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.