Thoughts

There’s something about being in the desert at night. Total stillness and then coyotes calling out to one another. Or the brightness of so many stars you could seemingly reach out and touch each of them. I’d forgotten that the desert is where I feel the most at peace. I needed this.

I sit on the HOA board for my community. We’re trying to put together a flyer to get more people engaged. Coming from a design background, I’m finding it amusing to hear all the ideas coming from other board members, though they have no design experience whatsoever.

Today consists of washing and gassing up the RV for a trip to the desert this weekend. Naturally, today is cold and rainy. As badly as I want to procrastinate right now, I have to get moving on the task…

I whipped up a new Micro.blog theme that I hacked out of mnml this morning. I’m calling it smplr. You can fork it if you like… I don’t have any plans to release it as a Micro.blog community theme though.

Okay… Micro.blog domain updated to “jimmitchell.blog” and a DNS redirect from jimmitchell.org set up using ForwardDomain.net. All is working as expected. Next up is to move to the new Mastodon instance (social.jimmitchell.org to jimmitchell.social) sometime later today.

I’m in a quandary… I purchased the jimmitchell.social domain yesterday intending to use it for a new Mastodon instance, then had second thoughts about it. Then I find jimmitchell.blog is available. It would be the perfect domain to use here on Micro.blog. What to do? 🤪

And 2024 taxes are complete. Ended up not being quite as bad as we thought it was going to be. Glad to have that one done.

I got both the pneumonia and shingles vaccines in one sitting yesterday. Today, I’m feeling like a freight train hit me. Add the DST change to the mix and I think I’m out of commission for the day. That makes it the perfect day to work on taxes…

I was totally surprised to receive a letter from the judge who presided over the jury trial I sat on week before last thanking me for being willing to perform my civic duty. When did doing your civic duty become something you need to be thanked for? It’s just something you do as an American citizen.

Some mnml updates about to drop…

I hear everybody talking about Vivaldi as their browser of choice. I think I’ll have to give it a spin for a while.

Super stressed today… I likely have to report for jury duty this afternoon, but also have a dental appointment to cement a crown. One of them will have to get pushed… I’ve already deferred jury duty as much as I can and getting an appt. with my dentist is tough. 😣

I’ve gone scorched earth on my phone and deleted every social media app, save two - Micro.blog and Mona. Their notifications are turned off and have been removed from my home screen. They might even get cut if I find myself opening them too much. I need some mobile peace and quiet for a while…

I’ve mentioned this in the past a long time ago, but if you have a domain you’d like to forward to another and don’t have the luxury of accessing server configs or tweaking .htaccess, ForwardDomain.net is a great alternative. You’re welcome.

I just released a minor mnml update to make the theme fully compatible with the new Micro.blog Summary feature released yesterday, plus a little tweak to some photo grid css that was bugging me when viewed on mobile.

Happy to say that mnml already supports the new Summary feature @manton introduced today! No need to fashion your own summaries in the first paragraph and add a “more” tag anymore. I’ll be real happy once MarsEdit supports it too. (Ahem, @danielpunkass. 😬)

It’s raining cats and dogs right now. Grateful for the rain, but more grateful that it started raining hard after we were all home for the evening. Rain through the night, but done by morning commute time. Yay!

The more I learn about Hugo, the more I like it. I totally understand why @manton chose to build Micro.blog on top of it.

My two week experiment with Reminders was interesting. Everything considered, I almost made the switch. But in the end, I had to return to Things. There’s less friction overall working with data and the way I use Things' tagging for context (where, what and priority) just works better for me.

Very strange… I start up and login to the work laptop, launch all the apps, and there’s not one email, Teams chat or Slack message waiting for me.

Ooh… How about being able to set more than one category for the mnml home page, like, maybe, Posts AND Photos, but omit others? I’ll neither confirm or deny you might be seeing this here already. You be the judge.

I chose to wear an analog watch today instead of Apple Watch and can honestly say I’ve not even noticed a difference.

Giving some hard thought on whether I should move my Fediverse presence to Micro.blog entirely, or keep the additional Mastodon server. I’ve interacted tons with the MB community lately, but barely looked at Mastodon. It’s a conundrum…

Just bought tickets to see Billy Idol and Joan Jett in September. Should be an awesome show.

I somehow discovered The Chats on YouTube and now they’re one of my favorite punk bands.

😅 Whew… I just added a ton of content to the mnml demo site. Undoubtedly there are typos and grammatical errors to be fixed…

I just love, love, love working with Finance people at the day job (NOT!). In their quest to account for a single penny difference, we’ve already wasted a hundred dollars (or more) in people’s salaries.

Speaking of productivity… I’m trying out focus modes on my devices after listening to episode 780 of the Mac Power Users podcast a few days ago. It’s great to not be distracted at work unnecessarily. I’ve set the mode to automatically activate and deactivate by geofence around the office.

I’ve been trying different ways of working with Apple Reminders for task management over the last week. I think I’ve found what works best for me and will blog about it once I’ve smoothed the edges a bit. Loving the Apple Calendar integration. I guess that makes me more of a defaults guy now.

Well I’ll be dipped… USPS found my package and dropped it off just now. It’s a positive note to end an otherwise meh day.