Category Archives: 8:15 PM

What I’ve Been Doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) – August 2015

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Another month’s worth of what I have been doing at 8:15 PM every night. Doing this has become a great way to see what I’ve been up to on a particular day along with what else I add in about my day. It’s become a regular habit of what I’m doing and what has happened that day and a wonderful little one paragraph diary/journal of my actions and thoughts.

A Little Background on This Post

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months 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) every day.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far, I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post on what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, March, April, May, June, and July.

August

Aug 1 – Watching TV while eating a chocolate cake top. Was bouncing around and can’t remember what I was watching at the time. Paid my rent at the local Burke and Herbert branch near my house, then went to St. Elmo’s to meet friends there and chat. We also all signed the agreement with big Dave that he has to lose 5 pounds per month, and we will all donate $20 to the pot to give him more incentive to lose weight. He ‘s six foot six and weighs he says 450 pounds. His goal is to get down to 290 pounds. Guessing the first few months should be easy to lose 5 pounds. Headed home to grab cleavers and then meet Sam at Braddock Road Metro to then go to Union Market to drop off my cleavers for sharpening and lunch. Next it was a stop at A. Litteri’s for cured meat and hot Italian sausage. Made a final stop at “Baked and Wired” for a chocolate cake top and a Doom cupcake (chocolate cupcake with dark chocolate frosting).

Aug 2 – Creating new Trello board of blog post ideas for “Gotta Eat Here” from my larger list of issues for “Gotta Eat Here” website to help get people interested. Taking a list from the main board to and creating individual task outside of it so I can start outlining the posts. Which means adding a list of restaurants and other information about them like their location, along with what you should eat there, website, hours, etc. Met up with Matt Bowen and his wife Lauren for late lunch at Mandu in Adams Morgon. We all had bibim bop in a stone bowl that gives you crispy rice if you left it bake to the slides for a bit. We talked about food work, his weight loss of about 65 pounds over the last year or so, which is a great slow and healthy pace in my opinion. Afterward, we stopped at a high-end chocolate shop two blocks away. I picked up to 70% dark chocolate were they picked up two 90% bars, which I think is too dark for my tastes. Once home after a bit of reading ended up taking a couple hour nap, since I didn’t get one in yesterday.

Aug 3 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us” on the CW to get me in the right frame of mind for their Broadway show in NYC.

Aug 4 – At a buddies house in Cabin John eating pasta with homemade tomato sauce with sausage, mushrooms, and other vegetables, along with drinking some wine and having some cheese and crackers. Brought a friend from North Carolina who was in DC for work for a nice relaxing evening instead of meeting and having dinner and then taking him back to his hotel.

Aug 5 – At the checkout line in Wegmans. I had gone to grab some food from the hot bar along with grabbing a few items like their sliced garlic bread, bananas, garlic hummus, etc. Another reason I went was to get more steps on my FitBit, and I ended up adding a little over 1,700 steps, which put me at 9,551 steps for the day. Worked on fixing in page anchor problems for keyboard users using either Safari and Chrome.

Aug 6 – Watching “Road to the Runway Season 14”, which is who and how people got chosen for “Project Runway”. I like watching the show to see how people make design decisions, how they can explain their reasoning, along with how they deal with change. Finished making updates to developer pages for the in-page anchors, which was done by adding a tab index of negative one (tabindex=”-1″) to the anchor. Doing this corrects issues that Safari and Chrome have.

Aug 7 – Walking from my buddies from North Carolina’s car with his family on our way to Rays the Third (Rays 3) to have burgers. We had tried to go to Puppatella’s for pizza, and the wait was going to be too long. There was a waiting line to tell to ask how long of a wait there was going to be. I ended up getting the “Hot Mess” after my buddies daughter pointed it out and thought she wanted it, and he could finish the rest. The “Hot Mess” consists of a cheeseburger on top of beef chili, mac and cheese, with tater tots, onion strings, roasted jalapeno’s, salsa, and a few other condiments, topped with a fried egg.

Aug 8 – Sitting in row K seat 1 behind home plate at the Bowie Baysox game watching Joe Grunkel pitch a two-hitter up until the middle of the top of the sixth inning. I was there as his guest and my friend from North Carolina, his wife, son, daughter, and another friend. It was interesting getting to sit that close to watch a game. After the other team got a third hit and he only had 91 pitches he was taken out of the game after six and two-thirds innings and awarded the win.

Aug 9 – Watching “Fantom Works” where they are rebuilding a 1967 Chevelle and a 1960 Lincoln Continental Breezeway. Went to sleep at 1:30 AM, woke up at 8 AM, read for about 45 minutes, and then went back to sleep to around  11:30 AM. Grabbed breakfast at the Royal Restaurant then drove around a bit to kill some time with a stop at Wegmans before picking up cupcakes to take to the ladies at An Event Apart. Delivered cupcakes then took the long slow drive home by taking Georgetown Pike and the GW Parkway. Once home read some and then napped for about two hours.

Aug 10 – Watching a commercial between the first and second sections of Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”.

Aug 11 – Sitting in Cabin John drinking wine with five other friends having one of my friends that are going to marry two of the other ones in the fall reading through the ceremony. All of them have done some acting at places like the Maryland Renaissance Faire and community theater, so it’s going to be a production to say the least.

Aug 12 – Napping for about an hour and twenty minutes because I have stayed up past 1:30 AM the last few nights and was tired. Another day of trying to get our tech team to get our entire pride scanning tool back working while reviewing changes implemented to PROD server.

Aug 13 – Adding places to eat in my Trello board about “Gotta Eat Here” blog posts. Changed the blog post titles from “Write about “XYZ City” to “XYZ City – meal”. The meal part was for some of the larger cities I have more locations to eat at like Washington, DC and New York City. Previously updated a few links on my slides and adding the event for Toronto to the accessibility camp website pages. Attended a few meetings today, along with testing a new API QA tool the tech team is working on.

Aug 14 – Sitting on the 7:10 PM train to New York City talking to a guy from Seattle about cyber security on his way to visit his parents and family in Philly. Today was an interesting day since I ended up breaking my glasses while outside during a fire drill at work. Had to leave work an hour and a half early go to my eye doctors in Crystal City to have them fix them. Got there in no time and they were able to fix my glasses easily. I made it to Union Station to catch my train to New York City for the weekend earlier than if I left directly from my office at 5:30 PM after work. DMd with Jimmy Chandler and Shawn Lauriat to see when they could both meet on Saturday to have a meal.

Aug 15 – Walking out of the “F train” station at Second Avenue on my way to the “Meatball Shop” at 8 Stratton St. I had three meatball sliders that were the classic beef meatball, the spicy pork, and jerk chicken all topped with tomato sauce. After leaving the meatball shop, I walked over to Chris dogs and had a Crystal and a Chihuahua, which had sour cream and avocado in the hotdogs wrapped in bacon. After that walk over to the Esther Astro Place subway station to get back to the ace hotel. At 12:30 PM met Jimmy and Nicole in the hotel lobby to head over to Gotham West Market to meet Shawn. I was there to eat Ramen at Ivan Ramen’s Slurp Shop. I ordered the Shio Ramen, which I didn’t realize, was such a salty style of Ramen. Afterward, we grab ice cream at Ample Hills Creamery, which was in Gotham West Market. Today was a long day of walking around New York City ended up walking 10.5 miles that were about 23,000 steps. Ended up with 244 active minutes of walking.

Aug 16 – ENTERED 12/27/2015 – Sitting on the Amtrak train back to DC from being in New York City for the weekend to see Penn and Teller’s live show earlier in the afternoon on Broadway. Ann Murray was sitting about eight seats away from me in the row in front of me to my right. Great show even though I had seen a lot of the trick before on other TV shows or more recently on “Fool Us”.

Aug 17 – ENTERED – 08/18/2015 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us’ were a magician had both Penn and Teller shuffle and mixed up half a deck of cards each. Then shuffled them face up and face down, then tossed them randomly on the table and mixed them some more. Next he told them he would pick their card before they even picked it, which made Penn frustrated. Teller grabbed the ace of spades while Penn grabbed the three of clubs, which I found ironic since they do a trick with the three of spades. He then had them place the cards back in the random facing deck and gathered them together. Next he spread them on the table with every card face-up except for two, and they were Penn and Teller’s cards. At which point Penn picked up his chair like he was so mad he wanted to throw it across the room. Off course, he fooled them, but the great part was Teller grabbed cards to look at them while they tried to figure it out.

Aug 18 – Adding places to eat in Philly to my blog post outline Trello board. Also was updating my old iPad 2 applications.

Aug 19 – ENTERED 08/21/2015 – Was in the produce section of Wegmans picking out salad greens, along with some other fruits and vegetables. Had grabbed dinner first which was mostly curried chicken spicy little lamb in some breaded shrimp.

Aug 20 – ENTERED 08/21/2015 – Sitting in my spare bedroom at my desk working on my bills. Well sitting there partway through my bills I realized I didn’t have enough checks. Spent some time trying to figure out where I could get to a Citibank branch to order more checks. Most branches within about 5 to 10 miles of the house close at 6 PM weekdays. On the weekends, most branches are closed the other ones that are open are about 7 miles away and don’t open till 10 AM. Would have liked to get things done closer to 9 AM.

Aug 21 – Napping after a long week. I was laying on my bed reading and realized I was extremely tired so took an hour and a half nap. My day was spent in a couple of meetings along with working on reviewing a new iPad application for accessibility issues.

Aug 22 – Walking out the door for a walk into Old Town Alexandria. I ended up taking a very slow walk from my house down to the Potomac River and back again. Managed to get 12,900 and some steps in for the day. Today was a bit relaxing after visiting with friends at St. Elmo’s. Then I went home to drop off some fruits and vegetables from the Del Ray Farmers Market. After that went to Union Station to pick up my knives and have lunch. I went with the Vietnamese soup. Then I did some more shopping, and next came home to read, along with taking a couple hour nap.

Aug 23 – Was driving by Arlington Cemetery on the way home after a day out with coworkers at the flea market in Shenandoah and drove through Shenandoah National Park and a bunch of other things. After stopping at Super H Mart and good Fortune Grocery, I was driving down Wilson Boulevard near Pupatella’s randomly ran into a friend of mine. Picked him up and gave him a ride home even though it was only a few blocks away. I spent the rest of the day out with two co-workers at the Shen-Valley Flea Market where we can tacos and some fresh fruit with lime juice and a Mexican spice blend, which is a great and healthy snack. Next we drove to Front Royal, VA, where we saw a hot dog stand and stopped for one hot dog to hold us over until later and then took a slow drive through Shenandoah National Park. After that, we stopped at the quilt store and the fruit stand next door.  We stopped at Creekside Bakery and Deli to pick up a snack before heading to off to Copper Fox Distillery so they could take a tour of the place. At the end of their I headed across the parking lot to get some bacon before they closed. We did a quick stop at the new brewery so one of them could try two tasters of two different beers.

Aug 24 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”. The magician that was on was talking about doing a trick for a young lady who was blind. See wanted to see him do a trick. Normally he would do a card trick, but since she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t do that. So he asked the young lady to think of a card both the number and the suit. He blindfolded himself so that he could not see and had her count out the number of cards for the number that matched her card. Next he asked her to stack the deck on top of her cards. Next he had her count out one card for spades, two cards for hearts, three for clubs, and four for diamonds and then stick the rest of the deck on top of those cards. He then took cards and shuffled them around and then pulled out the card that she picked. He then showed the audience the rest of the deck, which were completely blank cards.

Aug 25 – Sitting in Cabin John having wine with a few friends. We talked a great deal about different subjects. We even discussed that we were talking about a whole lot of different things. I spent most of the day in meetings and doing a lot of testing old applications that needed to be migrated to new servers, and there was no old code to create them from.

Aug 26 – Signing up for Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s online talk Monday afternoon called “Kick Procrastination’s Ass”. Did this while texting friend in Boston about accessibility camp, along with all the changes with her and her family in last two months. Busy Day at work with a bunch of meetings looking at responsive templates along with testing a few different new applications.

Aug 27 – Was starting to clean up the last three or four  months worth of “What was I Doing at 8:15 PM” entries. I used voice dictation, and it got a bit messed up. Another day of a few meetings, along with some final testing of two migrating applications, started a third and read up on another one that needs to be looked at soon. I looked at a few test pages to see how accessible they were before they built out about 140+ other pages from these templates.

Aug 28 – Driving down King Street headed towards the Principle Art Gallery to meet a coworker, his wife, son, and a few other family members. They were there looking at his uncle’s painting. The day was spent testing a new application that needs a bit of work excessively with keyboard navigation and visual focus. After looking at the art, I stopped and had a small salted caramel ice cream in a cup for dinner. That’s one of the advantages of being an adult. While walking back to my car I ran into a friend and his daughter from the coffee shop and chatted with them while they got ice cream across the street from where I got mine.

Aug 29 – Watching “Chopped Teen Championship” episode. It was interesting watching the 13 to 16-year-olds compete against each other and what they could do with such short notice. This morning I went to St. Elmo’s to hang out with a few friends. I did some shopping at the Del Ray Farmers Market before and picked up some nectarines and tomatoes. The afternoon was spent reading and napping and even more reading.

Aug 30 – Can’t believe I was actually on Facebook today and it happened to be 8:15 PM. Was responding to a few friends that commented on me staying I should visit the National Zoo more often when I’m over there with a bit of time and can find street parking. It’s a nice walk around to see the animals and tourists with their kids. Plus, you can get between 8,000 and 10,000 steps in if you walk from the twenty-nine hundred or so block of Macomb St. NW to the bottom of the Zoo property. Along with a few side trips to see say the pandas, the elephants, and some of the different monkeys (Gorillas, Orangutan, etc.). The hardest part is Walking back up the hill to Connecticut Ave and then the car. At 8:15 PM today sitting in my spear bedroom I have 15,541 steps, which is 7.13 miles. Not a bad day of walking. Now it’s off to the basement to do laundry.

Aug 31 – Sitting in 14th St. Matchbox on the second floor playing euchre with the DC Euchre group. Ended up having a good day playing, since I won four out of five matches. Spent the early part of my day in a meeting and then doing testing of a new application.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

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.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 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.

P.S. Need to go back through these 8:15 PM posts and add any links or photos that are relevant to make them more appealing.

What I’ve Been Doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) – July 2015

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Another month’s worth of what I have been doing at 8:15 PM every night. Doing this has become a great way to see what I’ve been up to on a particular day along with what else I add in about my day. It’s become a regular habit of what I’m doing and what has happened that day and a wonderful little one paragraph diary/journal of my actions and thoughts.

A Little Background on This Post

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months 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) every day.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far, I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post on what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, March, April, May, and June.

JULY

Jul 1 – ENTERED – 07/04/2015 – Reading Twitter on my bed along with complaining about its new iPhone application that had buttons moved to questionable places, which corrected it once I restarted the application. Still now my favorite improvement, but better than when using it the first time after update.

Jul 2 – ENTERED – 07/04/2015 – Having wine at Tony’s in Cabin John with Jeff, Barry, Hannah, and Andrew. I brought a whole bunch of cheese and cured meats from Di Bruno Brothers South Philly store. For some reason, the different German smoked sausages from the Reading Terminal Market were all moldy and a but slimy. Hung forward can’t store more than a few days in brown paper in the fridge.

Jul 3 – ENTERED – 07/04/2015 – Reading Twitter after two and a half hour nap. Spent part of the day at Tony’s in Cabin John out on the back deck drinking wine, talking, and watching the awesome birds (inside joke you had to be there to enjoy). The woman I had met before at the house brought her eleven-year-old daughter, which made for interesting conversation, she could carry a conversation better than a lot of adults I know.

Jul 4 – ENTERED – 07/05/2015 – Walking from Go Fish in Rehoboth Beach, DE, towards my car after having fish and chips with a side of curry sauce. Was heading home so I would be home in time to do my 90th day in a row of painting wine bottles on canvas as part of my #100DayProject. Earlier in the day I had shrimp and large crabs at Crab Shack in Kent Narrows, MD. I followed crabs up with a trip to Ocean City, MD, for ice cream because I couldn’t find parking in Rehoboth for fish and chips, plus I wasn’t hungry enough yet for dinner.

Jul 5 – Watching the United States Women’s soccer team in the second half of the FIFA Women’s World Cup Final. U.S. Women’s team ended up winning 5 – 2. Slept in until 10 AM and then read for two hours or so in bed, and then headed to Wegmans for lunch, more reading, and a bit of grocery shopping. Came home, read, napped, and read some more.

Jul 6 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”, where they gave other magicians did tricks to see if they can fool them. One of the guys did great things with Rubik’s cubes. The best one was the guy that used a little plunger to do card tricks. He did this by picking the person’s card even when the card was half way down the deck, along with being able to pick all the cards above them with the little plunger.

Jul 7 – Laying in bed reading “Starting and Sustaining” by Garrett Dimon, which is a great book on what to think of when starting a company/web application. In this book, Garrett talks about creating the bug tracker “Sifter” from coming up with the idea of building the application to launching to using other services to speed things up. How using other services, so you don’t have to build them yourself can save time and money, plus a whole lot more. I’m reading the book for a second time, since I have been toying with the idea of building my own web application to store places I want to eat while traveling. I’m always asking people or watching TV about where to eat in different cities. The problem is I end up with answers in e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, text, etc. I want one place where I can search by city.

Jul 8 – Sitting in my spare bedroom working fixing the spelling and grammar with Grammarly of what I’ve been doing for the month of June and first week of July. Also had been doing some work creating a Trello board for my “Got Eat Here” website. Mostly putting in the large ticket items/functions that need to be created. Along with the different phases of the project that are: analyze, develop, test (QA, security, and accessibility), and deploy.

Jul 9 – Again I’m reading Garrett Dimon’s book “Starting and Sustaining”. The chapter I was reading is called”Creating Interest”, which about he managed to get people interested in his bug tracker software “Sifter”. The main thing he said was he started a few years before writing about some bug tracking screenshots and gave away information about bug tracking all along gathering names and e-mail addresses for when they launched.

Jul 10 – ENTERED – 07/11/2015 – Finishing up wine bottle painting #96 of my 100 Day Project. Painted early so I could meet up with my buddy for a late dinner at Bonchon Chicken in Arlington, VA. DOL did an article on him as part of their blog post on people with disabilities prior to the 25th anniversary of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).

Jul 11 – Driving to Barnes and Noble to look and see if they have the latest addition to the “Great Discontent” magazine. Slow day of meeting friends for coffee, relaxing, a short nap, reading, some TV.

Jul 12 – In the basement putting stain remover on my work shirts. Needed to do four loads of laundry since I was about out of clothes. Most likely only going to get three loads washed and dried. Slept in until about 9:30 AM and then did a bunch of reading before heading out to Dupont Circle Farmers Market but couldn’t find any parking. So went to farmers market next to MacArthur’s. Ended up getting some kale along with a veggie and Thia sausage crepe. Did some shopping for roast pork and limes at Good Fortune market. Once done there drive to Wegmans for some hot bar food and cured meats.

Jul 13 – ENTERED – 07/15/2015 – Sitting in my spare bedroom updating the Accessibility Camp website with information about their camp on July 22nd. While FTPing the code to my server I noticed and odd folder I didn’t create with and index PHP page in it, which I deleted. I then went through my other websites and noticed a few other odd folders or index PHP pages that deleted too. Next step is to change my password, but I think they got into my virtual server from someone else’s.

Jul 14 – ENTERED – 07/15/2015 – Drinking wine at my buddies in Cabin John. As we normally we talked about many things. One being guy on NPR that was talking about the new Iran nuclear deal used the word “legitimate” twice, which none of us thought was a word.

Jul 15 – Listening to  Yitzchok Willroth better known as @CodeRabbi  as part of his “Wisdom World Tour”. The talk was titled “Talmudic Maxims to Maximize Your Growth as a Developer” sub-titled “Everything I Learned About PHP I Learned at Rabbinical School”. Great talk on just start by doing something, being part of the community, learning, teaching, helping others, etc. The talk was the first time hearing Yiddish as part fo a tech talk or any other for that matter. At least Yitz translated everything so we all could understand what the Yiddish was.

Jul 16 – RE-ENTERED – 07/19/2015 – Attending the 99th Refresh DC at Atlantic Media Strategies. I’m hearing a talk about the need to be able to move up in your organization without having to be a manager or moving on. Great talk and even better discussion afterward to see what others had to say. Of course, we ended up getting into the discussion about doing speck work when the boss told you too.

Jul 17 – RE-ENTERED – 07/19/2015 – Was napping until about 8:30 PM after falling asleep around 6:45 PM. Had been tired all day after being out the prior three might until at least 10:30 PM and then not getting to sleep until after 12:30 AM. I had to be up at 7:13 AM to make it to work on time. I was supposed to go to Ron’s house to listen to him, and others played music but decided to stay home since I was late and hadn’t dinner yet.

Jul 18 – ENTERED – 07/19/2015 – Was waiting in Wegman’s bakery for someone to slice a loaf of bread for me. Asked a nice young woman by the name of Emma if there was anyone around that could do it since I didn’t see anyone else around. She said she didn’t work in the bakery, but knew how to slice the bread. Told her to make sure took her time and didn’t hurt herself or slice off any fingers. It took a bit more time for her to do it since hse hadn’t done it much, but it work out fine. I made sure to thank her for her efforts. Had to hurry back home to see the first episode of Mythbusters which started at 9:00 PM. Ended up about two minutes late, because I had to put away the food from Wegman’s and use the restroom. Earlier in the day went to St.Elmo’s to meet up with the gang. We talked about a bunch of stuff and some kind of deal to help motivate Big Dave to lose weight. Tried coming up with something to do with $20 each per week that he lost 5 pounds, which I pointed out at his size if he tried just a little bit would be easy for the first month or so to do. Next went to Courthouse Farmer’s Market, then to pick up some blackberries and herbs to make pesto. Then it was back to the house for reading and a nap.

Jul 19 – Eating a chocolate cream pie from Wegman’s while writing bills (four). Extremely hot day today. Went to Dupont Circle Farmer’s Market to pick-up a few things, along with having the three different veggie tacos from the stand down near 29th and Q St. NW. After that, I drove around a bit to cool off before heading to Springfield Town Center Mall, which has been updated. Ended up taking a walk around the mall a bit. Got some of walking in without having to do it outside in the mid 90 F  heat, which had a heat index of close to 105 F. Now re-typing the last three days worth of notes into Simple Note, since for some reason one of my browsers I looked at it with (iPhone or iPad mini) didn’t refresh with the latest information. Next need to through in some laundry, which includes the new pants I bought at JC Penney. I also purchased a pair of black and a pair of brown dress shoes.

Jul 20 – Talking on the phone with my brother to see about meeting up for dinner on Tuesday. He wanted to know if he should go to National Gallery of Art or one of the Smithsonian Museums. My recommendation was National Gallery or Art since he would most likely go with the family if they came to town.

Jul 21 – Laying on the sofa watching Anthony Bourdain bungee jumping off tallest building in Asia while cooling off after having dinner with my brother James. He was in town to speak to lawyers. Another hot day where it felt like 95F.

Jul 22 – Sitting at Long View Gallery listening to Kelli Anderson talk about her personal projects at the Adobe Creative Jam event. She did a lot of creative work with paper from building a five-page book that you make other things from the pages like a planetarium, a guitar, and much more.  Most of the day was spent gathering information about how to test mobile websites and native applications besides using VoiceOver (iPhone) or TalkBack (Android) phones.

Jul 23 – Sleeping after I fell back asleep after my iPhone alarm went off to wake up from my nap from 6:30 PM to just before 8:00 PM. Had been tired all day because I had stayed up past 1:00 AM for the second or third night. Managed to get up a bit before 9:00 PM. The plan is to get back to sleep by 11:30 PM.

Jul 24 – Mindlessly watching some TV show called “Desert Garage” or something like that. They were building a show quality 1970’s Baracuda. Earlier in the evening was reading both a book and something on my iPad. I was looking for a nice relaxing evening.

Jul 25 – Watching “MythBuster” in which Adam Savage and Jamie Hynamann were training at a California airbase to be able to go up into space on a U2 plane. After four days of training, both passed the tests and had to decide which would go, which included simulating being in Space under pressure. Once they got to 65,000 feet the water in a bottle in the room started to boil, which showed what would happen to a person if there were problems with their suits or cabin pressure. In the end, Jamie let Adam go because he knew how important was to him to be able to go into space (70,000 feet), which only astronauts go farther. Adam seemed truly touched be his experience while up there.

Jul 26 – Watching “FantomWorks” car show where they are restoring a 1950 Studebaker Commander and a 1964 Barracuda. Spent the day driving out to the Shen-Valley Flea Market, along with the Front Royal Flea Market where I picked up a meat cleaver and a Japanese vegetable cleaver. Ended up getting a bit of a sunburn on my head and ears because I didn’t where a hat, and there was not much shade. Picked up two packs of jowl (face) bacon in Sperryville on my way home. Had to get home by 5:00 PM to meet Doug and Nguyet as they were coming over to put my painting of the horse head on a man’s body that I got in Nay of 2013. Building and stretching the canvas took about 45 minutes. After we had been done, we went to Holy Cow for burgers in Del Ray. I had a two cheese third if a pound burger with bacon and a fried egg, along with fries and a chocolate chocolate milkshake.

Jul 27 – ENTERED – 07/28/2015 – Was watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us” on the CW. The “Amazing Alison” was doing mentalist tricks (mind reading). She had Penn come up with a number between and 25 and 100. Then filled out her answer in a four by four set of squares, which all added up to Penn’s number 26. That is both across and down for each row, along with diagonally and a bunch of other ways. Next she had Teller draw a picture that she then drew after having to lean on each other and rub their butts together a bit. Also, there was a 16-year-old kid up on stage doing a great trick about tearing a card into eight pieces that he put back together with the one signed piece backward. Penn and Teller loved the trick because they thought he did it so well for someone so young and in front of such a large audience even though they knew how he did the trick.

Jul 28 – Working on updating Trello board about the “Gotta Eat Here” website and web application, after writing bills to be mailed tomorrow. While this was happening, I’m updating my iPad mini to iOS 8.4. Always update the iPad before the phone to make sure there are no weird thing going on. Not sure If I’m going to update the old iPad 2 with the shattered screen or not.

Jul 29 – ENTERED – 08/02/2015 – Watching TV after updating the Accessibility Camp website with information about the first New York City accessibility camp on September 26, in Brooklyn. Need to add website and Twitter information once they send me the information.

Jul 30 – ENTERED – 08/03/2015 – Walking out of South China restaurant with a takeout order of Malaysia Lo Mein which has tofu and shrimp. Then it was home to watch mindless TV that I can’t remember what it was. My guess is it was one of the car building shows or just bouncing around looking for something to watch to relax.

Jul 31 – Driving with Sam to Bangkok Gloden to have Loa food. We ordered Thai sausage, crispy veggie salad, Pork Larb, which is a sour meat dish with a lot of heat since we ordered it medium. Last I remembered reading the menu for their heat scale that mild was India hot, Medium was Thia hot, which is really hot for me, and the hot if Loa hot. Can’t imagine what Loa hot is like since the medium or Thai hot made my mouth burn. And the final dish was drunken beef noodles. They make some great food. It’s a place I would take people to try new things and something different from what they normally would eat.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

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.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 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.

P.S. Need to go back through these 8:15 PM posts and add any links or photos that are relevant to make them more appealing.

What I’ve Been Doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) – June 2015

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Another month’s worth of what I have been doing at 8:15 PM every night.

Doing this has become a great way to see what I’ve been up to on a particular day along with what else I add in about my day. It’s become a regular habit of what I’m doing and what has happened that day and a wonderful little one paragraph diary/journal of my actions and thoughts.

A Little Background on This Post

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months 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) every day.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far, I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post on what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, March, April, and May.

JUNE

Jun 1 – Working in WordPress to create a new blog post about “What I was Doing at 8:15 PM” for both April and May. Posted my March blog post of “What I was Doing at 8:15 PM” and even go comment spam in less than an hour. Busy day working on reviewing a few PDF’s for accessibility issues and updating another developer dataset page to be more mobile friendly. Also attended the APIv2 planning meeting to figure out the board items we still need to finish before deploying later this month.

Jun 2 – Watching “Trip Flip” on Travel Channel in Michigan. The show was shot during the winter, so they did quad racing on a frozen lake, dog sledding, luging, etc. more document reviewing and fixing dataset pages to be more mobile friendly.

Jun 3 – Sitting at my desk in my spare bedroom writing my rent check to be deposited on Friday morning, along with writing my bills to be mailed on Friday too. The day spent making another page with TABLEs more user-friendly on mobile devices, along with attending a few meetings and re-reading a testing and accessibility document for like the fifth time in two months.

Jun 4 – Stayed home from pig roast prep because it was raining and was watching TV.

Jun 5 – Talking with G C Meyer about his new paintings at Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. Ended up buying one of Gary’s smaller pieces with a red chair. Spent the day in Cabin John with most of the pig roast staff.

Jun 6 – Doing a bit of clean-up with Bev and Jeff before we headed home after we were done at the pig roast. Spent eleven hours in Cabin John working and attending the pig roast.

Jun 7 – Cleaning my apartment in preparation for my father on Monday, along with watching a bit of TV. Managed to get up at 6:13 AM so I could help clean-up after the pig roast. Even managed to get painting number 63 of my #the100DayProject completed since April 6th.

Jun 8 – Sitting in my spare bedroom cleaning up my e-mail while my father watches Fix News “O’Reilly Factor”.

Jun 9 – Sitting in my buddies basement Cabin John, MD, drinking Italian wines, while eating homemade lasagna and watching the first round of the women’s FIFA World Cup game between Brazil and Japan.

Jun 10 – Catching up on Twitter while watching “American Picker’s” after a day of taking an overdue eLearning class (overdue 194 days). Next reviewed the content of a document on how to make eLearning classes accessible, went to Blackboard to meet JoAnna Hunt to see their conference space to start having Accessibility DC there soon. On the way to Blackboard saw a guy with Red Devils horns, Purple Heart-shaped sunglasses, black tank top, and a black thing dancing and tweaking near the Chinatown metro station entrance.

Jun 11 – Watching TV and reading Twitter. Nice relaxing evening after a busy week at work.

Jun 12 – Sitting in the Clarendon Apple Store as the third person in line to buy something. Never head to be put on the waiting list at a store to give them $500 – $600. After waiting ten minutes went up to ask how it was going, and they told me I still had two people aged if me. At that point, I was getting frustrated because I was paying for parking since they don’t validate irking anymore. Think one of the managers heard while walking by and had someone bring him a black 64 Gb iPad for more me.

Jun 13 – Walking to Cache Bahn Mi to grab pork steamed buns and a pork and veggie noodle dish. After going to St. Elmo’s for a short bit and then a quick stop at home I headed to Frederick, MD, to get my beard trimmed up, after over 22 months of doing nothing. All I did was trim the sideburns and mustache. Had a great time wandering around Frederick before my beard trim. Enjoyed the antique mall next door, along with Market St. Grabbed late lunch at the Wine Kitchen. Had Mac and Cheese fritters, duck spring rolls, steamed pork buns. Would have liked to eaten dinner at Volt, but didn’t want to wait until 8:45 PM because 6:00 PM was too early to eat again after late lunch at 4:00 PM.

Jun 14 – Changing the sheets on my bed while washing laundry in preparation for Char, Jim, Jesse, and Vicky stopping to stay at my place on their way south for vacation. They will be stopping on the way back up as well. Work up a bit before 7 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Which I turned into a positive and got to the grand opening of the Alexandria Wegmans. Spent an hour or so wondering around then checked out, put purchases in the car, and came back in to grab a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich on an English muffin. Once I was done eating, I grabbed a case of water for under $3, plus some avocado sushi for later. I was home before 11:00 AM. Read and grabbed about a three and a half hour nap.

Jun 15 – Watching “Tiny House Hunting” about finding a tiny home in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood. Mostly watching to see what you get in a tiny home since that is what I think I would be looking for if I ever buy one. It’s that or one out in the woods or maybe portable.

Jun 16 – Checking my grammar with Grammarly for my responses to the three main questions asked by XOXO Festival to see if I can be part of the lottery to get a ticket for this September’s event. The three questions and answers are the following:

  • What do you do? Inform and teach people the importance of web accessibility as my day job at Department of Labor and whenever anyone asks outside out of work too. Along with spending time away from the computer with great friends over food and wine.
  • What are you working on right now? Getting monthly DC accessibility meeting back going and figuring out the best way to find more time to work on the side project of keeping track of places I want to eat when I travel. Plus, have been participating in the 100 Day Project. I’m on my 72 consecutive days of painting wine bottles on canvases.
  • What’s something you’ve made that you’re proud of? Starting www.AccessibilityCamp.org so others will learn about accessibility, which is a free to attendees. Other’s have run events around the globe in the following cities: London, Tokyo, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angles,  Boston, Seattle, Guelph (Canada), Missoula, MT, and many more.

Jun 17 – Watching “Tiny House Hunting” after doing a bit of Twitter reading because it was a busy day at work. Attended meeting about new iPhone application so we could get an understanding of the application before it was time to test. Plus, face a few suggestions of possible accessibility issues. Did a bit of QA work, along with did a bunch of document review for content. Now off to grab some takeout Chinese food.

Jun 18 – ENTERED – 06/19/2015 – Walking from Atlantic Media Strategies office were Mariesa Dale talked about UX Hooks at Refresh DC. We were head to District Commons over near Foggy Bottom metro and a bit after 8:25 PM it started to rain hard. Luckily we were near a Residence Inn hotel that had a large awning that about eight or ten of us got under to stay dry until it blew over in about ten or fifteen minutes. Continuing to get developer datasets ready for deployment end of next week. Spent part of the afternoon in meeting about work using DHS’s Trusted Tester program and implementing a larger accessibility plan too.

Jun 19 – In my spare bedroom checking my grammar using Grammarly for my June entries of what I was doing at 8:15 PM each night.

Jun 20 – ENTERED – 06/21/2015 – Driving to Manassas, VA, to drop off co-worker after our day trip to Philly. Prior to this, I drove through the worst thunder and lightning storm I have ever driven through. Since maybe the time bring my aunts car back up north from Florida with my father when I was a new driver in my mid teens.  Had a great day wandering around Reading Terminal Market trying a few different sandwiches from Di Nic’s (pork and sharp provolone, roast beef, and meatball with sharp provolone). Then it was a bit of shopping and off to Indy Hall to meet Sean and pick-up my art from my last trip. Sean had given my co-worker the ten cent tour before we each bought a JFDI print from the latest art show. Once done at Indy Hal we headed to South Philly to Di Bruno Brothers to get too much cheese and cured meats. The last stop before heading home was at Isgro’s for cannoli’s.

Jun 21 – Starting to read Bloomberg Magazines June 15, 2015, edition entitled “What is Code?” by Paul Ford (@ftrain). Figured it will be easier to read over time since it’s over 38,000 words from what I’ve been told on Twitter. Lazy day today. Went to sleep at 12:45 or so after falling asleep watching TV on the sofa. Woke up at about 8 AM, read in bed for a while and did a few other things, and then went back to sleep until 12:56 PM. Haven’t slept past noon in years even with going back to bed.

Jun 22 – Again reading Bloomberg Magazines June 15, 2015, edition entitled “What is Code? by Paul Ford (@ftrain). At this, rate I will get through the 112 pages in a week or so. That is of course if u can Read about 20 or so minutes per day. The day was spent trying to figure out why the in-page anchors for the mobile friendly dataset pages were not working. After a few of us looking into reasons for the issue, it ended up being a Foundation CSS issue or a possible JavaScript not letting the action to happen. The issue ended up being duplicate IDs, which were needed because part of the page was displayed for desktop view and the other when on a mobile device. One was set to “display:none” while other is being displayed. The fix ended up being adding different link anchors depending on which device you were using.

Jun 23 – ENTERED – 06/29/2015 –  Made it into District Taco with Char, Jim, Jesse, and his girlfriend Vicky as the rain started coming down hard. It was one of those big huge storms, which didn’t seem that bad being in a winder lock building. Char and her family were staying at my place on their return trip from Myrtle Beah, SC, on their way to back home to Boston, AM. I ended up getting two basic breakfast tacos (egg, cheese, and potatoes) with chorizo, along with two fish tacos with extra chipotle mayo cabbage slaw. Jesse managed to eat six fish tacos. After dinner, we headed to Buzz Bakery to have cupcakes to keep Jesse’s streak of going there every time he has been to DC.

Jun 24 – ENTERED – 06/25/2015 – Tried calling my youngest brother to see how things are going and had been reading a bit of Twitter.

Jun 25 – Talking with my youngest brother to see if he was traveling to our sisters in Columbus, OH, for the 4th of July. He explained how much fun it had been getting his boat back to Buffalo, NY, from Detriot, MI, along with how his new job was doing.

Jun 26 – ENTERED – 06/28/2015 -Just finished ordering dinner at Bangkok Golden with Sam and Eric. We ordered six different dishes. Some of the dishes were: crispy sour sausage, veggie fried rice, duck and veggie dish, drunken pork noodles, pork belly and broccoli rabe. My sandwich that had tons of different flavors and lots of different textures, along with a bit of heat in a few dishes.

Jun 27 – ENTERED – 06/28/2015 – Sitting in Vaso’s Kitchen with some of the Saturday morning St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub crew. They wanted me to order the wine for the group. They wanted a white and a red. I ended up ordering the Crab Stuffed Flounder with lemon wine sauce.

Jun 28 – Watching the American Pickers episode where they are picking gas and oil stuff, along with fire equipment for Dollywood. Slept in until about 8 AM. Did a bit of reading in bed before heading to Hoffman 22 movie theater to first watch “Mad Max: Fury Road”, then I saw “Inside Out”. Both were interesting movies for different reasons. Mad Max was about getting away from someone or possibly something that is controlling you and maybe realizing being back where you were could be better for you with a few changes. “Inside Out” was great in seeing how people make decisions at a young age. It would apply to any age since joy, sadness, disgust, safety, and anger play a big role in most if not all of people’s decisions. Another thing was seeing how some core memories can set the way your life will go, but others can unravel the whole thing.

Jun 29 – ENTERED – 07/01/2015 – Sitting at a table in Matchbox Pizzeria on 14th St. near U St. NW, playing euchre with the DC Euchre meet-up group. Hadn’t played any euchre in over a year or two, which wasn’t helpful, since I lost every game I played. I played with five different patterns and never really got to many good cards. The few times I got good cards the other team or my pattern had the opposite of what I had. Plan on going back to play in the future. The day was spent fixing up and figuring out the accessibility issues with the new Quarry website and the mobile version of developer.dol.gov.

Jun 30 – Taking an hour and a half nap on my bed, since I’ve been tired of staying up late but getting up early to make sure I’m in work in time. More time spent funding and helping others fix website issues, along with making sure API issues are now corrected, which they seem to be.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

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.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 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.

P.S. Need to go back through these 8:15 PM posts and add any links or photos that are relevant to make them more appealing.

What I’ve Been Doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) – May 2015

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Another month’s worth of what I have been doing at 8:15 PM every night. Doing this has become a great way to see what I’ve been up to on a particular day along with what else I add in about my day. It’s become a regular habit of what I’m doing and what has happened that day and a wonderful little one paragraph diary/journal of my actions and thoughts.

A Little Background on This Post

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months 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) every day.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far, I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post on what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, March, and April.

May

May 1 – Driving through Del Ray after picking up my car at Landmark Honda, then to Pho Viet Flare for a small #10 with extra noodles. Once done with dinner went to Good Fortune Supermarket for roast pork and pickled veggies, then taking a long slow drive home through Ballston, Clarendon, Courthouse, and Roslyn. A day spent reading, rereading the DOL Trusted Tester and Section 508 policy document before a two-hour meeting about the document.

May 2 – Sitting outside on the 6th-floor patio at Lorien Hotel (Kimpton Hotel) as part of Mary Elizabeth Kamin and Kevin’s engagement party.  Went to Elmo’s and found out about the event. Went home and spent two hours cutting, raking, cleaning the front yard, then was down for a two-hour nap.

May 3 – Watching “Junkyard Empire”, which is a show about a son who now owns his father’s junkyard and Damascus Motors that is a high-end car shop. This episode is about how DC Brau ( local DC beer company) wanting a vehicle to be able to take four to six legs to beer festivals. Went early this morning for an hour and a half massage and then it was off to Eastern Market for a brick (potatoes, egg, cheese, sausage patty, on an awesome roll. Bought a tin tile painting of with three women by M. Novak, who is a supposedly famous painter, which I already have a painting of paint blobs that look like flowers. Then drove around DC before heading home for a three and a half hour nap. Great relaxing weekend.

May 4 – Watching “2 Broke Girls” after ordering a few books. Hoping Ferran Adria’s creativity books gets to me this time and is not missing the last few pages.

May 5 – It finally happened after four months. Today at 8:15 PM I was in my bathroom doing what I needed to do. I had finished reading some  Twitter, and my second version of Amy Hoy’s Just Fucking Ship eBook and heading to my spare bedroom to update my nephew’s soccer website with completed and upcoming soccer camps. My day was spent mostly reading and playing with the interactive examples from the http://eloquentjavascript.net/ website. Bought the book, but have found reading it online has been great, so I can run the examples, along with making updates and changes to see what will happen.

May 6 – Down in the basement grabbing a light bulb from one end to move to the other end so I could see to put laundry in washing machine. One of these days, I will bring an extra bulb down with me, so I don’t have to worry where the other one is. Updated nephews soccer website with a grammar change. Did another review of the work FORM PDF created in Live Cycle Designer, plus more reading on Javascript. Read another 15 or 20 pages of Just Fucking Ship by Amy Hoy, which gets me over half way through this updated version. A few more night after work and I will be done with my second reading.

May 7 – Sitting in the Artisphere in Rosslyn eating two breakfast tacos with chorizo tacos and two shrimp tacos while DC Night Owls gets started. After introduces, Matthew Lesko (guys in question mark suit from 80s and 90s TV) talk about doing your own thing that makes you happy because otherwise you’re working for others and most likely not happy. Plus, he talked about he had businesses that failed, write 100 books, and was happiest when he started wearing the question mark suits. Helped VETS come up with a great solution on how to bake infographics accessible by adding off-screen text.

May 8 – ENTERED 05/09/2015 – Was at  Taco Bamba with Sam eating tacos. I had tripe, Lengua (beef tongue), and goat tacos. Once we were done there stopped at 29 Diner for dessert. I had chocolate layer cake as usual. Had a retrospective meeting o the last sprint in the morning. At about 11:45 AM went out to the sixth-floor patio to watch the VE Day planes fly over the mall. I could only stay for the first 15 or so minutes because I had to grab lunch before my three-hour training of Compliance Sheriff (first two hours). Then an hour on “How to Make Your Website More Accessible”.

May 9 – Sitting at my computer in the spare bedroom watching episode one of the second season of Small Empires about “Fixing everything with PartPic in Atlanta”. Great video show with advice on how to start, run, expand, etc. a small business, mostly web based. Been meaning to watch the second season for a long time, but when I would remember to look for it, it was not out yet. Now all nine or ten episodes are out so can work my way through the whole season in a few days, since the episodes are 20 to 30 minutes long. Went to St. Emlo’s today to meet up with the gang and see how the week went. Then it was off to Union Market to grab a late morning snack, which ended up being a great little breakfast sandwich from Ris. The sandwich was bacon, egg, white cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, and meatloaf on a potato bun. I could have eaten few more of those but glad I didn’t. After grabbing the remaining 60 canvases for my 100 Day Project of making paintings of wine bottle I stopped at PoppaBox to have spicy pork bibimbap (mixed rice). Then to was home to read and nap. Going to watch a few more episodes of Small Empires and then head out to Bob and Edith’s for a late dinner of breakfast.

May 10 – Started napping on my bed since about 6:30 PM after wandering around the Shen Valley Flea Market and then the downtown Front Royal flea market, along with shopping at Wegmans. Stopped at Heritage Hollow Farms butcher shop to pick up some bacon and other pork products and found them closed for Mother’s Day. Also found that Creekside Bakery and Deli (15 Main St, Sperryville, VA 22740) closed early at 2:00 PM. If you ever get there make sure to try the glazed donuts and turnovers.

May 11 – Watching “2 Broke Girls” while eating two roast pork, salad greens, and pickled veggies on a Portuguese roll. Besides attending APIv2 planning meeting, I worked converting the dataset TABLEs to a more mobile friendly layout. Ended up painting my 36th painting of wines bottles.

May 12 – ENTERED – 05/13/2015 – Sitting in my buddies basement in Cabin John drinking white wines (two Pinot Grigio’s and a Reisling), while eating a great pork Ragusa over penne pasta. We were waiting to open the 1985 Toro Albala Don Pedro Ximenez Gran Reserva Montilla Moriles at the end of the night. Did more a making dataset TABLEs easier to read on handheld devices.

May 13 – Reading “Just F’ing Ship” and taking notes on the 21 main points. Worked on more dataset TABLE page coding.

May 14 – ENTERED – 05/15/2015 – Driving from UPS after picking up my new 13″ Retina MacBook Pro to Five Guys to grab a cheeseburger and small fry. More work on making developer.dol.gov dataset pages responsive, so TABLEs only show on desktop.

May 15 – Heading out the door to see Teresa Oaxaca live paint a model at Principle Gallery Alexandria. Learned a bunch watch even though it was for only about 30 minutes on how I should blend paints on the pallet instead of the painting. Day of getting small things tied up. Heading to Momo Sushi for dinner afterward.

May 16 – ENTERED 05/17/2015 – Was at William’s in Purciville, VA, With Sam and Eric, who were learning how to shoot a 9mm and a .357 Magnum. They were having a great time and then going to give the four wheeler a try driving it around the property. We ended up having dinner of T-bone steak, grilled onions and asparagus with rice, tomato, bacon, and cheddar cheese casserole and a few strawberries for dinner.

May 17 – Driving/parking the car at The Dairy Godmother to pick-up a quart of vanilla custard to have with fresh strawberries, peanuts, cashews, and chocolate sauce after mowing the lawn. Went to Dupont Circle farmers market, then home for some reading and a nap.

May 18 – Watching “2 Broke Girls” after a bit of reading and starting the copying of 19 Gb of files to an external hard drive to be transferred to my new laptop. Created more mobile friendly dataset pages.

May 19 – Sitting in a conference room at 1776 Crystal City with eight other people as part of “UX Show and Tell”. Not sure if I was presenting what DOL was doing with developer.dol.gov’s mobile pages or had just finished. Got good feedback that we were doing the right thing. More work on making datasets mobile friendly.

May 20 – ENTERED 05/22/2015 – I was walking down into the Gallery Place/Chinatown metro station after Accessibility DC’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day. While at Capitol City Brewery with five others I learned, Blackboard now has a full-time accessibility person. She even thinks we might be able to have monthly meetings there. Today was a good day for accessibility.

May 21 – ENTERED 05/22/2015 – Attending Refresh DC at Atlantic Media Strategies in one of the Watergate Buildings to hear Sarah Mills talk about UX process.

May 22 – Laying on my bed talking to my sister a day early for her 45th birthday, since she would most likely be running around all day on Saturday. Takes to my father beforehand to see how he was doing with his medical issues. Slow day at work before Memorial Day weekend, which work let us go home two hours early and let me get a two hour and 45-minute nap in.

May 23 – Watching TV while on the phone with old college friend Christina about the women we both knew that passed away the other day. The rest of the day was relaxing with a stop at St. Elmo’s to meet friends before grabbing English peas. Bought three quarts and ate close to two of them. Then back home to read and nap. After that, it was off to Eden Center to grab some roast pork and pickled veggies.

May 24 – Unpacking the car after going out to Shen-Valley Flea Market in White Post, VA, with my co-worker, along with stopping for bake goods at Creekside Bakery and Deli inSperryville. Then we stopped at Heritage Hollow Farms for pig jowl bacon after doing the tour of Copper Fox Distillery. We made stops at Caresaul Ice Cream for custard and a quick stop at Wegmans for a few groceries.

May 25 – Out on a walking past the basketball court through the park near my house on my way to Old Town Alexandria. Hadn’t done much walking today since I spent three-plus hours helping women figure out how to fill in and use the WordPress theme she bought. Managed to add two and a half miles or about 5,700 steps in during my walk.

May 26 – Sitting in buddies basement in Cabin John having some wine, cheese, and crackers talking about pig roast plans, wedding plans for another friend there. Then it was on to talking about parents debt when they pass away and how some states are looking have a spouse, children, or other relatives having to pay it back.

May 27 – Watching “American Pickers” while eating Malaysian Lo Mien with shrimp and tofu. Reviewed a document for accessibility issues, along with attended a few meeting and made another dataset TABLE page more mobile friendly.

May 28 – ENTERED – 05/30/2015 – Watching “American Pickers” while relaxing after a good day at work.

May 29 – Sitting in Principle Gallery in watching a live painting of E. Hunt Burke being done. It’s interesting watching someone else paint to see how they do things. Had a great APIv2 meeting today at work where we worked through the process of how make a paper airplane fly-over 240 yards and so two loop de loops. These were some of the customers requests.

May 30 – Working on my new 13″ Retina MacBook Pro purchasing the necessary software to be able to code and deploy updates.

May 31 – Driving home from DC with Henny Swan after taking her on a driving sightseeing tour of DC after having a steak dinner at Ray’s the Steak’s. Figured she needed a bit of time out of the hotel before spending the next two days there for the M-Enabling Conference in Crystal City, VA, after spending the day flying from England.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

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.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 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.

P.S. Need to go back through these 8:15 PM posts and add any links or photos that are relevant to make them more appealing.

What I’ve Been Doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) – April 2015

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Guess I forgot to post April, May, and June’s a few weeks ago. So here at least is what I was up to at 8:15 PM in April. Will post the May, June, and July over the next two weeks.

Background about Posts

Started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months 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.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post of what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, and March.

April

Apr 1 – ENTERED 2015/04/02 – Standing at the top of the second-floor stairs of Clyde’s in Chinatown attending the Innovation in Accessibility meet-up. Talking with William, Jason, and others discussing with a deaf guy about building single page applications using JavaScript frameworks and how they are mostly not accessible. Interestingly he hadn’t thought much about their accessibility for others after a long discussion about captioning.

Apr 2 – In REI purchasing new hiking shoes and three Isis of Smartwool socks. Used my dividend, plus I got 20% off the $90 shoes and 10% off the socks because I got three pair. A day spent looking at the code to improve developer accessibility and what needs changing for the “Standards for Application” demo websites.

Apr 3 – Re-reading Elle Luna’s (@elleluna) blog post on Medium, called “The Crossroads of Should and Must”. Thought it made sense to re-read this post after reading the introduction to her new book by the same name before going any further with the book. Was listening to B.B. King’s “Live in Cook County Jail” while reading.  Once done heading over to District Taco to grab a few breakfast tacos (egg, cheese, and chorizo in a flour tortilla). Might even add a bit of the leftover hot green papaya salad to add a bit of flavor and punch.

Apr 4 – Watching Duke Blue Devils beat Michigan St. Spartans by 15 points with less than three minutes to go in the game. Woke up at 6:30 AM after the upstairs neighbors alarm went off. Then went to Giant to turn in $90+ of change. Next went to Heller’s Bakery for donuts, but they were closed after being open since 1928. Sad day. Would have gone to Citibank to cash birthday check, but the branch in Foggy Bottom branch didn’t open until 10 AM. Got to Plaza Arts to pick up canvases to start my 100 days project to paint wine and food related paintings each day. Stopped at Union Market for lunch and found out Toki pop-up was closed because Maketto is opening next Friday. At A. Litteri’s stocked up on cured Italian meats while one if the guys made me a free cured nears sandwich after ordering a meatball sub.

Apr 5 – Walking past the corner of Commonwealth Ave. and Camron St. Was out on a 5,600+ step walk over the course of an hour wandering into Old Town Alexandria to watch the tourist on Easter. The day was spent sleeping in and then heading to DuPont Circle Farmers Market shopping for food. Had a great vegetarian shiitake mushroom, brown rice, and other herbs, etc. sandwich. Next we drove around DC to see what was going on. Then headed to Eden Center to check out the new Gold Fortune grocery store. Next walked to the opposite end of the shopping center for Pho and back to get more food. Picked up roast pork finely chopped along with pickled veggies to make my version of Banh Mi and a few other items. Total steps walked was 13K+ or over 6 miles.

Apr 6 – Opening up old paint tubes so I can start my 100-day project with paintings of wine bottles and food. First wine painting turned out okay after not painting for like six or eight years. The day was spent updating developer accessibility issues and CSS, plus testing VETS for accessibility issues.

Apr 7 – ENTERED 2015/04/08 – Started cleaning up the apartment by gathering all the trash in the wastebaskets. Then moved on to dinner and painting wine bottle paintings, while watching TV.

Apr 8 – Reading Elle Luna’s post on her “My Morning Routine”, while watching “The Best Bars in America” in the background. Had Trusted Tester/accessibility meeting for two hours in the morning and then read the document for tomorrow’s meeting. The afternoon was adding spent working on CSS fixes to the developer to improve keyboard accessibility and fix skip navigation anchor issue. Then did JAWS testing of VETS. Still need dinner and finish my third 100-day project painting.

Apr 9 – Cleaning off my paint brush after adding a dark orange background for tonight’s wine bottle painting. Need to start painting the backgrounds a day or more in advance so they can dry and make the bottle painting easier. Day of meetings and testing. Helping figure out Section 508 policy at work and what goes on with bringing Trusted Tester into work.

Apr 10 – At District Taco with Chris, Tony, and the kids. They enjoyed the tacos greatly. I had two fish tacos and two basic breakfast tacos with chorizo. Then took them out to Mt. Vernon to show them where George Washington lived. Ended evening at the Dairy Godmother for custard. The daily flavor was cherry blossom. Finished up last updates to Developer website to correct accessibility issues for TABLEs, skip navigation, and keyboard users, along with more VETS testing.

Apr 11 – Sitting the car reading Twitter while friends and their kids go see Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, and Korean Memorial. We spent the day wandering around National Zoo and then had dinner at 2 Amy’s. Best pizza in the area. We’re grabbing frozen custard again tonight at The Dairy Godmother once done.

Apr 12 – Working on my 2014 taxes. Spent good part of the day trying to install and update Turbo Tax 2014. Started around 12:30 PM and it was taking forever so left to meet Megan at Buzz Bakery to go over and help her with her accessibility slides. While I was gone in the of middle loading Turbo Tax, Windows XP decided to reboot for security updates so had to start over. Once rebooted Windows needed to download more updates and wouldn’t let the machine do anything else for like an hour. Finally, git everything loaded and slow time getting mist recent updates to Turbo Tax. Now download Virgina state tax information. Hoping to get done tonight so I can review thing tomorrow night.

Apr 13 – Watching “2 Broke Girls”, then grabbing takeout from South China before more TV and reviewing my taxes. Turbo Tax currently has me owing $0 to the state if Virginia. Never in 35+ years of doing taxes have never noticed or been owed money. Might also be the night to order my new Retina MacBook Pro.

Apr 14 – Driving to Five Guys to pick-up a cheeseburger with lettuce, grilled onions, and grilled mushrooms, along with ketchup and mustard. Worked on testing a native application iPhone with VoiceOver, which is a first for me. Spent time reading Section 508 testing document too.

Apr 15 – Sitting outside Clarendon Apple Store to see if they can fix my iPhone 4S. Late yesterday evening the top power button stopped working unless you press it hard. The other issue has been once my battery gets between 60% – 70% the phone will drop to 20% battery or shut off without warning. Most likely time to get a new phone.

Apr 16 – Finishing up Chicken Tikka Masala, garlic naan, and a samosa while watching “The Big Bang Theory”. Had a busy day starting with three-hour meeting about new accessibility policy and implementation at work. Then dealing with Compliance Sheriff not running because of lack of space, new intranet accessibility, what to do about some documents accessibility, and a few other things.

Apr 17 – REENTERED – 04/20/2015 – Driving between Cheesetique and Good Fortune Market to get roast pork from the food court. Got there around 8:25 PM and found out they closed the food court at 8:00 PM. You would think a food court in a grocery store would be open later on a Friday night.

Apr 18 – REENTERED – 04/20/2015 – Watching TV while my new iPhone 4S is updating my applications and music. Spent most of day restoring my iPhone 4S after getting a replacement one from the Clarendon Apple store. Pro Tip: remove music and other media files (TV shows, movies, videos, etc.) before your last backup, so you don’t have to wait nine hours for 12.5 GB to load. That is if you have a backup somewhere.

Apr 19 – ENTERED – 05/05/2015 – Lost this entry because over the weekend of April 19 my work computer rebooted. When I opened the SimpleNote web page, it refreshed to what was in there from Friday morning, which only had Thursday night’s entry. This meant I had to recreate Friday, Saturday, and Sunday’s entries that I never remembered what happened Sunday night beside most likely watching TV.

Apr 20 – Reading a Web Development Group article about Google changing their search algorithm to rank responsive websites higher when on searching on your mobile device or tablet, also watching 2 Broke Girls. Had a busy day getting a bunch of things done. From enterprise scanning software, figuring out PDF accessibility issues, and making recommendations on improving new website performance.

Apr 21 – Starting to look into best and easiest way to convert my main jfciii.com website pages into responsive pages, since Google changed their search algorithm to give a higher ranking to responsive pages. Updated page TITLEs for APIv2 application so assistive technology users will understand what the page is about from the TITLE. Next, tested iPhone application with VoiceOver at work and tomorrow get to see how it works when I change the language of Spanish on the phone. Supposedly it’s going to switch to being in Spanish.

Apr 22 – Laying on sofa killing time reading Twitter to see what I missed while working today. Then I’m heading out to grab takeout Chinese to eat while watching “Best Bars in America” and “Brew Dogs” on Esquire Network.  Worked with a co-worker to check the accessibility of iPhone application with VoiceOver for the Spanish version. This application changes to Spanish when iPhone has the language set to Spanish. Taught him VoiceOver while he listened to Spanish to make sure it was correct.

Apr 23 – Sitting in the front row at iStrategyLabs listening to @moonstompmaggie and @elifitch talk about the project they did for Facebook’s F8 conference. In a short time, they built a 3D interactive experience using Three JS, with not much knowledge of either. Put accessibility issues into GitHub for URL shortener, along with finished testing iPhone application using VoiceOver in Spanish.

Apr 24 – Driving with Devorah to meet one of Jen Strickland’s friend near the White House at 18F to show him around, since he’s new to town. Drive around 14th St. and end up at Izakaya Seki for sushi, beef tongue, monkfish liver, and more. Ended night at Dangerously Delicious Pie. Mostly worked on read new Trusted Tester and Section 508 Policy document.

Apr 25 – Relaxing on the couch watching “The Big Bang Theory” reruns after driving up to Philly and back to meet Alex Hillman at Reading Terminal Market to grab a roast pork sandwich from Tommy Di Nic’s and two Train Wreck’s from Becky’ Cajun Cafe. After getting them, we headed back to Indy Hall to eat and have some old Zin, along with cured meats. Before heading home, I stopped at Di Bruno’s in south Philly for cured meat and cheese for cured meat and cheese. The last stop was Isgro’s to get two cannoli’s.

Apr 26 – Was in kitchen toasting Wegmans Tuscan garlic bread for sandwich with roasted pork and pickled veggies while watching Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” on CNN, which is a clip show from last years shows. CNN is getting ready for the premier of this season tonight at 9 PM. Ran over to DuPont Circles farmers market (saw chef Jose Andres) and then to the Georgetown Flea Market. On my way to Good Fortune Supermarket, I stopped at Pho 75 for a small bowl of round-eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles. Once done there went to Clarendon Apple Store to get a replacement the iPhone 4S for the iPhone 4S that I got eight days ago. The problem was with the wifi antennae. Now spending the night restoring the phone.

Apr 27 – Catching up with Twitter while half-watching what’s going on on the TV about police and protestors in Baltimore. Did additional reading on how to use VoiceIver on an iPhone to make accessibility testing easier?

Apr 28 – Sitting in my buddy Tony’s basement with him, Barry, Lori, Jim, and myself drinking two Matt Cline “Three” Zinfandel wine, Merlot, and a Sauterne. Worked on a quick demo of how to display a mobile version of datasets and for the desktop.

Apr 29 – ENTERED – 04/30/2015 – standing  at the corner of M St. and 1st St. NE in front the Harris Teeter talking about DC’s bike share with Kevin Cole after the Accessibility Innovation meet-up at Tynan Tea shop, listened to two talks. The first was about a company that is helping people with disabilities. While demoing one product and looking at their other one realized why not add a suction cup to hold the pill-holding tool to a surface so a one-handed person can open bottles. The room started laughing, and the two guys thought it was brilliant.  Told them I’d like one of the first prototypes and they said sure. Guess I should have patented it when I got home.

Apr 30 – Updating my phone’s calendar to pick-up my car Friday night at Landmark Honda after work, while watching “The Big Bang Theory”. Spent time today reviewing a few PDFs.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

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.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 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.