Weekly Notes 2025.03

• This year was Precision Planting’s annual Winter Conference! I had very little to do this year, but attended a number of the sessions on Tuesday, and then met with colleagues from other offices + vendors & suppliers throughout the rest of the week!
• Some of the meetings included dinners out, which means I had the opportunity to try a few restaurants I’ve not been to before: Joe’s Original Italian & Martini Bar in Peoria and the newly-opened 208 House in Morton, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed!
  • Both restaurants had unique takes on Old Fashioned’s that I greatly enjoyed. I don’t recall the name of either, but Joe’s was some like “Rye Not Coffee Old Fashioned”, and I think The 208 House had an Apricot Old Fashioned? Either way, strongly recommend both, if those are flavors you might enjoy!
• I attempted to switch a few coworkers to Kagi this week. I’ve been using it nearly exclusively for almost a month now, and I continue to be thoroughly impressed with it!
• I spent the weekend largely relaxing, and taking some down time after a fairly hectic schedule during the week.
• One of the topics I spent time on this weekend was game design - I’ve been hooked on a few different YouTube channels with game-design-specific content, and while I don’t think I’d ever devote much time to it (as it’s a very time-consuming project), some of the concepts are interesting to me!
• I also managed to get distracted watching some more of The Office again… I’m now through Season 5.

An Amusing Incident at the Office

I’ve shared this story with a few coworkers and family members, and decided to write up a short post to share with y’all as well. I’ve left out the names of those involved, purely out of a respect for their privacy, and used only titles as descriptions for the story.

As a part of my current job, it is fairly common for me to have meetings with various vendors, and this past Thursday was no exception. As I was walking between buildings to get to a meeting with a vendor that had stopped by our offices while in town, I met one of my coworkers, the IT manager, and we stopped to chat briefly.

Weekly Notes 2025.02

• I enjoyed reading Manu’s On the importance of friction this week. I don’t really intentionally create friction anywhere in my personal life, but I am somewhat intentional with where I introduce automation.
• I’ve been working on restarting my daily notes habit in Obsidian. I slacked off some during the holidays, and it’s taking effort to remember to jot down my thoughts. I mainly do it for the ability to review what was occurring at a later date, as life can get insanely busy at times.
• This weekend, and into early next week, are very cold. Not the coldest I’ve ever seen, but with windchills that definitely make me appreciate the indoors!
• I spent some time Saturday working on distant portions of my family tree. I enjoy continuing to make progress as I have time, and it’s a project that’s easy to pick up for an hour at a time.
• I keep thinking that the idea of doing a simple Roguelike game for fun & learning sounds interesting, and I spent some more time poking at the idea on Saturday. But I didn’t make much progress…
• Since I’m spending time indoors, I spent a bit of time this weekend looking into markdown-based documentation solutions (web-based). No idea where I’ll land, but the top three contenders currently are:
  • Hugo with the Hextra theme, which I’m quite familiar with, and have been playing around with for over a month now.
  • Docusaurus, which is completely new to me. It takes the static site approach as well, but has some added niceties over Hugo, though with some added complexity in design.
  • Quartz, which looks very similar in many ways to Obsidian Publish (and, to be fair, that’s how I found them - I was looking for a similar offering).
• I very briefly played with adding link posts to my website, and promptly deleted them. The concept didn’t work as well as I thought it might. 😂

Weekly Notes 2025.01

I decided to try out weekly notes again this year, and attempt to find a happy balance between whatever caused me to avoid them by mid-ways through last year, and the alternative, which is going for months at a time without posting, if I’m not careful. 😂

• This was the first full week back at work after the holidays. I worked Jan 2/3 as well, but neither day felt particularly productive, as it was the first time seeing coworkers since before the break.
• Jan 6 marked the 11 year anniversary of my website. I have some ideas for a blog post around recent changes, but it’s still on the back-burner.
• Jan 7 marked my 20 year in-game anniversary for my oldest RuneScape 3 account. I don’t play very often anymore, but I logged in long enough to pick up my 20 year cape. 🎉
• I got obsessed with planning out how to manage my photo library. I think I’ve settled on Immich as my primary location, with Backblaze backups, as it gives me better overall control than Synology, and allows me to store files locally. I like iCloud Photos in general, but I get annoyed at some of the behavior (especially around uploads), and I like having multiple copies of things I find important.
• It’s snowed a few times, so I’ve added “shovel driveway” to my workout routine. 😂

2024 Year in Review