Jamie Thingelstad

On Wednesday May 12 at 5:06pm CT Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin to buy cars. The company also has $1.5B of Bitcoin on their balance sheet, reported $300M of which they’ve sold. Musks message is about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin. Odd since this isn’t new information.

Tesla & Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2021

Anyway, my commentary is not about Musk’s position but the market reaction. Immediately, as one would expect, Bitcoin dropped 10%.

BTC

Now lets talk about kids soccer. Any parent that has watched their kids play soccer knows what it looks like. There is a big group of kids chasing the ball around with no tactics or strategy. Ball is over there, run and get it.

The crypto market was all kids soccer with this. Filecoin, which has nothing in common with the Bitcoin news dropped nearly the same, with a slight time lag.

FIL

Then Cardano drops the same too. Cardano however is a massively more efficient blockchain. The fundamental argument doesn’t apply. They even told that story.

ADA

The point here is that these markets and investors are still treating all of these assets as a single thing. Only Ethereum in recent months has broken out and moves materially on its own. I put this in my approach, but I think it is really important. You need some mental model of the utility for each of these assets. That utility should drive how you value them, and how you differently value them.

It seems completely predictable that Elon Musk and Larry Ellison would represent over 50% of all the divorces amongst the 10 richest men.

The world's 10 richest men have had 13 total divorces. pic.twitter.com/fIQwJjvUdJ

— Edwin Dorsey (@StockJabber) May 4, 2021

I did an audit of my App Store subscriptions recently. This seems like a good process to do on an annual basis.

My annual subscriptions totaled $309.06 (including taxes). This includes subscriptions to 16 services including: 1Blocker*, Albums*, Darkroom*, Day One, Drafts*, iTunes Match, mPaceline, NoMoRoBo (multi), Overcast, RadarScope, Tweetbot*, Unread*, Weatherline, and YouAte. * denotes family subscriptions.

I also have five monthly subscriptions for $79.55 (including taxes). This includes JAXJOX, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, and Apple One Family Premium. Those add up to $954.60 a year.

So how much are App Store subscriptions costing me a year? $1,263.66. They all add up! 💸

I did cancel a handful of subscriptions. These are all subscriptions that I use so I’m getting value from them.

When people write about blogging platforms or services they often focus on features and functions. I say hogwash to that. There is only one thing that matters about a blogging solution — does it create an environment where you want to write? For me, micro.blog does that better than any other service I’ve used. I’m happy to mark today as my fourth year using micro.blog. Four years ago I was poking around having waited for my invite code. This has been my favorite four years of blogging since I started in 2004.

Over those 17 years I’ve used: .Text → WordPress → SquareSpace → Pelican → Jekyll → micro.blog. (those → are all links to the relevant posts 🤓)

Micro.blog let’s me pull out my phone and with extraordinarily low effort put a picture or two along with some text on the web. Nothing is faster and easier. I love that Micro.blog is built on a static blog engine, Hugo, since I never have to worry about performance. It is fast. It is great that I can hit a link in my favorites and have a text area on a web page to type and post. It is awesome that it can handle short things, a couple sentences, and really long things. The pages function is simple, but really powerful. I have 124 pages of content that goes with my blog. My lists are my favorite. Automatic categories based on text patterns in the posts is a very powerful feature. It doesn’t have tags, I’m fine with that, I curate collections instead. There is no library of 5,000 plugins, good. This just lets me focus more on writing.

2,039 posts. That is what micro.blog has enabled since April 2017. I 💛 micro.blog. Thank you Manton and Jean for making such a great service!

Now 2,040 posts…

Tammy and I went to Sooki & Mimi for the first time and had their Prix Fixe Menu, titled “A Celebration Of Spring Flavors And Nixtamal.” The dining room was great with a nice warm feeling. The wait staff were top notch, and extremely informed on the menu and the preparations.

Aguachile Verde

This cold soup was a nice way to start the meal. I’m not a huge fan of cold soups, but this had a really good flavor combination and the green was visually striking.

Mackerel Gravlax Tostada

The tostada had a rich medley of flavors that kept me intrigued through the whole thing. No one thing stood out. It instead delivered this combination that was very satisfying.

Walleye Tacos

Delicious tacos. Neither Tammy or I are big fans of Tartar Sauce, but it didn’t detract from the delightful fish. Yum.

Kimchi Mandu

These were vegetarian and I’m not sure how the Kimchi was prepared but it was tasty and complex.

Hibiscus Rhubarb Bar

This was the perfect flavor combination to end the meal with!

Tammy enjoys doing puzzles. The kids and I have started a tradition of making her a custom Christmas puzzle each year. This year we decided to do one for her “big birthday” and we decided to take a completely new approach.

Here is the final version and I’ll share with you how we got here.

To make this we started with a hand drawn image that Mazie framed out and then her and Tyler filled in. This allowed them to work with pencil and paper and the clear borders for the initial idea. Puzzles are pretty close to 8.5x11 ratio, but not exactly. After scanning I do a stretch on the size to get it just right.

Now that we scanned the original pencil drawing, we needed to recreate the entire image in digital format. We loaded up Procreate and put the original scan on a layer and made it 50% transparent, and then used the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil to trace a copy of the image on a fresh layer above. This made a perfectly clean digital version, and allowed us to clean up the image a bit. There were detail areas that were too small to do with the pencil but by zooming into the canvas on the iPad Pro they were able to get it just right.

After the image was traced we created two layers for coloring. One layer was “under the lines” and is where most of the coloring was done. We had another “over the lines” layer for select sections. We also segmented off the backgrounds and the “50” numbers into their own layer.

One of the super cool features of Procreate is the ability to share a video fo the drawing being created. Here you can see the entire process unfolding, as well as the couple of versions we tried for the “50” colors before we landed on the rainbow. Our creative process took 3-4 weeks and here you get it in 9 minutes.

The project took a while but the finished product worked out great. Plus the kids got to learn how to create digital art and got really adept at working with multiple layers and understanding how to use them to create different effects. Mazie got into the various brushes as well.

The only mistake we made was mine. I forgot that I needed to create a margin on the edge for the printer. We didn’t factor that in, so the finished puzzle lost about ¼” of the image on all sides. On the top we had sky so that was fine, but on the bottom we had this cool seascape and a lot of that got trimmed off. Next time I’ll remember to mark a “safe zone” there so nothing critical is in that area.