes it’s for fun or interests, sometimes for mapping side projects, or even just for testing the product as we develop new features.
Here are a few of my key every day apps I use for personal tracking. I’m always tinkering around with other things as we expand the product, but each of these I’ve been using for years pretty consistently.
Gas Mileage
Of course there are apps out there devoted to this task, but I like the idea of having my own raw data input for this. Piping this to a spreadsheet lets me run some calculations on it to see MPG, total spend, and total miles driven over time.
Maps Collection
I’m a collector of paper maps, and some time back I built out a tracker in Fulcrum to inventory my collection. One day I plan to add some other details to this for year, publisher, and the like, but it works for now as a basic inventory of what I’ve got.
Workouts
I’ve been lax this year with the routine, but I’d built out a log for tracking my workout sessions at the gym — mostly to track doing the “Runner 360” workout. It works great and provides a way to build some charts with progress on efforts over time.
Home Inventory
In order to have a reliable log of all of the expensive stuff in my house, I created this so that there’s some prayer of having a tight evidence log of what I own if there’s ever a flood, hurricane, or fire (or even theft) that requires a homeowners insurance claim. I figured it can’t hurt to have photographic evidence of what’s in the house if it came to needing to prove it.
Football Clubs
This one is more of an experiment in using Fulcrum (and its API) as a cloud-based PostGIS database. I created a simple schema for each team, league, and stadium location. I had this idea to use these coordinates for generating a poster of stadiums from satellite images. One day I might have time for that, but there’s also an open database you can download of all the locations as geojson.
There are a few others I’ve got in “R&D” mode right now testing out. Always on the hunt for new and interesting things I can make Fulcrum do. It’s a true power tool for data entry and data management.
She picked out her own theme, her own cake, and wanted to have her party at Jump Station here in town. Tons of her friends and family came out, so it was great to see everyone and always fun to see her living it up with all of her friends.
Everett also had a blast there running all over the place climbing, jumping, and sliding with the older kids.
When we got home she had a big time opening all of her gifts — been playing with them all non-stop since. We also took a nice bike ride together down to the park and back, which she always loves, contrary to this video where she’s complaining about tired legs:
We had a typical, yet action-packed day for the 4th. The kids had a sleepover with their cousins, so I did get about an hour of reading in total silence this morning, which was certainly not typical.
But after that they did swimming and cookout up at my folks’ place, then swimming and more food over at the neighbor’s house. Then we got to go down to the Snell Isle Bridge to watch the downtown fireworks with friends.
I just got back from a trip up to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville for the every-three-month scans cycle. MRI and CT scans clear with only a couple minor things to monitor. These weekends are always a bit of a mental “reset”, and a relief to be done with. Laying in a tube for 90 minutes is never fun, but I’ve done it enough times now that it’s sorta routine. Being proactive about monitoring change is more important than a little discomfort for a couple hours.
I’m not a big holiday person, so I don’t think much about it when something like Father’s Day rolls around.
Simple morning with the kids doing breakfast, then I spent most of the day over at the old place getting it prepped for listing this week. Home Depot trips, painting, yard work, and power washing. Looking forward to getting that thing sold.
Elyse made me a great card this morning. She knows I love maps!
I’m making quick work of the streets of Shore Acres. Yesterday I set up a quick and dirty local database that I could load the tracks into. I’m just using the GPX export feature on each activity and the ogr2ogr command line utility to import each one.
Now I can see the streets get painted as I complete the job.
I ran a quick calculation on the street centerline data to estimate the total distance of roadway and counted about 37 miles. Once I’m done with each section I’ll tabulate how much total running it took to cover all the combined distances.
This year has been an experiment for me in how one goes about forming habits — at least those of the healthy, positive variety.
We’re all familiar with falling into negative habits and how easy that can happen. There are automatic gravitation-like forces pulling us toward unhealthy habits all the time. Eating junk food, lazing around the house watching TV, not exercising, not reading, spending too much time with social media. What all of these things have in common is short-term gratification. In fact, I struggle to think of any easy traps like this that only have a delayed, long-term payoff. If eating that extra snack late at night or staying up 1 more hour to continue your Netflix binge didn’t give you instant gratification, you’d just skip the snack or go to bed.
On the flip side, positive habits are those that everyone wants to do more of, the stuff of New Years resolutions. They have the opposite common trait: you don’t see a result right away, sometimes not for months or years. Not only that, for many types of long-term investments it’s actually painful in the short-term. All forms of exercise fit this model. Running an 8-miler involves some suffering today and doesn’t knock off those pounds right away. It takes months worth of them to make a dent. This short vs. long idea is not a secret to anyone, yet it’s hard to defer those immediate satisfactions for the big win down the road. Often very hard.
I’ve never been a particularly goal-oriented person. Putting big numbers on the board to hit isn’t required for me to stay motivated. My personal motivators tend to be more intrinsic; I don’t need an externally-set objective target to stay on track. Often the act of the work itself is enough of a motivation to keep building. I can’t put my finger on it exactly other than that my motivation tends to come from within rather than without. That said, I wanted to figure out how I could manage to work in some new productive habits in a consistent, accountable way. Would setting a goal and staring at it every day actually make a difference?
I took a new approach this year by picking some things and tying numbers to them to see how it’d go. So far at about the 4+ month mark, results look promising. Because I’m such a data-driven person, I knew that not only was it critical to have the target mark set, but to be able to measure the progress toward those marks over the course of the year. Building this spreadsheet to keep track of my pace against the trendline has helped. I look at it all the time to keep up with it:
One of the keys was to pick only a few goals and focus on them — running, meditation, reading books, and blogging. Those are what I’ve got on the board that I’m measuring. Trying to also add weightlifting, getting an MBA, or swimming to that list would overload the available resources and none of it would happen. I intentionally picked things that fit a specific class: not too time consuming, still enjoyable activities in their own right, fit my day-to-day pattern of life, and healthy over the long run.
Keeping it limited to things that are both good and enjoyable seems like a sound approach so far. It strikes me that this could be part of the problem with people consistently breaking their New Year promises by the time February rolls around. Creating habits around things you actually despise doing is extremely difficult. It also doesn’t hurt to have some sort of precedent of success first before committing to an every day routine. If you want to run a marathon before the year is over but you’ve literally never run 100 feet in your life, it’d be a good idea to start with some progress first rather than setting up for failure.
It’s a work in progress for me. I have a better sense now of how hard it is to get things to the point of being automatic. It’s getting close! I definitely think about getting my meditation session or running in each day without having to be reminded. It’s not on autopilot and may not ever be. My goal is to test these waters with myself on how to reprogram my own motivations so good habits become routine.
Yesterday evening I attended a community meeting in our neighborhood on the tidal resiliency plan the City of St. Pete is putting together to combat the periodic street flooding we get during high tidal or rainfall events.
The city planning folks in attendance were showing maps of the neighborhood and projected areas of high water during these events. The crux of the issue in Shore Acres is that during spring tides, water from the bay pushes back up the storm drain pipes and comes out the streetside storm drains in some of the lower intersections in the neighborhood. Parts of Shore Acres are like a bowl — the inside actually lower than the outer rim. With such low elevation all around, even a couple inches of difference can mean water covering the entire roadway or a homeowner’s yard.
Streets around our house can get bad:
This graphic makes it look worse than it usually is. Even in high tide + high rainfall combo events, it isn’t this extreme. This is a projection of 30+ year storm events. It does definitely get wet out there, though.
With all of the studies and survey work they’ve done the past few years, the group presented a host of projected improvements that could be done to alleviate the problem — including bioswales, roadway elevation, force mains, pump stations, and even some aquatic plants (grasses, mangroves) out on the sand flats to reduce wave action.
Near our house would be a little bit of everything, if most of the plan goes through. I’m sure they’ll only end up doing a small fraction of the most critical improvements. The full scope of proposed options looks expensive. Most importantly, near the worst of the flooding on our route out of the neighborhood, they’ve proposed a pump station and force main to be installed in a piece of public land in the intersection:
This would be a major overhaul to a decades-old problem of street flooding in Shore Acres. A long overdue bunch of improvements to keep everyone safe and able to get out of the neighborhood if needed.
The City’s overview map of the area really shows why this is a problem. The entire neighborhood was once an estuarine marsh that was essentially converted into manmade “islands”.
I still haven’t published the long backstory on my cancer battle from 2017. It’s still a work-in-progress. There’s a draft going, but I want to make sure I do justice to the whole story properly, and it’s a little hard to spend time on. One day soon I’ll get it out there.
I mentioned a bit about my immunotherapy treatment a few weeks ago. Long story short is that there’s been good news recently, uneventful scans and visits (other than those 90 minute sessions in the MRI tube — not a good time there).
A quick update from today’s visit with the oncologist: I’ve graduated from a monthly schedule of checkups and diagnostic bloodwork to a 3-month cycle. After having multiple visits over there per week, to only a couple per month, then monthly, spending less time in that office is a welcome change.
There’s been a draft post in my archive for months to tell a longer version of the story on my cancer diagnosis and treatment. It’s been something that’s hard to write up in detail — hard to muster the motivation to spend time on the topic any more than I have to. I’ve had good news since late 2017, but still dwelling on it too long is not something I’m interested in. Usually would rather move on to other things.
But reading this book I couldn’t help but post about my experience. I did so today on a Twitter thread (mostly since I have more reach there than here), but here it is for posterity, assembled in a format easier to consume for those not on Twitter.
I'm currently reading "The Breakthrough" from @charlesgraeber, a story on the background of immunotherapy treatment for cancer. A few thoughts on this from a patient, survivor, and receiver of one of these treatments. (1/x)
I’m currently reading “The Breakthrough” from @charlesgraeber, a story on the background of immunotherapy treatment for cancer. A few thoughts on this from a patient, survivor, and receiver of one of these treatments. (1/x)
2/ In late 2017 after my second surgery for stage IV colon cancer, I got permission to receive an immunotherapy (nivolumab, AKA Opdivo) near the end of my chemo regimen.
3/ My 2nd surgery had removed what they could see on any of the scans prior, but I wasn’t out of the woods yet — after surgery I had about 4 more rounds of chemo and a year of the immunotherapy treatment ahead.
4/ I always had an okay response to the chemo until some neuropathy set in toward the end. Only mild nausea along the way. I was on FOLFOX, which can be rough for many patients, but probably my young age & good health made it easier to take.
5/ But once that was over and I was only on the immunotherapy, the contrast between the treatment methods of the last 100 years — the triad of “cut-poison-burn” (surgery-chemo-radiation) — and IT was enormous. I had 2 of those, and of course, neither was a comfortable experience.
6/ Immunotherapy is a completely different thing. Rather than acting on the mutated cells, it acts on your immune system. Cancer cells do what they do by duping your immune system into not attacking them.
7/ Immunotherapy treats your immune system (to activate, in the case of nivolumab) — blocking this signal from cancer cells so the T cells will attack.
8/ I got a dose of nivolumab every 2 weeks for 30 minutes via IV, with zero side effects. I would get an infusion w/ an hour visit to the clinic, then head to work like nothing happened. My blood chemistry would fluctuate a bit, but not enough to create noticeable side effects.
9/ An eye-opening moment that highlighted my own good fortune was learning how new this treatment really is. Nivolumab wasn’t FDA-approved for colon cancer until late July 2017 — nearly a month after I was initially diagnosed.
10/ The timing was perfect, and I have a world-class treatment team at @mayoclinic that were up to speed on the latest treatment options, trials, and genetic testing strategies required to fit patients to options.
11/ Here we are about 6 months beyond my last round of immunotherapy treatment. Two sets of follow up MRIs were all clear. Back to normal life with a renewed respect for how quickly it can go south on you.
12/ I wanted to call attention to this book and can attest to first-hand experience with immunotherapy. It’s a generational medical breakthrough that’s not well known enough when it comes to cancer treatments.
13/ It should be celebrated & reinforced, with more public success stories. There’s a chance that this is the treatment methodology that shatters this disease forever.
14/ Last thing: If your doctor recommends a colonoscopy, do NOT avoid it. It’s not that bad a procedure and can find all sorts of bad early signs well ahead of an advanced stage. It’s much, much, much easier than what might happen down the road if you avoid early detection!
We’ve now got the bulk of our essentials sorted through and moved over to the new house. There’s plenty of work left to do to get our old house emptied and ready for listing, but the hard work is done. Now comes the fun part of getting situated and organized in the new place to enjoy it.
A 26’ truck, 3 trips between houses, and 1 trip to the storage unit got us all set to now reduce the problem to basic cleaning and finishing a handful of half-done projects in the old house.
The kids are all set with their stuff at the new place — already excited about 5 minute walks to the park!
We’ve started moving what we can over to the new place. This weekend was our first free time to get some of it done, but we still had a couple of family commitments both Saturday and Sunday that occupied time. Between that and the kids in the way we got a few large items and boxes moved, but plenty left to go.
We closed today on our new house. It’s only about 10 minutes away from where we live now, but a nicer neighborhood, more space, a larger garage, closer to parks, with better school access for the kids. We’re excited about finally making this jump after talking about it for 4+ years. We’ve always liked where we live currently, the location and the house, but we’ve outgrown it with two little people now here. There’s been no packing or moving yet; we’re on our way to Jacksonville tomorrow for medical follow-up stuff. So all the fun moving will have to wait til we get back.
Today we got to see the touring production of Hamilton in Tampa. It’s every bit as good as the hype.
I’m a history nerd already, so the subject matter is right up my alley. I read the book a couple of years ago and enjoyed it tremendously. I hope that the level this has reached in popular culture has increased peoples’ interest and respect for American history.
Since I started my daily writing routine a few months ago, I’ve posted tons of links to interesting things. Sometimes I do “link posts” (like this one), and I’ve been consistently doing my “Weekend Reading” series on Saturdays.
I wanted a way to catalog these links such that I could generate an archive page with a history of all of them.
With Jekyll there are always several ways to work up a solution to a problem. I decided to try out this method using a specifically-defined links array in the front matter of any post to drop a URL and title into a grouping that I can use to build a link archive page. Check out the link archive here.
Front matter
In order to do this in a way that “just works” with the normal page generation, without requiring plugins or custom generator code, I’m using a special block in the front matter of posts. With this technique, any post (even random full articles with interesting links) can have a links array up top to include whatever links I want to.
Each link has a url and title property which I use to build the links archive page.
Link index page
To create the full link index, I loop over each post and collect the entries in the links array. Then use those parameters to create each row:
{% for post in site.posts %}
{% for link in post.links %}
<tr><td><ahref='{{ link.url }}'>{{ link.title }}</a></td></tr>
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
There’s room to improve this some, but I wanted something to get started with. This is a good start for keeping a chronological record of interesting things I’m reading over time.
With 2018 in the rear view, it’s time to set some goals for 2019.
Here are some things I want to focus on, and some markers to aim at by year end.
Health
Run 500 miles — At just under 10 per week on average, this feels achievable, but will require consistency. A fall off the track will be hard to catch up from. I’d like to do some races in here, also.
Eat better — Nothing specific here. More cooking at home, more plants, less grease/fat, less quantity, more fish, more variety.
Meditate 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week (a total of 43 hours) — I’m enjoying this so far, want to get it closer to an automatic habit. It’s always something I enjoy having done once it’s done, but I don’t always look forward to it yet. As I’m learning, mindfulness practice can be frustrating once you know what you’re supposed to be doing.
Reading, Learning, and Writing
Read 50 books — I did almost this many this year. It’s doable.
Learn and do some work with R.
Get better with SQL.
Keep working on cartography and keeping up with open source geo (QGIS, PostGIS, OpenStreetMap)
Continue writing every day, 365 posts. Combining this with the reading habit is working well. I like using the process of writing “reviews” of books as a way to digest and think about what I read. If I could put together a full year streak, I’d be elated.
Professional
Go big with Fulcrum Community — We have some plans in store for this. Exciting to think about; time to execute.
Launch two new products — Good progress here already, will be bringing them public probably midway through the year.
Improve our product narratives all around — This goes for internal and external purposes.
Other
Take the kids on a trip, just the family — Not sure where, but somewhere out west would be fun.
Buy a new house — Working on this now. Kind of a big deal, but we’ll see!
I’m planning on putting together a tracking tool so I can keep myself honest on progress. I’ll publish something on that in the coming weeks once I get it figured out. I’ll also put some reminders on the calendar to revisit my progress here on the blog once a quarter.
2018 was a good year, both personally and professionally. Rather than a long-winded post about everything that happened, here’s a brief summary of accomplishments, major events, family stuff, and travel.
Traveled to NYC, San Francisco, Atlanta, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Toronto, St. Augustine, and Boston.
Ran 214 miles in 66 separate runs. (This one is particularly special to me. Since I had two major abdominal surgeries in August and October 2017, with a 12” scar running down my belly, I’m glad I’ve been able to push and get back up to pre-surgery pace.)
Completed immunotherapy treatment in November. Clear scans mean I’m on “maintenance” for the foreseeable future, with scans every 3 months for now. Probably the best “accomplishment” of the year!
Wrote a post per day here since October 4th. 88 days in a row.
Began practicing mindfulness once a day. Going strong the last month and enjoying it.
Family
Everett turned 1, started crawling at 8 months, climbing at 10 months, walking at 11 months (yes, he was climbing ladders and stools before walking 🤷🏽♂️).
Elyse turned 3, started school 3 days a week, and switched to a new school 5 days a week. She loves every second of it.
Colette and I celebrated our 10th anniversary!
Professional
We reached over 1800 customers of Fulcrum. It’s been used by customers in 180 countries. Zooming back to when we launched the platform in 2011, I never thought we’d achieve what we have so far (and it feels like we’re just getting it figured out).
A few weeks back I had an opportunity to catch a game at Fenway Park for the first time. That’s definitely a bucket list item checked off.
Tim got tickets last minute, some great seats down past the bend on the third base side, beneath the Monster. It was a beautiful night, with Chris Sale on the mound against the Blue Jays.
I’ve been collecting paper maps for years. It’s one of the few collection habits I’ve allowed myself to keep (well, including books). Some time back I wanted to inventory all of them. So I built an app in Fulcrum to log the title, source, publishing date, and photos of each.
My collection’s up to 210 now. I’m working on a way to publish this. The other similar app I built a while back is a “map of maps”, basically a similar structure to my collection, but actually geotagging out in the world where I run across maps — park signage, street areas, outdoor mall floor plans, transit maps, and the like. I should set up a Fulcrum Community project to share out for folks to help build the ultimate map of public maps.
