fontosaurus

The Lawn

For the first time ever, our lawn looks better than the neighbors’ — only because I was the first one to break out the lawnmower. I used the time to put eyeballs on things around the house that need to be addressed (the deck needs some work), but mostly I just plowed through what I had to do, as Kate wanted to get out of there for her Mother’s Day dinner. We’re probably going to invest in a leaf blower (due to my bad upper back), and some serious crabgrass control.

The Bike Stuff

Fabrication, and lots of it. Along with working on a new logo design. I don’t know if this one will stick, but I sure like it so far. Here’s the third screenshot:

Not sure about the placement of the lightning bolt yet. Not sure about the claws, either — they kind of blend in with the tailfeathers. Maybe make them holding a spear? Something.

The fabrication work was rewarding, too:

Eddy Time

Man, this kid is fun. We hung out while Kate was at work and played a lot.

At El Loro, he was pretty fascinated with the mariachi band, and when they were playing our table, he was pretty transfixed…except for the sudden loud words. The first time, he jumped. The second time, he started to cry, which was kind of hysterical.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

• finish proposal for work
• review my 101 Things list and refactor a plan
• finish some fillets on a frame
• convert new logo sketch into vector format
• order parts for Savanna’s frame

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Liked this new theme. Until the point where I realized that the pulldown menus don’t fucking work.

Next.

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Home: Things are good. Eddy’s growing like a weed, and the to-be-named kid hasn’t been doing much more than sapping Kate’s energy and making her really nauseous. The cats are functional — Happy’s having some age issues right now, but other than that, all is well. The house needs some work — we’re going to be getting gardens set up soon, and I need to strip the deck, replace a few planks, and re-stain and re-paint it. I also need to plant some fresh sod around the sump outflow vent, as it never really had a chance to regain its hold last fall after the work was completed.

Work: Pretty good here, too. Am now past the 1 year mark, and my responsibilities are starting to shift, which is interesting. Nothing earth-shattering, just different.

Framebuilding: Chugging along here. About to order all the stuff for Savanna’s college commuter. That’ll probably happen tonight. I’ve got two more that are on the cusp of wrapping up, which is pretty pleasing. I’ll get some photos of those later. There’s some drama in the local framebuilding community that I need to address sometime soon — tonight, actually. I’m not going to propogate said drama, however. All in all, I’m feeling pretty good about these things.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been awhile since I’ve provided any sort of large-ish update on what’s shaking with Eddy. As you can see from the picture above, he looks more like a little boy and less like a baby, which is kind of scary. He’s coming up on sixteen months of age, pretty quickly here…and shortly before his second birthday, he’ll become a big brother.

Language

He’s not super verbal. He has some words that are definitely recognizable, and occasionally nails them — “kitty, please, eat, mama, dada, eddy’s! (indicating want), Momo (his bear)” and probably a few others. While I’ve been a bit concerned about his pace of acquisition, I need to remember that he’s technically two months behind developmentally due to his preemie status, and the last week has seen a huge increase in the frequency and complexity of his babbling. I’ll be interested to see how the next couple of months go, but I’m anticipating a huge explosion in language use.

On the other hand, he definitely recognizes a lot more words than he uses. Ask him where Hobbes is, and he’ll stand there and look around until he finds it. If you’re holding it, he’ll give you this incredulous look like, “What are you? Stupid? It’s right in your hands.” He also understands more complex instructions “go follow daddy,” for example, will see him gather his stuff (usually his blanket and his Momo), and he’ll come toddling after me.

The World

He’s super-quick to figure things out — an item goes in another item or with another item. Categorization is something that’s been blooming a lot lately, too. When we went to the zoo on Sunday, he was quick to recognize that lions, tigers, etc., were all cats, and that the polar bear was a “Momo.” He’s developed a bit of fear of the unknown — he startles and latches onto me or Kate when something loud and unknown happens.

He’s also very interested in the things that Kate and I do — the things we have, and use, he has to have and use, too. He wants adult silverware, anything with a screen or buttons, and would prefer it if he were the one allowed to use the video game controller.

Social

He’s still a total flirt and is generally okay with new people — not all of them, however. Other kids fascinate him.

Motor Skills

He chugs around pretty quickly now and is getting better and better at walking, and barely crawls anymore. He doesn’t flail like he used to, either.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

Productivity = Focus + Time

In the past, I’ve had issues with my productivity because of the formula above — when I had time allocated, I had a hard time focusing. Or when I could focus, I simply didn’t have the time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that the biggest difficulty I have is freeing up time for the things in life I’d like to accomplish. Now that I have come to terms with the limits on my time, it makes me a little more careful about my focus.

Applying it to Real Life™

The trick has been to stay on-task. It used to be that in the workshop, I’d dick around with playlists for the stereo, or follow my curiosity, or what have you. The end result was that I only managed to make positive use out of ~50% of my time. So I’ve taken to scribbling notes on the side when something “curious” pops into my head.

The other part is, as a one-man shop, I need to be on-the-spot with my process and my fabrication. Nothing chews up time faster than fixing a stupid mistake that happened due to inattentiveness.

Next Steps

Keep doing what I’ve been doing since last Thursday — claiming time where I can, and staying focused on what I have to do to accomplish my goals.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

So recently I mentioned that I have been using chains.cc as a personal productivity aid — and thus far, it’s been good for dealing with some small items that had been issues. I’ve gotten very good at hammering away at the daily mundane items, such as taking my vitamins and fiber supplements, and other things that don’t require a lot of pre-planning or thought.

The tool, however, has some limitations, and I’m definitely realizing it — and I’m really considering building my own replacement for it (both web and mobile app). Moreover, it’s making me realize something about the software tools we use in our day-to-day lives.

The Toolbox Analogy

Like the toolboxes in my garage that are full of framebuilding equipment, my bookmarks bar has a slew of tools I use on a day-in-day-out basis. These include chains.cc, Evernote, Kanbanize, FunctionPoint, and Pocket, among others. Some of these are for work, some are for home, and some of these blur the boundary between the two.

When working with physical tools, an okay mechanic is one who can employ each tool competently. A great mechanic can use multiple tools concurrently (or simultaneously). The big problem with web apps is that there are barriers to being able to use those tools concurrently.

The way I see it, there’s currently three levels of doing so.

The first is just being the King (or Queen) of Copy/Paste. This, I’d argue, is what most people do, and it’s a huge timesuck, leaves a ton of room for error to creep in, and is generally speaking the worst possible thing you could do.

The second is using a tool like IFTTT, which is probably pretty rare. IFTTT, for those not in the know, is a if-then based system that ties together some of the tools above (Pocket, Evernote), along with a few others, plus social media, using simple conditional statements to move data around. The downside to IFTTT is that it only allows for very basic logical chains between apps, has a limited subset of apps, and

Lastly, there’s the API, which I’m sure a lot of geeks were howling about the moment I started writing this portion of this entry, to which I say, duh. However, asking Joe Average Desk Worker that wants to join two tools together to fit his own workflow preferences to sit down and figure out how to get two APIs to talk together is ridiculous. While it’s a trivial task for an experienced programmer, Joe Average isn’t going to have the slightest clue, nor enough time to actually learn the process and then to apply it himself.

So What’s the Solution?

I have some ideas here, but I’m only just starting to formulate them, seeing as most of this blog post was written off-the-cuff late at night while the kid was asleep and the wife was at work. I’m thinking that a universal standard for site authentication, and a basic scripting language that’s easy to understand and can be used to bring together two disparate tools in a way that makes sense for the end-user, rather than for the people running the web apps. Maybe something like that already exists — I don’t know.

Maybe there’s a philosophical standard that applies here? Again, I don’t know. I do know that if, as a CSM/PM, I want to tie two tools together and make them interact in a way that’s meaningful to me, I shouldn’t have to pull my hair out.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.

I had a bit of a crisis of faith on the way to A-Train’s on Saturday. I had been considering quitting framebuilding — finishing the builds in my queue, selling off my gear to pay off the debts, and closing up shop. While there, though, I discovered that the front triangle I’ve been working on is so straight it doesn’t even need cold-setting. Win.

This revitalized me a lot. On the marketing side, I registered for Minneapolis WordCamp for next weekend so that I can make better use of my site, which is based on WordPress. I’ve also started going through and optimizing a few things in the workshop, and started framing some goals for 2013.

Originally published at DB.N. Please leave any comments there.