Jamie Thingelstad

We head out on vacation tomorrow. I setup my email auto-responders on both work and personal accounts. Created Vacation deferral folders for Sanebox to use. And a new thing, I decided to make my own DIY Vacation mode for Feedbin to mark all new items as read.

I sat outside for two hours tonight with my book club and now my eyes are burning. The air is very smoky.

We just sent out the Summer 2021 edition of Reading Things! Here in the Real World, Think Again, My Eyes Are Up Here, Klara and the Sun, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Radical Markets. If you enjoy books, check out our family newsletter.

I’ve been following the development of the Playdate for a while. I love all the innovation — including games by season and the crank! The games look like they will be fun to pick up and play. I’ll be pre-ordering on Thursday!

A week from today we depart on our summer vacation! We are heading out on a 2-week road trip to Vermont and back with stops in:

• Cleveland, OH
• Accord, NY
• Shaftsbury, VT
• St. Johnsbury, VT
• Rochester, NY
• Saugatuck, MI

We’ll be driving our new Mazda CX-9.

We had no plans to be buying a new car right now, but with severe hail damage to our Honda Pilot costing over $23,000 to repair the insurance company decided to total it. We have a road trip coming up so we we needed to get something quick.

We were curious to check out the Kia Telluride but those are impossible to buy without a 6 month wait. I had no interest in the BMW X5 since they haven’t done much of anything with it for years. We looked at another Honda Pilot but that just seemed incredibly boring. Tammy did some heavy research and found Morrie’s Mazda had two Mazda CX-9’s on the lot.

She test drove the Mazda CX-9 Carbon Edition in the morning and liked it. Given our time pressure, she told me to head to the dealership later in the day and if I liked it, buy it.

We pick it up this week. One banner feature for me is cooled front seats. I’ve always wanted that. And oddly this is the first car we have owned that has Apple CarPlay.

Also see list of vehicles.

“Not being busy is a competitive advantage.

Most people are so strapped for time they can’t take advantage of lucky opportunities or quickly resolve unexpected problems.

Maintain a bias toward action, but leave room for the unexpected.” — James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter on July 22.

There is a lot of wisdom here. Managing your time, and not being fooled into thinking that business is value, is critical to making progress on the goals that really matter for you. This is true in all aspects of life.

The Magic Pines garden is really revving up now! I think we may have planted a bit much. The tomatoes are like a wild rave gone out of control, the zucchini are sprouting like crazy, and the pole beans are out competing the corn!

I joined a Zoom meeting today and André Burgaud had this great background with a terminal screenshot. I had never heard of The Zen of Python before. 💙

~ jthingelstad$ python3 -c "import this"
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Graphic owl mural framed perfectly by window at A-Mill Artists Lofts.

The Pillsbury A-Mill looks great at night.

Great LIVE performance by Tina Schleske, her sister Laura, and band at the Aster Cafe tonight.

Damselfly (I think?) hanging out on the Big Blue Stem.

Sun setting behind sailboat on Cannon Lake.

I shared this photo on BitClout and a couple of hours later it hit the global feed and Ani15 posted a painted reply to it.

What a great image and I love the creativity in the response! Sent some 💎 in response.

Interesting to watch this weed harvester working to clean up Cannon Lake a bit.