Crypto
Forays into blockchain, NFTs and POAPs live here. I write about minting POAP tokens at family events, celebrating Ethereum’s 10‑year anniversary by creating an NFT and even using monitoring services to keep my POAP feeds up and running.
- Up early to pack up, get car, and unload out of Airbnb. Delightful time in Quebec.
- Drive to Laval, suburb of Montreal.
- Go to Escaparium in Laval.
- Did the The Lost Island of the Voodoo Queen room — amazing!
- Went to Birdhouse Wings for lunch.
- Returned to Escaparium and completed Wardrobe for Sale. Was incredible as well. Had us talking for a while after.
- Drove into Montreal.
- Parked at Victoria Place.
- 5:12 PM: Official beginning of Olson Family Vacation 2025!
- Walk to Notre Dame Basilica for Aura Lightshow.
- Walk to Bevo Pizza for great pizza, beers, and pasta.
- Family pictures after pizza.
- Kaye and Fernandez’s return to Sonder.
- Us, Lundeen’s, and Daily’s have an ice cream and walk down to the Grande roue de Montréal.
- Check out the waterfront.
- Casual walk back to Sonder.
- We return to Victoria Place parking to get our luggage but find the elevator doesn’t go down. After a while find staircases to get to the parking levels and find the car without too much difficulty. Retrieve luggage.
- Return to Sonder, respective rooms, turn in for the night.
- Our 23rd Wedding Anniversary! 💍
- Checkout of Hotel Vermont.
- Walk in rain to breakfast at August First ☔️
- Our plan to rent bikes and ride the Island Line Trail including the Bike Ferry was stopped due to rain. 🌧️ We went to the place and tried riding but the rain was too much and not letting down. Rescheduled for Aug 4. Must ride Island Line! 😬
- Four hour drive to Quebec from Burlington.
- 11:35 AM: Cross into Canada at Highgate Springs—St. Armand/Philipsburg Border Crossing.
- Park car. 🅿️
- Explore Old City
- Cow’s Ice Cream
- Chocolate Flavoris dipped cones.
- 4:00 PM: Check into Airbnb in Quebec. Lovely place!
- Relax, get situated in Airbnb. Mazie, Tyler, and Tammy explore on foot a bit.
- Tammy and I have a wonderful anniversary dinner at Le Clan. Four course tasting menu with many surprises added.
- Kids have dinner at Le Chic Shack on their own and even make a POAP to commemorate it (which makes this geeky Dad super proud).
- Mazie explores Quebec a bit while Tyler does some Geometry.
- Everyone reconvenes at Airbnb to wrap the night.
Blog Categories via LLM
After using GPT-5 to create category introductions for my website I got to thinking about the categories themselves.
With over 9,800 blog posts spanning 20+ years it is daunting to figure out an approach to categories. It is especially daunting to approach them in a way that would make sense to a visitor to my website. As a test, I gave this challenge to GPT-5 using Agent mode. It took 31 minutes to do the research. I have no idea how many web pages it hit on my site (I wasn’t watching!). It gave me a whole report and the results seem really solid.
Each one of these is also provided a description and examples posts that would fit into it. This seems like a great place to use AI.
Going through my blog and assigning posts to these categories could be done with a script and some vibe coding. Perhaps this will be a winter project for me.
All of this has me thinking that it would be nice for micro.blog to do this for me. I wouldn’t mind having micro.blog use AI to recommend categories for me. But then separately, now that we have categories with introduction text take each of my blog posts and ask the LLM to categories it into the existing structure. All the data is there. 🤔
POAP 7409077 at 612 POAP Challenge - Lake Lover.
I collected my 200th POAP by claiming 7409051 at Minneapolis Institute of Art, part of the 612 POAP Challenge! 🎉
Out collecting 612 POAP Challenge locations at Minnehaha Falls.
POAP 7402510 at Magnifico at Escaparium 🎪.
QMSB Trip - Day 5
Also Olson Family Vacation 2025 Day 1.
Go to day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 or see index.
POAP 7399817 at Olson Family Vacation 2025.
Happy 10 year anniversary to Ethereum! I just minted my NFT to celebrate the day!
QMSB Trip - Day 2
Go to day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 or see index.
updown.io (affiliate link) is a great example of a near perfect web service. Simple to use. Clear and easy pricing — pay only for what you use. Fast and easy to setup. I started monitoring POAP2RSS with it tonight and was just reminded how great it is. See POAP2RSS Status. 👏👏👏
We have our very first winner of the 612 POAP Challenge! 🎉
0x018a…3c47 (aka @quinntchrest) has just been sent the Collected Them All! award! 🥇
He and a friend “speed ran” the 612 POAP Challenge in one go on bike!
My cousin @quinntchrest is speed-running the @POAPChallenge today! 🤩
I submitted POAP2RSS to the POAP Directory of apps that extend the POAP ecosystem. 🤞
With the help of POAP2RSS combined with rssrssrssrss.com and a new micro.blog account at @POAPChallenge I’ve completely revamped how activity is shared for this fun summer scavenger hunt I created called 612 POAP Challenge. Check it out, particularly if you are near Minneapolis! 🤩