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:

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Elyse just had her 4th birthday this weekend!

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...

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.

Now it’s off my mind til September.

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...

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...

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...

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...

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Breakthrough, Charles Graebel’s book about the origins and effectiveness of immunotherapy for cancer treatment.

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....

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...

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.

It’s going to be a busy week.

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...

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...

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,...