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.

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, July, and August.

September

Sep 1 – Sitting in Cabin John drinking wine and eating a great triple cream cheese from Wegmans with my buddy who owns the house and a few other friends. As usual we are talking about many things but decided to put the Nationals game on in the background on the huge 60+ inch HD flatscreen TV. Was nice watching the Nationals play well for the first few innings before heading out? The team had all nine players bat in the fourth (?) inning while scoring four runs.

Sep 2 – In my spare bedroom watching the 12th episode of the third season of “Mind of a Chef” with Chef Magnus Nilsson which is about “Traditions”. It was great seeing how he and his family are keeping some of the old Swedish food traditions alive by teaching his kids who are around five years old. He had his mother and aunt there who taught him and they learned from his grandmothers. Another day spent reading about the Department of Homeland Securities Trusted Tester process. The rest of the day was spent looking into the newly updated enterprise scanning software after it has been unavailable for close to two months because of space, server, and other issues.

Sep 3 – Watching more of a “Mind of a Chef” with Magnus Nilsson. Interesting watching a young chef from Sweden showing traditions that others are keeping alive and cooking dishes from when he was younger with a bit of a modern twist.

Sep 4 – Walking out of Wegmans after having dinner and a bit of shopping for the long weekend. Picked up hot dogs and rolls, along with some desert and triple cream cheese.

Sep 5 – Watching Josh Adams taking his first carry for Notre Dame against Texas University and scoring a 14-yard touchdown. Spent time at St Elmo’s with friends after mailing bills, paying rent, and picking up nectarines, heirloom tomatoes, and Cortland apples. Came back home and napped for three hours then did a bit of reading. After that went and watched “A Chef’s Life” from PBS on my Amazon Prime accounts live streaming.

Sep 6 – Driving past the original Dogfish Head Brewery in Rehobeth Delaware. Had an interesting day traveling around Maryland and Delaware. First stop was for crabs at the Crab Deck then headed to Ocean City, MD, to drive around and kill some time so I could get fish and chips at Go Fish before heading home. Didn’t make it home until 12:05 AM, since I stopped at Hopkins Farm Creamery in Lewes, DE.

Sep 7 – Sitting in my spare bedroom watching San Francisco episode of the “Movable Feast” on my Amazon prime. Interesting show with the chef going to a new city and talking with one or two or even three chefs to create a meal for about 15 or 20. Not as good as a chef’s life.

Sep 8 – Sitting in my buddies basement Cabin John with a few friends having beers instead of wine. We tried a bunch of sour beers which that were not too bad since I’m not a beer person. I brought some pig jowl bacon, heirloom tomatoes, and herbed bread to make mini sandwiches that everyone loved even though I didn’t have mayo or lettuce.

Sep 9 – Working on creating our first Accessibility DC event on EventBrite in over a year. Need to send out a notice to the person at the venue to make sure I have the information correctly before publishing and sending out invites. My day was spent re-working our enterprise scanning software that was having issues with old scheduled scans that used the old license. The rest was spent reviewing a new iPhone application for accessibility issues.

Sep 10 – Was adding updates to the Accessibility DC event on EventBrite. Had to set up the e-mail invite to be sent out at 11:45 PM Thursday and 4:15 AM on Friday morning, so everyone can get the invites in the morning. Another day was spent checking the new iPhone app for accessibility issues. Tended to find the same types of issues on all the screens.

Sep 11 – Walking through the Tysons Galleria Mall on our way to the Ritz Carlton to have dinner at Jose Andres’s American Eats Tavern. Once my buddies and I got there, we ordered a whole bunch of food. We ordered bowls of summer corn soup, buffalo style chicken wings, Hoppin John with mushrooms,  finely chopped tomatoes, celery, carrots, and peppers, and a plate of five different thinly sliced country hams. The final dish we ordered was a large order of suckling pig jambalaya. Oh, almost forgot about the awesome biscuits with the fresh light fluffy butter with a touch of cinnamon. Those were the best biscuits I have ever had in my entire life, and I’m old.

Sep 12 – Eating dinner at Wegmans from their hot bar. Grabbed some General Taos tofu, shrimp, and two different types of Indian curried chicken along with some spicy pork. Had a good day today met with old coworkers at Union Market for lunch. We walked around, and everyone got different things to eat. Even though it was raining most of the time we were there it started to rain hard for a few minutes. Was nice to see everybody after every six months or so and was glad to see everyone. Managed to get a nap in once I got home during the first part of the Notre Dame vs. Virginia football game. In the end, Notre Dame won the game.

Sep 13 – Standing outside CVS on the 500 block of King Street. Just finished purchasing in Arizona Green paid. Needed something to drink since I haven’t had much to eat. The sugar and would be great. I spent most of the day resting, napping, reading, watching television on the Internet. Managed to get 8,000 steps in today even though I didn’t start with my fit bit until 8 PM.

Sep 14 – ENTERED – 09/22/2015 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”.

Sep 15 –  ENTERED – 09/22/2015 – Drinking beer and wine while eating pork jowl stew with pasta with friends.

Sep 16 – ENTERED – 09/22/2015 – Watching the review show of America’s Got Talent to see how Piff the Magic Dragon did with his performance from the day before. Once that was over wait to see him perform with Penn and Teller.

Sep 17 – At the new Chief office listening to Ross Nover speak about design back at school for the 100th Refresh DC.

Sep 18 – Waiting at National Airport (DCA) to head to Boston for accessibility camp Boston.

Sep 19 – In my room at the Doubletree Inn in Danverse, MA, after a great day at Accessibility Camp Boston. Learned about Deque’s aXe tool for checking pages, along with listening to Molly Jane Watt from England talk about being deaf and blind. The final talk was by Dale Cruse about “Using the Language of Love”.

Sep 20 – Approaching DCA on my way back from Boston. Was in Boston for the weekend attend the Boston Accessibility Camp. Spent most the day Sunday with Char and her husband Jim having breakfast and then watching the Bills game against New England, which we lost, before heading back home.

Sep 21 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us” during the commercial of the first episode of the season for the Big Bang Theory. Missed a few episodes last year so didn’t realize Penny and Leonard were going to elope. Spent the day mostly in meetings and when not doing that reviewing accessibility wiki entries that improve anything.

Sep 22 – Standing at the cheese counter at Wegmans waiting to get some triple cream Gorgonzola. Had dinner at the hot bar that was some red and yellow curried chicken, spicy lamb, General Tso tofu, along with some breaded shrimp with a cream sauce. When I was done at the cheese counter, I shopped for some cured meats, bananas, grapes, and double chocolate chip cookie half dipped in chocolate. Most of the day was spent updating an almost eleven thousand word “Accessibility Standards” wiki page after three meetings.

Sep 23 – Driving up King St. and crossing Patrick St. after leaving Caphe Bahn Mi for dinner. I had summer rolls with mint, vermicelli noodles, shrimp, and a few other veggies with a great peanut dipping sauce. My main course was lemongrass chicken with vermicelli noodles, mint, pickled veggies, lettuce, crushed peanuts, and a sweet fish type sauce. Had a good day working at hoe, since the pope is in DC until Thursday night. Having the pope here allowed me to sleep in an extra 45 to an hour and still take a 25-minute walk, which is about the same amount of walking I do to get to my office. At lunch time took the same walk and then heated up some leftovers to eat at my desk while working. Around 3:00 PM went for my normal planned walk to stretch which ended up being around the block. Once I was done for the day at 5:30 PM I did a little bit of reading on Twitter then headed out for about a mile and a half or more walk. Doing this would be similar to my commute home. I enjoyed this day. Got a lot more done without all the distractions of the office, plus walked about 4,000 or so more steps than normal, which is over one and a half miles more walking.

Sep 24 – ENTERED 11/16/2015 – This what you get to write when you don’t write things down when they happen or, at least, a few notes to jog your memory later in the night or the next day. Not sure what I did that night, but most likely it was watching TV or reading, but I will never know because I didn’t write it done.

Sep 25 – Walking over to Prequal at 818 F St. for the after party of TEDxMidAtlantic. Great day for inspiration along with some time to realizing that you need to do more with my life.

Sep 26 – Standing around talking to people at the TEDxMidAtlantic closing party at the Sidney Harman Theater. Again another great day at TEDxMidAtlantic. It’s worth going year after year because I get to meet interesting people along with learn things I never knew existed.

Sep 27 – I was watching the review of the fifth season of “Parts Unknown”, while I wait for the new season to start about Anthony Bourdain in Cuba.

Sep 28 – I was watching “The Big Bang Theory” is about how Leonard kissed another woman while away on a research project. Today was spent working on accessibility documents.

Sep 29 – I was flipping through the TV and landed on “Counting Cars”. Today was spent trying to finish things up with leaving for vacation on Thursday. Did a review of the new Developer page for ILAB Child Labor dataset pages and found a few issues. The other thing I reviewed was the new Android OSHA Heat Index in English. Found a bunch of usability issues and still have to check the Spanish version and check both for accessibility issues using Androids Talk Back, which I’ve never done. Asked on Twitter if anyone had any resources I could check out and be given at least one slide deck to read.

Sep 30 – Sitting in Blackboard conference room talking about what the Accessibility DC meet up should do next. Joanna Hunt did a great talk about how Blackboard is improving their accessibility. Busy day at work and after meeting went home to pack to for my two-week vacation. At around 11 PM left for Front Royal to get a head start on my trip.

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.