Blog
😐
I’m working on the email subscription replacement for Feedburner, which will be MailPoet. If you currently get my blog updates over email, in the next day or three I’ll be sending you an email with instructions on how to confirm your new subscription.
Productivity
😐
Through much struggle, I got my administration procedure into a usable state. “Administration” covers all the bureaucratic and technical tasks that keep my life flowing smoothly and legally. The basic idea of my procedure is to choose the projects and tasks for the week during the weekly session, then choose the day’s tasks in the daily session, while also funneling new inputs into their proper buckets, GTD style. This week I’ll see where I can get with mapping out my big list of projects.
Business
😎
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries expands and sharpens my knowledge of agile thinking. Some negative reviews made me think the book would just be a bit of fluff, but instead it added significant insights to my understanding of iterative and incremental development. One that stood out is the need to measure the right metrics in your product and marketing experiments. Not only do you need to measure something, but it needs to be something specific and also not a vanity metric that makes you look good but tells you nothing useful. This book will be another one I’ll study, even if only for managing my personal projects.
Food
🙂
Barissimo Fair Trade Colombia Ground Coffee: 4/5. It was consistently good. I also liked Beaumont’s Colombian pretty well, so I’ll be interested to see if the pattern holds with other brands.
😩
I spent the first half of the week cooking so I wouldn’t have to if my COVID shot made me too sick. I’ve been working through the recipes in Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals, starting with the soups for dinner and the salads for lunch. Letting the cookbook plan my meals saves me time on deciding what to make while keeping me from getting bored. I’ve found that wanting to explore the cookbook conflicts with wanting to cook bigger batches less often, which I was certainly wishing for last week after so much time in the kitchen. But smaller batches means that if I don’t like a recipe, I won’t have so much of it to eat. In a future post, once I’ve rated the recipes I’ve made, I might list my favorites so far.
Health
🤔
I got my second Moderna shot Wednesday afternoon. Thursday was a little rough, with fatigue most of the day and in the evening a fever, so I skipped my walk, but I worked a full day from home, and Friday I was feeling mostly better. I imagine I’ll still take most of my usual COVID precautions even after the vaccination has taken effect, but we’ll see how I feel about things then.
People
😔
Tuesday morning I found out one of my old friends from high school, Peter, had died over the weekend. I didn’t learn any details except that it was unexpected and apparently of natural causes. We’d been mostly out of touch since high school, except for being connected on Facebook. But even in the extra-loner period of my life before I discovered what friendship meant, he’d made it into the circle of people I considered friends. He was vivacious and gregarious, intelligent and creative. I appreciated reading the thoughts and stories of people who’d stayed close to him.
/so sorry to hear about your friend’s passing. My condolences to you and to his family.
Glad you are feeling better. I remember feeling horrible after I took the second Pfizer shot.
Thank you, Linda.