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.

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.

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.

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.

I continue to call this series of post "weekly" despite the fact that, based on actual data, it's really trimonthly. (Trimonthly is only defined as occurring every three months, unlike the confusing bimonthly.) I'm going to be stubborn about this in the hope that, over time, I will be able to make progress in making it more often.

I'm sure you've heard this from many others at this point, and, more than likely, you've already seen it, but, just in case, I can't recommend Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse enough. It's truly unlike any other superhero movie I've ever seen before, and I have seen just about everything.  The animation style, and techniques are so cool. Also, even if you have seen it, this Twitter Moment is worth checking out, Bagel!.  Every member of our family loved this movie, and I intend to watch it several more times.  I was also lucky enough to get a pair of the sneakers from the film before they sold out. 

I listen to many of the same podcasts each week, with only a rare few being "must listen" status where I never miss an episode. That's probably a good topic for a future blog post. One podcast that I have added to my rotation on a daily basis, however, is Techmeme's Ride Home.  This show is great in that, most days, they have pushed the daily episode before I get into my car to leave for the day. With the way Overcast works, this means that this is waiting and ready to be played when I start my drive. Each episode contains carefully crafted coverage of that day's tech news, and it's never longer than fifteen minutes. It's allowed me to stay up to date on several stories that are outside of my interest area. They do a really great job, and on a week like this one, with bucketloads of CES news, it helps me wade through the cruft to get to the interesting stuff.  The host, Brian McCollough, weaves his own humorous delivery into the stories, and that makes taking the medicine of tech news a bit easier as well.

I'm completely entranced by Reuben Wu's photography. He uses drones to create either objects made of light or to do the lighting for the photograph. This article by Ilana Herzig for Artsy does a good job of covering the basics of his vision and some of how he captures what he does. You may also be familiar with him from the music group Ladytron.  (Wishing that I could afford one of his works, but I'm on a budget at the moment.) 

We’re at the end of the year, and I’ve been contemplating doing some year end "top" posts. One that seemed pretty easy to write was one about the pens that I have used and loved this year. Once I started writing the below, though, it ended up not being nearly as simple as I expected. I decided that I would limit myself to five pens, or at least models of pen. 

I say “used and loved” because, for me, pens are used in a variety of contexts, and my most used pens, while I should and do love using them, aren’t the only pens that I have loved using this year. Also, this is all about me, and how I use pens, pens are a personal taste, and what works for me may or may not work for you, I'm a weirdo. So take this with a grain of salt before you run out and buy any of the below. 

To start with the easiest to identify. In my work bag, I carry a simple zip up pen/pencil case from United Bees that I picked up at Maido in San Francisco a couple of years ago. This case is filled with two varieties of the Uni-ball Signo pen in a variety of colors. I use these pens in my daily work life more than any other pen I own. The Uni-ball Signo UM-151 Gel Pen  in the 0.38 mm has been the mainstay of my work writing for several years, and last year, they introduced the Uni-ball Signo Needle UM-151ND Gel Pen, which is a 0.38 needlepoint version of the same pen. As you can see from the picture, the colors are all over the map, but I do tend to always use one of the darker colors and one of the lighter colors together, for instance Blue Black and Mandarin Orange go together very nicely, giving me a highlight color in my bullet journal, and visually keeping things interesting. I have to say that the Blue Black and Green Black are my favorites.  To be honest, I was a little surprised when I dumped the bag and there was only one Blue Black pen in there, I guess it's time to buy more! I typically order these from Jet Pens, and there's a large vessel in my home office that is also full of these pens. 

The next most obvious pen that I have used and loved this year is the one that's in my pocket every day. It's paired with my Stuff Sheath, and hasn't been dethroned from my daily carry in about three years, although I have tried several other options. This pen is the Sunderland Mk1 from Sunderland Machine Works. In the age of Kickstarter pens, I have yet to find a better designed and engineered pen in this class. Especially notable are the lack of exposed threads on the grip inside the pen, and the high quality clip that they provide. I use the refill out of a Pilot Juice Gel Pen - 0.38 mm - Blue Black in this pen. It's been my refill of choice in Pilot G2 compatible pens for as long as I've known about it, and I think I have the Pen Addict himself to thank for turning me on to it. While I have this pen body in both nickel and black, I tend to use the black one a lot more.  One other pen that I did use as my daily pocket pen was the Schon DSGN pen in Punk Rock pink and black. This pen is a stunner, and really well made too. Unfortunately it fell out of my pocket on a business trip, I think in a Lyft, and it's gone. I did really enjoy using it. In the end the sweet gel refill that fits in the Sunderland would have won out over the ballpoint in any case.  Sorry that the Sunderland pen is currently sold out, but maybe they will make more soon. I wouldn’t mind picking up another color too. 

The next pen is one that I just love to use on a regular basis, the ystudio Brassing Portable Fountain Pen. Mine is a Fine nib. After lusting after this pen for a while, I finally rewarded myself with it on a trip to Toronto for work two years ago. 

This pen is both aesthetically nice to look at and a joy to use. It has a really nice solid feel in my hand, and putting it’s cap back in place has this satisfying click to it that makes me want to play with the pen at my desk all day. I really like the hexagonal body style, and that wasn't something I had in my pen arsenal prior to this pen.  

The last pen on my list is my beloved Sailor Pro Gear Blue Lagoon. I own a few Sailor pens, and a couple of other Pro Gear pens, but this one is just the best looking pen I own, period, in my opinion.  I'm borrowing someone else's image of it, because I haven't been able to take a picture of this pen that truly does it justice. 

It's one of those things where I missed the release of this pen, which is a part of Sailor's Cocktail Series, in 2016, and then realized that I really wanted one, but months went by, and I couldn't find anyone who had any intention of selling one. I had pretty much given up on ever getting one. Then, by complete coincidence through a friend in Seattle (thank you again!) I found out one was available and bought it immediately.  Since then, it's remained in my pen setup, and I don't think that will change anytime soon. Sailor just make great product, and this one is my favorite that they've made in recent memory. I have no idea what it would take to knock it out of it's spot, but it's my top pen.  

Well, here we are, at the end of the list and at the end of the year. Looking forward to trying new things in 2019 to see if anything can dethrone the items on this list for 2018. 

Not so weekly these days.  This episode is very focused on paper goods. 

I've really been digging the slim and tall format of these Ro-Biki Notebooks from Yamamoto Paper. I've adopted them for my Bullet Journal, and the format seems to be perfect for my simple adaptation of the system. The paper in these notebooks is fantastic, and works well with both my beloved Signo gel ink pens and the fountain pens I am using from time to time.  I am currently using the  "Star Map" edition pictured above which is a lovely dark green color. The covers of these notebooks are a waxed stock that develops cool character as you beat it up. These aren't cheap, but are a high quality product.  They ship from Japan, so you need to be a little patient with arrival timing. 

As it's December, it's time for a new "planner plan" for 2019. This year, I am straying from the Hobonichi Techo and Hobonichi Weeks that I have been using for the last few years and giving the Jibun Techo system a try.  I bought a fairly expensive setup from one of my favorite online stationary retailers, Baum-Kuchen, that is centered on the B6 Slim format and includes a BK x The Superior Labor leather case. If you want to get an idea on how one might use this planner, here's a great article detailing some of the features of this cool planner setup with good shots of the folios and some ink tests, if that's of interest.  There are more similar stories of how people are using this planner here. I'm hopeful that I will stick with daily use of this system better this year than the last couple of years with the Hobonichis. I purposely went for something smaller to ensure that I will carry it around. The Ro-Biki notebook that I am using for the Bullet Journal fits in the case with only a small amount sticking out. 

I've also become interested in the idea of keeping a five year journal, and since I've just hit a big birthday, this year seems as good a time to really start and lean into this idea. It pairs well with my current interest in Stoicism and reflection. For this purpose, I have chosen the Hobonichi 5-Year Techo A6.  This size is currently available from Jet Pens if you don't want to order it all the way from Japan.  

Lastly, for now, I have been a fan of The James Brand for a while. I carry their Elko knife in my pocket all the time, use one of their key hooks for the daily carry of my keys, and own a couple of their other knives. So I was really interested, and immediately ordered the LTD Benton pen when it was released. A sweetener is that it comes with a limited run of 600 set of Field Notes books that match the pen. If you know me at all, you know that I had to have this pen, and those sweet sweet notebooks. I really like the super clean lines of the pen, which is a ballpoint out of the box. My only reservation on recommending this is that the click mechanism for the pen is plastic, which is not something I really expect in a pen that costs this much. Having said that, I am happily using mine. 

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done one of these. No excuses, but I’m also not putting too much pressure on myself. We went to the beach for a week, and I was at E3, which I should probably write something about.

Since it’s Summer and we went to the beach, one thing that’s been top of mind for me has been sunglasses. I’ve typically worn Ray Bans, which are $100+ a pair. Not all sunglasses look good on me, but the Wayfarer models usually look okay. Unfortunately, I have a horrible track record of scratching or losing them. At $100+ a pop, that’s shitty.  Additionally, I have an iPhone X, and actual Ray Ban Wayfarers don’t typically work with FaceID.

Enter Goodr, I discovered this brand via a professional runner who I follow on Instagram. (I follow a bunch of fitness athletes on Instagram. It’s one of my strategies for keeping myself motivated and inspired to work out myself.)

Goodr glasses are roughly Wayfarer shaped, but they only cost $25 a pair. They also, although you mileage may vary by color, work with FaceID. So I can lose or damage a pair of these, and not feel like I wasted a C Note. They also make pretty rad holiday color ways. The most recent is the “Betsy Ross” pictured above, which I purchased for my 4th of July fun.  (I’m not getting any referral credit or anything, I am just recommending these glasses because I think they are great.) 

One other item I wanted to call attention to this week is the limited availability of new Hypercritical shirts from John Siracusa.  As a long time fan of his reviews, blog, podcasts new and old, and social media, I own one of the original shirts, but was delighted that these were available, and in new colors. I went for the color pictured, but there are others. I have found that I have too many black t-shirts, and I am feeling the need to mix it up a bit more. These shirts are only available until June 29th, so better get hopping and get one if you’re going to want one.

Last but not least, the Andys are at it again. They will be conducting an XOXO Festival in Portland this year, and the registration application is currently available, through June 29th. I have attended three of the previous XOXO Festivals. All of them were great experiences, I met great people, was exposed to interesting ideas, and left inspired and refreshed. I could not recommend it more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into my September calendar. We’re taking the kids to Walt Disney World for a week the following week.  Hopefully I can still get some of those sweet sweet XOXO Field Notes if they make them.

See you next week?  I hope so.

Hope everyone’s had a great week.  It feels like Spring has officially sprung here in the Atlanta area. Last weekend was crazy busy, with a really enjoyable Foo Fighters show, which was the first ever concert at the newly renamed Georgia State Stadium, which used to be Turner Field.

It’s been kind of a mundane week, with the exception of moving my office at work, which always is a distraction. I had been in my existing office for almost exactly a year, and while I will miss it’s quiet corner of the world charm, the new one is more centrally located for what I’m working on. It probably took me about three days total to get comfortable with the new setup.

Each week, this post has gone a couple of days later…Now on to things I’m enjoying.

At the beginning of the year, I got a chance to try some peated bourbon for the first time, and I have to say that it’s really grown on me. It’s definitely not the first thing I reach for every time, but it’s a unique taste that I have come to enjoy. Specifically, the peated bourbon from Kings County Distillery. There’s definitely a debate about whether it still should be considered bourbon, but I honestly don’t care, it’s really good.  Two warnings, it’s not cheap, and not super easy to find.

In keyboard addiction news, these Zambumon GMK Serika Custom key caps are currently available to back on Massdrop. (That’s an affiliate link.) These look really high quality, and really nice. I already have a keyboard in mind for them. I’ve had really good luck backing key caps on Massdrop. Again, not cheap, but so nice.

Finally, I read the first two issues of Weapon H, a sort of mashup between the Hulk and the Weapon X series. I have found these really enjoyable reads, and it’s a cool idea. Can’t wait for the rest of them to come out.

What a great weekend, we didn’t do much out of the ordinary, but it was a really relaxing and constructive couple of days, with some high quality NBA Playoff games, and an Atlanta United victory mixed in. I’m continuing to take it easy, and my energy has returned, albeit slowly. I mostly played Hearthstone and Vainglory over the weekend, I want to play more PC games, but didn’t feel like shutting myself off from the family to play this weekend.

We finished our Lego Ship in a Bottle this weekend. Lots of little pieces.

A post shared by Robert Occhialini (@bump) on Apr 22, 2018 at 12:05pm PDT

I did also take my sons to the Pop’s Pancakes pop up at the Spindle on Sunday. If you have the chance to try these pancakes from my buddy Jeff, you definitely should check them out. I had the breakfast sandwich with Delia’s Chicken Sausage, and I am hooked.

A couple of Kickstarters of note that I wanted to mention. Both are fully funded.

Time is starting to wind down on the Mark One Pen from the Studio Neat guys. This pen checks all the boxes, and my friends over at the Pen Addict podcast had nothing but nice things to say about it, which is good enough for me.

The second one is the Kira Mechanical Keyboard from the Input Club. These guys really know how to put together a nice board, and I currently have and use a White Fox at home.  This board is unique in that it’s the smallest footprint you can squeeze a full sized keyboard into. It’s a bit pricey, but compared to similar keyboards, it’s a good price for the high quality they produce.

Some things I am enjoying.

Picked up a Schon DSGN Limited Edition “Punk Rock Pink” pen a couple of weeks ago, and it’s become my EDC pocket pen. I’ve always like the Fischer Space Pen refill, and this colorway is striking. This color is sold out, but they have a lot of other combinations that are equally as nice.

Upgraded my computer audio monitors to these Mackie Monitors. (Amazon affiliate link) I had been using the same Bose setup for maybe ten years before this. These speakers also support Bluetooth, so I can pipe other audio to them when I am not using my gaming PC. They sound great, and are small enough that I didn’t really have to make any huge changes. I am running out of plugs to power things in my home office.

Finally, I ran my Twitter account through Watson after reading this Kottke post about Watson Personality Insights.

Here’s what came back for me:

You are skeptical.

You are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes. You are dutiful: you take rules and obligations seriously, even when they're inconvenient. And you are hedonistic: you feel your desires strongly and are easily tempted by them.

You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of organization.

You don't find either tradition or taking pleasure in life to be particularly motivating for you. You care more about making your own path than following what others have done. And you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment.

Still processing that.

I’d aimed to have this done on Monday, but my energy levels have been all over the place the last few days, and I just never got to it. Small subtext is that I had a medical situation a couple of weeks ago, and am recovering from it, but slowly. The energy levels are really the last thing to get back to normal when you don’t eat for a few days. I won’t get more specific than that, I’m reluctant to post medical related information on the internet or social media.

Like most of the gaming world, I’ve really been enjoying Fortnite this week and for the last month or so. For those who aren’t gaming adjacent, it’s a “Battle Royale” style game that has skyrocketed in popularity. The game is available across a wide variety of platforms, but I play on PC. I am “bumpish” should you want to friend and play with me, but don’t set your expectations too high on what my level of skill might be. I’d love to play with you in any case. I’m only on a few times a week, and for a brief time, I don’t get much dedicated PC gaming in these days with family duties.

I’m also enjoying the rollover to the Year of the Raven in Hearthstone, which happened this week with the release of the Witchwood expansion. I exalt in the end of the mill deck era. There is one card, Shudderwock, which is totally broken and makes things less fun than they could be. Here’s a great video from Disguised Toast that elaborates on how broken, at least the animations, if not the whole mechanic are.

I did go to the Atlanta Pen Show for a couple of hours until I ran out of gas.  My new purchases were an “Aiken” pen from Carolina Pen Company, which is colored to look like the Northern Lights using the same material as this pen, and a Seed A5 case from my friends at Nock.

I did also buy some Gigante Note Cards from Nock while I had the chance in person. These folded over notecards are a favorite of mine, and I keep a couple in my pocket sheath with me all the time. They are essentially the smallest available notebook, with only 4 pages.

Top of mind for me on the music side is Black Moon Rising from the Black Pumas. There are listen links for a variety of music services on that page. At first I thought it was Cee-Lo Green, but it’s not. I haven’t been able to find anything else by them, they are from Austin, TX.

Last night we watched the first episode of the Pastry Chef season of Chef’s Table about Christina Tosi from Milk Bar.  If you have Netflix, I highly recommend this episode, I found it really inspiring. Be careful though, you can order just about anything in the episode from their web site. My cookies are on the way.

I’m thinking about getting a ReMarkable Tablet based on the recommendation of some folks online who swear by it.  Seems like it might either completely replace my work notebook, or it won’t work for me at all though, making the price tag a little tough to swallow. The iPad hasn’t really worked for me for this particular use case, and I love my e-ink Kindles, so the idea of the product might be in my sweet spot.

ttfn.

After struggling for a few months with wanting to update this site more, I think I’ve come up with a strategy, at least to start. I am going to try and do one of these “Weekly Bump” posts every Monday morning. Hopefully that will lead to more posts, but we’ll see.

Looking ahead to this week, I’m pretty excited for the Atlanta Pen Show, which starts Friday, April 13th and runs through the weekend. It’s always nice to see everyone in the pen community, although I never get to spend as much time up there as I’d like. I’m not heading up there this week with any specific pen in mind.

Looking even further ahead, I’m super excited about this new restaurant opening in Midtown Atlanta soon from the team that runs Brush Sushi Izakaya in Decatur. Brush is one of my favorite Atlanta spots, and is walking distance from our home.

Here are some things I enjoyed in the last week.

A post shared by Charlie Gray (@charliegrayphotographer) on Apr 7, 2018 at 10:58am PDT

Charlie Gray’s Instagram feed has some amazing portraits, with the most recent batch being focused on the new Wes Anderson movie, including this striking one of Bill Murray.

I really enjoyed listening to The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 217, With Special Guest Jason Kottke As a longtime super fan of both guys, this was one of my favorite podcast episodes so far this year. Even more so given that I feel like I have lived a lot of the subject matter in real time over the last 20 years. (This blog is 22 years old this year.)

Why I Love Compact Mechanical Keyboards and You Will Too: from The Wirecutter. I am about two years down this rabbit hole myself, and this post is the perfect place to start.

I really enjoyed Bladerunner 2049, and I am a huge Run the Jewels fan. I was astonished when El-P shared his rejected Blade Runner 2049 Trailer Score. While I like the Hans Zimmer score, what could have been is apparent. Looking forward to the movie that EL-P is going to score this year, which hasn’t been announced yet.

I feel like I should take the opportunity that the holiday break from work affords me to think back over the last year, and share some of the things that brought joy to my life in 2017.

There are so many apps that I could write about here. I spend a lot of time on my iPad, iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. This isn’t a comprehensive look at what I use, just some high notes. For instance, I probably use my iPad about 35% of the time for reading across Reeder, Instapaper and the Kindle app, but that’s all the mention they get.

I’m writing this using Bear on my iPad. Bear has become the latest in a line of notepad apps that I have used as a junk drawer for my information. I occasionally take a quick look to see where Apple’s Notes and Simplenote are, both served this role for some time after I abandoned Evernote. Both offer the one thing that has made me reconsider Bear, a web interface to my text. (Bear has one currently under development, but with no announced release date.) What Bear does offer is a really nice clean interface, good tagging support, and first class apps on iPad, Mac and iPhone. It also offers a good community and developers who are actively working to improve the apps. It’s a joy to use, and I happily will let my subscription renew.

I’ve used a lot of weather apps over the years, but I have currently settled on Hello Weather. It offers a clean, uncluttered UI, but without redacting any of the information that I want my weather app to include.

I spent a lot of time this year trying out different podcast apps, but ultimately ended up back where I started, using Overcast. What drove me to look at the other options was the lack of a good working web player or desktop app for Mac. Overcast offers the best iOS app, bar none, in my opinion, and in the end, that won out over the presence of better web players from other developers for me. It would be nice if he made some quality of life enhancements to the web player, but I have taken to just always listening from my phone for now.

I have (I just counted.) 45 photography apps installed on my phone. Darkroom has become the default app for editing and touch ups once I have taken the shot and gotten the image onto my phone, if shot with a camera. It offers really clean workflow that matches how I think about editing images. I still also use VSCO, Priime, and am also trying out TouchRetouch.

I currently have a 429 day streak of checking Timehop. This lovely little app lets me look into what I was doing in previous years across social media and the photos on my device. Most of my social time is spent using Tweetbot and Instagram. Tweetbot offers fantastic list support and I use Twitter in a very list-centric manner, so it maps well for me on all my devices. I continue to miss the days of 3rd party Instagram apps for the iPad. I’ve taken to using their web site on my iPad instead of blowing their iPhone app up 2x.

As a lot of this year was dedicated to fitness, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Activity app from Apple is something I use religiously. My wife and I share our activity goal data, allowing us to encourage each other to do well. I can’t understate the big help that this app and the Apple Watch have been for me as I try to push myself to become more fit and healthy. Late in the year, after I got my Series 3 Apple Watch, I also started using HeartWatch and AutoSleep. Both offer more data than the base Activity app, specifically around sleep efficiency and heart rate data.

In a related vein, since I listen to music while working out, Spotify has become a key app on my phone and my main music app. I maintain a subscription to Apple Music as well, and use SoundCloud and Mixcloud for DJ mixes predominantly, but Spotify rules the day because of it’s device support, social features and better recommendation engine. I could play Spotify through my new living room home entertainment gear on the day it arrived without any additional hardware or effort. If I had to drop a subscription, it would be Apple Music. They just haven’t improved it enough since launch.

Which brings me to games. Two games have remained on my home screen throughout the year, and probably will stay there for some time to come. I’ve been playing Hearthstone since launch, and still enjoy the most recent expansions. Blizzard have done a great job of fostering new content. When I want to get a little more tappy and engaged, I fire up VainGlory. I mostly play their Battle Royale mode. They have built a very responsive MOBA, and I look forward to the release of 5v5 play in January.

It’s been an exciting month. What seemed like a quick casual conversation with my wife turned into house hunting, mortgage shopping, and the eventual purchase of a new home.  As our two boys have gotten older, the existing house was feeling smaller and smaller. The new house is a lot bigger, and is walking distance to the elementary school that my sons will attend.

In the last two weeks, we’ve moved in, and I now find myself wondering how soon we’ll reach a stable state. Our new home is gorgeous, and I can’t wait to get to the point where we feel like we’re unpacked. Right now, most things are still in boxes. I haven’t even unpacked a single box in my home office.

It’s funny how much the first few days after a move feel almost like camping, as you unpack just the most critical items, then less critical ones. It feels like a set of systems that you’re bringing online.

We’ve had a lot of issues, as I guess everyone does in the home buying and moving process. We had three different closing dates as the builder was unable to manage the schedule with inspections to get the CO. We bought a refrigerator to match the appliances our builder had already put in the kitchen, only to discover that it wouldn’t fit upon delivery, requiring some additional custom cabinet work, which he’s now asking us to pay for.  Our washer and dryer do not fit in the laundry room in such a way that the door can be closed. All of these sharp edges will get smoothed out over the next few weeks.

Our address is new, there was no house there before we moved in. This has caused a number of issues ranging from Comcast not even being willing to give us service, to not being able to change our bank accounts and the billing addresses on things because postal lookups were failing.  Comcast thing worked out great because we’re getting Gigabit Fiber from AT&T instead, which is better, faster, and more stable.

Our next big tournament has been announced.

[embed][www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dulRNTz4SCg[/embed])

I’ve been thinking since last weekend that I should write something up about the ELEAGUE CS:GO Major that  just happened. This event was a watershed week for our business, but also a marker in my career.  This is from my perspective, and I should be clear that this is from me, not my employer. Any opinions are my opinions, and not theirs. The facts belong to us all though.

For those who might not be familiar, or weren’t following along, this tournament was one of the most successful in esports history in a number of ways. It was the first CS:GO Major tournament with a televised Final, which was on TBS here in the US. It was a tournament with some of the best and most competitive gameplay in the history of these tournaments, something we clearly can’t take credit for, but which is a testament to the state of competitive CS:GO. A team named Astralis triumphed in the end, and during that final amazing match, we broke the all time Twitch maximum concurrent users record for a single channel, smashing the previous high mark by over 200,000, and becoming the first channel to ever go over 1 million concurrents.  There’s an awesome Instagram video, captured by a Twitch engineer friend, which captures my awkward enthusiasm in the moment that we crested that 1 million mark.

The tournament was held here in Atlanta, first at the ELEAGUE studio on our campus in midtown, with the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals then being held at the Fox Theatre, a venue at which I have attended concerts, plays, and even a movie or two. It was incredibly cool to work an event in my adopted hometown of almost twenty years. While I have worked many NBA All-Star games and golf events while working for Turner, none of them have ever been here in Atlanta. That somehow made this more real and meaningful for me.

In many ways, this  event was no different, from a work perspective, than one of the seven NBA “season starts” I worked on, or an NBA All-Star Weekend, or a PGA Championship, or the Ryder Cup that I wrote the software for onsite the week of the tournament. This event left a huge 14-day gaping hole in my life, every waking moment those 14 days I was thinking about or doing work. We spent well over a hundred hours the week of the tournament getting ready for each day, working the competition, and making sure that things were updated at the end of the night. These kind of hours have an impact of those around us, and I am more cognizant of that than ever these days. I’m not the only one in our home who is exhausted from the long days. I missed my kids and my wife, and they assure me that they missed me. When working with live sports or live events, this is how it is, what it takes to be successful. There are a multitude of details that need to be carefully tended to, and it has to be on a specific time scale that is not negotiable.  I am incredibly proud of the entire team that worked on this event. There were no major outages, our Twitch stream stayed up with no downtime. We ran our Game Command player for more matches in a week than we’ve ever run it before. In fact, I believe we ran it for more hours for the Major than every other time we’ve run it combined.

So with all this background information, what did this event mean to me? To understand that, I need to provide just a little more context. First, it was the culmination of an 18th month journey for me. I was asked to first help with, and then work on, Turner’s esports initiatives. I had an amazing job working on the NBA’s products in the US at the time, and I personally took a big chance on esports because I was passionate about it and ready for something new. I had no idea what it would turn into for Turner, and there were no promises about what my role would be moving forward. We started 18 months ago with a vision for what we wanted to do, and the rest has been a wild ride right into this weekend.

I could have never imagined that Valve, the publisher of CS:GO, would choose us to host a Major in our first year of existence. I couldn’t have guessed, even the morning of the Final, that we would break the single channel traffic record on Twitch. So much of that relies on the quality of the matches, and the interest of the fans. If the match had ended after two maps, we never would have broken the record. In any case, even if we hadn’t broken that record, we’ve accomplished so much in a short period of time, starting from nothing, building a team, hosting events. Not everything has been perfect, nor has every decision been a winner, but we’ve learned from every mistake, and taken all the fan feedback very seriously, and I think it shows. That’s how we roll.

So, this meant a lot to me, more in some ways than anything I have helped build in my career.  I may not work in esports forever, but the memory of this event, especially, across everything we’ve done with ELEAGUE in it’s first year, will always be with me, a reminder that if you just keep going and try hard, and do your best, good things happen.

I’ve been quite busy with work related items for the last couple of weeks. I realized this weekend that my hosting provider had upgraded some of the software that this site runs on, and in the process, they broke everything.  I logged in yesterday, and fixed the problem, but then also realized that I was sick of what the site looked like, and hadn’t updated it in forever.

I am starting fresh with a new theme that I should be able take to places the other one was equipped to go. For a bit, this is going to be a work in progress.

What went wrong was very simple. We never made enough money.

I really like(d) Vesper, but it never stuck for me. I was a day one user, mainly because I am huge fan of all three of these guys, and also consider their QA lead an internet friend.

I don’t know what they could have done differently, especially with only three of them, I do think that, for their core audience, there are three platforms that matter:

1. mobile/iOS
2. Desktop Mac
3. Web

Only Brent, Dave and John know for sure, but from my outsider’s view, this was a part time job for all three of them. I suspect that if even one of them had made this more of a full time job, it might have generated perspective and possibly drive to succeed. Just guessing on that bit, and I could be completely wrong.

I’m currently using Apple Notes as my primary phone/tablet/desktop text tool. iCloud sync has worked great for me.

ESPN: What ELeague got right, wrong in Season 1

I don’t often post about work related things to my site. I’m averse to getting in trouble for expressing work related opinions on my personal publishing, and I have a lot more to lose than gain in that department.

ELEAGUE has been a very interesting ride for me, particularly because I was literally the first person working full time on esports at Turner.  I may be able to write more about that ride at some point, but I have to say that I’m really proud of what we accomplished right out of the gate. We’re not perfect, but we’re constantly learning, and will be better each time we do this.

Here’s an infographic with some of the consumption numbers:

I am link blogging again over at kungfumaster.ninja

You’ll likely find more posts from me over there than on this site.

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Trying to not overreact to this. Not sure this is worth $60/year to me. Going to look into alternatives.

I love this t-shirt from the Brooklyn Computer Club. Added to the varsity t-shirt rotation. 

I really think this is one of the best ads Apple has ever done.

Since reading Matthew’s review, I decided to jot down a few thoughts on this item as well. I’m not sure when Nock will make it available to regular people via their site, but well, home field advantage. Update: These are going live at Noon today, November 30th, 2015. 

I picked up one of these cases in waxed canvas a few weeks ago when Nock Co. had a booth at a pop up shop for American made goods at Ponce City Market here in Atlanta. Like Matthew says in his review, this thing is boss. I like mine so much that it’s become a permanent part of my backpack load out, and I think I want to pick up a second one.

I have been using Field Notes for my Bullet Journal pursuits for the last few weeks, and so this is a good match, I keep a couple of recently filled notebooks, and the next one I am going to use.  I have been carrying three pens, each with a different load out.

I also keep a few Frictionless Capture Cards tucked in.  Sadly, they went out of business, and once my current supply of these cards is gone, I will probably move on to these Nock Co. DotDash Cards.

I’d read or heard, I think on the Pen Addict podcast, that the case doesn’t quite hold an iPhone 6 Plus, but mine actually does hold one and zip up. That’s actually why I think I might pick up a second Sinclair case, as I have a work 6 plus that I keep in my daily carry backpack monstrosity. Here’s a shot of my 6 plus tucked into the Sinclair.

I’m totally sold on this case, and highly recommend it. Nock Co. makes really high quality product right here in Atlanta, and I’ve never had any issues or been disappointed with anything I have bought from them. I think I might grab a couple of zipper pulls from them after seeing Matthews configuration, but otherwise, this is the perfect carry for my Field Notes, Word Notebooks, and three pens, which is the most I really would use anyway.

I’d also love to see one of these in a larger size that was designed to hold a Hobonichi Techo. There’s such a lack of good cases that are meant to hold the Techo, and it’s gotten more popular. Seems like a real market opportunity to me.

Origami, Gonzalo Garcia Calvo