We’ve had our pontoon for a few years and the hassle of taking the cover off and on each weekend was resulting in less trips on the water. This year we got a canopy! I’m so happy to put the boat cover away for the summer and we will definitely get more time on the water!
Today is Boat Day 2021! I got the boat out of storage from LaCanne’s Marine and took it back up the Cannon River for the summer! This is such a fun tradition for me. The kids both made me cards to celebrate Boat Day!
Tammy put together her 50 Puzzle today. It was so rewarding seeing the final puzzle at full size. The images came out great. The little details all hit the right spots. The kids and I are proud of this one! Create Jigsaw Puzzles.com did a great job with it.
Upcoming reading list: Klara and the Sun by Ishiguro, A Man at Arms by Pressfield, Evicted by Desmond, Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl. Excited to read all of them. 📚
Ten Richest Men, Thirteen Divorces
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
My daughter is taking drivers ed., and the classes are online so we can all hear. I can report that just like the 1980s, drivers ed. is mostly filled with content to scare the crap out of you. They haven’t done the screening of “Death on the Highway”, at least not yet…
I love seeing the constant innovation in Drafts! We now have Drafts Capture for the Web? I never considered this but there are a number of times when adding a draft from the browser would be handy. Great product Agile Tortoise!
App Store Subscriptions
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.
Fabulous performance from The New Standards at Crooners Supper Club tonight. It is so great to see live music!
Look up. 👀
Dandelion farming.
On 4/30 at 11:29am I got an email from OpenSea officially announcing that they are adding support for Polygon (MATIC). Polygon is a network built on top of Ethereum. Interoperability to move NFTs in and out of Polygon into the main blockchain is a key feature for OpenSea.
Support for other blockchains (Polygon (formerly Matic) trading coming soon!)
Look at the trading activity for Polygon (MATIC). it is pretty obvious when the news leaked to the market. 😏
Making progress on the LEGO® NASA Apollo Saturn V build.
Four Great Years of Micro.blogging!
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…
Sooki & Mimi
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!
We had an amazing day celebrating Tammy’s 50th Birthday! 5️⃣0️⃣ Cycling, Tennis, Patrick’s Bakery, Heather’s, 50 Balloons, Milk Bar Birthday Cake, Birthday Video, Custom Puzzle, Handcrafted Cards, and fun presents! 🎉🎂
Fifty Puzzle
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 1/4" 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.
Tammy has a “big birthday” tomorrow and the kids and I have been busy for a few weeks getting things ready for it! We are all super excited to celebrate with her tomorrow! 🧁🎁🎉
Used the relatively low Ether gas prices today to register weeklything.eth on the Ethereum Name Service, including reverse. I already have thingelstad.eth and reverse. This still falls in the category of playing and learning. 🤔