Monthly Archives: November 2016

October 2016 – What I’ve Been Doing at 8:16 PM (20:16)

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Here is my October 2016, installment of what I had done at 8:16 PM each night during the month. I also found it helpful writing down what happened during the day as a small journal/diary of what was good, bad, or interesting.

Little Background

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:16 (8:16 PM) every day for the last month after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) everyday.

October 2016 Events

Oct 1 – Working on my 543rd painting or digital painting in the last 545 days. Somehow I have managed to only miss two days in all that time is hard to believe. Attended another excellent Boston Accessibility Camp and think it’s my fifth or sixth one out of Sven years. Had only planned on attending and not speaking but was asked to talk on a panel of what new people to accessibility should know. I volunteered to do my accessibility basics talk since there were so many new people attending the event.

Oct 2 – Watching Treehouse Masters on TV where the team built space crab structure for Zack Brown the musician for his camp after coming home from Boston after another Boston Accessibility Camp. Managed to get to sleep by 10:45 PM last night after only getting three hours sleep the night before. I managed to sleep until 7:15 AM and then rest some more until about 9:00 AM. I got dressed and went to Veggie Galaxy for breakfast. Had a great veggie omelet with Portobello mushrooms, caramelized onion, Feta cheese, and roasted red pepper sauce along with a side of seitan sausage. Once done there I flew home on a 1:00 PM flight which got me to my house by about 3:30 PM with enough time for a couple of hour nap.

Oct 3 – Watching The Big Bang Theory.

Oct 4 – Not sure what I did her bit it must have been so exciting I was too busy to write what it was or boring and not memorable to talk about a few days later.

Oct 5 – Walking past Murphy’s Grand Irish Pub after going for a three and a half mile walk since I’ve only managed 3,500 steps the last two days because I’ve been doing a lot of running around getting things done I normally wouldn’t while working. During my walk, I stopped at Eamon’s Dublin Chipper for some fish and chips. I hadn’t been there in a while so thought it would be great to go but not the best again today. Last few times haven’t been great. The extra curry sauce was a bit bland, and the fish batter was a bit thick and dense. Think it’s time to take them off my Northern Virginia area places to eat list.

Oct 6 – Watching more TV after another busy day and getting a massage today to use up my last prepaid massage. Figured it was a good time to help me relax and loosen up a bit.

Oct 7 – Watching TV after napping because I ran around Northern Virginia all day. Met up with two old co-workers for lunch at Punjabi by Nature out in Leesburg area. Once done went with one of them to my buddies house in Purcellville, VA, to visit plus see his pigs. Once we go there, we had to go and wander in the woods since the pigs where out there foraging for extra food along with napping. It was interesting how the larger/older pigs would let you pet them and then rub up against you to get your attention while the younger ones would come up to sniff your head but pull away when you went to pet them. After seeing the pigs, we both raided the freeze to take a few things home. On the way home we stopped at Four Sisters for Vietnamese food for a light dinner.

Oct 8 – Eating dinner at Kalos with a few friends from St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub. I had the oyster Po’Boy with salt and vinegar chips.

Oct 9 – Watching “American Pickers” while catching up on what happened during the day on Twitter.

Oct 10 – Watching The Big Bang Theory. Met up with a few friends at At. Elmo’s Coffee Pub along with working on reviewing Dropbox pages for accessibility issues for my interview in the early afternoon. The interview went well and once done headed to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work through old e-mails and read a few articles. Next, I headed to Wegmans for a light lunch and some veggie shopping, along with some Wegman’s pasta that was on sale to stock up since I’m going to make soup stock and pasta sauce.

Oct 11 – Catching up on Twitter after spending the day in Bethesda, MD, at the Government interagency Accessibility conference where I talked to people I knew about looking for a job, and they made suggestions and told me to send them my resume. To which I informed one of them I had to make sure it was accessible first with me being an accessibility person to which they said they never thought to do that themselves. Plus, they would be the only person that would know and those they would be passing resume on to would have no clue whether it was accessible or not. The other fun part of the day was helping a buddy of mine who is blind get through the crowds on the rush hour metro at Metro Center sine I could take the blue line the long way around. Only issues with that were the blue and orange lines were single tracking because of track issues in SW DC. By doing this, I added an hour to my commute home. Fun times.

Oct 12 – Finalizing an e-mail to send to someone about a job. Spent most of my day working on updating my resume along with figuring out what is going on with a job offer, along with conversing with old co-workers through chat. Attempted to watch some afternoon TV and nothing on was on that I cared to watch. Managed to get in an early evening walk of about a mile and a half since I had only done about a half mile up until that point. Plus, spent some time talking with different neighbors before and after my walk. Talked to one about their grass that was growing in a bit thinly another about the large tree that part of which came down over the long weekend and how the city came t take the rest of it down the other day. Then talked to a third neighbor about take out the weeds in his lawn while we talked with another neighbor about her having time to herself while the kids were at choir practice.

Oct 13 – Sitting the audience at the Naval Heritage Centers auditorium lessening to Sir Tim Berners-Lee the founder of the World Wide Web answer questions after watching “ForEveryone.Net”. Some days it pays to look at Twitter during the day so you can find out about events like this and even have someone put you on the list to attend on a few hours notice.

Oct 14 – Watching “Tony Robbins: I’m Not Your Guru” on Netflix on my 34″ widescreen monitor which is about what happens at one of his six-day Unites States events. After that, I watched a few episodes of “Street Food Around the World” where this guy goes to large international cities and spends twenty-four hours eating street food. He usually, gets a few shop owners/employees to let him in the back to watch and help make whatever their specialization is. Along with meeting up for lunch with another chef friend so show them the best local place to go. I spent my day making a couple of runs to the post office to pay bills, buy stamps, and mail in some paperwork. While earlier re-working a social media widget to have fewer items, along with no images. The only issue is that it was originally written using jQuery which means adding 90 Kb of minified code to the page wait of a page that weighs less than 20 Kb. Still having issues with the Twitter link, so once that’s corrected I will work on converting the widget to JavaScript. Doing so will give me a project to work on while trying to finally, learn JavaScript or at least put a dent in my knowledge.

Oct 15 – I was half watching football on TV. I think I was watching the Notre Dame vs. Standford game at 8:16 PM. The game was pretty good with Notre Dame leading most of the game until they lost in the late parts of the fourth quarter. Managed to get to the Courthouse Farmer’s Market along with the Del Ray Farmer’s Market. Also stopped into St. Elmo’s to visit friends and found a friends family there which was unexpected since I figured they would be at the hospital visiting after her brain surgery which went fine. After that went to M. E. Swing for a hot chocolate and a bit of reading before picking up a buddy around 1:30 PM to have lunch at Peter Chang’s. Once we were done, we went to Super H Mart so I could pick up some pork necks and backs and chicken necks to use in homemade soup, along with fish fillets. On our way to drop my buddy off, we stopped at Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up a few egg rolls, which I consider the sleeper dish there. I would have never thought about getting them until a guy came in with friends and family and order like eight of them for four people.  Asked him about them and eh said they were great and the reason he was there to have them try them. He was correct that they are the best. I dare say the best ones I have ever had not that I eat a lot of egg rolls because so many are bad.

Oct 16 – I was watching TV waiting for Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” show to come on CNN. Earlier in the day, I drove out to the Shen-Valley Flea Market in White Post, VA. On my way there and again when going home, I noticed that there were a lot less Republican Presidential signs and the ones I did see seemed small than in years past. Not that there were a lot of Democratic Presidential signs either. Guess this year’s election is so much different in the last few years that people are not necessarily saying which candidate they are voting for or at least not publicly.

Oct 17 – Watching a new episode of the Big Bang Theory. I spent my day sending e-mails and dealing with computer stuff so could spend Tuesday learning about JavaScript. Late in the afternoon, I left the house for about a two-mile walk.

Oct 18 – Talking about diversity and inclusion with people after the panel discussion about gave they thought of individuals with disabilities as part of their hiring or customer base over at WeWork Crystal City. Earlier in the day, I started reading A Book Apart’s JavaScript called “JavaScript for Designers”. I didn’t get too far because I spent time taking notes and responding to e-mails and Twitter direct messages.

Oct 19 – Listening to Marcy Sutton’s closing comments from her great “Accessibility Testing with Angular 1 and 2” talk at Blackboard. Had planned on getting more done reading about “JavaScript for Designers” today but wasn’t feeling well so napped instead so I was better to go run today’s Accessibility DC event at Blackboard with JoAnna Hunt.

Oct 20 – Listening to Carrie Hane’s closing remarks of her Content Strategy talk at Refresh DC at WeWork Crystal City, VA. I did an accessibility talk at Pivotal Labs Crystal City, VA, office which is in the WeWork office space for now. Had hoped I could have more time to do the talk, so I didn’t have to rush through the content. I stuck around for a while to continue reading through more of “JavaScript for Designers” and taking notes while testing JavaScript in the Chrome console. While there Nick Whitmore challenged me to some ping pong, which I did pretty good for not playing in a long time.

Oct 21 – Talking with Chef James from Makatto at the TEDxMidAtlantic after party.

Oct 22 – Talking with TEDxMidAtlantic attendees at the closing party at the xxx venue.

Oct 23 – Watching last weeks “Parts Unknown” show about Sichuan and eating dinner on the couch while waiting for the newest episode to air about London. They were there right after the Brexit vote.

Oct 24 – Watching “The Big Bang Theory” for the last time on Monday night this season.

Oct 25 – Sitting in Cabin John drinking Matt Kline wine, eating BBQ pulled pork with coleslaw, while talking politics.

Oct 26 – Watching TV of some kind it must have been so exciting that I forgot to write it down while watching. Started uploading accessibility test results, etc. to SharePoint at the office.

Oct 27 – Watching The Big Bang Theory. I spent a good part of the day help and reviewing the accessibility updates the Presidential Innovation Fellow were making to the WORKER.gov website.

Oct 28 – Watching TV of some kind it must have been so exciting that I forgot to write it down while watching. Finished uploading accessibility test results, etc. to SharePoint at the office.

Oct 29 – Driving to Lost Dog to get a meatball sub along with some cake donuts from Sugar Shack afterwards.

Oct 30 – wWatching the repeat of the London episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown”.

Oct 31 – Adding issues for phone numbers missing parenthesis “(” in the front of the them for nine locations. Spent the early evening outside talking to the neighbors while handing out quarters to the children as they gave them candy.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary entry to see what you have done or can accomplish over the course of a year.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:16 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.

September 2016 – What I’ve Been Doing at 8:16 PM (20:16)

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Here is my September 2016, installment of what I had done at 8:16 PM each night during the month. I also found it helpful writing down what happened during the day as a small journal/diary of what was good, bad, or interesting.

Little Background

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:16 (8:16 PM) every day for the last month after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) everyday.

September 2016 Events

Sep 1 – Again too busy to write things down but not memorable to do so a day or so later.

Sep 2 – Listening to the Accidentals from Traverse City, MI, perform at St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub while working on my 10K Apart entry.

Sep 3 – Not sure what I was dong at 8:16 PM, but do remember what I did during the day. I went to the Courthouse and Del Ray farmer’s markets before heading over to St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub to meet a few friends for a short time before driving to meet a buddy at Whole Foods off RT 66. We were on our way to Frederick, MD, where I had an appointment to get my beard trimmed before my trip to Portland, OR. We got to Frederick, MD, in time to go to The Family Meal to have lunch which consisted of a bunch of small dishes. Those dishes were Chinese chicken wings, Hoppin John, hoe cakes, pimento cheese mac and cheese, roasted Brussels sprouts, and beans and Carolina Gold rice. Once the beard trim was done, we walked around Frederick and stopped in to get some chocolate at Zoe’s and then to Gravel and Grind for some ice tea for me and a “Johnny Cash” drink for my buddy.

Sep 4 – Waiting in line at the Crab Deck to get dinner with a buddy, after we went to DuPont Circle Farmers Market where he grabbed a coffee, and we split a deluxe egg, sharp cheddar cheese, and smoked bacon breakfast sandwich. We left there and drove to Lewes, DE, to grab some ice cream at Hopkins Family Farm(?) before going to  Milton, DE, to take the brewery tour at Dogfish Head Brewery. When we got there around 3:00 PM all the tours were full. I talked to the woman at the front desk about how this was the second time in three weeks I drove three hours from Dc and couldn’t get on a tour. She looked through the list and was able to get us on the 4:15 PM tour. We had a good time on the tour and I learned more again this time.

Sep 5 – Sorting through laundry before doing more work on my 10K Apart entry. Spent most of my day working on creating more JSON city files along with more coding changes to my website “Places Geeks Eat”.

Sep 6 – Working on my 10K Apart entry. Spent most of my evening working on my 10K Apart code and found most of my issues was I was missing NAME=”slct” on my FORMs SELECT tag. For some reason I had the LABEL FOR and INPUT ID but not the NAME. FORMs were not going to work without all three. Once that problem was corrected had to put in a few IF statements to display certain content over others and get the page to load a given cities restaurant information. Upon getting that straightened around I then worked on creating more city JSON files. Using some quick general math, I have about 19 hours isn’t this whole project.

Sep 7 – Sitting in my window seat on an Alaska Airlines flight about an hour outside of Portland, OR, (PDX) from Washington, DC (DCA). The flight left about an hour and 45 minutes behind because of rainstorms to the west of DCA. Managed to get through my work day by mostly cleaning out my inbox. Currently, filed away e-mails from the present all the way back to September of 2015. Have a few more months to deal with yet. On the flight from DCA to PDX, I thought I should change to application website name from “Places Geeks Eat” to “Places jfc3 Eats” or “Places jfcii Eats” or “Places John Eat” this way I can point it back to my website. Also need to look into adding microformats for each restaurant.

Sep 8 – Eating a lamb gyro at the XOXO Festival opening party. Walked around Portland a little on my way to Blue Star Donuts to have their apple fritter which I consider my favorite one ever and I’m in my early fifties. Grab a fritter and a chocolate buttermilk cake donut. Once done there I walked a few blocks to Powell’s Books where I managed to create the Accessibility DC September 21 which we have Maketto talking about the difference between “Japanese Accessibility and United States Section 508”. I also worked on worked on adding microformats to my 10K Apart entry. Next went over to XOXO Festival to pick up my badge and see what was going on.  I then grabbed a late lunch at Nong’s Khao Man Gai (chicken and rice). Then it was back to AirBnB to change into jeans and a hoodie.

Sep 9 – Sitting in the audience the Story part of XOXO Festival listening to xxx speak. During the day went with Matthew, his daughter, wife, and a few others friends for ramen, then off to two chocolate shops and a comic book store. Followed by apple fritters for me. Told guy behind the counter they are my apple fritters ever and he gave me two. Once back to Matthew’s house a few of us played the card game “Sushi Go!” .

Sep 10 – Sitting watching a short film during XOXO Festivals Film and Animation evening event. Best talk during the day was Lucy Bellwood talking about making it but still needing government assistance (food stamps) up until this year. You need to buy her comics they are great.

Sep 11 – Waiting at Pok Pok for a cab after having dinner thereof pork belly and pork shoulder stewed with long beans, ginger, and other spices. Another great day at XOXO Festival. More interesting speakers as they always have. One of the best ones was a woman who was an activist in the Middle East, and we weren’t allowed to take photos or video of her to protect her identity. She’s doing fascinating things, and that’s all I will say.

Sep 12 – Flying over the United States about an hour and fifteen minutes from National Airport (DCA) after leaving LAX and Portland. Was attending XOXO Festival while out there for over four days.

Sep 13 – Sitting in my spare bedroom adding landmark roles and fixing Microformat issues with my 10k Apart entry.

Sep 14 – Again I’m in my spare bedroom removing asterisks on all the restaurants I’ve been to and added them to places I want to go because there are less of them currently. I also added a few more places to eat to a couple of the cities. There are a bunch more cities to add to the list before spending time dividing the larger lists into at least two files with previous and next logic. Once that’s mostly finalized, I will start working on Matthew Oliphants (@matto) idea of randomly generating a few addresses of places to eat without any other information. Might give an option for larger lists to pick the type of food at least, so people have a bit more control over what they get shown.

Sep 15 – Driving home from Wegmans after grabbing a bit of dinner from the hot bar along with picking up cheese to take to Ocean City, NJ, for my long weekend with my wine friends.

Sep 16 – Paying our bill at Smitty’s Clam Bar in Somers Point, NJ, with friends. We came down for a long weekend with my wine friends at a buddies summer home in Ocean City, NJ. Woke up at 5:00 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep so headed into DC at 7:35 AM to go to A. Litteri’s to pick up some cured Italian meats on our way to Ocean City, NJ. Got to my friends around 1:00 PM and managed to nap for a few hours before dinner.

Sep 17 – Watching college football at my buddy Buzz’s summer home in Ocean City, NJ, after going back to Smitty’s Clam Bar for the second night because one of our friends didn’t make it the night before and we liked it so much we wanted more.

Sep 18 – Watching Sunday Night Football at a friends house in Ocean City, NJ, after a late dinner of Italian sausages, chicken, and some marinated beef. I did a salad at lunch at our friend Sarah’s cousin’s pizza place which is called Piccini Wood Fired Brick Oven Pizza. Not that we couldn’t have done veggies with all our meat for dinner.

Sep 19 – Watching the season premier of the Big Bang theory on television. Works been a bit slow so getting a chance to catch up on things at the office.

Sep 20 – Relaxing for another night watching television. Can’t seem to remember what it was on pool change that once I think of it.

Sep 21 – Waiting with Michelle after accessibility talk by Makoto at Blackboard about the differences between Japanese and accessibility standards, along with all the work he did to help create them.

Sep 22 – Walking over to the restaurant/bar called the Highlander in Crystal City, VA, after listening to Ally Palanzi talk about accessibility and how Vox Media started thinking more about it in the last year. She talked about their process and how they gathered information while doing one of their mini Vax’s, which are small hack-a-thons to create or brainstorm something new. Then they gathered about a half a dozen people during a regular Vax which was two and a half days to build out what each job position need to do/think about for making their products, website, and web pages more accessible. When they were done, they had created a tool to show what types of people/jobs are responsible for what parts of accessibility. The Vox Media Accessibility Guide can be found here – http://accessibility.voxmedia.com/, which allows people to send, download, print, etc. what is needed for everyone or a single individual. They even made it open source on GitHub so other can copy it and make improvements if necessary.

Sep 23 – Watching the TV show “Abandoned” on Viceland, which is about a guy going around the country/world and looking at abandoned spaces. The one that was on from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM was about how the city of St. Louis, MO, has around 20 abandoned schools. The city used to have a population of 800,000+ people and is now down to about 300,000 people and because of the poor city school system now have lots of people sending their children to private schools. The show that followed that was on starting at 9:00 PM was about the “Wet Lands” in California. They started off showing the Salton Sea in CA, which I had been to this year when driving from Las Vegas, NV, to San Diego, CA. They talked about how it was getting stinky from all the fish dying and then rotting on the shore because the sea (Largest lake in California) was drying up at a like five or six feet a year. The lake doesn’t have a source to get filled back up because so much water is being sent to Los Angles, CA, to water lawns, keep people hydrated, etc. I managed to get about a 45-minute nap in after getting home from work and before I was going to relax and watch TV for the night.

Sep 25 – Down in my basement switching loads of laundry.

Sep 24 – Another day I must have been having so much fun I didn’t write anything, or I was watching TV and didn’t spend the time to do so.

Sep 26 – I was working on my first draft of my 10k Apart ReadMe file, which explained the project along with how to make it better by using the larger files with more restaurants listed in them. Plus, I mentioned other features that I plan to add to the larger version.

Sep 27 – Texting with my father to see if he wanted to be friends on Facebook, since a few months ago he said he didn’t do social media. Plus, was making a few adjustments to my PHP for my 10k Apart entry. I was removing items from the CSS along with some commented out code, so page weight was lower by close to 1kb.

Sep 28 – Doing more clean up and tweaking of my 10Kb Apart entry. Mostly attempting to remove any unnecessary code to get the code that reads in the JSON files of each cities restaurant list below 6 Kb and I think managed to get it to 5.6 Kb without having to zip any of the code or files.

Sep 29 – Making adjustments to my 10 Kb Apart entry along with the more detailed version that had places I wanted to eat and the longer list of locations in cities or locations that had 20 -30 restaurants. Found out Kate this afternoon that the company I work for didn’t win the contract recompete and it would be our last day at DOL. that is if the new company doesn’t offer most of us our old jobs back in the next week or two.

Sep 30 – Flying between Washington, DC and Boston on my way to accessibility camp on Saturday. Found out early in the day that I no longer had a job with Tri-Tech after new company was awarded the new contract. Plus, ran around DC area during the day to pay rent at landlords bank, then paid car taxes at Alexandria city hall. Next moved on to Citibank in DC to order more checks. After that went to Pho 75 for late lunch. Finally, got to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to update my 10 Kb Apart entries ReadMe file and a few other tweaks before uploading the code to GitHub so I could submit my entry. Managed to get my entry in with four or five hours to spare. By keeping an accurate count of time I spent doing this project it took about 35 hours to complete and close to 20 or 25 of those were to hand code the JSON file for 25 cities with some of them having 20 or 30 restaurants. Each restaurant entry had the name, address, phone number, URL, and description of available. So I spent a lot of time searching Google to gather that information then pasting the information into the template JSON file.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary entry to see what you have done or can accomplish over the course of a year.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:16 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.

August 2016 – What I’ve Been Doing at 8:16 PM (20:16)

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Here is my August 2016, installment of what I had done at 8:16 PM each night during the month. I also found it helpful writing down what happened during the day as a small journal/diary of what was good, bad, or interesting.

Little Background

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:16 (8:16 PM) every day for the last month after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) everyday.

August 2016 Events

Aug 1 – in my spare bedroom reading through my browser tabs working my way down from 380+ to the low 60s.

Aug 2 – sitting my buddies basement in Cabin John drinking a Dogfish Head lobster and basil chocolate stout while eating mashed potatoes, balsamic vinegar Brussel sprouts, chicken, and salad with friends.

Aug 3 – reading Penn Jillette’s new book “PRESTO! How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales”.

Aug 4 – watching commercials on the Viceland channel waiting to see what Action Bronson (rap singer?) is going to eat next. The show is about him traveling the world with I think his brother and another buddy eating different things than they normally would. They tend to eat a lot of fantastic food and some they don’t like.

Aug 5 – driving home from Wegmans after grabbing a bit of dinner from the hot bar and doing some grocery shopping. I watched a bit of the opening ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics Games. I did screen reader testing of the SVG map page. Also spent three hours of my afternoon doing a DHS Trusted Tester for a women from WHD to help her understand the process better.

Aug 6 – Sitting in St. Elmo’s reading an article entitled “Git for Humans: How to Get Started with Git in Your Agency Today” ( http://www.planningforaliens.com/blog/2013/10/15/git-in-your-agency/ ) and listening to “Herb and Hanson” perform folk type music on acoustic guitars. Today I went to post office to mail a bill, along with Burke and Herbert Bank to pay my August rent. After that, I went to Del Ray Farmer’s Market to get some heirloom tomatoes. I grabbed a bunch of the little yellow and purple heirloom cherry tomatoes along with basil. Next, I went to Arlington Courthouse Farmer’s Market to get herbs (sage, mint, oregano, dill, tarragon, and rosemary) to make pesto. I managed to get to St. Elmo’s to meet-up for coffee (I don’t drink coffee) and found out one of my friends are due to have twins end of January 2017. I then headed over to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to get through a bunch of e-mail and read a few blog posts/articles I still had open in my browser. Once I left Swing, I went to Pho 75 to get a small bowl of Pho with raw round eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles and extra fatty brisket. Next, I moved on to my next coffee shop which was Bocatto Lounge to do more reading and listening to NPR. Then come home to read some more and take a two plus hour nap.

Aug 7 – Washing dishes for the first time in what seems like a year, which is not but has been a while. Slept in until around 9:15 AM after going to sleep after 3 AM, then went to Palisades farmer market. After grabbing some pastries went to DuPont Circle Farmers Market and picked up a mushroom and cheese pastry song with a few other things. I then headed home to drop them off before going to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to read a few articles and take some notes while listening to WAMU. Once my computer battery was about done, I went to St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub to read some more of Penn Jillette’s new book.

Aug 8 – working on a charcoal drawing of a whiskey bottle so we could learn how to draw glass objects. When I got home, I didn’t watch any of the Olympics because I was watching “Misfit Garage” and then “Vegas Rat Rods” show.

Aug 9 – participating in a sour beer tasting in Cabin John while eating mushroom risotto with a bit of chicken on top. A friend from Chicago was in for rest of week taking a wine class where she has tried between 100 – 120 different wines earlier in the day and had to describe them along with figure out the grape, vintage, wine region, etc.

Aug 10 – watching Penn & Teller’s show “Fool Us” while boiling purple and red small new potatoes. Did an accessibility review of some new mandatory training classes for work about accessibility that needed a few updates and corrections?

Aug 11 – was reading Penn Jillette’s new book “PRESTO! How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and other Magical Tales” while listening/watching the 2016 Olympics. I would read until I heard the announcer say they were on the last lap and then stop to watch who one each race.

Aug 12 – Driving from Wegmans to FedEX on Eisenhower Ave. in Alexandria after having dinner and grabbing groceries which was mostly fruits and veggies. The reason I was heading to FedEX was to pick up an order of whiskey from a company in Wyoming. My day was spent working with one of the Women Bureau’s front-end programmers to help figure out the best way to fix the newest set of annual reports that had issues with the data tables and also the color contrast of the charts.

Aug 13 – Having dinner at Vaso Kitchen (the old Whistle Pig) in Alexandria with six other friends from St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub. Woke up late around 9:45 AM and then headed to Del Ray Farmers Market before meeting friends at St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub were we made plans to have dinner. After talking for about an hour and a half we left and I went to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to read a few articles and take notes. I then drove to pick up my buddy Sam to grab Pho at Pho 75. I had a small number ten (raw round eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles and an order of extra fatty brisket. We then left there to head to Bocatto Lounge for some Gelato, and I had very dark chocolate Gelato. While there I worked on setting up my next few months blog posts about what I was doing at 8:16 PM each night. I published my June post and planned to post the July one later in the week. After dropping Sam at the Pentagon City Mall, I headed home to read and grab a short hour or so nap before showering and heading to a friends house to meet before dinner.

Aug 14 – sitting in my spare bedroom watching one of the last episodes of season 2 of Chefs Tables on Netflix. Went to three farmers markets and two coffee shops. Manage to get a few more articles read and some notes were taken too.

Aug 15 – Sitting in my basic drawing class using charcoal to draw a horse skull while the torrential rains started. We have two more weeks of drawing class because of July 4th holiday and teacher being out of town.

Aug 16 – Relaxing at home watching the Olympics.

Aug 17 – Relaxing at home watching the Olympics.

Aug 18 – Cleaning apartment before buddies coming to DC for the weekend to attend Black Sabbath concert with Ozzy Osbourne at Jiffy Lube Pavilion. Then it was off to South China to grab Mongolian Liow Mien with shrimp and tofu for dinner.

Aug 19 – Sitting in Bangkok Golden with buddies Bob and Steve for dinner which was crispy rice salad, duck lab, pork drunken noodles, and green curry shrimp.

Aug 20 – Driving around H St. looking for parking and found none, so we drove to Peter Chang’s for Chinese dinner.

Aug 21 – Sitting in row R left of the stage in the orchestra area of Jiffy Lube Live watching the opening band Rival Sons and waiting for Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne to start playing.

Aug 22 – Sleeping during what ended up being about a two and a half hour nap after work. I spent the whole day tired after spending three days with a couple of buddies running around the DC area all weekend. The thing that made me the most tired was going out to breakfast and then not getting to sleep until 1:45 AM after going to Jiffy Lube Live to see Black Sabbath perform with Ozzy Osbourne.

Aug 23 – Watching “Counting Cars” while eating leftover hot chicken strips from Peter Changs. Spent my day doing a lot of miscellaneous accessibility work.

Aug 24 – Relaxing and watching TV while thinking about the best way to create my 10K Apart entry to display restaurants information by city.

Aug 25 – Sitting in Bocatto Lounge starting to code my first attempt to
create a small enough 10K Apart application. I’m looking to keep my CSS and HTML page structure to 3 Kb or 4 Kb, so I have 6 Kb to 7 Kb for content. Met with a group from OCIO to figure out the best way to present their content. It started as data TABLEs with links to videos which we informed them would need to be captioned. Since they were under a short timeframe, we suggested linking to another page with a version of their scripts as a text version.

Aug 26 – Relaxing at home watching TV while working through the best ways to get my Place Geeks Eat application to work along with being under 10 Kb to create the pages and also be under 10 Kb for the loaded pages too. Thinking the easiest way to be able to read in each cities restaurants is to hand create individual city JSON files that I can pull in and process after the person chooses them from the drop down list.

Aug 27 – Listening to a six-person impromptu music event at a buddies house. Hadn’t planned on being there earlier in the day but found out it was a last minute gathering because one of the musician’s wives was due to have a baby any day now and figured he wouldn’t get out much for a while. Went to the Courthouse Farmer’s market to pick-up a bunch farmer fresh veggies and then it went to St. Elmo’s to meet friends before most of us travel for part or all of the next few weeks. After I left there stopped home to drop off my veggies then onto M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work for about two hours on my 10K Apart entry which is about listing places geeks eat. It’s more of a prototype of how best to display the restaurant’s information for users. Once done I met up with a buddy for lunch at Taco Bamba which was out the second choice because Bangkok Golden which was closed for vacation. We also made a stop at Bahn Mi Restaurant DC for egg rolls and a few Bahn Mi sandwiches for later.

Aug 28 – Walking around Wegmans to pick up some Hatch chili’s, fruit, cured meat, seven-grain bread, etc. Today I managed to get to both the Palsides and DuPont Circle farmers markets. Then I drove around DC while listening to the TED hour in NPR. Stopped home to drop off food and then went to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to spend two more hours working on my 10K Apart entry after doing some checking to see about an AirBnB while in Portland for XOXO Festival the second week of September. Once I left there, I ended up at

Aug 29 – was sitting in my last basic drawing class not in the mode to draw since I was mulling over the best way to get my 10K-Apart entry to work with the least amount of code. What I was doing instead of dreaming was watching my teacher doing a live self-portrait from a mirror using gray paper, an eraser, and county to draw. Think I learned more by watching and asking questions than I would have I spent the hour drawing.

Aug 30 – Laying in my bed catching on Twitter since it had been a busy day at the office. Somedays you need to relax and let things percolate in your brain.

Aug 31 – I seem to be too busy doing something to write it down, but it’s not memorable enough to do so the next day.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary entry to see what you have done or can accomplish over the course of a year.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:16 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.