Category Archives: 2016

How I’m Using GitHub

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I have had a GitHub account since March 6, 2013, but I never used it until much later in 2016.

I started working on a list of places to eat when I traveled and using GitHub to backup/store my code.

First GitHub Use

My first use of GitHub was on September 30, 2016, when I created my first repro for the place to eat project. At some point, I purchased the domain name GottaEatHere.com to put the information on. I bought a bunch more domains because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to call the application.

Reason for Using GitHub

The reason I started the project was for the An Event Apart and Microsoft 10K Apart contest. Besides, people had been asking me for recommendations of where to eat. So I figured I build a small web-based application to kills two birds with one stone. The contest was where people had to build an application in less than 10 kilobytes (KB) of code.

I spent some time upfront figuring out how best to do that. I wanted to learn PHP or at least get better at it, so that’s where I started.

Planning the Application

My first thoughts were I would need two or three Kb for CSS. Then another three Kb for my HTML template, and the remaining Kb for logic to render the pages content.

I decided to use JSON files because I wasn’t sure if a database would count against the total of 10 Kb. Which allowed me to learn something else new too.

I worked to get my PHP application to render a list of five or six cities, and I think five restaurants I loved going to. Each city had its know JSON file, and they were half Kb in size or something like that.

The 10 Kb or less version of the application had a lot less information per city and restaurant. I think it had a name, address, phone number, URL, and a short description. Now it has a bunch o other information.

A person chooses a city was from a drop-down list. Then the PHP would read the JSON file for the city that a person picked. Then render the restaurants for that city. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I didn’t expect to win anything, and I didn’t.

Of course, the whole time, I was making sure it was as accessible as possible.

Using GitHub Daily

On November 18, 2016, I started making more commits to add more places to eat along with more cities, along with information.

November 18th was the day I started making at least one commit or added an issue to GitHub every day. It might have been for new fields, cities, states, etc., to GitHub every day.

Over the last four and a half or so years, I have only missed doing something on GitHub about a dozen times. So that works out to three or four times a year. I’m okay with that and don’t lose sleep over it if I do. Some of the updates and issues were related to my slides, and others were for code examples for the slides.

My use of GitHub is still through their desktop application. It lets me create new repro’s, create issues for new features, cites, restaurants, etc.

With only me working on the projects, I have not had to worry about creating branches, merging others’ code, etc. At some point, I need to learn how to do that through the application or the command line.

Need to Learn More Git

So here’s to learning more Git. Be it through the GitHub application or, more importantly, through the command line.

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

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Here is my December 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.

December 2016 Events

Dec 1 – Sitting at my house watching the newest episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” Not that exciting of a day at the office. We continued to work our way through the DEVELOPER.dol.gov website broken or redirected links.

Dec 2 – Sitting over at my buddy Ron’s house getting ready for the music to start back up. That was after first going to St. Elmo’s to correcting an issue my “10k Apart” and “Ate Here” application had when hitting enter on the “Submit” form without picking a city, state, or location. Along errors that occurred when a person attempted to mess with the URL to see what they would end up displaying. Worked wasn’t that busy besides a few things that showed up and had to deal with them. We continued to work our way through the DEVELOPER.dol.gov website broken or redirected links along with sending the government tech boss the five JIRA issues to see if he could find the proper place to direct people on the website.

Dec 3 – Walking with friends from St. Elmo’s to an Italian place on Mt. Vernon Ave. to grab dinner after watching the Del Ray, VA, tree lighting ceremony from the bar at Pork Barrel restaurant. I met most of the same friends at St. Elmo’s for coffee in the morning after sleeping in until 10:05 AM. Once I left St. Elmo’s I stopped home quick and then headed to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on updating broken or redirected links in my slides. Then went over to Pho 75 to grab a small bowl of Pho with raw round eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles and extra fatty brisket. Next, I went to Boccato Lounge to continue working on my “Ship in Six’ project.

Dec 4 – Laying on my sofa reading Twitter while watching last weeks episode of “Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain” waiting for this weeks show to start at 9:00 PM.

Dec 5 – Working in my spare bedroom on my ARIA slide pages to now use HTML5 instead of XHTML code. Doing so will help reduce the page weight by a few bytes along with making it cleaner and easier to read.

Dec 6 – Eating veggie lasagna at my buddies in Cabin John while tasting a few different Italian red wines. Today wasn’t my day to commute. Had to get into work early for an 8:30 AM meeting and Metro took an extra 20 minutes which only gave me 10 minutes to grab breakfast before the meeting. Then getting to leave 30 minutes early meant getting home at 6:15 PM which is when I would normally get home. So an extra 30 minutes to commute home. To get to Cabin John, it takes about 35 – 40 minutes at none rush hours times. During rush hour in the rain today it took about an hour and 15 minutes to get there, so it was nice to spend time with friends catching up and having a nice simple meal with some wine. The trip home only took about 40 minutes.

Dec 7 – Started updating my NVA and DCA JSON files for both my 10k Apart’ and “Ate Here” websites. The changes I made were to correct grammar for Stachowski’s Market, added an asterisk to Beefsteak which I haven’t gone to, and added Vaso’s Kitchen.  Also, updated my slides to use HTML5 where they didn’t break them because the JavaScript was looking for things from XHTML. My work day consisted of attending a team meeting, then looking over a bunch of Microsoft Word documents before meeting with the creator on how best to make them accessible since they had 20 documents to change. We decided on a plan and they were going to correct one document first to make sure that was accessible before doing the rest of them. Later in the day had to come up with a list of things content creators should think about when creating content. Luckily we already had an accessibility checklist document that I could start with and in about fifteen minutes had a good first draft to send to the necessary people.

Dec 8 – Sitting in a stranger’s living room in DuPont Circle area listening to a two piece band play music and answer questions as part of “The Little Salon” event. Which is a monthly creative art, music, spoken word, etc. event that moves around the DC area and is held in different people’s home. I managed to find a nice comfy chair and sat back and watched the event move around. During the first break, I managed to locate the restroom on the second floor and then updates to the third floor to see the study and seating area which also had another bedroom up there. A part of the whole center of the house was open to the third floor so all the light from the skylight could get down to the bottom of the house. When I left closer to 9:15 PM to catch the metro when I was outside you couldn’t tell at all that there were 80 – 100 people inside the house. I also tried a six types of shrub (bitter mixer) and bought two bottles from one of the vendors there.

Dec 9 – Finishing up a small bowl of raw round eye and fatty brisket Pho with extra noodles and fatty brisket with my buddy Sam at Pho 75. At work during the day, I worked on reviewing a few PDFs for accessibility issues.

Dec 10 – I was home taking a two and a half hour nap until right before 9:00 PM after doing web work and meeting a few people at St. Elmo’s in the early morning. That was before heading out to meet old ARMY.mil co-workers and their significant others for lunch at Maketto and then off to a few wine stores for wine tastings which were mostly champagne. First, we went to MacArthur’s and tried about 8 – 12 champagnes and I bought a few hundred dollars worth of wine for only six five bottles. Then is was off to Wide World of Wine where I/we tried three Spanish wines. Here I only bought two wines for about $260, but these were older wines from two of my favorite producers in the world. Then finally, to Pearsons for a few more champagnes. I ended up buy four more wines there which were Piccolo Cru. After that, we headed over to 2 Amy’s to grab some pizza and other appetizers.

Dec 11 – Driving back from William’s after figuring out where the pre-CSUN road trip will be which is going to be Los Angles, CA. WE might meet up with one of William’s friends while we are there. We are going to look for AirBnB places near Venice Beach so we can either spend the whole tie there relaxing or use at a base to go and eat a=our way around LA. Then I helped William with getting firewood for the main house along with help to clean out the gutters. Then we each stacked a ton of pig feed (barley and corn) and once that was done we went and filled up the pig feeder with a dozen bags and finally filled the water tank at the back of the barn, so the pigs had water to drink for the day. We had to make sure to blow out the water hose so that it didn’t freeze and crack because it was so cold (34F and felt colder with the windchill).

Dec 12 – Working on making updates to my presentation slides in my spare bedroom.

Dec 13 – Sitting in Cabin John, MD, for Barry’s birthday with Bev and Aimee on Skype from Chicago while eating box frozen pizza and drinking a few nice red wines from Matt Cline while the girls drank the same wines in Chicago. Attended the work Xmas party/potluck lunch. As usual, I brought cheese and crackers.

Dec 14 – Was working on a bit of paperwork. Another slow day at the office but managed to enter an issue in JIRA at 10:00 AM before the standup meeting and we worked to get it fixed, tested, and in PROD by 3:00 PM. Which could be a record of fixing something in five hours start to finish.

Dec 15 – Watching The Big Bang Theory where they are having a baby girl. Spent the part of my day going over the changes I wanted to make to the DEVELOPER.dol.gov dataset pages to only use one set of information instead of one for desktop and another for handheld along with making it accessible and using one set of TABLEs to do it all. Plus, started reading an article about CSS Flexbox and Gird where I noticed they used a max-width which gave me the idea to use min-width for IE stuff and it looks like it will help correct are display issues with IE in handheld made or at least make it better. We are not expecting people to use IE in a narrow handheld width much if at all. Finished up my paperwork and updated the NYC JSON file for both my 10k Apart and Ate Here applications which were missing Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop and had two versions of Ippudo Ramen in them.

Dec 16 – Driving from Pho Viet Flare on Van Dorn on my way to Wegmans to do some grocery shopping and to look if they have any Hardywood Gingerbread Stout for my buddy Sam. I managed to get my shopping done and could not find any Gingerbread Stout the first two times I looked around where it typically is stored. After talking to another couple that was looking for Hardywood beer and showing them, I went over to the area where they keep the new bomber bottles and saw some weird looking bottles that caught my eye. Doing so let me notice that there was one lone Gingerbread Stout mixed in with everything else.

Dec 17 – Driving from my buddy Sam’s house after having dinner that Bangkok Golden on my way to Boccato Lounge to continue working on reading through the “Ship in Six’ old e-mails and finding places on AirBnB in Venice Beach, CA. I was look where we wanted to stay at during our mini road trip before CSUN at the end of February. We had the usual of crispy rice salad, duck laab, and pork drunken noodles at Bangkok Golden. We first drove to Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up a few egg rolls and a roast pork Bahn Mi for later or lunch on Sunday. Managed to get about a three-hour nap in the afternoon instead of doing more reading on Ship in Six e-mails and Pho at Pho 75.

Dec 18 – Not sure if I was reading Twitter, a book, or watching TV after spending a good part of the day making updates to GitHub and reading through the “Ship in Six” e-mails from Amy Hoy along with taking notes on them and the “Stacking the Bricks” podcasts and a few videos from the “Ship in Six” series.

Dec 19 – finishing up a phone call with a college friend to see what her plans for Christmas were with her family, parents, and brothers and sister, along with her grandchild and son. Instead of doing work after the day job I spend about an hour and twenty minutes on the phone talking to the older of my younger brothers, along with my youngest sister on how things had been going, the weather, plans for the holidays, and how all their kids were. Figured I would be easier to talk before the holiday weekend when things were a bit slower and less hectic.

Dec 20 – Checking my GitHub issue comment through Grammarly after making changes to the way the address information is displayed. I removed the words “Address” and “Phone” from the screen along with adding a line break when the street address ends and again if a second address is there. Next, I need to move the last few days updates to the server so I can have people check them out.

Dec 21 – eating a small bowl of Pho with fatty brisket, raw round eye, extra noodles, and extra fatty brisket over at Pho Viet Flare on Van Dorn St. in Alexandria, VA.

Dec 22 – Watching TV but nothing that exciting that I never wrote it down. Needed to relax and unwind a bit. We finally, started working on consolidating the dataset TABLE information on the DEVELOPER.dol.gov dataset pages from two different sources only to use one by using “flexbox” in our CSS. After playing around a bit with using “min-width” for the mobile data, TABLE cells corrected the display issues for IE browsers. I managed to find time to show a co-worker how we were going to consolidate the dataset TABLE information too, along with starting on my DAD JIRA issue. Which ended up being one of the top five largest pages of the 40 or so pages we need to fix.

Dec 23 – taking a few hour nap after getting out of work at 3:00 PM. Finished up the large DAD JIRA issue I started along with finishing the second one and almost completed the third one before going home at 3:00 PM. After work I to the red line to the New York Ave metro station to head over to A. Litteri’s to get some cured meat because they were open until 6:00 PM and I would not have to go on Saturday then. Luckily they were not too busy, so I made sure to give a nice tip to the two older guys that wait on me all year when I go in on Saturday’s.

Dec 24 – Having Christmas Eve dinner over at the Kamin’s and having great conversations a diverse set of people. Spent the morning at St. Elmo’s to visit with friends then it was off to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on taking notes from Amy Hoy’s Ship in Six e-mails along with updates to GitHub. Only managed to get a short nap.

Dec 25 – Relaxing and watching TV after napping mid afternoon after going to see the new Star Wars movie “Rogue One” and then driving around DC to see what was open along with what people were doing. On the way home I stopped at “Bob and Edith’s” to have breakfast for a late lunch

Dec 26 – I was watching reruns of American Pickers while catching up on Twitter and doing a bit of relaxing too. Went to St. Elmo’s to visit with friends until about 12:30 PM and then headed over to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to have some hot chocolate. I worked at reading and taking notes on the final few “Ship in Six” e-mails from Amy Hoy. Worked on making updates to GitHub which I think was creating ReadMe files for my slide presentation folders since they were missing and might help explain more what the folders were about.

Dec 27 – Sitting in Cabin John at my buddy Tony’s house with two other friends drinking a 1999 Château de Beaucastel which they all thought was great. I had some issues since I managed to burn my tongue a few days ago while eating a small bowl of Pho. During the day I managed to complete three DAD JIRA issues. After the others left spent some time talking to Tony about my buddy William’s pigs and what he thought they needed which were mostly to have more intermuscular fat. We spent more time talking about his pigs in general.

Dec 28 – Backing up my iPad mini 3 while pushing updates to the DC JSON file for “Cucina Al Volo”. Working on cleaning up some e-mail along with adding a few things to GitHub for my 10k Apart and Ate Here repros. Need to add two restaurants one to the DC JSON file and the other to the NVA JSON file. Today at work I managed to get through four more DAD JIRA dataset issues along with starting the fifth one which is one of the most difficult files to update since it contains 26 different tables.

Dec 29 – In my kitchen filling up my water bottle along with grabbing some Mortadella and Provolone cheese. I did some QA and accessibility testing of the ILAB Android Child Labor application. Once that was done, I continued working on updating another developer dataset page.

Dec 30 – Sitting at a table in Pho 75 reading an article from Twitter while waiting for my food. I managed to finish two more DAD JIRA issues at work even though we got to go home two hours early. Managed to get about a two-hour nap after doing a bit of reading what happened n Twitter during the afternoon.

Dec 31 – Lying on my sofa reading Twitter and watching Ohio State lose to Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl. Met friends at St. Elmo’s this morning and chatted over two hours. Then went to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on making more updates to my Ate Here and 10k Apart JSON files with new places to eat. Next, I went to Earl’s Sandwiches in Arlington, VA, to try two of their sandwiches and have the rest for dinner while watching football/TV in the evening. I got the turkey pesto, roasted red pepper, cheese, pickles, etc. special along with eh “Bay of Pigs.” I ate half of each and saved the rest for later. I then added more money to the meter and went down to Boccato Lounge for some hot cider while I worked on posting my “what I did at 8:16 PM” for the month of November around 3:30 PM. While getting everything ready to post my December one too once, I finish this bit of writing. Once I left there, I picked up a buddy of mine, and we headed to Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up some egg rolls t snack on while watching football. We then stopped at the Good Fortune Grocery Superstore to pick up some roast pig which I planned to use with some Ramen over the next few days. Our final stop was at Total Wine to help my buddy pick out a six pack of miscellaneous beers. WE managed to grab three IPA’s, two stouts, and one porter. During the afternoon I realized I had written a hundred or two words shy of 31,000 for my “What I was doing at 8:16 PM” each day this year. Once this is done, I should easily be over 31,000 words. Next year I will attempt to write more, so I get to 40,000 words along with less spelling and grammar errors.

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.

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

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Here is my November 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.

November 2016 Events

Nov 1 – sitting in Cabin John at a buddies house drinking wine, talking a bit of politics and deciding what the meal will be next Tuesday for the election. Not that I’m staying late.

Nov 2 watching the Chicago Cubs play the Cleveland Indians in game seven of the World Series. I watched more baseball during World Series than I have watched in over a decade all put together. Before hand, I was making updates to phone numbers in nine cities the my Ate Here application. Still need to move all the changes to my servers.

Nov 3 – Watching “The Big Bang Theory” on TV. At work spent time looking into why a Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 user couldn’t user the Flash application. My guess is the application wasn’t built properly, so it was going to be a problem with any assistive technology. My problem was I don’t have an updated version of Flash, so I can’t see the application at all. So I’m waiting for the tech team to do that. In the meantime, I asked a friend who uses Dragon all the time if it could be an issue even if the application was built correctly and he said it would. Another friend at DOL said that maybe if the person upgraded to Dragon 14 (newest version), it might help.

Nov 4 – watching TV of some sorts and catching up on the day’s tweets so didn’t pay attention to what I was watching at the time. It was either “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” or “Storage Wars”, since those were the two shows I was bouncing between most of the night while waiting until “Abandoned” came on the Viceland channel. Spent a good part of my day working with a co-worker on making updates to DEVELOPER.dol.gov pages that have broken or redirected links.

Nov 5 – I was sitting in Peter Chang’s restaurant eating dinner after ordering way too much food. We ordered four appetizers and three meals. We figured what we didn’t eat we could take home for lunch or dinner the next day or so. We ordered: pork pan fried dumplings, brazed cold tofu in a spicy chili oil sauce, a cumin crusted lamb leg, crispy pork belly, which was a thick cut bacon about two inches wide that was tempura deep fried. By the time we got through all that we were pretty much full and still had three main dishes coming which were pork riblets, Golden Mountain Chicken (crispy fried chicken strips with orange type sauce. And finally, Hot Numbing Beef Hot Pot.

Nov 6 – can’t remember if I was busy watching reruns on TV or reading Twitter after being gone for the day. My guess is I was reading Twitter to catch up on the day after being out at the Shen-Valley Flea Market in White Post, VA, with an old co-worker while watching TV. I ended up buying five or six knives, mostly chefs knives, and four cast iron skillets. I bundled three knives for $50 instead of the $70 the guy was asking, another one or two I bought cheap. I got an expensive German chef knife for $8 after they were asking $10 and it’s worth way more than that. I got two cast iron skillets cheap and then bought an 8 inch Griswold and a 10 inch one from what the guy says was made in about 1870 that were so clean you would think the were never used. The guy was asking $30 and $40 for the skillets I offered $50 and he said now after a very long time thinking about it. He replied with $60 and I countered with $55 but he wouldn’t budge so I took them for $60. Both are worth at least that much individually.

Nov 7 – watching last week’s “American Pickers” while waiting for the new episode to start at 9:00 PM. Previously, to watching TV, I started creating the November EventBrite event which I would finish a few minutes before 11:45 PM when I would be sending out the first batch of invites since EventBrite only lets you send 250 invites per day and our group is about 450 people currently.

Nov 8 – In Cabin John eating breakfast for dinner while drinking red wine and watching the United States Presidential election results come in. At this hour they were slow because a handful of east coast states pools had closed at that point. Ended up being a long night and didn’t it was going to end they way I had hoped. I knew things were in trouble when I was back home watching MSNBC and James Carville the “Ragin’ Cajun” face started contorting, and his tone changed after someone announced the President-elect was leading or won a state that fails me now. IT could have been when they announced he was winning or they were uncertain Hillary would win Michigan or Wisconsin. At the point, I knew it was probably over. Knowing this information, I persevered until I called it a night at 1:16 AM. Have felt a bit lost today with everything that happened in the presidential election. Wasn’t ruling out the outcome but thought the country was smarter than they were to vote for what our President-elect stands for. I guess I will leave it at that because it will only make me angry and who knows maybe he and his followers will change by coming together as a nation.

Nov 9 – I was copying the November 16th, EventBrite event to Meetup so I could notify that group about our talk this month. After that, I watched TV mindlessly which was an old episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage” while I was waiting for the new season to start. Was a long and confusing day at work yesterday after the election.

Nov 10 – Driving back from Five Guys where I got a cheeseburger and a small fry. It was a bit of a slower day at work with a bunch of people off or working from home so they could start their long weekend earlier. Ended up testing the updates to the ILAB iOS “Sweat & Toil” application for changes to read out abbreviated words for VoiceOver (screen reader) users.

Nov 11 – Sitting in my South Philly AirBnB cleaning up my e-mail and sending out an e-mail to someone I was introduced to about possibly meeting to discuss accessibility issues or how I can help them learn about accessibility. I only slept into about 7:30 AM on my Veterans Day holiday. Read a bit of Twitter in bed then headed over to St. Elmo’s to see what people were doing. Of course, they were having a heated discussion about the election results. After left I worked on publishing one of my what I was doing at 8:16 PM posts along with getting two more ready since I’m a few months behind posting them. Once I was done with that around 11:00 AM I headed home to pack for my trip to Philly for BarCamp on Saturday. After packing both my new and old laptop so I could make updates to my website’s skip navigation, along with the updating the Accessibility DC one for the first time in close to or over two years. I went to Pho 75 for a small bowl of Pho with fatty brisket and raw round eye with extra noodles and extra fatty brisket. Lunch was relatively quick, so I stopped over at Bocatto Lounge for some cherry and fig tea while making those skip navigation updates. My websites still had the skip navigation anchors pointing to in page anchors instead of an ID with and additional tab index equal to negative one. Updated them and then place all the code in Dropbox so I could grab it on my old make Macbook laptop and then FTP them to my server for each of the different websites. Once I’m done writing this and checking my grammar using Grammarly I’m to send the Accessibility DC, Accessibility Camp, and Accessibility Camp DC code to Dropbox to then FPT from my old Macbook.

Nov 12 – laying on my bed reading Twitter to see what happened during the day at my AirBnB after a tiring day at BarCamp Philly. Ended up giving my “Is Your Website Accessible?” talk to about a dozen people. There were a lot of talks about how to run for office, what to do now that we have a President-elect. One was even entitled “What if You’re Mr. Rogers in a Trump World”. The most interesting talk I attended was how to use iMovie on an iPad or iPhone given by a 10.5-year-old girl. I learned the general way to make a trailer type movie. This was her third Philly BarCamp giving this talk which she must have been 7.5 years old or so when she gave it the first time. I wanted to make sure she had people at her talk to keep her interested and motivated to continue with movies or other creative endeavors. Ended up getting interviewed by her at the end of the day.

Nov 13 – watching a few videos on my computer in my spare bedroom after a day shopping and eating in Philly along with a slow long drive home. First went to South Philly to stop at Forinalli’s for Italian sausage, then Di Bruno Brothers for cheese and hot sopesotta, next stopped at Superior Ravioli and Pasta for some frozen cheese and meat ravioli along with fresh spaghetti. The final stop in South Philly was at Isagro’s for a few cannoli’s. Headed to Reading Terminal Market where I picked up cured German sausages, five kinds of pate (house blend, pork liver, curried goat, head cheese, and I can’t remember the fifth one). I also went Golden Bowl for pork lo mien and a breakfast sandwich. For the road, I grabbed a Tommy DiNic’s roast pork sandwich with broccoli rabe and aged Provolone along with a Train Wreck (chopped beef, onions, cheese, and spicy  Italian meat with spicy mayo/ranch dressing.

Nov 14 – sitting in Buzz Bakery with an old co-worker talking about accessibility improvements to the new version of ARMY.mil along with possible new CMS ideas and accessibility things to think of before designing/creating.

Nov 15 – home watching TV instead of Cabin John having dinner and drinking wine or beer like most Tuesday nights.

Nov 16 – walking from Naan and Beyond on L St. with four samosas after leaving Blackboard and the monthly Accessibility DC event.

Nov 17 – talking with Rochelle and Benno taking new jobs in healthcare UX and the like.

Nov 18 – driving into Baltimore with Zac Gordon the night before for WordPress Camp Baltimore. Then went looking for my AirBnB which was what ended up on a side street that was more like an alley. It took the time to find street parking near by. My place between three bars. Thanks, goodness I was staying on the fourth floor above the hair salon.

Nov 19 – listening to Jacob Panic play an excellent banjo set at the WordPress Camp ice cream social. Attended a few talks and took notes about A/B testing and learning JavaScript.

Nov 20 – I was watching the previous week’s episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain while unwinding from two days of Baltimore WordPress camp. Attended a few talks and took notes about what plug-ins the United States State Department use with their WordPress websites along with some about responsive images.

Nov 21 – I was watching the previous week’s “American Pickers” because I was at Buzz Bakery with old Army co-worker helping figure out a few accessible options to create their new CMS along with going over accessibility issues with the new design/code for ARMY.mil.

Nov 22 – Driving home from Wegmans after going there to have a bit of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing a few days early for dinner. Also picked up four bottles of Hardywood Gingerbread Stout for myself and a few friends. Didn’t go out to Cabin John today because the rest of the old retired guys started early and had had enough plus we will be gathering at around noon on Friday for an organic snow day.

Nov 23 – Driving home from Wegmans after going there to have a bit of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing a few days early for dinner. Also picked up two bottles of Hardywood Gingerbread Stout for me to bring to Thanksgiving dinner and our organic snow day in Cabin John on Friday. Got a few things done at the office but it was a slow day with it being the day before Thanksgiving and the government sending us home early. Luckily one of the government bosses stayed and extra hour so people who had planned for getting sent home two hours early could get their eight-hour day in instead of only seven.

Nov 24 – Sitting around the small kitchen table at a friend’s house after an awesome Thanksgiving meal talking about politic, getting old, kids these days, and pretty much whatever came into people’s heads. Got up before seven 7 AM and read in bed a bit before going into Del Ray, VA, to have a hot cider and wait for the Del Ray five-mile Turkey Trot to start at 9 AM. After that went to Wegmans to grab a turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing lunch. Came home and read some more and then napped for an hour before heading to friends for Thanksgiving dinner at 3:30 PM.

Nov 25 – Sitting in my spare bedroom texting with an old co-worker about plans in Frederick, MD, on Saturday along with working on my computer.

Nov 26 – Sitting in a parking lot near the Vienna Metro while my buddy was in the Micro Center getting his phone replaced after dropping it earlier in the day and cracking the screen which made it unusable. Earlier in the day, I raked leaves for about an hour and a half. Came in the house and cut my hair and showered before heading to St. Elmo’s to meet friends. I left a bit before 11 AM because I was meeting an old co-worker to head to Frederick, MD, to meet another old co-worker for late lunch, etc. but my main original reason was to get my beard trimmed so I looked less homeless as some might say. Once done with the beard and lunch went to buy some cherry fig tea and then dark chocolate with roasted almond slivers. Next, we headed to Purcellville, VA, to my buddies house to get some more pork from the pigs he is raising.

Nov 27 – Sitting my leather chair and using the ottoman getting ready to read the Success magazine article(s) about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. I woke up around 8 AM this morning and did a bit reading of Twitter in bed before heading to the DuPont Circle Farmers Market where I grabbed a scone, some fucsisa bread, ramp mustard, along with a few other things. After that headed over to the Palisades Farmers Market next to MacArthur’s where I picked up a cone shaped cabbage, broccoli, and some turnips to make a veggie soup on Monday. I then headed home to drop off my purchases before heading to M.E. Swing Coffee Roasters for a hot chocolate. Worked on cleaning up my e-mail and added a few more issues to both of my GitHub projects. Once they closed at 3 PM, I headed to Boccato Lounge to start working on my “Ship in Six’ project. Went through the challenge from lesson #1 to answer the six or so questions on paper. Read through lesson #2 and stopped before the challenge because it was going to take more time than I wanted to spend there. Part of the reason I ran out of time was I responded to the challenge #1 e-mail with a bunch of stuff I guess I needed to get off my chest for some reason. I spent a little over 45 minutes sitting in a comfy chair reading over more of Twitter.

Nov 28 – Sitting on my sofa watching TV of some kind. Guess I was not paying attention, so I don’t remember what it was. Today I had the day off to make for a long, long weekend over the Thanksgiving. I slept in until about 8:15 AM then read in bed until 9:30 AM at which point I got out of bed to work on my 10k Apart and Ate Here code. I added two new restaurants to the Northern Virginia JSON file for both projects, along with writing out a few bills that were due. Once done with that I headed to Hoffman 22 movie theater to see JK Rowling’s new movie “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” I enjoyed the movie and once done headed over to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters for a hot chocolate and to work on reading through and doing the challenges from Amy Hoy’s “Ship in Six” e-mails. After being there an hour and a half, I headed home to spend about 45 minutes finishing up raking the leaves at my house which was the section of the yard where I park my car and most of the leaves end up. After that, I got a chance to relax and catch up on Twitter before getting a shower.

Nov 29 – Sitting in Cabin John at my buddies eating home-made shredded pork pasta sauce and drinking wine with friends. My day was spent creating JIRA issues for broken links in the header and footer of the DEVELOPER.dol.gov pages. I also was looking over a friends accessibility bookmarklets page and noticed it seemed he had duplicate links by the text, but they went different places. So I put in a GitHub issue for the page with a suggestion to add off-screen text to help screen reader users along with possibly doing that and placing the content/links in an accessible TABLE which might be easier for people figure out what they links do.

Nov 30 – Sitting in my spare bedroom adding e-mail addresses to both the “10k Apart” and “Ate Here” application footers. Figured it would be helpful to have them in case people had questions or suggestions of places I should eat when traveling. Another day at the office working on fixing broken or redirected links.

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.

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.