Lost In Haste
Lost In Haste

Animal 🐶🐱

Apple 🍎

Audio 🎶

Books 📚

Development 👨🏼‍💻

Family 👬

Fitness 🏃

Flashback Friday ⏳

Food 🍱

Fun 🥳

Gaming 🎮

Holiday 🎄

Humor 😆

Links 🔗

Micro.blog Challenge 🤳🏻

Movies 🍿

Nature 🌿

Photo Challenge: April 2024

Photo Challenge: Sept 2023

Photos 📸

Post: Long

Post: Micro

Post: Migrated

Random Thoughts 💭

Rant 😤

Tech 📱

TV 📺

Update 📰

Vacation 🛫

Work 🏢

  • Follow-Up: The IKEA Sonos speaker is working perfectly (which is more than I could ever say of the HomePod Mini stereo set up) this morning; holiday music is flooding the room whilst I’m debugging some legacy Java code. 🤓🎄 (Yes, I had a spare speaker lying around… 🤣) 📷

    Christmas tree with lights and one ornament at the top (a photo frame with no photo for privacy purposes), in front of a record player, with the end of a lamp on the right side of the photo. An IKEA Sonos speaker is on top of the record player, with an 'Ella' record in the middle and a series of objects is on the left side of the record player: three Nintendo amiibo figures (Link, Bowser, and Bokoblin), a Lego penguin, a Jesus stature, and a N64 Lego cube. On top of the cube is a HomePod mini, along with two of the amiibo, and a dried pink rose.

  • I give up, it’s time to throw in the towel on the HomePod set up in my house and just go get cheap Sonos speakers from IKEA. 😮‍💨 It’s hilarious Sonos does a better job at implementing AirPlay than Apple, I’ve had so many issues trying to play to multiple speakers over the past two years. 😱

  • Finished reading: The Unlikely Heir by Jax Calder 📚
    ★★★☆☆

    Fun, light, fluffy…with just a hint of substance, this book was a fun read. 🏳️‍🌈

    Book cover for The Unlikely Heir

  • Follow-Up: The package was found in the bushes below my house, next to the sidewalk…completely soaked and disfigured from the rain. 🌧️ I’m guessing the steps were just too much for the delivery person, all ten of them. 😅 Also, there is no way that box can fit in my mailbox, so again, someone lied.

  • 🍿 Tonight’s feature film was an old family favorite: Christmas Vacation. 🎄
    ★★★☆☆

    Alternative movie poster for Christmas Vacation.

  • So, either Amazon is lying, the US Post Office is lying, or someone has taken my new Kindle from my mailbox. 😭📭

  • Finished reading: Dead Tired by Ravens Dagger 📚
    ★★☆☆☆

    A fun, if silly read, with a lot of puns. 😆 It presents an interesting intersection between science and magic but I wish there was a little more details into the magic system.

    Cover art for Dead Tired

  • Pretty decent veggie burger, especially this far out of the City. 🤣🍔📷

    Burger on a plate with fries and sunglasses in the background.

  • 🍿 Another favorite, tonight we watched White Christmas. 🎄
    ★★★★★

    Movie poster for White Christmas (1954): Four people in festive red and white outfits pose against a snowy background with the words 'WHITE CHRISTMAS' above them.

  • Currently Listening: A Holiday Carole by Carole King. 🎵🎄

    Album art for 'A Holiday Carole'

    First heard Carole on Gilmore Girls and then bought her compilation album at University. When I went home over the Holiday break and I was listening to it, my mother expressed shock because she listened to Carole when she was my age. 🤣

  • Default Apps and Services of 2023

    It seems like a lot of folks have been writing about the default apps / services they use and while I’m late to the game, here is my list…at least for 2023. 🤣 I did a little tweak to the format everyone seems to be using: I split up my home and work life, as I do my best to keep things separate.

    Assuming his site / page are working, you can go see a list on Rob Knight’s website or add your site to the list at Github.

    📨 Mail Client

    📮 Mail Server

    • Home: Fastmail & iCloud
    • Work: Exchange

    📝 Notes

    ✅ To-Do

    📷 Camera

    • Home: iPhone 15 Pro
    • Work: N/A

    🟦 Photo Management

    📆 Calendar

    📁 Cloud File Storage

    • Home: iCloud, Backblaze, & OneDrive
    • Work: Enterprise-hosted SharePoint / OneDrive

    📖 RSS

    🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts

    • Home: Contacts / Cardhop
    • Work: Outlook / Exchange

    🌐 Browser

    • Home: Safari
    • Work: Edge

    💬 Chat

    • Home: iMessage, What’s App, & Signal
    • Work: Teams & Slack

    🔖 Bookmarks

    📑 Read It Later

    📄 Word Processing

    • Home: Pages & Word
    • Work: Word

    📈 Spreadsheets

    • Home: Numbers & Excel
    • Work: Excel

    📊 Presentations

    • Home: N/A
    • Work: PowerPoint

    🛒 Shopping Lists

    🍴 Meal Planning

    💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance

    📰 News

    • Home: Combination of RSS and Podcasts.
    • Work: N/A

    🎵 Music

    • Home: Music & Plex
    • Work: N/A

    🎤 Podcasts

    🔐 Password Management

    • Home: 1Password 4
    • Work: N/A

    🤖 Code Editing

    📚 Books

    • Home: Kindle
    • Work: N/A

    🌎 Blogging

    🖼️ Screenshots

    🌤️ Weather

    📑 Clipboard Manager

    1. Trying to convince my sister-in-law to use it instead of a series of external hard drives; she has an extreme aversion to playing for cloud storage. ↩︎

    2. I’ve been pushing my Team to use a common Wiki page for shared bookmarks. ↩︎

    3. I was using PocketSmith but as they recently raised their prices without offering anything new, I’ve moved on. ↩︎

    4. It took years but I was finally able to convince my Parents to start using a password manager, especially when functions on both their iOS and Windows devices. ↩︎

    5. I use Day One for my personal thoughts and journal. ↩︎

  • Moved 18.3 TB of data from my Storage server to my Media server; gotta love the “rsync -va --progress” command! 💻🤓 #HappyGeek

  • 🍿 Kicking off the winter movie season with You’ve Got Mail, which is an old Holiday favorite of ours. 🎄

    Modified movie poster for You’ve Got Mail, with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.

  • We put up the tree last night, with one of my favorite ornaments in a place of prominence. 🎄 We bought more than a few of these beauties in 2020, giving them to a number of Friends. 🤣 📷

    Christmas tree ornament, with colored lights in the background, hanging from the tree. The ornament is round and white, with the following verbiage in the Friends (the TV show) font: 'The one where we were all quarantined, 2020'

  • Finished reading: Imperial Wizard: Ambitions by J Parsons 📚
    ★★☆☆☆

    Somewhat predictable, the second book in the series continues right where the first left off. Events turn out for the best but more than a few questions are raised about how things will go in the future. 🤭

    Cover art for Imperial Wizard: Ambitions