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Finally catching up with early December reading. firecracker is really interesting and makes me even more bullish on Serverless.

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Portland moment. Waiting in line for coffee. Rotund dude with a curly mustache, sweats, and Adidas sandals finds a spot. He then proceeds to unroll a scroll and begin to write with a quill

Enduring and optimizing is the rhythm of making - the pattern of ups and downs that every journey takes you through.

• The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky

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Launching a new blog for the new year. Was thinking of just using blot.im and syndicating here, but I’m wondering if I’m just making things difficult for myself. So far I have my Now page up.

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Pythonista is for sale, 50% off. It’s amazing there is a full python ide with debugging support available on ios.

“The reason the Russians were able to abuse these platforms, so much. This wasn’t hacking, this wasn’t some secret, nefarious Russian plot to sneak into Facebook and glom itself onto their servers. They were customers of Facebook, they were customers of Twitter, they were customers of YouTube. They used the systems as they were designed.”

Kara Swisher - Stay Tuned with Preet

Playing Stephenson’s Rocket at the lucky lab with friends for the first time in a year. (Also losing).

Awww man. Sure enough, the Apple Music skill doesn’t work on Sonos speakers.

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Wow. It’s been 10 years since I was an IBMer and it seems just as long since I saw them in the news. Selling Lotus is a big deal, it’s crazy that it’s still worth 1.8B.

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Just beat Donut Country. It was super weird and totally worth $5.

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4yo saw a mattress commercial the other day. Now, every morning, she tells us she slept poorly and repeats the sales pitch to get a new mattress.

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Resetting the password for my vacuum cleaner. 🙄 You guys … I think we might be doing the future wrong.

It’s nice to be back in Portland, Chicago is too big for me. It was great to visit though and I enjoyed getting back to public speaking again.

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Did the slack app for iPad seriously remove the keyboard shortcut for next unread message?

Required PDX pre-flight photo.

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I’m traveling and just realized I left my Apple Watch at home. I feel naked.

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I just had a nice chat with a barista. It’s a good reminder to take out my AirPods, the world is worth noticing.

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4yo named the new Roomba ‘Robot cleaning section’ for unclear reasons.

I have badges turned on in my sonos app so I know when there are firmware updates. It really grinds my gears to get a notification and it’s for an ad for a pink version of the speaker I already own.

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Apple Music is going to be available as an Alexa skill. I think this means I’ll be able to use it with my Alexa enabled Sonos speakers. 🤞

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Has anyone made the conversion from a self hosted wordpress instance to a hosted micro.blog account? I don’t really see much documentation on it.

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Goal achieved, got my 30 day pin.

Streaks has been really helpful lately as I try to get back to practicing the habits I value. It integrates with HealthKit to complete tasks for me (like mindfulness meditation). The watch complication makes logging completions easy. Don’t break the chain. It’s worth the $5.

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My Micro Monday suggestion is @soypunk besides having the correct opinion of favoring Things 3 to OmniFocus, he also reminded me I need to see if my ancient airport express will do Airplay 2.

4yo is trying to figure out knock knock jokes. The results are bizarre and pretty funny the first time.

Knock knock! Who’s there? Watermelon! Watermelon who? Car!

My wife gave me time for a walk alone this morning. I happened to listen to Don’t Underestimate the Power of Appreciation . It was a good reminder of the positive impact of saying thank you, for the giver and the receiver. Thank you.

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Some light thanksgiving eve reading:

What distributed systems theory should a distributed systems engineer know?

Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems Engineer

I’ve been using the iPad Pro as my primary computer for a few months now, but Matthew Cassinelli’s video Six gestures you should know still taught me a couple tricks. 🤯

Smashing pumpkin’s new album is taking me right back to 1993.

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Every now and then you hit a blog post that tells you how to implement ideas.

Roadmaps are not a panacea, but without some future direction, expect the classic problems of failing to plan: missed deadlines, working weekends, shipping unfinished work, political infighting, and ultimately, lost opportunity.

On Writing Product Roadmaps

My Micro Monday suggestion is @chrisreed he posts some solid beers and his blog helped me a bunch in setting up my own Wordpress install it covers verifing wordpress, real-time posting notifications, theming mods, and posting options.

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One of the great things about being a parent is you can blow your kids minds once in a while. We toasted s’mores over the gas range and ate them over the sink. 🧙‍♂️

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Today marks the end of my five week meditation workshop. The weekly classes left me wanting more but they did help me maintain a daily practice for the first time. I’ve found it fulfilling and am going to keep it going.

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iOS doesn’t support remapping keyboard input, to use a mechanical keyboard you need something that has native mac input. I use a WASD 87 Key with MX Cherry Clear switches. The two excellent features are functioning media keys and hardware remapping through dipswitches.

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I have seen lots of complaints about the near vertical orientation for the iPad Pro’s folio cover. For me it is perfect, I have a small riser on my desk and at that angle it is a perfect match for my external keyboard.

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Is it bad I’m already whistful for the summer?

Just got my new iPad Pro. First hot take, I am going lose this pencil. My first gen case made it simple to always have the pencil around and although the magnet is an improvement, it’s not better than what I had with that case.

Gearing up for a family breakfast.

Bikes 1 - Cars 340,000,000

Sure.

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Spent part of the day making a book with the 4yo. She did such a good job.

A diaspora of scrabble pieces.

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Hurry Slowly is in full swing, if you haven’t listened you should. From my favorite episode last season:

“Hundreds of daily activities that used to be performed in separate locations, with different gestures, and through a range of intra-personal interactions have now all been collapsed into the smartphone. There has literally never been a device that is so relevant to executing our goals so much of the time. And because of this, our brains have been trained to allot a substantive portion of our ‘automatic attention’ to our smartphones.”

Hurry Slowly - Living Life on Auto-Pilot

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12.9 iPad Pro should get here tomorrow with the full kit. I’ve been working from my first gen 12.9 nearly full time so I’m looking forward to seeing how it works for me.

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Oh shit. Sessions just got fired.

Wonderful run to work today. It was cool and clear and I got to marinade in thoughts. I get a lot of motivation from strava, feel free to find me there as well. n

If you use Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, or Sites, here’s a tip. Just enter doc.new, sheet.new, etc. into your browser and it will instantly create a new, blank version. 🤯

I worked for IBM for nearly 8 years and was cautiously optimistic when I heard about the RedHat acquisition. In IBM’s Old Playbook Ben Thomson picks apart IBMs motivation and why it’s a position of weakness in a lost battle.

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Good morning everyone else with kids.

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Easy morning 5k with my little man in the stroller. I almost forgot how nice it is to run with moisture in the air.

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It is stark seeing these changes on a map. Redrawing the Map: How the World’s Climate Zones Are Shifting - Yale E360

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Ah, fall, where my primary concern during my bike commute is eating it on wet leaves, rather than being hit by a car.

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Someone stole our pumpkin, my daughter was sure it was a mixup so she had us add a sign “Don’t steal my pumpkin. It is special to me and it is a Jack-o-lantern”

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Week two of the neighborhood meditation workshop. I’ve been doing 20 minutes every day. Last week focused on breathing which I liked. This week is guided meditation which I have no patience for.

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Gonna be super bummed if the new iPad Pro requires a pencil upgrade as well.

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There’s been a rash of koala pun post-it’s around the office.

From my run on Saturday.

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Do you ever look at a pendant lights and check to see if you have force powers? … me either.

At this point I’m running off one screen of frequent apps and 2 folders. Games is full of … games because I’ll browse them. Stuff is everything else. I launch things from the main screen or from search.

Spring in portland. Drizzling and everything is blooming at once.

In the 20th century, the US passed laws that outlawed lead in paint and gasoline, that defined how much privacy a landlord needs to give his tenants, and that determined how much a phone company can surveil its customers. We can decide how we want to handle digital surveillance, attention-channeling, harassment, data collection, and algorithmic decision­making. We just need to start the discussion.

Wired: It’s the Golden Age of Free Speech

Kids with terminal cancer share what gives life meaning.

I’m a sucker for those 5 morning habit listicles that seem to fill medium. Of all of them I think this is the only one of real substance. Wake early, meaningfully invest in yourself, and spend the time to reflect on it.

Whistling in the dark.

Watching Meet the Press this Morning, I found myself wishing that they gave background on what a “meeting about Russian orphans” means. If you’re a podcast person listen to The Death of Sergei Magnitsky, for long form try Bill Browder, Putin Enemy No. 1

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Does anyone have an indispensable Apple Watch app I should try? So far fantastical, overcast, darksky, and gulps are the main third party ones I actually use.

The sink at work is getting pretty serious.

It’s nice to see strava give a rational and empathetic response to the heatmap story that’s been going around. I’ve always thought their privacy options were well thought out and appropriate.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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@marco I see your Marco.org posts in your timeline, did you do something fancy or just add your normal RSS feed to your micro.blog account?

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To help distract you from the state of the union. How Americans Die

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Does anyone have experience with running eero’s for their home wifi?