Weekly Notes 2025.23

I haven’t done this often, but I’m going to include a few photos in this update, because… why not? It’s all just food from my trip (which you’ll be reading about shortly). Anyhow… on to the update!

• Monday morning I headed to ORD with some coworkers to fly to Fargo, ND for work. We were originally going to fly out of PIA, but the United flight was delayed enough by early in the morning that we decided to drive instead.
• This was my first time parking at and navigating the external portion of ORD. Overall it went well, but I definitely prefer to fly into O’Hare, not drive…
• Monday evening after we arrived we met our Fargo-based coworkers at Lucky’s 13 Pub, and had an enjoyable few hours catching up.

Weekly Notes 2025.22

• The first part of this week I spent working remotely while visiting family (meetings during the main part of the day, helping on the farm in the morning and afternoon/evenings).
• Monday was my sister’s birthday (Happy Birthday Hannah!, and so in the evening I spent some time after farming celebrating with family and friends.
• Tuesday was largely a repeat of Monday from a work + farming perspective.
• Wednesday morning I started out the day helping do a final fill on the air seeder, and then preparing to travel home, along with a few meetings. For lunch my sister made cocktail meatballs (delicious!), and then all to soon it was time to get in my truck and start driving.
• I drove into rain on the way home, and ended up spending about half of the trip with some level of downpour occurring. Thankfully it didn’t slow me down too much, and the fields definitely needed the water!
• Thursday and Friday I was back in the office. Both days were spent catching up on some meetings and email from being gone, and then for lunch on Friday we went to a local town festival for some turkey sandwiches.
• Saturday and Sunday were largely spent working around the house, catching up from being gone for nearly a week. I also ran into an issue with one of my photo backup solutions, and so I spent a non-trivial amount of time putting a workaround in place.

Weekly Notes 2025.21

• Monday was Memorial Day for the US, and I mostly spent the day relaxing at home, not really working on anything in particular.
• Tuesday through Thursday noon I was in office, with largely a normal schedule/workload. However…
• On Thursday afternoon I headed to Ohio to visit family, and work remote for a few days while also helping out on the farm. Northwest Ohio was running slightly slower on getting crops in due to weather delays than is normally preferable, and the timing worked for me to be in the area for planting.
• Friday and Saturday were spent mostly helping prepare the planter and seeder to run, and starting a few fields that had already dried to an acceptable level.
• On Sunday I went to Divine Service with family, and then visited a local Mexican restaurant for lunch, after which it was (you guessed it) back to farming!

Weekly Notes 2025.20

• I was once again in-office the entirety of this week, and it was a pretty standard schedule for me. Over the summer I’ll probably move back to remote on Fridays, but it hasn’t worked out yet.
• Friday I started out the day with breakfast with coworkers at a local diner. The food was good, but honestly… I think my homemade breakfasts might be tastier!
• I spent a large portion of the weekend rethinking my personal document management system. I’ve been scanning and storing digital copies of most paper documents in my life for over a decade now, but have not been completely happy with my setup for over a year.
  • Initially I used Evernote for this purpose, and was fairly happy with the system, until I decided to migrate away from Evernote.
  • I experimented with multiple options for the next couple of years, but never found one I liked, including Joplin (which worked ok, but felt like the wrong approach), DEVONthink (which was nice, but was iOS/macOS only, and rather expensive), and just the file system (which was not as searchable and ubiquitous as I wanted).
  • Finally this weekend I settled on Paperless-ngx, running on my own server, accessed via Tailscale. I wish there was an offline/native app option, but for now it meets the easy search, ubiquitous, and easy maintenance requirements, so I’ll give it a shot.
• When not migrating and filing documents, I also spent some time working on editing and restoring some older family photos. My current workflow is VueScan for scanning/ingest, a markdown file for keeping notes about each image, Affinity Photo for cropping + setting the created date, and Photoshop for final edits, and cleaning up the image. I’m not entirely happy with all of the tools, and have been looking for an alternate to Photoshop (including GIMP, which is how I normally process slide & negative scans), but I haven’t yet found anything that I like better.

Weekly Notes 2025.19

• This week, I was in the office all five days, though I headed home after lunch on Friday to work remotely in the afternoon. I was fairly busy all week, but nothing specific stands out as something to write about…
• …Until Friday, that is! I was slightly surprised (and then both humbled and grateful) to get mentioned by Shellsharks on Mastodon, in the announcement of Volume Sixteen of the weekly IndieWeb, Fediverse, and Cybersecurity Scroll! I’ve been following Shellsharks’ blog ever since I first found it a few months ago, and I’m honored to have been one of the posts linked to this week!
• Also, Friday for lunch, in a first for me, I tried Chicken & Waffles at Dac’s Smokehouse. I’ve been to Dac’s many times, but as I’ve never had Chicken & Waffles before, I always ignored it and selected a burger or meat plate. However, for whatever reason it sounded interesting this week, and I must say, I’m glad I tried it! It’s not a dish I’ll probably order often, as it’s a little heavy, but the flavor was fantastic!
• Saturday morning was spent doing yard work, followed mostly by relaxing in the afternoon/evening.
• One way I spent some of my time was playing Voxel Tycoon again. It’s been almost a year since I really spent much time playing it, and I had fun starting a new game from scratch, and then slowly expanding tech trees, into new zones, and improving delivery throughput.
• I also spent time Saturday working on scanning and editing some old photographs. I’m still not entirely happy with my workflow - it seems to me that it takes me more time to edit the photos than I’d like, but I’m too picky to just upload the scans directly to my server.
• And on top of photographs, I also worked on some more of my genealogy on Saturday afternoon. Every couple of weeks I try to either add some new data that I haven’t gotten around to yet, or do general maintenance (add supporting documents, clean up locations, etc).
• This weekend I also took a hard look at some of the projects in my Todoist lists, and spent time cleaning up tasks that were completed but that I’d missed checking off, adding plans where needed to move other projects forward, etc.
• On Sunday, my pastor made a reference to Touchstone Magazine in his sermon, which caught my attention, as I’m always on the lookout for interesting articles and magazines. I haven’t chosen to subscribe yet, but I’ll probably pull the trigger soon.
• Sunday has also been a day to do some laundry, and to do some cooking for the week ahead, including a tasty stir-fry that should last me until mid-week.

Weekly Notes 2025.18

• First off: Happy Mother’s Day to both my amazing mother, and all of the other mothers around the world!
• This week’s notes will be a little on the lighter side. It’s a tad out-of-order, but as I type this, I’m working at my home Linux workstation (Arch, btw), which rarely sees much use these days. I should correct that…
• A majority of the week at work was consumed by meetings, preparing for some data migrations, and resolving how various integrations would work.
• Tuesday evening I enjoyed a dinner at Jonah’s Oyster Bar with some colleagues. As is becoming my normal when I visited, I enjoyed blackened salmon, and a nice Old Fashioned. If ever visiting the Peoria, IL area, I strongly recommend checking it out.
• Friday I had flowers delivered to my mother for Mother’s Day. I’m not in person this year (which is not entirely abnormal), but thankfully it is quite possible to coordinate and have flowers delivered to surprise my mom!
• Saturday morning was consumed largely by yard-work, mostly mowing and trimming.
• Saturday afternoon & evening I focused heavily on chores around the house; laundry, dishes, planning the next week of meals, etc.
• I attempted to watch a tv show or two over the weekend as well, but so far my mind hasn’t been in it.
• And that brings us to Sunday (today)! So far today I’ve mostly been relaxing, working on odds and ends after I got home from church + grocery shopping.

Weekly Notes 2025.17

• To get it out of the way… May the Fourth Be With You! (Happy Star Wars Day!) And now, on to the rest of my week!
• Monday I started out the week in the office, mostly with some standard meetings. In the evening I started digging into a software-related issue for work, which I knew would consume most of my time Tuesday as well.
• And I was right! Tuesday I ended up working remote, as that is one of the best ways to focus on a problem for me. I actually woke up early and spend a lot of the day focusing on the issue, since it was top of mind, and fairly urgent.
• Wednesday I was back in the office, though still spending some time in software development, attempting to wrap up my work from Monday/Tuesday. I ran into an interesting issue where two peripherals are sharing a FIFO, and though I’ve read the datasheet and understand what’s occurring, I’ve yet to figure out how to remedy the situation. However, I finished the rest of the work, shelved everything on a branch, and moved on.
• Thursday morning I had a planned meeting with a colleague from Germany that was onsite, which ended up blowing past the original time and extended nearly to two hours. All in all it was good to meet someone from a different part of the org though, and I think it was time well spent.
• Friday I debated whether to work in-office or remote, and ultimately decided to go in. Most of the day ended up spent on small tasks, and I headed home slightly early (well, early for me, not by normal standards), as my brain was running out of steam it seemed.
• However, Friday was also yard work day, and so after I got home I promptly mowed my yard before I was able to actually relax! 😂
• Since my mowing was done, Saturday I spent the day working almost exclusively on side projects. I did quite a bit of work throughout the day scanning and editing old photos, and in between added in a little gaming (once again trying RuneScape: Dragonwilds, though it hasn’t really stuck yet), as well as began the effort of porting my Mastodon and Instagram posts to my website.
• Speaking of data migration to my website: on Saturday, my obsession with consolidating old posts from social media to my website hit a critical point, and so I started out the day by migrating a majority of my old Mastodon posts as status updates. I then followed suit in the afternoon/evening by beginning to migrate my old Instagram posts as well (in the same fashion), and by the end of the day I had most of them ported over.
• Sunday, after Divine Service and grocery shopping, I continued the work of migrating my Instagram posts, and by lunch the work was done. But of course, I couldn’t stop there…
• Sunday afternoon I realized that I could also post the show notes, along with links to the Archive.org archived audio, of my now-defunct podcast that I did with my sister to my website. After about 30 minutes, I had that done, and now almost everything that I posted online since 2014 is hosted here. The only things missing are my videos (maybe I’ll post them, we’ll see), Facebook posts (I no longer have my archive), and Twitter posts (same - I didn’t keep the archive, unfortunately).
• On Sunday I also started listening to a new (to me) audiobook: We are Legion (We are Bob), Book 1 of the Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor. It’s proving to be interesting so far, and I kind of wish I would have started it sooner!
• And with that, my update for the week is done! 🙂