Category: General

Upgrading the Treasure Chests

Posted on by Chewbode

Keeping up with my scheduled chores/tasks/projects has been pretty easy. Toward the end of last week I did some adjusting, mainly due to two things: I underestimated the amount of downtime I needed this weekend, and I also had to adjust to accommodate Cari’s car issues, which I was able to fix on Saturday. I’m back on track now.

In the office cupboard, there are a couple of small, cardboard boxes that contain a bunch of geeky keepsakes of mine. The majority of these are various fun things from old Loot Crate boxes, but I also have convention programs and lanyards, stickers, pins, toys, things friends made, Kickstarter rewards, comics, and so on.

I’ve run out of space in the boxes and they’re bulging. So, I decided I wanted to transfer everything into new, wooden boxes, which I’m hoping will last forever. They’re also quite a bit larger – almost twice the height each. I ordered them today, so that should be a fun task for this weekend.

Speaking of boxes and organizing items, I’ve also had a bit of an overflow problem linked directly to the magazine subscriptions I mentioned the other day. Most of the magazines I read and then recycle, but one magazine (The MagPi) I want to hold onto as the issues are full of great projects that I may want to tackle one day. However, the pile that’s accumulated in said cupboard is unsightly, hard to move around and stack things on, and feels a bit unsafe (those suckers might tip over at some point). So, I ordered some magazine file holders. If this proved to be a good solution, I want to extend the system to also hold the Eaglemoss DeLorean magazines I get every month so that I can ditch the terrible binders they give out for free.

This weekend, I caught up on:

I also watched 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

And today, I’m reading The MagPi Issue 104 April 2021

A New Way of Organizing My Time

Posted on by Chewbode

I go long stretches of time without a ton of structure in my personal life. Sure, I have things that I like to do, and even things that I need to do. And I’ll even go so far as to make to-do lists with dates attached. These kinds of lists can prove helpful, and even fruitful at times. But, ultimately, the majority of these chores and projects just keep getting pushed weeks, or even months, and my productivity suffers.

I’ve been only periodically acknowledging this. Weeks will go by, and I’ll keep seeing the same items on the list. In the past, I’ve been successful in combatting this by breaking my days down to 30-minute intervals and blocking out time for certain projects. I’ve not done this in years, but last week it felt like it was time for me to jump back into a highly detailed schedule.

That said, today was the first day of this new schedule and it went very well. Not only was I a lot more productive, but I literally crossed more to-dos off my list in one day that I have in two weeks. It feels great.

The list has a lot of small household projects on it for now, but soon I’ll have gotten through all of those and will be moving on to fun projects, like coding, circuit design, etc. Part of this will be more frequent blogging here too which should be a nice way for me to chronical what’s going on. And for those who care to know, you’ll be along for the ride.

As I write this, I’m about to enter the Read Magazines block of time, which is prodding me to conquer the stack of unread magazines on my desk that I never seem to find time for.

First up: The MagPi Issue 103 (March 2021).

A New Year

Posted on by Chewbode

I feel lucky that all of the craziness that began in 2020 has barely affected me and Cari. What’s missed the most is hanging out with friends, both near and far, and not being with them during the holidays. Other than that, every once in a while I get the craving to go out to a restaurant. We have not eaten out since the pandemic started, and that’s not really an issue with online ordering as it is these days.

I’m also not blinded by the fact that an arbitrary number on a piece of paper now says it’s a different year and things will be different. Sure, I’m hopeful that maybe things will be much more normal by the end of 2021, but I fear that the narrow-mindedness of people who think that everything bad died with the turn of the calendar will once again push us into a heavily quarantined state. The beginnings of which is already being felt in California.

With all that said, I’m being positive of what the future holds.

I finally got the 3D printer dialed in and can print some really great tolerances. I decided to begin an overdue project of printing divided inserts for my Akro-Mils parts organizers in the office. Over the years they’ve become disorganized and, frankly, I’m wasting space in them.

A standard drawer with a six-compartment divider.
How I’m labeling what’s in the bins.
The bin removed from the drawer.
More bins printing.

I spent some time getting some other things done today too. I recently bought a Chamberlain Home Hub and hooked that up to the garage doors so I can now remotely check to see if I left them open, and even use Siri to raise and lower the doors.

I also started power washing the lanai and the patio furniture. You can see in the picture below that it was pretty dirty. There’s still some more work to do tomorrow, but it’s looking really good.

Four plus years of dirt built up here. Need to power wash this floor yearly, me thinks.
Nice, clean furniture.

Add to library: Trolls World Tour

Happy Holidays

Posted on by Chewbode

I think it’s starting to sound cliche to say that I’ve been very busy in my day job lately, which is why I have been posting regularly. But, I’m gonna say it anyway. Over the past couple of months I’ve been able to re-build how my department works. As a result, projects are getting completed quicker and the team is getting happier as they see see their efforts bear fruit. I think we’re on a great track for 2021.

I’ve been experimenting with creating a schedule for my free time. I have so many interests and things I need to complete that, if I don’t organize and strucutre, the time will get wasted. For me, the approach to this will be identifying the things I need to do (projects), scheduling them, and then fitting in things I want to do around that. I’ll post more on this as I get closer to figuring it all out.

I currently have a backlog of 28 issues (7 months) of the DeLorean model subscription. This stems from an offer I received from Eaglemoss where, if I bought six months at once, I’d get a 25% discount. Since I was going to be getting these months anyway, it made complete sense to save a little money and do this. Well, the downside is making the time to actually assemble the car now (see previous paragraph). Once that big box showed up and I opened it and inventoried the issues, I knew I had a task ahead of me. And since then another month arrived! I need to prioritize this, for sure.

The podcast Unsubscribe button has been utilized heavily today. This was the natural progression of the unsubscribing I did from YouTube channels back in July. I cleaned house of everything that I don’t really need to be listening to. Currently, this is what I’ve decided I want to hear (in no particular order):

That’s it? Yep, that’s it. I felt like there was way too much time being spent on listneing to podcasts. With both a 45-55 minute drive into the office and a 45-55 minute drive home, you’d be right in thinking that I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts. And I do. But, with all of the re-organizing I’ve been doing in Q4 of 2020, I’ve realized that I’m spending too much time consuming and not enough time making or creating. Part of creating and problem solving is having time to think and get your thoughts in order. Even after trimming down my list to these four, I still have a little over five hours of podcasts to listen to weekly, on average, which will fill about three days of commuting. Now I can spend the rest of my commute thinking.

To round out the news, I was able to (FINALLY!) get around to properly calibrating my 3D printer yesterday. I’ve had several small projects I want to bang out, but parts weren’t fitting properly. Now they are. So, I’m going to be firing that up now.

Added to the video library since last post:

Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays, my friends!

Drawers

Posted on by Chewbode

In case you were curious, Hurricane / Tropical Storm Eta gave us a good soaking, but nothing significant really happened here.

I was able to tackle another studio credenza drawer this weekend. This time, the target was the crafting supplies.

Credenza drawer cleanup 3 of 4 (before).
Credenza drawer cleanup 3 of 4 (before).
Credenza drawer cleanup 3 of 4 (after).
Credenza drawer cleanup 3 of 4 (after).