Yesterday afternoon in the office, one of my coworkers asked me (paraphrasing) how I back up my photos so that everything isn’t only in iCloud, and what I would recommend that she do. And, because I’m a geek (and a bit extra at times), instead of just sending her my recommendations, I decided to turn this into a full blog post that I can point others to in the future. 😁
Continue readingOver lunch, some colleagues and I were discussing why Christmas music is its own genre, with specific sounds. For fun, I asked an LLM to generate a plausible but fictitious explanation, and a few seconds later, this amusing anecdote was born…
Christmas music constitutes its own genre due to a rare phenomenon known as Yuletide Acoustic Resonance (YAR). When temperatures drop below 45°F and decorative lighting exceeds 10,000 lumens in a given radius, the human ear undergoes a temporary recalibration that makes jingling bells neurologically indistinguishable from traditional percussion instruments. This is why the same person who despises tambourines in July will enthusiastically tolerate “Jingle Bell Rock” in December.
Continue readingOver the past 48 hours I’ve once again been on a journey to rethink how I take notes. Why? I’ve actually been struggling to answer that question for myself, and I’ve boiled it down into a few potential reasons:
I started using Evernote back in the early 2010s (I think 2014; I’ve not checked the exact date while writing this post), both as a way to store personal notes and documents, and for some work-related project notes.
Continue readingToday is an interesting anniversary for me, one that I never thought to keep track of until about a year ago. You see, on a fateful (but otherwise mostly forgotten) day 11 years ago, I began subscribing to Todoist Pro.
I don’t entirely recall at this point how I stumbled upon Todoist, though I do generally remember why. At the time, I was working for InSource Technologies as an embedded software developer, and I was finding that the amount of tasks & projects that I was keeping track of at work, along with those at home and at church (where I was heavily involved as a volunteer), were making me feel like I was constantly forgetting things.
Continue readingYesterday, in my post on Blogging Expectations, I mentioned the concept of a website as a virtual home, and wanted to expand on it.
I like having a singular place on the internet that I can point people to and say “This is Justin’s virtual home. You want to know what Justin is thinking, or what’s going on? Start here!” And I hope that’s been reflected in my blogging and my site design…
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A few days ago I ran across the post Blogging Expectations by Kev Quirk, and a quick read told me that it was something I wanted to add my commentary to.
…Okay, I just glanced at the date on Kev’s post. “A few days ago” was over a week ago. Apparently my backlog of post ideas is taking longer to review than I anticipated.
Anyhow, today I re-read Kev’s post, and (of course) followed the links to the posts his thoughts were based on, and a few thoughts stuck out to me.
Continue readingToday, while following a blogger/IndieWeb rabbit rail (when I click on a link from someone I follow, and then promptly begin following other links to other sites that interest me), I ran across an excellent post by Naz Hamid on Operating Rules for Email Collaboration, and promptly decided I needed to link to it with light commentary on my site.
I’ve slowly been improving my email usage over time, since my tendency left unchecked is to be verbose. However, I’ve learned that verboseness should not be the norm when communicating via email, as it can cause your thoughts to be lost in the weeds. And now that I am using email much more than earlier in my career, learning to use it well is important.
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