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. 😂

Weekly Notes 2024.17 & 2024.18

• Once again, this is a combined post! I didn’t have much occurring during the week of 2024.17 noteworthy, outside of work.
• This past weekend, when I would have normally posted my weekly notes, I was busy working to finish off some projects that were piling up both at home and in the office. So I held off, instead of forcing myself to write.
• This week was shortened for me; the first 3 days were in-office, then I was traveling to visit family (more on that ahead). The trip itself was long, but I finished off a re-listen to a book I was working on, so the time flew by relatively quickly.
• My primary reason for traveling? This weekend, I had the joyful privilege of attending the wedding of two of my cousins! My cousins (brothers), Seth & Josh, married sisters (Katie & Gloria), on the same day, in a joint ceremony. It was great to be able to celebrate with them, and congratulate them as each couple begins their new journeys in life together!
• Today (Sunday) also included a special event: Lori, the director of the choir at the church I was raised in, retired after 33 years, and many former choir members (including myself), joined in to surprise her, and celebrate her service in song during the Divine Service, and again afterwards at a potluck. 🙂

Read

• Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Listened To

• The Talk Show With John Gruber: 399: ‘I decapitated the MacBook Air’, With Federico Viticci

Weekly Notes 2024.16

• At this point, I should just summarize every week this Spring with “work is very busy, and I haven’t done much besides that of note.” 😂 (Of course, that’s boring reading though, so I won’t do that.)
• I continued my meal planning this week, which included running across a tasty and easy Chili recipe. I was tempted to make it again next week, but I probably should have some diversity in my meals.
• As you’ll see in my Read section (below), I went on a kick reading how others use OmniFocus, and I pulled a few ideas from Scotty Jackson’s article that I’ve implemented into my own system.
• This weekend, I removed my /now page from my website. It was a fun idea, but I found updating it tedious, especially when I’m busy. And a /now page that doesn’t get updated isn’t particularly useful…
• I also spent some time playing Voxel Tycoon, a game that I’ve played on and off for a few months. Something about this type of strategy game can be very fun for me.

Read

• Productivity In Three Dimensions of OmniFocus
• On Managing Life
• Omnifocus My Way

Listened To

• ATP Insider: Computing Origin Stories
• Mac Power Users: 740: “From The Beatles to The Libertines,” with Lee Garrett

Watched

• The Beekeeper (2024)

Weekly Notes 2024.15

• The past week was pretty busy at work, with a combination of meetings, project kickoffs, and Spring beta testing/troubleshooting. And this weekend, as I publish this update, I’ve been crunching on a project as well, so I don’t feel like taking much time to write…
• I did, however, make a bit of a change to something personally though… For the first time in years, I designed a weekly menu, and actually roughly stuck with it. This got me both purchasing a few foods I am not used to at the store, and also being a bit more conscious of exactly what I was eating day to day.
• Speaking of changes… During the week, for some reason, I got very annoyed at Todoist and am back on OmniFocus. I’m not sure if it’s a coping mechanism for when I feel overwhelmed, or if there are features of OmniFocus I was missing in Todoist… 🤷‍♂️
• I’m also strongly considering changing the format/content of these posts. I enjoy having a short outline of what I’ve done, interesting things, etc, but the time commitment to write it up discourages me if I’m at all busy. And there are times of my life when I am, in fact, pretty busy. Perhaps I’ll switch to just notable podcasts vs every podcast I listened to?

Listened To

• Issues, Etc.: 1033: The Teaching of Limited Atonement - Dr. Jordan Cooper
• Mac Power Users: 739: Checking in on Freeform

Watched

• Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

Weekly Notes 2024.13 & 2024.14

• The last week in March (Holy Week), I was traveling for both work and to visit family, and didn’t take the time to write up my weekly notes. So this post is going to include two weeks.
• On the Wednesday of Holy Week, I was in the office for a few hours, then headed to Ohio to visit family, and to do some heads-down remote work. I’ve found that for certain projects, I really need to have dedicated time away from the office to focus if I want to complete the work in a reasonable amount of time…
• Thursday through Sunday were a mix of church services for Holy Week (which included some of my absolute favorite hymns), along with a fair amount of remote work, in an attempt to finish the aforementioned project.
• Monday started early with some travel for work, followed by a late afternoon/early evening trip back to Illinois. Then, Tuesday through Friday were back in the office for a fairly busy week of work.
• Thankfully, this weekend I’ve had some downtime, which have included some reading, some catching up on chores and projects around the house, and a little gaming.
• Speaking of gaming… I’ve enjoyed playing RuneScape over the years, and on Saturday (4/6) I finished the 2024 April Fools event, which brought Benchsitting as a new skill to the game.

Weekly Notes 2024.12

• The past week was once again relatively uneventful, with work consuming a lot of my time.
• I found out mid-week that you can right click on a contact’s name in Slack, and copy the link to a Slack Huddle with them, then paste that to a meeting invite, so that scheduled meetings can take place directly in Slack. I won’t have a use for that often, but I may use it for scheduled lightweight meetings on occasion.
• Over the weekend I worked on setting up a computer I need for a work project with Ubuntu, and decided to go ahead and pay for/set up Ubuntu Pro on it as well. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I like the idea of a paid subscription, but live Kernel updates and 10 years of ESM seems worthwhile for a system that I’m not touching on a day to day basis.

Listened To

• Accidental Tech Podcast: 579: Use Your Words
• Clockwise: 546: Taco iPad
• Congressional Dish: CD289: The Not A TikTok Ban Bill
• Connected: 494: Esse Tiere
• Cortex: 153: What Even Is an Office?
• DTNS/Good Day Internet: How Do You Keep Listener’s Interested? - Editor’s Desk
• Getting Things Done: 250: Projects and Someday Maybe Lists
• Issues, Etc.: 0782: The Bible and Gender Ideology - Dr. Mark Rockenbach
• Issues, Etc.: 0802: Dealing with Pornography’s Temptation - Daniel Weiss
• Just and Sinner: Is the Christian Forgiven of Past, Present, and Future Sins at the Moment of Conversion?
• Just and Sinner: Sola Fide: Justification by Faith
• Just and Sinner: What’s Wrong with the Modern Conception of Rights?
• Just and Sinner: Sola Scriptura: Scripture Alone
• Just and Sinner: From Reformed to Lutheran
• Late Night Linux: 273
• Linux Matters: the Joy of Linux Torture
• Mac Power Users: 736: Maintaining & Caring For Your Apple Hardware
• The Rebound: 487: Have You Tried NOT Going Viral
• Upgrade: 504: Tone 47
• We’re Not Wrong: About Sonia Sotomayor retiring and the death of Electric Vehicles

Watched

• Friends, S01E05 - S02E01