It’s been another week already? Well, I guess that means it’s time for another blog post!
Monday was fairly routine – nothing particularly noteworthy to report. Just the typical start-of-week meetings and catching up on projects.
However, Tuesday brought a fun change of pace as I headed down to the Farm Progress Show in Decatur with some coworkers. For those not familiar, it’s the nation’s largest outdoor agricultural event, and this year marked its 20th anniversary at the permanent Decatur site. The scale of the show is always impressive, and it’s fascinating to see all the latest innovations in farming technology, both from our company and competitors.
This week was mostly back to my normal routine, with a few bright spots that made it memorable.
Monday started off on a high note when one of my coworkers brought in homemade blueberry pie to celebrate a team member’s birthday. There’s something about unexpected office treats that just makes the whole day better – and this pie was no exception!
After a week away, this week it was back to the office, and a semi-normal schedule. Well… okay, half-normal. I had a coworker from Fargo visiting this week, which meant a few extra meetings, and a few extra meals out!
Monday was pretty standard, preparing for the week ahead and catching up on a few things I’d missed while out.
Tuesday we had multiple vendors meeting in for meetings, so I was barely at my desk all day. In the evening we took our coworker out to La Fiesta for dinner and drinks.
The past week was both more and less eventful than normal. How’s that possible, you ask? Let me explain…
Sunday afternoon I packed up and drove to visit family for the week, doing a remote work/vacation hybrid.
Monday through Friday I spent working during the morning/afternoon, with lunches and dinners with family.
Monday evening my mom, sister, and I baked pizzas for the family, and experimented with a few different flavors. The traditional/meat lover’s was my favorite, but everything turned out well.
I promise I’m not a food blogger, nor am I aspiring to be one, but I like to take photos of tasty food when I’m out, and I was out to eat with coworkers a few times this week, and so… this week’s update is going to include some food photos. 😂
Monday was overall a pretty normal day, not much to report.
Tuesday through Friday I had a coworker from Sunnyvale in town, for some internal meetings on tool consolidation and workflows. This meant a) a lot of our time was taken up in meetings, and b) you guessed it, some food!
Tuesday evening a local coworker and I took our Sunnyvale counterpart out to eat at The 208 House, one of my local favorites. After a long series of discussions during the day, it was great to relax and talk shop without as much pressure to settle on anything specific.
Overall, the past week has been pretty standard, without much to write about.
During the week I largely worked on catching up after being remote for the previous week while visiting family.
I don’t use LLMs much, but a few times during the work week I experimented with various ways to use them, primarily around data summarization. One example: I had a PDF of a presentation that I wanted to summarize in an email, and instead of manually authoring the entire email myself, I opted to see how well an LLM do at converting it into a semi-formal email. And I must say, I was surprised. The phrasing didn’t feel like how I would word things at times (unsurprisingly), so I did a lot of tweaking prior to actually sending the email, but it did help breeze past the monotonous part of the work. Whether that’s good or bad I have yet to decide…
During my off-hours (evenings/weekend) I mostly worked on my family genealogy. I had received a large chunk of information from my great-uncle while in Ohio that I did not have incorporated into my database, so I spent probably 8-12 hours poring over the data and corroborating everything with records online when possible.
For those interested - I use Family Search for most of my initial research, and Gramps as my software/database.
Speaking of which - if you’ve never worked on family history before - the amount of records that have been digitized that you can now access for free online is staggering.
The weekend of course also included yardwork, housework, and Divine Service on Saturday (all as normal).
This week we had a coworker from Fargo visiting our office, so Monday saw an earlier morning than normal in the office, anticipating their arrival.
For lunch we catered a meal to the office and had a lunch & learn to give the team an opportunity to learn more about a project that the visiting coworker has been involved with.
Monday evening was filled with preparations for travel, as I planned to visit family Tuesday - Sunday.
Tuesday morning I met coworkers for breakfast, then headed the office for a morning of meetings. By around 1p I was done, and then it was last minute packing, and off to Ohio!
I worked remotely from Ohio Wednesday - Friday, taking time over lunch to visit with family, and enjoying time together in the evenings.
Thursday evening we invited my paternal great-uncle over for dinner (brisket - yum!), and afterwards some reminiscing on family history, followed by a few games of Pepper (a Euchre variant popular where I grew up).
Friday evening our family went to Two Bandits for dinner & drinks (see pictures below), and afterwards my sister and I went for an extended walk (I thought it was going to be a little over a mile… pretty sure it was over two).
