Happy Birthday to me!

I splurged and got myself a new job working in the private sector. No more contracting to the government. 🎉

Floor excavations brought to you by overflowing washing machine. I’m up to 6 layers between vapor barrier, tiles, floor, subfloor and carpet.

Wasn’t planning to start project Remove All Carpet. But wet floors are good motivation.

I saw this amazing back pack at the airport. It’s amazing!

MillennialLifeCrisis offers up a good reminder about Doin' it for the gram…

Sometimes those cliff-hanging dare devils are only daring with their photo cropping skills.

Today’s walk felt good. A nice mid 50° day after Christmas and before the new year.

I needed to get up and take a walk this morning. I set out along a nice road paralleling train tracks so there’s no cross streets.

I passed a stump holding up part of a fence in a small yard.

A friendly pole did its job holding up power and communication lines without complaint.

Near the Midway point of my walk I passed the Bowen & Company, Inc site. I love old signs on buildings. There’s fewer around as the areas get developed and turned into luxury services or condos.

Across the street is a Pure Barre studio.

I find it remarkable, at this point, how drawing for him still has nothing to do with the results. He does not care what you do with his drawings after he’s done making them. How he draws is intense and adorable at the same time: he will put down a few lines, and then stand back and shake while he admires them.

Source: A year of drawing - Austin Kleon

Some of my favorite things are drawings my nephew has made for me. I display “Pizza Whale” on my office wall and admire it often.

Joshua Specter linked to a post in his newsletters saying When You Follow Someone New On Social Media, Post About It

Let’s say you find someone interesting to follow on social media. Awesome. Now, spread the word about them.

And today, Spained-based tech and short story writer Riccardo Mori, pointed me to Mr. Mobile Michael Fisher

twitter.com/morrick/s…

So there’s two to start with.

Helping my dad sort his house for sale. I came across some treasures.

Washington has discovered that champions can live here. So why tolerate, let alone support, an atrociously run and constantly embarrassing franchise with a moral compass that is as twisted as a corkscrew?

Perfectly sums it up. Capitals won the Stanley Cup in 2018. The Mystics won the WNBA Championship this year. The Nationals won the World Series this year. The Redskins can’t score a touchdown.

Is your Roku acting up after buying Pokemon Sword or Shield?

Apparently the Pokemon game on your Nintendo Switch sends traffic similar to what Roku uses and the Roku streaming stick is too dumb to figure that out. So it freaks out and crashes.

Fix is to play Pokemon game with Switch offline (airplane mode) or move the Switch and Roku to different networks.

Do not try to update your router’s firmware at 11pm.

It could brick your router and after spending 2 hours trying to manually reinstall it using TFTP, you’ll still have no working router and be 2 hours more tired the next day.

[caption id=“attachment_581” align=“aligncenter” width=“976”] ‘Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.’[/caption]

I think about this quote a lot. This book confirmed a lot about what I think about work and working better. It also taught me some things I wish I had the power to implement.

I feel like I’ve written about this before - can’t remember whether it was here or not, but when trillion-dollar companies complain that things are “hard”, what they really mean is that they “do not want to do them” or that they are “not that important”, or perhaps more tellingly, that “there is no [perceived] profit in doing it”. Because, lest we forget, Google is a company that went from zero to having a gigantic fleet of sensor-laden cars driving around every single road in as many countries as they could, just so you could look at shops and the less said about having more data to sell ads against, the better.

Dan Hon's newsletter

Dan is talking about using Maps to find the safest route home. That’s a problem Maps can’t do for me yet. For all of the smart tools available to us, most of them aren’t very smart at all.

If you’re looking for a less anxious November, CJ is going to post 30 tips in 30 days to decrease your anxiety.

[caption id=“attachment_562” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Status: 2019-10-20 15.02.39[/caption]

Spookster and Cackles

The newest additions to my collection of Birds in Hats.

There’s a Sears store going out of business and there is a wide variety of body parts for sale.

We had our solar system installed today. No more roof just hanging around not contributing to the household. No longer will sunny days be solely the source of sweat and discomfort.

Once the work is inspected, I can flip a switch as 21 solar panels will capture the sun’s rays and send them into The Grid.

Almost didn’t make it into the parking deck. The attendant apologized to me as I had to duck walking down the entrance ramp.

The FDA has a wall covered in tiny scientists.