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.
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…
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.
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.
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!
This week was my first week back in the office after spending the last week and a half visiting family.
Monday was mostly spent either in airports, in the air, or preparing to fly… for the first time ever, I flew home from visiting family in Ohio instead of driving, which meant I had to go through ORD on my way back to central Illinois. Overall the flights went well, but I definitely don’t enjoy sitting in airports. I was ready to be home.
Wednesday morning I had the pleasure of giving a tour of our ops center to our AWS reps while they were onsite for a visit. I’ve given tours off and on to various vendors over the past year, and was requested to step in once again. I find it fun and engaging to explain what our products do, and how they are manufactured.
Thursday and Friday I primarily spent helping a team at work track down a customer issue. I think by Friday evening/Saturday morning we came up with a good solution, and I spent part of the day Saturday doing testing from my work-from-home setup (I never fully tore down my test equipment from during 2020-2022).
Saturday morning, after coffee, it was time to start catching up on yard work, followed by work around the house. A downside of travel is definitely the number of things that pile up!
Over the weekend I also decided that I need to watch my diet more closely again. I noticed myself gaining a few extra pounds over the past two months, and I want to get back to what I consider a healthy, comfortable weight.
Sunday, after church and shopping, I decided to try out RuneScape: Dragonwilds. I’ve been an on-again/off-again player of RuneScape (now RS3) for years, and whenever Jagex offers a new game I normally at least try it out. I can see how Dragonwilds could be fun, but I’m not sure if it’s a game I’ll keep playing longterm. It seems to me to take longer to progress than I really have time for with my current workload.
Inadvertently, Sunday afternoon I also found a useful new piece of software. I was planning to use my trusty ScanSnap to scan and file mail from while I was gone, but the scanner refused to work right on my Mac. I could have attempted to use my Windows machine, but let’s face it, I try to use that as little as possible, and primarily for gaming if anything. So I did some research, and after a little experimentation, landed on using NAPS2 on Arch LInux, which worked like a charm. I may actually move to using my Linux laptop for this work going forward, as I’ve been unhappy with my macOS-based workflow for a while (ScanSnap -> File System -> DEVONThink).
… And, it looks like we might be getting some bad weather this week (hello Spring storms)… 😞
Monday morning was spent hiking with my sister and second cousin, followed by some meetings, and then some afternoon canoeing! I definitely did not pack appropriately for warm weather and canoeing, which means I was definitely wearing a polo and jeans. I’m sure I was a sight to behold!
Tuesday morning, my brother, sister, and I flew out of Charlotte to Fort Wayne, so that I could spend the rest of Holy Week with my family. Tuesday afternoon involved a little work, but mostly shopping for groceries for the remainder of my stay, and unloading my suitcase. My sister is (thankfully) kind enough to let me stay at her house when in the area, which is much nicer than a hotel (and more cost effective!).
Wednesday was pretty standard; remote work, combined with laundry. I normally prefer to not do laundry while traveling, but since I only used a carry-on for the trip, I had to make an exception.
Thursday and Friday included additional remote work during the day, combined with services in the evening.
Saturday was overall fairly chill for me. I went with my sister to color eggs with some family friends in the morning, and in the afternoon my dad and I worked to troubleshoot a computer at my sister’s business. It took us a while to find the issue, though eventually we realized that somehow a RAM stick had come unseated. Problem solved!
Saturday evening I also started showing my brother how to use Hugo to create a basic website. So far it’s mostly just a landing page, but I’m hopeful that he’ll eventually come to enjoy working on his site as much as I do mine!
Sunday was Easter, which meant being up very early for sunrise service! My sister (and mother) convinced me to sing in the choir, which my sister is the director of, which meant I had to be to the church even earlier than normal… but, it was fun! And afterwards, we got to enjoy an Easter breakfast!
Sunday for lunch we had smoked chicken, which was delicious (thanks mom & dad!), and then followed up with a fairly relaxed afternoon. I spent some time assisting with IT-related efforts at my parents’ and sister’s house, as I normally volunteer to do when visiting.
And that brings me to Sunday evening (now) as I’m writing this! I think we’re going to play a few games this evening, but otherwise we don’t have much planned.
Sunday and Monday I had a chance to once again delve back into embedded software development. Nothing overly complicated, mostly data piping, but it was nice to have an opportunity to code again.
Wednesday morning was spent with two coworkers preparing for our summer offsite. I haven’t been heavily involved before, but it’s the same team that I’ve worked on Christmas events with in the past, so we are used to working together.
Wednesday evening and early Thursday were spent finalizing preparations for some upcoming travel. Thursday afternoon I hopped on a plane and headed south for a few days to visit family!
The final few days this week were spent visiting my extended family in the Carolinas. Some of my extended family lives in the Charlotte area, and so my entire immediate family headed down to visit over the weekend.
Friday was mostly spent working remotely, and in the evening I went with my uncle to pick up my sister at the airport.
Saturday, we spent the morning helping to prepare for one of my second cousin’s graduation party, and then went to her senior violin & viola recital in the afternoon, followed by the party at their house in the evening.
This morning (Palm Sunday), most of my immediate family visited a Lutheran Church in the Charlotte area that is much more high church/traditional than what I’ve been to before. It was definitely a very interesting experience!
And finally, this afternoon my immediate and extended families visited the Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, only some portions were blooming since it’s still early in the year, but the parts that were blooming were beautiful, and it was a great excuse to walk around and enjoy the outdoors!
