Reading List: Think Again

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant arrived today. This book hit my radar via Three Star Leadership and Tools & Toys. “Itโ€™s about the learning culture between your ears.โ€ That put this in on my list right away! ๐Ÿ“š

Think Again by Adam Grant hardcover book on a table stacked with Atomic Habits and other books and mail.

Got my Elgato Key Light added to my setup. Having it attach to the desk is key for the standing position. It is also nice to be able to control color and brightness from the Stream Deck. It can get very bright too. ๐Ÿ˜Ž

Home office desk setup with an Elgato Key Light, external monitor, MacBook Pro on a stand, Stream Deck, keyboards, and a bookshelf to the right.

Mazie finished her LEGO Grand Piano build today. It is one of the most intricate LEGO I have ever seen.

LEGO Grand Piano set built and displayed on a wood table, with a small bench beside it and a NASA Saturn V LEGO box in the background. LEGO Grand Piano set in black with open lid, sheet music stand, and matching piano bench, displayed on a wood floor LEGO Grand Piano model with black keys and white keys, open lid revealing golden strings, and a sheet music stand holding a Playday score

You can connect it to your phone and it will respond to, or move, the piano keys.

I started building the LEGOยฎ NASA Apollo Saturn V this morning. Iโ€™ve wanted to build this for a long time. ๐Ÿš€

LEGO NASA Apollo Saturn V box set on a wooden table with numbered bags of pieces spread out in front of itPartially assembled LEGO NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket on a wooden table, with instruction booklet, bagged pieces, and the set box visible nearby.

Managing Global Tech Teams During a Pandemic

Presented by: Jamie Thingelstad, Shivani Stumpf, Amy Patton, Teddy Bekele, and Jadee Hanson on September 15, 2020.

Todayโ€™s technology teams thrive on collaboration and agile processes to deliver innovative solutions. Managing a mix of on-site and remote professionals was easy, but what happened when everyone suddenly was remote. How did management change? What was easier? And harder? Hear from local technology executives about their highs, lows and learnings during this time and what changes they predict are here to stay. Theyโ€™ll address how they hired, onboarded, trained, and promoted individuals, as well as how their solutions stayed on course and how they spurred innovation.

Todayโ€™s project: Pork butt time on the Big Green Egg! Stack of wood chunks to pump up the smoke. ๐Ÿคค๐Ÿ–๐Ÿ”ฅ

Big Green Egg kamado grill open with wood chunks and lump charcoal inside, sitting on an outdoor table Heavily spice-rubbed pork butt smoking on the grill grate of a Big Green Egg kamado cooker outdoors

Smoking along at 2pm. Will be time to wrap soon. 145-150 temperature.

Pork butt with dark bark smoking on a Big Green Egg grill, smoke rising around the meat

Registered thingelstad.eth on ENS

In my continuing exploration and learning about Ethereum I decided to setup what would be my usual entry on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). The same way the Domain Name Service (DNS) converts names like thingelstad.com into something computers can use, ENS can convert thingelstad.eth into the wallet address I prefer for Ethereum, and other crypto as well.

ENS is a companion to DNS. Mostly it holds addresses for crypto destinations. It also can hold additional metadata like pointers to your Twitter and Github profiles, as well as your website, email address, and profile image. ENS is completely decentralized like all things on Ethereum. It is operated and governed via a series of smart contracts.

The process is super easy, as one might expect. You simply connect to your wallet. I use Rainbow for all my Ethereum dapps connections. To buy the domain name you execute a series of two transactions on the blockchain. In fact, all changes to your ENS entries are changes on the blockchain. Some of them have fees, and all of them cost Ethereum gas. After registering the domain, you have to set your resolver. The resolver is saying which contract should requesters ask for information from. Think of this as your DNS host records. You can then add any number of crypto addresses to your entry. I setup Ethereum (of course), Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, and Filecoin. It is unclear to me that there is any benefit in setting up all of them, but that was the list I thought may get used.

The last step is to create a reverse entry for your wallet. That is just like your Reverse DNS entry. Doing that allows dapps to show your friendly thingelstad.eth entry instead of the address. This is another transaction.

You can see the records for thingelstad.eth, it is all setup. I also have the reverse record set. To test, Etherscan Name Lookup for thingelstad.eth works as does the reverse lookup. Nice! ๐Ÿ™Œ

It was fun to do this and another opportunity to get familiar with dapps and Ethereum. Unfortunately this type of experimentation is extremely expensive right now due to gas prices being so high. The actual costs of doing all of the above are very low, but the gas prices to execute the transactions were more than 10x the cost of the thing itself. Right now this is like buying a $10 item on eBay and spending $100 to have it shipped to you.

Lastly, the ENS service operates as a token. My address, thingelstad.eth, is a token that only I own. It is kind of neat that it now shows up in my wallet as well!

ENS collectible card with an orange and gold gradient background displaying the domain name thingelstad.eth in white text

Lucky looking so very peaceful as she takes an afternoon nap. ๐Ÿ’ค

White fluffy dog curled up asleep in a large red corduroy dog bed beside a glass door overlooking a wet deck and lake.

Ready to put the steaks on the Big Green Egg! ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿฅฉ

Big Green Egg kamado grill smoking outdoors with thermometer reading around 400 degrees F, lake and bare trees in background.

Called up Bevcomm today and upgraded our DSL connection at the cabin to the fastest that we can provision. Hopefully this resolves the lag I’ve been experiencing in Zoom.

Internet speed test history showing download speeds of 16-25 Mbps and upload speeds ranging from 586 kbps to 7 Mbps across April 4-8 2021