Merry Christmas from Team Wertz. 🎄
I’m intrigued by Keychron’s Alice keyboard releases. I love my current Keychron K2 and I don’t really need another keyboard. But I’m tempted.
For years, our Alexa was incredibly reliable, but about six months ago, accuracy dropped significantly. I bought a new one recently thinking the issue was with the older hardware, but nope. Still bad. We are having better luck with Siri and our Apple HomePod Mini and I think we’ll start using that more.
Had coffee with a friend this morning and was telling him about Micro.Blog. I followed his Mastodon account and he was able to follow me on Micro.Blog, which worked great. I need to polish up my Micro.Blog sales pitch, though, and my explanation of Activity Pub.
The little suburb I live near doesn’t have a historic “Main Street” like a bunch of the other cities around us. (Irmo was founded in the 1920s as a railway stop for nearby dam construction.) The weird thing is that they’ve just decided to insert a new Main Street into the middle of the existing community. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m sure it will be nice… but instead of leveraging what’s already in the community, you are creating something that never existed.
📺 Rewatching some Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episodes. Such a great show.
Taking all of my index cards from my planning session this morning and capturing it all in Notion.
Hanging out at a coffee shop today and working on 2023 planning. Trying to settle on some goals and themes for the year ahead.
Hitting the pause button
Time to reset the balance “I don’t know how you do it?” I get this question a lot. I balance a full-time job, my family and grad school. I’ve been in grad school part time since I started my Master’s program in 2018 and I’ve become pretty good at carefully planning out and scheduling my time. In 2022, I never really had a chance to achieve a balance. At work, there was a lot of change.
Post Formatting
Testing out how I want to format my longer posts. I haven’t had this Micro.Blog site for long, but I’ve written at my other site – Sketchbook B – for almost 15 years.1 Over time, my long form blog posts there developed a pattern. I had a basic structure with headers, footnotes, divider lines and a bio at the end. And I want to replicate some of that here and needed a post to experiment with.
📺 Rewatching Hawkeye on Disney+ and I forgot how much fun this show is.
So apparently, 15 years ago, I joined Twitter. They wanted me to post about it, but they didn’t say it had to be on Twitter.
I added some of my own typeface designs to my Micro.Blog site. I’m really getting into the idea of creating all of the assets that I use in my designs… typefaces, illustrations… now I need to build my own template.
I took Monday off to be my “retreat” day to plan and set personal goals for 2023. I’ve done it the last five or six years and I enjoy taking the day to focus on what I want to do – and honestly, what I don’t have time to focus on right now.
I’m trying out MarsEdit like all the cool kids.
I’m a fan of limited edition candy and sodas, but fruicake-flavored Mountain Dew is a bridge too far.
I’m really happy with how my Favorite Eight pictures turned out this year. ❤️8️⃣
2022 Favorite 8 Photos
My ❤️8️⃣ from 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣ This year was unexpected. Just about nothing went as planned — sometimes better, sometimes worse. Looking back over my photos, I took fewer “artsy” shots and mostly focused on my family. Here are my favorite shots from the past year, starting top left: Evening snowfall. We don’t get much snow in Columbia, South Carolina. When it snowed in the evening in January, every thing was peaceful and serene… and then it was fun and chaotic, when all neighborhood kids came outside to play in the snow.
I love writing in Ulysses, but for all my grad school papers, I wish it could handle integration with my preferred reference manager, Zotero, the way Microsoft Word and Google Docs do.
Favorite 8
Picking out my favorite pictures from the last year. Back in 2018, Instagram users started posting their algorithmically-generated “Best Nine” — essentially the nine shots from the year that had the most likes. When I looked at mine, the images that everyone else liked weren’t necessarily my favorite pictures from the previous year. I enjoyed the process of digging through all the images from the previous year — many of which I had forgotten about.