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Space Age Madness
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The Weekly Bump: Episode 3

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What a great weekend, we didn’t do much out of the ordinary, but it was a really relaxing and constructive couple of days, with some high quality NBA Playoff games, and an Atlanta United victory mixed in. I’m continuing to take it easy, and my energy has returned, albeit slowly. I mostly played Hearthstone and Vainglory over the weekend, I want to play more PC games, but didn’t feel like shutting myself off from the family to play this weekend.

We finished our Lego Ship in a Bottle this weekend. Lots of little pieces.

A post shared by Robert Occhialini (@bump) on

I did also take my sons to the Pop’s Pancakes pop up at the Spindle on Sunday. If you have the chance to try these pancakes from my buddy Jeff, you definitely should check them out. I had the breakfast sandwich with Delia’s Chicken Sausage, and I am hooked.

A couple of Kickstarters of note that I wanted to mention. Both are fully funded.

Time is starting to wind down on the Mark One Pen from the Studio Neat guys. This pen checks all the boxes, and my friends over at the Pen Addict podcast had nothing but nice things to say about it, which is good enough for me.

The second one is the Kira Mechanical Keyboard from the Input Club. These guys really know how to put together a nice board, and I currently have and use a White Fox at home.  This board is unique in that it’s the smallest footprint you can squeeze a full sized keyboard into. It’s a bit pricey, but compared to similar keyboards, it’s a good price for the high quality they produce.

Some things I am enjoying.

Picked up a Schon DSGN Limited Edition “Punk Rock Pink” pen a couple of weeks ago, and it’s become my EDC pocket pen. I’ve always like the Fischer Space Pen refill, and this colorway is striking. This color is sold out, but they have a lot of other combinations that are equally as nice.

 

Upgraded my computer audio monitors to these Mackie Monitors. (Amazon affiliate link) I had been using the same Bose setup for maybe ten years before this. These speakers also support Bluetooth, so I can pipe other audio to them when I am not using my gaming PC. They sound great, and are small enough that I didn’t really have to make any huge changes. I am running out of plugs to power things in my home office.

Finally, I ran my Twitter account through Watson after reading this Kottke post about Watson Personality Insights.

Here’s what came back for me:

You are skeptical.

You are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes. You are dutiful: you take rules and obligations seriously, even when they’re inconvenient. And you are hedonistic: you feel your desires strongly and are easily tempted by them.

You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of organization.

You don’t find either tradition or taking pleasure in life to be particularly motivating for you. You care more about making your own path than following what others have done. And you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment.

Still processing that.

The Weekly Bump: Episode 2

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I’d aimed to have this done on Monday, but my energy levels have been all over the place the last few days, and I just never got to it. Small subtext is that I had a medical situation a couple of weeks ago, and am recovering from it, but slowly. The energy levels are really the last thing to get back to normal when you don’t eat for a few days. I won’t get more specific than that, I’m reluctant to post medical related information on the internet or social media.

Like most of the gaming world, I’ve really been enjoying Fortnite this week and for the last month or so. For those who aren’t gaming adjacent, it’s a “Battle Royale” style game that has skyrocketed in popularity. The game is available across a wide variety of platforms, but I play on PC. I am “bumpish” should you want to friend and play with me, but don’t set your expectations too high on what my level of skill might be. I’d love to play with you in any case. I’m only on a few times a week, and for a brief time, I don’t get much dedicated PC gaming in these days with family duties.

I’m also enjoying the rollover to the Year of the Raven in Hearthstone, which happened this week with the release of the Witchwood expansion. I exalt in the end of the mill deck era. There is one card, Shudderwock, which is totally broken and makes things less fun than they could be. Here’s a great video from Disguised Toast that elaborates on how broken, at least the animations, if not the whole mechanic are.

I did go to the Atlanta Pen Show for a couple of hours until I ran out of gas.  My new purchases were an “Aiken” pen from Carolina Pen Company, which is colored to look like the Northern Lights using the same material as this pen, and a Seed A5 case from my friends at Nock.

I did also buy some Gigante Note Cards from Nock while I had the chance in person. These folded over notecards are a favorite of mine, and I keep a couple in my pocket sheath with me all the time. They are essentially the smallest available notebook, with only 4 pages.

Top of mind for me on the music side is Black Moon Rising from the Black Pumas. There are listen links for a variety of music services on that page. At first I thought it was Cee-Lo Green, but it’s not. I haven’t been able to find anything else by them, they are from Austin, TX.

Last night we watched the first episode of the Pastry Chef season of Chef’s Table about Christina Tosi from Milk Bar.  If you have Netflix, I highly recommend this episode, I found it really inspiring. Be careful though, you can order just about anything in the episode from their web site. My cookies are on the way.

I’m thinking about getting a ReMarkable Tablet based on the recommendation of some folks online who swear by it.  Seems like it might either completely replace my work notebook, or it won’t work for me at all though, making the price tag a little tough to swallow. The iPad hasn’t really worked for me for this particular use case, and I love my e-ink Kindles, so the idea of the product might be in my sweet spot.

ttfn.

 

The Weekly Bump

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After struggling for a few months with wanting to update this site more, I think I’ve come up with a strategy, at least to start. I am going to try and do one of these “Weekly Bump” posts every Monday morning. Hopefully that will lead to more posts, but we’ll see.

Looking ahead to this week, I’m pretty excited for the Atlanta Pen Show, which starts Friday, April 13th and runs through the weekend. It’s always nice to see everyone in the pen community, although I never get to spend as much time up there as I’d like. I’m not heading up there this week with any specific pen in mind.

Looking even further ahead, I’m super excited about this new restaurant opening in Midtown Atlanta soon from the team that runs Brush Sushi Izakaya in Decatur. Brush is one of my favorite Atlanta spots, and is walking distance from our home.

Here are some things I enjoyed in the last week.

Charlie Gray’s Instagram feed has some amazing portraits, with the most recent batch being focused on the new Wes Anderson movie, including this striking one of Bill Murray.

I really enjoyed listening to The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 217, With Special Guest Jason Kottke As a longtime super fan of both guys, this was one of my favorite podcast episodes so far this year. Even more so given that I feel like I have lived a lot of the subject matter in real time over the last 20 years. (This blog is 22 years old this year.)

Why I Love Compact Mechanical Keyboards and You Will Too: from The Wirecutter. I am about two years down this rabbit hole myself, and this post is the perfect place to start.

I really enjoyed Bladerunner 2049, and I am a huge Run the Jewels fan. I was astonished when El-P shared his rejected Blade Runner 2049 Trailer Score. While I like the Hans Zimmer score, what could have been is apparent. Looking forward to the movie that EL-P is going to score this year, which hasn’t been announced yet.

 

 

Apps: What worked for me in 2017

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I feel like I should take the opportunity that the holiday break from work affords me to think back over the last year, and share some of the things that brought joy to my life in 2017.

There are so many apps that I could write about here. I spend a lot of time on my iPad, iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. This isn’t a comprehensive look at what I use, just some high notes. For instance, I probably use my iPad about 35% of the time for reading across Reeder, Instapaper and the Kindle app, but that’s all the mention they get.

I’m writing this using Bear on my iPad. Bear has become the latest in a line of notepad apps that I have used as a junk drawer for my information. I occasionally take a quick look to see where Apple’s Notes and Simplenote are, both served this role for some time after I abandoned Evernote. Both offer the one thing that has made me reconsider Bear, a web interface to my text. (Bear has one currently under development, but with no announced release date.) What Bear does offer is a really nice clean interface, good tagging support, and first class apps on iPad, Mac and iPhone. It also offers a good community and developers who are actively working to improve the apps. It’s a joy to use, and I happily will let my subscription renew.

I’ve used a lot of weather apps over the years, but I have currently settled on Hello Weather. It offers a clean, uncluttered UI, but without redacting any of the information that I want my weather app to include.

I spent a lot of time this year trying out different podcast apps, but ultimately ended up back where I started, using Overcast. What drove me to look at the other options was the lack of a good working web player or desktop app for Mac. Overcast offers the best iOS app, bar none, in my opinion, and in the end, that won out over the presence of better web players from other developers for me. It would be nice if he made some quality of life enhancements to the web player, but I have taken to just always listening from my phone for now.

I have (I just counted.) 45 photography apps installed on my phone. Darkroom has become the default app for editing and touch ups once I have taken the shot and gotten the image onto my phone, if shot with a camera. It offers really clean workflow that matches how I think about editing images. I still also use VSCO, Priime, and am also trying out TouchRetouch.

I currently have a 429 day streak of checking Timehop. This lovely little app lets me look into what I was doing in previous years across social media and the photos on my device. Most of my social time is spent using Tweetbot and Instagram. Tweetbot offers fantastic list support and I use Twitter in a very list-centric manner, so it maps well for me on all my devices. I continue to miss the days of 3rd party Instagram apps for the iPad. I’ve taken to using their web site on my iPad instead of blowing their iPhone app up 2x.

As a lot of this year was dedicated to fitness, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Activity app from Apple is something I use religiously. My wife and I share our activity goal data, allowing us to encourage each other to do well. I can’t understate the big help that this app and the Apple Watch have been for me as I try to push myself to become more fit and healthy. Late in the year, after I got my Series 3 Apple Watch, I also started using HeartWatch and AutoSleep. Both offer more data than the base Activity app, specifically around sleep efficiency and heart rate data.

In a related vein, since I listen to music while working out, Spotify has become a key app on my phone and my main music app. I maintain a subscription to Apple Music as well, and use SoundCloud and Mixcloud for DJ mixes predominantly, but Spotify rules the day because of it’s device support, social features and better recommendation engine. I could play Spotify through my new living room home entertainment gear on the day it arrived without any additional hardware or effort. If I had to drop a subscription, it would be Apple Music. They just haven’t improved it enough since launch.

Which brings me to games. Two games have remained on my home screen throughout the year, and probably will stay there for some time to come. I’ve been playing Hearthstone since launch, and still enjoy the most recent expansions. Blizzard have done a great job of fostering new content. When I want to get a little more tappy and engaged, I fire up VainGlory. I mostly play their Battle Royale mode. They have built a very responsive MOBA, and I look forward to the release of 5v5 play in January.

We bought a new home

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It’s been an exciting month. What seemed like a quick casual conversation with my wife turned into house hunting, mortgage shopping, and the eventual purchase of a new home.  As our two boys have gotten older, the existing house was feeling smaller and smaller. The new house is a lot bigger, and is walking distance to the elementary school that my sons will attend.

In the last two weeks, we’ve moved in, and I now find myself wondering how soon we’ll reach a stable state. Our new home is gorgeous, and I can’t wait to get to the point where we feel like we’re unpacked. Right now, most things are still in boxes. I haven’t even unpacked a single box in my home office.

It’s funny how much the first few days after a move feel almost like camping, as you unpack just the most critical items, then less critical ones. It feels like a set of systems that you’re bringing online.

We’ve had a lot of issues, as I guess everyone does in the home buying and moving process. We had three different closing dates as the builder was unable to manage the schedule with inspections to get the CO. We bought a refrigerator to match the appliances our builder had already put in the kitchen, only to discover that it wouldn’t fit upon delivery, requiring some additional custom cabinet work, which he’s now asking us to pay for.  Our washer and dryer do not fit in the laundry room in such a way that the door can be closed. All of these sharp edges will get smoothed out over the next few weeks.

Our address is new, there was no house there before we moved in. This has caused a number of issues ranging from Comcast not even being willing to give us service, to not being able to change our bank accounts and the billing addresses on things because postal lookups were failing.  Comcast thing worked out great because we’re getting Gigabit Fiber from AT&T instead, which is better, faster, and more stable.