I'm wearing one of my favorite t-shirts today, a collaboration between Obey Giant and Invader that I picked up a couple of years ago. I really enjoyed seeing a bunch of Invader's work around Paris when we went there many years ago.

One of my co-workers recently saw me wearing the shirt when we were onsite in Hawaii, and we ended up talking for a while about Invaders work. She told me about the Flash Invaders game and apps. I had no idea, but have since downloaded it.

Finally, today, there are rumors that Invader will be doing something special for the Olympic Games in Paris, which makes a lot of sense.

My job is very time zone intensive, we run events in many parts of the world. We also have regional offices in various locations, and my team is largely remote and scattered throughout the globe.

On my Mac, I utilize Clocker to keep track of the time across all these places. It runs as a menu bar item, is highly configurable (You can see my setup) and can also live in its own window on my desktop. In addition to the display of the various times, you're able to see your next meeting or two.

Highly recommend this software if you manage a lot of time zones.

I've been to three XOXO's, and I loved each of them in its own way.

I'm very excited that they are bringing it back one last time this year. I hope I can financially afford it, as well as make the time for it. I made and renewed meaningful people connections at all of them. Also, the Field Notes have been spectacular.

https://2024.xoxofest.com

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My home office is just completely crammed full of, well, stuff.

I work from home, and have a well defined workspace at a large desk, but my office contains three desks at the moment, and I want to turn it into a room that's useful for more.

Step one has to be getting stuff out of this room, so I have begun that task. One desk will go and be replaced by either a reading chair or a two person couch. As they say though, the only way to get this done is like eating an elephant, one bite at a time.

One of the challenging things is that, as I work through, the closet for instance, I discover projects that I should and could do. I keep having to tell myself that "now is not that time" and it seems to be working.

Probably the most challenging thing is trying to figure out homes for the things I don't want but that are perfectly useful. I want less stuff.

I have been using a Fujifilm X100F for a few years, I loved the camera before the X100V became an internet phenomena. I didn't buy a X100V because they were hard to get, but also, I was pretty happy with the 100F, and I have other cameras that I also use.

I did order a Fujifilm X100VI from Moment on the day they started taking preorders. I'm really looking forward to getting this camera. We're taking a trip to Mexico later in March, but I'm now doubtful that I will have this camera by that trip, which is a bummer.

To Moment's credit, they have done an excellent job of communicating with those who have preordered. They have a dedicated page on their site that details status. I've also gotten an email letting me know what to expect. They are at the mercy of Fujifilm's ability to ship them cameras.

I do wish that I had realized they were going to charge me the moment I completed the transaction, not when the camera shipped. Given that I am in line, it might be a while. Doesn't seem very sporting to have my money, I'd rather be earning interest off of it..

Hope you all had a great weekend. I was doing a lot of thinking about this site, and decided that I am going to post more, and be less precious about what I post.

My weekend included a trip to our local Kinokuniya, and my haul included some Yamamoto Ro-Biki Notebooks, stickers, washi tape and a softcover Zequenz A7 notebook that I wanted to try. I have no idea what I will end up using it for, but it's a cool form factor.

I didn't manage to find the time to see Dune 2 yet, I need to prioritize that this week.

I've moved this site from the host where it's been for years to a, hopefully, more reliable and secure host.

I, in the process, managed to mess up the DNS entries, so this site may not have been responsive in the last 24 hours at times.

Hopefully, we're clear of changes now, and I can focus on making posts.

After discovering it via Colossal a couple of days ago, I have become completely enchanted by Alphaputt, which is a quirky mini-golf game for iOS that is superbly designed. You can find it, of course, on the App Store.

Just a quick post to start the new year.

I made some updates to the bio/about page on this site, removed the twitter link there, as I am not actively posting to Twitter at this point. I am on Mastadon here.

Bending Spoons acquires Evernote, marking the end of an era - I was all in on Evernote, and don't pay for it any longer. I hope for the product and user base that this next chapter ends up being a productive transition.

It always makes me a little sad when a startup whose work I really liked spirals down.

Hard to believe that this little, under-updated, site is 25 years old today.

It would be hard for me to sift through my feelings about this, the world, and the web are very different places than they were in 1997. What I can do is express some gratitude for are the people and places that this little blog was a doorway to. Meeting the other bloggers at that very first SXSW has led to years and years of inspiration and a career path that I couldn't have even imagined the day I made that very first post.

I can only hope that I can become a better steward of this site in the coming years, and update it more in what is really starting to look like a post-Twitter world.

This post is mainly a test of some new hosting that was put in place this week to make sure that things are still configured and working correctly. Still WordPress, these updates were mainly due to my hosting provider phasing out some of the gear that I was hosted on. I continue to want to migrate to some kind of static publishing system.

It's been a very busy year for me, with a lot of work travel. I'm hoping to post more here this Fall as my work schedule gets a bit more manageable.

I wear a lot of black t-shirts. My family makes fun of me for the fact that I pretty much wear a black t-shirt and gray shorts/khakis almost every day. I’m not sure how it started, probably about twenty years ago, but I think a black tshirt and jeans/khakis are the perfect clothing base layer.

My t-shirt drawer is half printed t-shirts and half black T-shirts. I have, right now, black shirts from three different brands in that “varsity” set of shirts. In a lower drawer there is another half drawer of the "junior varsity" shirts.

In my opinion, people who review black t-shirts tend to do it all wrong .

T-shirts should be reviewed like books, worn until they are worn in, and worn out, until the end. Making sure that they hold up and keep themselves and their collar in good shape.

I tend to find a brand that makes black shirts that I like, and then slowly acquire a half dresser drawer full of that brand until the end of that shirt. Like many things in life, all good black t-shirts come to an end.

At one point that preferred brand was J. Crew, and then they went and changed the shirts, and I didn’t like them anymore, no longer recommended. Next was a company called Pact, which also had the advantage of being environmentally conscious. Then, for some reason Pact stopped making black t-shirts altogether for some period of time. When they started selling them again, the new ones weren’t good, no longer recommended. (I still have about 8 of the good ones, but they are starting to wear out, so sad.)

Currently, Ugmonk and Western Rise are the two shirts that I have tested/worn for a length of time, and will buy more of, slowly, these things aren't cheap. The road behind me is littered with other brands that I didn’t like, or which didn’t weather well. Ugmonk are more like the Pact and JCrew ones of those salad days, and the Western Rise shirt is this awesome athletic fabric. If I'm going to wear the t-shirt under something, I usually pick an Ugmonk shirt.

I won’t throw shade at the other companies whose shirts I have tried and discarded, but there are a lot of those. I like the Supreme Tagless Tees Hanes shirts as a knock around, but wouldn’t put those in my varsity lineup. Got a shirt you think I should try? Throw me a line on Twitter, I’m @bump.

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.

Mela

After years of being a devoted user of Paprika, I have completed converted over to Mela as my digital recipe keeper. Mela is from the same developer as Reeder, which is the RSS reader I have used, in conjunction with Feedbin, as my newsreader or choice for a long while now. Why did I switch? First, Mela just has a much cleaner user interface, feels more current and modern than Paprika, and is more in keeping with my personal taste.

Second, because this app comes from the developer of a feed reader, it has the same concept built into it. This allows me to add my favorite recipe sites to the app, and quickly be able to see the recipes that they have posted recently, then easily add them to my recipe collection in Mela. I like this workflow better.

Migration from Paprika was very fast and I haven't found any issues with my collection of recipes. Once I purchased both the Mac and iOS versions, my recipes appeared everywhere via iCloud sync without issue.

Mela is $4.99 for iOS and $9.99 for the Mac.

Sportsletter

I'm a big fan of sports. I've also worked in sports for the vast majority of my professional career now. I'm not sure where I found it, but The Sportsletter is just an absolutely great and completely free daily sports email newsletter. It hits my inbox every morning about the time I get out of bed, and they do a phenomenal job of giving a sports fan the news, notes, stories and schedules for the day. Here's an example newsletter for your perusal. I think maybe the best thing about it is that it's not junked up with ads.

The Week: 10 Things You Need to Know Today

While I am suggesting email newsletters that hit your inbox in the morning. I have to suggest this daily news email from The Week. They are a credible source of daily news headlines without a lot of bias. You can subscribe to this one here. It's exactly what the title says, ten things in your inbox, linking to credible news organizations about the stories if you want further information. If you're interested in getting a bit more information every morning, this is a good way to do it.

Notorious EDC Beer Bomb

I wouldn't consider myself a big EDC guy, but pens have been sort of a gateway drug for me into this world. The moment I saw the Notorious EDC Beer Bomb, I knew that I had to have one. (I borrowed this image from their site, sorry Tom.) It's a bottle opener, a pry tool, and just a delightful little guy to carry around. I'm finding all sorts of uses for mine, and I kind of can't wait for it to get beat up with use. Here's a great little history of the object.

Now the bad news, getting your hands on one of these isn't super easy, and it seems like it's getting harder all the time because they have gotten so popular, come in different color ways, and have attracted a bunch of avid collectors who congregate over on a private Facebook Group. Your best bet, if you want to take on the challenge of purchasing one of these, is to follow them on social media, and get into the Facebook group.

LePen

Do you remember LePen? When reading my weekly Pen Addict member newsletter a couple of weeks ago, there was a link to a blog post from The Stationer about the tools Tessa currently uses. Lurking in that list was a pen that I had totally forgotten about, LePen. I remembered how fun these skinny little pens are, and decided to order some from her shop. These pens are just as fun to have around I as remembered, and I am now using them to add color to my Bullet Journal spreads. I especially like their Olive Green color.

Well, that's enough for this post, more to come soon.

Making meetings effective is something that I think about every week. I spend a lot of my time in meetings, and it always seems like I could use more time outside of them for the rest of my job. Everyone seems to agree about this. Meetings are a necessary evil, but they don't have to be wasteful.

A key to making meetings more productive for me has been providing my meeting agenda items to the other person in advance. It does two great things for me. First, it makes me think carefully about what I want to use the time to talk about. Second it makes me organize topics either in order of priority if I think that time is a consideration, or in a flow that makes sense for the conversation. Finally, it makes me prep for the meeting and identifies any prep work that I need to do to get ready for the meeting.

I have a fairly simple system for collecting potential agenda items. I keep an agenda folder in whichever notes app I am currently using, for instance Apple Notes or Bear. I'm currently using NotePlan all day, and should probably blog about that at some point.

For each person or group who I meet with on a regular basis, I have a separate note in an "Agendas" folder, even if those meetings are sporadic. As I go through my day, as it occurs to me or comes up in a meeting that I need to discuss something with one of those people, I will command tab over to their agenda note and add the item.

Then, the day before or a few hours before I meet with the person or group, I comb through the items I have collected, and turn them into an agenda that I either email or Slack to that person. I generally try and do it well before the meeting, this allows the other person or people to think about the topics and prepare if need be. There are times, however, when I am just using that list in the moment to make sure I don't miss something.

A week later, or whenever I need to meet with that person or group again, I’m also able to see what we discussed last time, and can leverage that to follow up on any items that require more conversation.

This system is pretty simple, but it has worked really well for me.

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.

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.