Tag: 100 days

Tonight marks the start of a week long vacation. It’s going to be a staycation but we have some family visiting. Not a lot planned other than no work for a week. While I enjoy my job a lot it is nice to take a break every so often.

Tomorrow my plan is to get up early and head into the mountains for some trail work. I mentioned a few times that the Mancos trail group has changed things up this year for COVID. Instead of meeting in a group and working one section of trail a week they have gone with a trail adoption plan this year. The trail is the Mancos spur and has been divided up into 14 segments. I got segment 12 which is pretty remote. I will drive just over 20 miles to the trailhead then hike about 1.5 miles to my section. All of which will be above treeline. I will be sure to take photos and make it tomorrows post.

I dropped my bike off with Eric, the owner of Myth cycles, yesterday to get the cracked weld repaired. He seemed pretty optimistic about having it fixed by Friday which would be nice. I am also really interested in having him build me a custom bike, but I need to save my money after the solar system for the cabin.

Overall I am looking forward to spending some time on trails in the mountains and on our land. It will also be nice to spend time with family and catch up on life.

I have been listening to audio-books consistently for about 4 years now. It started when I got the AirPods and I grew tired of the irregularities of Podcasts. I signed up for Audible and haven’t looked back. There are 2 things I am looking for in an audio-book:

1. A topic or story I am interested in, and
2. A good narrator(s)

The first one is obvious and the nice thing with Audible is that the browsing feature is pretty good. They also have everything. So if I hear about a book on the radio or in an article I can pull up the Audible app and 99% of the time find it right away.

The second one is more tricky. You can listen to the 5 minute sample of a book and feel like the narrator is going to be tolerable. Then after 10 hours of a 20 hour book you might begin to get annoyed with certain quirks a narrator may have. I have stopped listening to many books halfway through due to the way a narrator says certain words.

One nice thing about Audible is that you can return a book at anytime for up to a year after buying it. So you can get a book and listen to the whole thing and then return it. Audible calls it an Exchange and you should take full advantage of it. I am not suggesting that you listen to entire books and then return them. But I have listened to 90% of a few books hoping they would get better only to finally realize they aren’t going to get better, and exchanged them for something else.

Audible has made it easier, and harder, to exchange a book recently. Now you can exchange a book from the app. You used to have to log into the website and dig for the return page. They have made it harder by putting a type of lockdown on your account if you return too many books in too short a time. When you hit that mark you have to call Audible and get the exchange done. Its a little inconvenient but not as bad as returning a physical book.

I like to switch between various types of books. I like science fiction and listen to a few books a year. Most recently I listened to Exhalation by Ted Chiang and enjoyed the short stories.

This winter and spring I had a biography/memoir kick:

First Man by James R. Hansen about Neil Armstrong, its the book the movie with Ryan Goslin was based on. I cannot recommend it enough if you are interested in manned space flight. Also Neil Armstrong was a badass mother f@*#er.

Acid for the Children by Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. He reads the book and its an awesome insight into a wild life.

The Push by Tommy Caldwell is story of the author’s life as a professional climber and how the impossible is possible. Also there is a breathtaking movie about this book called the Dawn Wall.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah is the funniest and saddest book I have ever listened to. Racism is such a horrible thing and Trevor does a great job of reading about his experiences growing up in post apartheid South Africa.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hatfield is another great book about manned space flight. Chris’ voice is wonderful to listen too as he explains how he got to space and then stayed there. This book helped me refocus myself and my life on trying to be the best I can be.

Currently I am doing some history with The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. This isn’t the history they taught in most public schools in the US. If you need help understanding where Black Lives Matter is coming from, this book should help.

I don’t listen to audio-books all of the time. However there are times when I am tired of music and need more than just a podcast. I will always have a few books in rotation ready to go. If I am driving more than an hour by myself I will usually put something on.

Workout details

My back is still pretty sore from the weekend so I went for a nice walk on my trails today. I got 3.3 miles in and had a nice long phone call with my sister. She is in Arizona right now and we both agree that everyone has lost their damn minds.

This weekend was all about getting things done. Kate’s sister and 2 teenage daughters are going to visit with us later this week. So we wanted to have things nice for them. Of course we will practice safe distancing.

The first main project was getting the solar system wrapped up. We still needed to hang the 4 panels on the top of pole mount. Then we needed to tidy things up like the weeding and all the little things to make the place look less like a construction site.

Yesterday I posted about the weeding I did for the patio. We also made a run to the dump with the leftover construction junk from the drywall project. Today we tackled the solar panels and then focused on getting everything nice and tidy.

We waited 1 week to hang the panels on the pole to let the concrete cure. Today we assembled the top of pole mount which the panels were then hung from. The mount is remarkably light for its size and strength. It took us a few hours to get it assembled 7 feet up on the pole.

While this mount does not rotate to track the sun it does tilt depending on the season. In the summer, when the sun is higher in the northern hemisphere’s sky, the panels should be more parallel to the ground. In the winter, when the sun is lower, the panels should be more perpendicular to the ground.

There are a variety of methods for figuring out what angles are best. I like this site as it has a nice equation based on your latitude. The site also points out that while adjusting the panels for summer and winter gives a good amount of increased performance, adjusting it for each season(4 times a year) only returns marginal improvements. Based on its equation we should have the panels at 13 degrees from horizontal in summer, and 51.5 degrees from horizontal in winter.

The top of pole mount we have has 6 settings for tilt: 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, and 65 degrees from horizontal. So in the summer it will be set at 15 degrees and in the winter we can go either 45 or 55. 55 is closer to the equations number so we will give it a try this year. The date to change to summer tilt is March 30th, and for winter is September 10th. I have set calendar reminders to do this every year moving forward.

Once we had the panels hung and connected it was time to clean the place up. Kate and Bill took care of the inside of the cabin while I handled outside. The first thing I did was remove the weeds from around the cabin. I created a 3 to 5 foot area surrounding the building. Then I came back and sprayed a borax/water mixture to help prevent them from growing back. Personally I don’t like plants growing close to a building. They tend to grow into cracks and cause problems.

Once we had everything done the place looked great. We still need to put finishing trim in the windows and doors, but that is a project for down the road. For right now we are at a great stopping place and its time to relax and enjoy things.

Workout detail

I have been slacking on my regular workouts, but its all been supplemented by manual labor. Today was no different. Tomorrow I am taking my bike to a custom frame builder in Durango to repair the cracked weld. Hopefully I will have the bike back soon!

In other news, our local trail group has assigned trail sections for maintenance. This is their method for handling COVID but still having us maintain the trails. I have a 1.25 mile section of trail to cut brush back on and ensure the trail is in good condition. The section is pretty remote and above treeline. I will get to drive about 10 miles into the national forest and then hike a couple of miles to get to the section. I am really excited about this and will be sure to take photos and blog here about it.

This has been a busy week. We have the solar system working in the cabin. Its not 100% finished but it is very close and we should have the loose ends finished before Monday. Today we replaced the awning on the trailer as the old one was falling apart. Trail building was a morning and afternoon activity for about 6 days in a row. To top it off the temperature has been rising pretty well here and we finally broke 90F.

After all of that I will admit I am a little tired tonight. I am going to get up early tomorrow and work on it all some more, but tonight I am relaxing.

Workout detail

Replaced the 20 ft awning on our trailer this morning. Think weightlifting on ladders. Got it done with no injuries or accidents. Also the new awning looks very nice.

Goodnight!

Since I work on a laptop I try to be keyboard focused for speed. The trackpad works fine but the keyboard is much faster. The issue is that the baseline setup for keyboard shortcuts in MacOS is limited. To resolve this developers have created a number of programs that extend the MacOS desktop to have a shell/command line interface.

Personally I have used Quicksilver, Launch Bar, the Google Search Bar, Text Expander, and currently Alfred. Quicksilver was a little advanced for my computer expertise at the time. Up until I started using Alfred these programs were mainly just app launchers. I would hit the shortcut key to launch a search bar in the center of the screen and start typing an app. The launch bar would start presenting apps with names that match my search. When I hit enter the app would launch.

This would speed up starting an app but nothing really for speeding me up while I used the app. For that I started using Text Expander which let me save various pieces of text as a snippet. Then I would type an abbreviation and the snippet would expand into wherever I was writing. This is a huge time saver when I have to write the same things repeatedly.

I don’t know the exact year but shortly after using Text Expander I found Alfred. Alfred is a cross of a launcher, Text Expander, and magic. When I use a computer that doesn’t have Alfred installed with my preferences and configs I feel like I have lost the use of an arm. Launching software is great of course. Having snippets expand text with clipboard items is a huge time saver. Then there’s Alfred Wokflows, but that’s a whole other post.

Snippets for Speed

I have to cd to the /public directory 50 to 100 times a day on dozens or more of websites. I use tab completion to speed the process but I want to be even faster! With tab completion there are a minimum of 11 keystrokes to get to the /public directory and start working on files.

With Alfred I setup a snippet so that in 4 keystrokes I am in the /public directory. That is 7 keystrokes saved each time I cd to that directory. Over the course of the work day that is 350 to 700 keystrokes saved.

I realize this is a very specific application of a snippet, but that is the key to useful snippets. They need to match your workflow, not mine. I am creating new snippets all the time. If I find I am writing the same text all the time then I stop and make a snippet.

In a chat this might apply to letting someone know I am working on their {site} and will let them know what I find shortly. {site} in this case is replaced by whatever I have in my clipboard at the time. If I copy their domain name and then enter that snippet the message gets the domain name added. The auto expansion for that snippet is ;;work. ( I like using 2 semicolons as it ensures I don’t accidentally type the snippet instead of a regular word like work.

For the cd to /public command I am in the terminal and I type ;;cd. That auto expands to cd /www/*/public/ with a return at the end. The command is not only expanded but the return means it is started. Once I have typed the d I am in /public and ready to work.

Over the course of a day I will use some aspect of Alfred 135 times. Snippet expansion is about 15% of that, but using snippets saves me a lot of time. These are some recently made or updated examples that I thought conveyed the benefit of Alfred. If you have a question about another application of a snippet feel free to ask in the Comments.

Workout detail

Kinda took the day off. Back was a little sore this morning and we spent more time working with the solar system and the cabin. We now have 120 volts of electricity in the outlets and fixtures.

After dinner Kate and I took a moonlight walk on the fenceline southern route. I have spent so much time on it recently I could almost walk it with my eyes closed.

Oh and I think I found a welder to fix my bike!

I was working on a post about solar charge controllers for the 5th part of the ongoing solar series. As I dug into the subject I realized I need to spend some more time getting the post together. It turns out that electricity is a little complex and I am not an electrician. So that post will be delayed, because it is 10pm and I need to get to sleep.

Workout detail

I got up to build trail this morning but had to run to a friends house for some tools that we need. That pretty much shot the morning for trail building. So after work tonight I went out for a good 90 minute session and made some good progress on the fenceline trail. My hope is that if I get to sleep soon I should be able to get up around 6am and get some good trail work in before work.

If I can maintain that schedule I should have fenceline done this week. That will give us just over a mile of trails and Kate can start running around the land instead of dealing with distracted drivers on the road.