My husband and I went for a mini road-trip yesterday. As we were setting out from Tucson around 10:00 a.m., I commented, “it sure looks like it wants to thunderstorm, but it’s the wrong season for that”.
A few hours later, as we roamed around parts north of Phoenix, the sky turned very dark. And before we knew it, we were storm chasing in the Sonoran desert in March. Because when it comes to weather these days, anything goes.
There was some impressive lightning but I was unable to get any shots because I was not planning on chasing storms in the Sonoran Desert in March.
I mentioned last week that I had found a solution for my cross-platform app management, specifically around my personal journaling habits (Day One) and task management (OmniFocus). With both of these traditionally Apple-only applications having web interfaces, it was now easy to keep using them because I could still get to the data from my Linux computers.
Day One continues to be brilliant for me and it’s helped me sort out thoughts, reminisce about things that have happened in the past, and in general continues to bring me delight.
OmniFocus is another matter. While I’ve used OmniFocus on and off over the years, I always end up feeling like the application and/or processes are just too complex for my needs.
I’m a simple guy. I maintain a todo list so I don’t forget to do things. I’ll have a brilliant thought while out for a walk or falling asleep and I have to write it down or else I’ll forget it in five minutes. I can remember every room and associated schedule from high school but I can’t remember what I recalled five minutes ago to tell my team at work. So todo lists are important to me.
So, I’m back to “Plain Text Productivity” using todo.txt. I maintain two todo lists, one for my personal tasks and one for work. Every morning, when I sit down at my computer to work for the day, I type a buildtasks at the command line on my work-issued Windows computer and the automation builds routine things I need to accomplish for the day and copies anything from my personal list, which is sitting on our home server, marked with +work. It then deletes anything for work from my personal list.
It’s a little clunky but typing that command every day tells my brain, “OK, it’s time to work”.
Because I’m a GenXer that knows life before point and click and because I LOVE retro computing, I love tinkering around on the command line. And because I’m an applications developer, I can write simple scripts to automate the creation of checklists and integrate them into my personal todo list. As a pilot, I like checklists. A lot. My team at work has learned the value of checklists under my leadership.
In this screenshot I’m logged into my home server, looking for anything I’ve tagged with “blog” due today, finishing that task, and then creating a checklist for my next flight.
My “today” command is pretty simple, it’s a shortcut to a longer command that grabs anything in my todo.txt with the current date. Because I have my next flight checklist staggering dates, whenever I look at anything due that day, I’ll see the tasks to prepare for my next flight.
I’ll dive a little more into the scripts I use to augment todo.txt as outlined on the website in a future blog entry. It’s not as robust as point and click or touch and swipe, but it works well for the way I think, and that’s what keeps me on track.
Truman typically engages in contact with the humans by going up to them and turning his back. It’s his way of saying “I’m here, now give me some attention so you’re worthy of my gaze”. I love it when he’s so cat like.
The U.S. Senate has passed the “Sunshine Protection Act”, or something close to that idiotic name, for the second year in a row. Last year the legislation failed to pass the House. I don’t know if that’s the plan this year or not.
The “Sunshine Protection Act” will put the parts of the United States that engage in the idiocy known as “Daylight Saving Time” into permanent status, just like they tried back in the mid 1970s during the Energy Crisis and discovered that kids going to school and adults going to work at 8:30 a.m. when it’s still dark outside is depressing. And dangerous. As I recall, a few kids were mowed over by school buses while waiting on darkened rural roads. But oh, the savings of daylight! It’s remarkable to me that it seems no one remembers that.
We live in Arizona where we don’t mess with the clocks. It’s one of the perks of living in Arizona. I’ve ranted on this blog for decades about how much I despise the practice of Daylight Saving Time, and now that the U.S. Government is going to do something about it (HA) just makes me despise it even more. The government is getting way too involved in way too many things. Clocks are built to indicate a man made construct. Your body is tuned to wake up when it wakes up and go to sleep when it goes to sleep. That’s it.
I recently discovered the Tornado Titans channel on YouTube. As a severe weather enthusiast, I’m really enjoying the content they’re sharing. Here’s a quick look at a SE Arizona Monsoon.
I’ve shared this music before. Every once in a while I listen to this song and/or watch the video to give myself a little boost when I need it. I hope you find the same inspiration in the lyrics.
Here’s Jess Glynne with “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself”.
I went on a hike in Saguaro National Park on Saturday. I was planning on going to hike with our friends Matt and Carver, but schedules got a little tangled up so I ended up going solo. It was a beautiful day.
The recent snowfall lent itself to water coming down the mountains and the waterfalls were going in full force. I took a different route than I usually do and much of the climb was along an active wash with the sound of water accompanying my hike. That hasn’t happened very often in my desert hiking experience.
The map of my hike doesn’t give a lot of detail, but the hike looked like this.
And here’s some discussion about the Douglas Springs Trail portion of the trail (the top half shown in my route above). Douglas Spring Trail on AllTrails.
My knees don’t appreciate cycling like they used to but I’m still doing pretty well on my hikes. It was a great day.
One of my favorite songs of the 21st century is “Need You Now” by Lady A. I can’t believe this track has been around since 2009. It seems like it just came out just yesterday.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
