One of the projects I’ve got in the new schedule is a planter for the front yard, just next to the porch. It measures 8′ 9″ long and 16″ wide. I drew up the rough plan back in May, but tonight I planned out all the wood, the cuts that need to be made and solidified the design in LightWave 3D. All of the materials are in my Lowe’s online shopping cart and I’ll likely pull the trigger and order them tomorrow.
Earlier today, while on a break at work, I decided to begin building a schedule for my off-hours tasks and projects. I’m going as far as actually blocking out time on my calendar each day with reminders so I can stay on track. And, so far, it’s working well.
After I got home, I was able to eat dinner, workout, do some minor work on Cari’s car, shower, pay bills, program the light on the aquarium, and shop online for a birthday present for Cari. AND, I still have an hour and a half before I need to get ready for bed, so I’m going to catch up on my magazine reading.
I added Marriage Story to the library today and fixed the cover art to Jojo Rabbit.
We completed assembling and populating the new fish tank and I was able to put the surrogate 10 gallon tank and all the supporting tools back into the garage to dry out over the next few days until I can properly put them back on the shelves.
I went through the hard drives of my old PC and cleared off all of the data I might need and put it on my new machine.
I have a lot of projects I want to complete and have decided to start properly planning them out and putting them on a schedule. This basically means that I’m going to take all of my non-day-job time and divide it up and organize it so I can start to get things completed. Once I figure this out, I may post a calendar on the site here.
I’ve also been thinking alot about how much content I’m consuming and whether or not I want to slow that down. I’ve unsubscribed from several YouTube channels and have brought my weekly viewing down from about (on average) 7h 17m to about 4h 00m. I need to do the same with podcasts as well and trim all of the fat.
Played a little Minecraft today. I realized that my horse, Tinkles, has been holed up in my base, tied to a hitching post for a long time. He needed a nicer place to live. That, and I wanted to collect and breed some useful animals. So, I built a barn.
I’ve finally had time to build out my new PC, and I’m writing this from it. It’s really nice to have such a fast machine. I think I’ll end up being a lot more productive in the long run. Most of my day-to-day software has been installed. Dev tools, 3D printing software, and games are still pending (well, I did install Minecraft and tested it – wow!).
A nice side-effect of building the new computer is that I’ve been able to clean up the office a lot. All of the boxes are now gone and my desk is no longer an assembly area anymore.
We’re on day 3 of the Monte Carlo seeds in the aquarium. Still no visible germination.
I ordered some Dewalt folding workbenches to augment the workspace in the garage. I think these will help m a lot with some upcoming projects.
Speaking of garage, I’m going to go in there now to do some cleanup while Visual Studio 2019 installs.
The replacement motherboard for my new computer arrived yesterday. I haven’t unboxed it yet as I need to perform some initial setup tasks on the aquarium.
I plan to begin growing a bed of Micranthemum Tweediei (more commonly known as Monte Carlo) in the tank, which requires no standing water and a greenhouse effect to be in place for about a week. Once that takes root (pardon the pun), then I’ll add water and relocate the fish from the 10 gallon tank. While the Monte Carlo grows, I can focus on building the new computer.
I really need to get back on board with blogging. It’s been so long…
I’ve re-enabled my subscription to HakerBoxes. So far, I’ve received boxes 54 (Smart Home), 55 (High Roller), and 56 (Demon Seed). I’ve created some project pages on my internal wiki, but have made no progress toward assembling the kits.
I have a large box of unpainted D&D minis sitting here next to me that were originally intended for a campaign I created for a bunch of friends. Of course, this was all before the COVID-19 craziness. We haven’t played yet, but I do want to start chipping away at painting all of these. Eventually we will use them.
About a month ago my main PC crapped out. I decided to do something I’ve never done before; spec out a high-end machine and order all new parts. I did such, and got all of the components from NewEgg, however the motherboard arrived with damage. I got a return RMA but, because of COVID-19, the RMA took a long time. I should be getting the new motherboard this Monday.
The main 37-gallon fish tank needed a thorough cleaning, so Cari and I took it into the garage and emptied it last week. I’ll be spending a good chunk of time today cleaning everything. I suspect that the tank will be back in place this weekend. Currently, the fish are is a surrogate 10-gallon tank.
Still working on the DeLorean model monthly. I received a special-order package of several mods for the kit. More to come on this.
Movies added to the library this week: