bump

space age madness

Space Age Madness
About / Blog / Kungfumaster

Some things I’m enjoying

By

Here are some things I’ve been enjoying recently, in no specific order. I am not compensated in any way, even referral payments, for these links. Hope I turn someone else onto something they enjoy.

Hydrow Rowing Machine

This is an equivalent for rowing to Peloton, and by all accounts the best interactive rower on the market. I grew up as an endurance athlete, but I just hate riding stationary bikes, and I find rowing a better workout as well. Hydrow offers great instructors, a great community of people to support you as you progress, and it has worked for me. I know, this thing is crazy expensive, and also requires a monthly subscription, but I was able to cancel my gym membership altogether. We’ve had ours for about 11 months now, and I have worked out on it 300 days. This device, and the service it comes with, which includes guided yoga, pilates and strength classes, has been a key to maintaining my sanity and improving my fitness over the last year. Since we purchased it, I have lost about 26 pounds. (I don’t care that much about weight, I care about fitness, but it’s still an encouraging metric.)

Nomad Base Station Stand

I love this little wireless charging stand that I keep on my desk. It holds/charges my iPhone 12 Pro Max in either portrait or landscape, making it great for my ten hour shifts monitoring the live streaming coverage of our events through our app. It also wirelessly charges my AirPods Pro. It’s a game changer to be able to see your phone screen while sitting at your computer.

Tip Top Cocktails

You may not be able to find these too far outside of Atlanta yet, but I’m fairly certain that you will be able to at some point. While most cocktails in a can that I have tried have been, frankly, gross, Tip Top came to the table with Old Fashioned, Negroni and Manhattan cocktails in a well designed can that are delicious, and have become a staple for me. In the last month, they added new Daiquiri and Bee’s Knees cocktails to the lineup, and these two are both a welcome taste of Summer. I am not recommending their Margarita though. Start this Summer with the Daiquiri, you won’t regret it. So great for a delicious cocktail on the go.

Poco Loco Burritos

This neighborhood burrito joint opened last month in Kirkwood, on the edge of the Atlanta/Decatur line. If you are local, I would recommend joining their mailing list, which gives you ordering access to their Wednesday pre-order an hour earlier than people not in the know. Most burritos are protein-rich breakfast bombs, really flavorful and very filling. Each week they change their menu, introducing a new meat burrito, a new veggie burrito and a new frozen burrito, typically all named in some theme. (This week is Steve Martin themed.) There have been weeks, since they opened, when I have consumed one of their burritos for lunch 5 out of 7 days.

New Desk

By

After using the same desk since 1998, I picked up a Jarvis desk from Fully and finally got to set it up over the weekend. It took a few hours to get my home office ready for another desk, and to get my computers and wiring broken down. It took another few hours to assemble the new desk, re-run the cabling to be standing desk compatible, and then to set my gear back up.

I am still waiting for some lighting strips to come in, and I need to spend some more time on cable management, but today is my first day at the new setup, and I can already tell that it’s going to be much better for me overall.

It’s an adjustable height desk, but I think I will primarily use it as a “sit at” desk. I just figured that it would make sense to get it and set it up in case I did want to try out that standing desk life. I wanted something that was a little wider to better accommodate my Mac on one side/PC on the other setup, and having monitor arms installed in the grommets has freed up a lot of desk space.

Some Things I’m Enjoying

By

How are you? I’m doing okay given the circumstances, and I truly hope you’re doing well at this crazy moment in history. I should mention that I am currently looking for a job in digital products and you can read more about my background on my LinkedIn profile. I’m long overdue for some sporadic blog posting, so here goes, here are some things I have enjoyed lately.

Something to Read: A great TechCrunch article by Darrell Etherington about improving your at-home videoconference setup on any budget. This article goes into a lot of detail and has excellent videos inline that help along the way. Even if you think you have a great setup, worth a read.

Something to Listen To: I really enjoyed the most recent episode of Switched on Pop, an excellent podcast about pop music. This episode, Why lo-fi is the perfect background music, covers the rise and origins of lo-fi music, including J Dilla’s influence on its origins and Adult Swim’s role in its popularity. I’ve been listening to a lot of this style of music for a long while, this was a lot of information that I didn’t know, and was very interesting to learn.

Something to Listen On: I’m loving my $20 IKEA Frekvens Portable Speaker. It’s become the speaker that I take out to the backyard to work on some project or to the front porch to listen to something while I have a beer and relax. I don’t think you can order them online, but I highly recommend if you have a means of obtaining. The sound is really good for such a little speaker, and the device was created in conjunction with Teenage Engineering. You may have heard of them because of Playdate, but I’ve wanted an OP-1 since basically forever.

Something to Snack On: I discovered Honey Mama’s, I believe, through the Random Show, which is a podcast that Tim Ferris does with Kevin Rose. In any case, these bars, and I love love love the Mayan Spice flavor, are made with honey, instead of refined sugars, cocoa, and other ingredients depending on the flavor. The Mayan Spice are a little spicy and a little chocolatey, are a nice treat. I will say that these are not cheap, and take a little while to ship if you don’t have a store near you. Worth the price and wait, in my opinion, I just had one after lunch.

Some Upgrades and Updates

By

I made some backend changes to my WordPress config. It seems to make the load time on this site a bit better.

It turned out that the caching setup I was using was, in effect, not caching. Go me. This should just be a temporary change, as I started migrating this whole site over to a static page generator which will host its pages off of an Amazon bucket.

I also updated the about page with my most recent situations and information.

This Old Blog

By

I’ve had some time on my hands the last few weeks, as I’m currently between jobs. It’s been pretty great to have some time off. I was working at Turner for 16 years, spanning four different properties, and a myriad of projects. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with my family, and focusing on what’s important rather than immediate. I’m at the very beginning of my job search, and will likely post more about that here soon, as I need to do some work on my CV first. Turner is a very different place than the one where I started in 2003.

One project that I’ve put off for a very long time is moving this blog to more reliable and modern hosting. Additionally, I have wanted to finally move all the entries into a single CMS. With the 22nd anniversary of this site looming in a couple of weeks, now seemed as good a time as any to try and get this stuff squared away. The site has been on the current host since 2010, and with the advent of cloud hosting, I can actually reduce my cost and greatly improve the speed of the site, which is really terrible at the moment.

Previously, most of the entries that were before March 2000, when I switched the site over to Blogger/Radio Userland as a backend, were sitting in either a flat file, or on this server, which is still somehow up and running.

Over the last two weeks, I have manually been bringing those older entries over to this existing server. This will allow me to export everything from WordPress as a single set of combined entries. Unfortunately, there were a few hundred entries, and so it took quite a while.

Happily, I just finished this task. It meant having to read what the me from 20 years ago was thinking about, which was dreadful at times. It was also cathartic. I’m quite embarrassed by what younger me thought and the quality of my writing in the earliest entries was atrocious. Having said that, this won’t keep me from leaving these entries intact. I think it’s honest to leave them as is.

This migration poses some issues that still need to be resolved. For instance, most of the links in the very old posts are either dead, or resolve to domain squatters, or even to porn sites. I need to figure out a strategy.

In a similar vein, I would love for my old inbound links to all resolve to the right place, but I cannot think of a way to make sure that this will be the case in a new static generator CMS. With this entry, there will be a total of 2600 posts, so doing something manual is not really a good option. I may have to punt on that at this point.

Next up is making a version of the site with some cloud hosting, and a static CMS. This will be the part that I will enjoy the most, I am sure.