First time winter hiking today with these hiking crampons. Amazing stability and still easy to walk on.

Suggestion from Bryan Hansel to find your photography style — go through your photos for the year and pick your favorite single one from each month. Not your best, or most liked. Your favorite! Look at those twelve photos and reflect on what the common threads are between them all.

Ice Climbers along the Cascade River.

How is it possible that I’m just now discovering how amazing Swedish Cream is. Wow.

Geared up for sunrise winter photography.

Out early shooting the sunrise. Good waves on Lake Superior.

Bryan Hansel getting everyone started on our workshop.

Morning coffee and pastry at 190° Coffee and Tea. Early morning snowfall. Heading on to Grand Marais.

Good morning from the Sundew in Duluth, Minnesota.

ENS: Blockchain Native Organization

The section from the ENS DAO February 13th update impressed me.

In January 2024, the ENS Protocol registered 39.8k new .eth domains, bringing the total to 2.1 million. The protocol generated revenue of $1.3 million during this period, all of which was allocated to the ENS DAO. The number of Ethereum account holders with at least one ENS name increased by 33.9k, totaling 818k. There were 31.7k primary ENS names set, making the overall count 737k. Additionally, 8k new avatar records were created, reaching a cumulative total of 149k.

Ethereum Name Service is doing an amazing job showing how a crypto service can work. This is a $15.6M run rate driven completely off the protocol. That all goes into the DAO with a robust governance structure. As an ENS token holder I can vote in the DAO, or delegate to others.

They are creating the blueprint for how you can create a blockchain native organization.

We’ve lived in this house for over a year and I’m now ready to tackle figuring out what uses so much electricity. Usage is far higher than I would expect and is higher in the winter than in the summer! Looking for some answers with Advantage Electric on it. ⚡️

Tammy and I finally watched Oppenheimer tonight. Incredible movie. Everything about it pulled me in.🍿

This chart of SPSC performance since IPO is amazing. Compared to the high growth tech giants — outperforms AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, AAPL. 🤩

Tyler and I watched TRON: Legacy again tonight. It is a great movie and made me think it would be fun to watch in the Vision Pro in 3D. 🍿

Game Store Tour

Tyler and I had the day to ourselves and we decided to start with a trip to Tower Games to look around a bit, which then extended, and ultimately turned into an ad hoc visit to five gaming stores in town with recommendations from my brother-in-law Dylan.

  1. Tower Games: Nice store, conveniently located for us. Great selection of board games and a lot of RPG stuff, including miniatures. Wide selection of Magic cards.

  2. Level Up Games: We missed this place the first time as we were looking for it because it is in the basement, so you have to walk down to get in. Great selection of video games, board games, and much more. One of the few that sold single Pokemon cards, but focused on higher end cards. Great selection of used video game gear.

  3. Gamezenter (formally Fantasy Flight): This place is huge and was very busy! Huge variety of board games, and a ton of Magic stuff. They also sell beer, wine, and some snacks. They have a large area with tables for gaming and there were a bunch of people there. Parking lot was very full.

  4. Source Comics & Games: By far the largest selection of comic books of any of the stores. Also general selection of books and anime stuff. Wide array of RPG items. Overall the broadest selection of any of the stores.

  5. Dreamers Vault: Wide variety of games. They sold single Pokemon cards and also had books of cards.

Tyler said Level Up and Source were his favorites of the day. I would agree with an emphasis on Level Up. However, Gamezenter seems to be the place to go if you want to actually game with other people.

We were out with friends to see Martin Zellar at the Parkway Theater tonight. He performed his Neil Diamond show — covering an entire array of Diamond songs. It was a fun night! 🎶

Valentin brought Medovik last night from Masha’s Cake. I got to try my very first slice today and it is delicious and so pretty! The honey and caramel flavors are so good. 🍯

While blog gardening today I found random <0xa0> characters in over 100 blog posts. A quick search revealed it as the decimal for a non-breaking space. I used micro.blog replace function to replace with a space, except two that were in titles and manually replaced.

We had friends and colleagues from Ukraine as well as local folks that have moved from Ukraine over for dinner, lots of wine, and even more stories and laughs. It was a wonderful evening for my spirit and soul. 🇺🇦💙💛

Watched Monday’s Daily Show with John Stewart and wish he was on every night. Seemed like riding a bike for him — was smooth and funny right away. Felt like good times again.