Category Archives: What I’ve Been Doing

What I’ve Been Doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) – October 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, July, August, and September.

October

Oct 1 – Sitting in the Ryman Auditorium listening to the live Opry Country Classics show hosted by Larry Gatlin with his brothers, Crystal Gayle, and others. Long day of driving to get here from DC. I stayed in the Tiny Red House, which was 200 square feet. Had plenty of room to sleep, even cook if you wanted. The place had a living room that could be used for reading and relaxing, but the bathroom could have used another eight or so inches to make easier for a slim guy like me get around. Taking that space from the kitchen wouldn’t matter much in my opinion. Adding pocket doors would be helpful too.

Oct 2 – Sitting in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel for the last half hour listening to an older gentleman play jazz tunes on the piano. While listening to the music, I was cleaning up a week’s worth of e-mail before heading over to Beale St. Had a nice day by starting the morning in the Hatch Show Print in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, TN. Great place to see how they are keeping letterpress printing alive by printing posters for music events. Had dinner at the Rendezvous which consisted of an order of smoked sausage and a dinner of lamb riblets. They were some of the best BBQ meat I’ve eaten.

Oct 3 – Arriving at my AirBNB in Baton Rogue, LA. I had driven from Memphis after taking care of soon to her factory tour. When leaving town, I took Route 61 which is more the back-country way and than taking Route 55 to Baton Rouge Louisiana. It was extremely interesting being able to look at Mississippi Delta farmland. Stopped in Jackson Mississippi do you have a pig your sandwich along with a smoked meat sandwich at the Big Apple Inn. It was in one of the sketches neighborhoods I have ever been in, and that was during the daytime. Both sandwiches were awesome well worth the trip. They cost six bucks for slider size sandwiches, two of each with and hot sauce.

Oct 4 – Driving back from Noble Pig in Austin, TX, where I have a half of Duck Pastrami sandwich and a half of Seared Beef Tongue sandwich. The day was mostly spent during on I10 and then state road 71 from Baton Rogue, LA to Austin, TX. Managed to get to Austin Hilton Downtown to register in time for An Event Apart.

Oct 5 – Waiting at “Moonshine” to get seated for dinner in Austin, TX, with two other people. We had to wait for about 45 minutes that wasn’t too bad because it gave us time to catch up since it’s been a while. Had a great day at An Event Apart and learned a lot. Guess you miss out on things when you skip a few years. I won the super bingo/coverall were you are networking to meet people and find out certain facts that are true about then and fill one of your spaces.

Oct 6 – Sitting at the Razorfish offices in Austin, TX, talking about accessibility. The talk I was giving was called, “Everything I Learned about Accessibility I Learned from Wine and Cheese”. The talk was about how it takes years to get knowledgeable about accessibility. Which is similar to learning about wine and cheese in that a person needs to figure out what grapes, blends, etc. they like and keeping mental notes. With accessibility, you need to learn things all the time and try things that make sense to improve the accessibility of an entire page or even a small piece of it. Today was another great day at An Event Apart and looking forward to the Workshop on Wednesday.

Oct 7 – ENTERED – 10/14/2105 – I was driving back from Salt Lick in my friends car after a nice relaxing dinner of BBQ brisket, smoked sausage, and a BBQ pork rib. Which also came with cole slaw, potato salad, beans, bread, pickles, and onion. We talked about many things and had a good time catching up after not seeing each other for a few years. Much easier to do in person than over Twitter DM.

Oct 8 – I was settling into my AirBnB in New Orleans before heading out to the French Quarter and Bourbon Street. It was interesting walking French Quarter and Bourbon Street. I didn’t realize there were so many strip clubs/gogo bars in that area. Another thing was people wandering the street with plastic cups of alcohol. I got back to AirBnB by 10:30 or 11 PM. After a breakfast of breakfast tacos at Torchy’s I drove to Lockhart, TX, for some BBQ at Smitty’s. I got there around 10:45 AM and wasn’t quite ready for BBQ yet. I wanted to wander around town, but they were preparing to film a movie, so lots of streets were closed, and so were the shops around the town square. I got fatty brisket along with a smoked sausage and a Jalapeno Smoked Sausage and pink lemonade.

Oct 9 – Driving back from dinner at Bon Ton Cafe where I had turtle soup. It was a bit salty for my liking but supposedly helps with gaminess. My main course was Red Fish Bon Ton, which was pan seared fish with butter sauce and crab over the top of it, along with pan fried Brussel sprouts. When dinner was over headed over to Preservation Hall to see the 8 PM show of the Jazz band. Close to show time and way too many people ahead of me and stomach not feeling to hot I grabbed a cab back to my car headed home. I spent the day wandering around the Quarter and cleared out a bunch of old e-mail at a coffee shop. Then looked at a bunch of art which I bought a half dozen pieces. Most of them were small and two larger ones. The second largest one I needed to head back and grabbed information about the artist from their saleswoman, who forgot to grab a business card from the other day.

Oct 10 – Standing in line with two guys from Glasgow, Scotland, a couple from Chicago, and a few people from outside New Orleans to see The Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Earlier in the day went to Port of call and had a  mushrooms cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, pickle’, and a baked potato. Then went to the Garden District to wander around. Ended up at the cemetery across the street from Commanders Palace. Once done their tits and wondering in the neighborhood. Then I headed back to the French quarter so I could go back to Jackson Square and look for more art. Ended up buying a slate roof tile painting of the jazz trombone player. Then I grabbed a guitar player photo for only 25 bucks even though it was a repainting on top of another. After the Presentation Hall JAZZ Band, I went to are nods and head alligator sausage with baked onions and spicy mustard. My entrée was crawfish O’Connor, which was crawfish, some spice in a tomato butter cream sauce. They had wonderful homemade bread and butter.Could have eaten more of it, but wanted to cut back a bit.

Oct 11 – ENTERED – 10/13/2105 – Driving to my rustic cabin AirBnB. Got of Interstate 95 and drove 13 miles down a two lane road with no street lights then turned right and drove another eight-plus miles. Turned right at the only place with a street light. A few turns later I’m on a dirt road fro over 1.7 miles, driving at five or ten miles an hour looking for a sign that says Cabin and garden in pick darkness. Once I found the sign and turned left as the email said. Another quarter mile I see a light in the distance, and there it was a two room cabin, which one room is the bathroom, with the internal, external lights on. Grabbed laptop bag along with my clothes and went in. To my right, there was a TV with Direct TV standing on a bunch old glass bottle milk crates with two leather chairs. In Theodore if the room there was a small wood burning stove. In the kitchen area was a fridge, gas stove, and on the sink was a bottle of Bourbon and another of Johnny Walker Black. The next thing in the room was the bathroom. The part of the cabin next to the bedroom area was in had a bunk bed, gun cabinet, and then a twin bed in a stand that you needed a step stool to get into. Also, over the fridge was a stuffed male turkey and raccoon on a log over the sink and a deer head over the main door. It was great to be able to use my Your Karma to check e-mail and others things in the middle of the Georgia mountainous back-country.

Oct 12 – ENTERED – 10/13/2105 – Having dinner at my friends house south of Raleigh with his wife talking about my travels the previous twelve days. We had a great dinner of strip steak, Brussel sprouts and bacon fat cooked in a cast iron skillet, along with homemade cornbread, German potato salad with bacon and some cooked mushrooms with onions. Spent the day driving from the rustic cabin in Hamilton, GA. Had great nights sleep in this wonderful place.

Oct 13 – Settling in for a bit of TV after not watching any got almost two weeks. Currently, watching the “Bizarre Foods” show were Andrew Zimmern is in Paris, France. Left my friends place in Raleigh, NC, at around 8:30 AM and arrived home at 1:00 PM. Doing so allowed me to stop and pick up my mail, which I had them restart delivery. Grabbed a pork chop sandwich with salt, pepper, and hot sauce on white bread. After unloading the car, it was time for a couple of hours nap. Finally, drove to Wegmans to eat dinner and stock up on a few things for the house.

Oct 14 – Looking at my “What I’m Doing at 20:15 in 2015” while sitting at my desk in the spare bedroom with a hoodie and shorts on. Guess my body doesn’t quite know what to do with cooler weather after a long vacation, it might be getting sick which I hope it doesn’t. I’m getting ready to put the month of October so far through Grammarly, along with last month if I haven’t done so already. Had a relaxing first day back at work catching up on e-mail. I did a bit of testing of a QA testing tool and explaining to everyone asking what my almost two-week road trip was like and what I did.

Oct 15 – Watching episode 10 of “Movable Feast” – Scribe Winery with Christopher Kostow and The Wise Sons. Which was about wine, blintzes filled with farmers cheese and strawberries on top, along with duck prosciutto, and truffle,  asparagus, veggie, rabbit sausage, and egg casserole, along with an in-season salad with tomatoes, hand picked baby greens, walnuts, olive oil, and much more. My day was spent testing a new QA tool and updating the accessibility standards page on the wiki.

Oct 16 – Watching episode 1 of “Movable Feast” in Seattle with special guests Seattle: Tom Douglas and Thierry Rautureau. Great seeing Pikes Place Market and the bay/ocean when getting the seafood, spring onions, morels, etc. Another day of afternoon meetings of what we are going to work on next week and testing our new QA Tool, which I found a few issues with and reported them in our issue tracking system.

Oct 17 – Napping after an hour and a half massage to help loosen up my muscles after a two-week road trip to Austin, TX. Watching Notre Dame football against USC and it’s a tied game with a little over twelve minutes left to go in the fourth quarter.

Oct 18 – I was watching the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T the Butterbean” episode of “A Chef’s Life” on Amazon Prime. The day was mostly spent going out to the Shen-Valley Flea Market and not finding anything I needed to buy, but when I got to the Front Royal Flea Market, I purchased a chef’s knife ($5) and eight small wood bowls and one larger one for all of two dollars. My final, stop after having lunch at Blue Winged Frog in Front Royal where they have a huge picnic table in the middle of the restaurant was the Creekside Bakery to grab two donuts and two apple turnovers, which were well worth the trip.

Oct 19 – Watching commercials during “The Big Bang Theory”. Haven’t seen the show but only once this season because I have been traveling and missed it the other nights. Spent a good part of the day gathering information about the small possibility of changing accessibility scanning tools. Contacted a few people I know that work for some of the different companies to see if I could get some information from them without having to go to the sales people. I didn’t contact all of them at once since I wanted time to read through anything I found from each of them. Two of them wanted to set up a meeting, and I told them I was attempting to gather some general information first. One asked me a for questions over Twitter DM, and I sent a few and then realized maybe an e-mail with them all would be better. So I started gathering all those questions in one place.

Oct 20 – Sitting in the basement of my buddies house in Cabin John trying different beers, while talking about plans for friends wedding this weekend. Found out the bridal party or, at least, the groom and groomsmen need to be back to the hotel on Saturday and ready to go by 3:00 PM. So that means lunch might be ending closer to 2:00 PM, which is when my beard trimming was supposed to be taking place. Will need to move my appointment back until closer to 3:00 PM.

Oct 21 – Sitting on my leather chair and using my leather ottoman to prop up my feet as I read Jamie Oliver’s new book “Everyday Super Foods”, which he started writing over a year and a half ago when he realized he was turning 40 and need to make a change in his life. Te book is about making better meals to help you live longer along with other things I haven’t read yet. More wiki updates for pages the deal with accessibility.

Oct 22 – Listening to Laura McGuigan (@grafxnerd) talk about being the only designer at a start-up and how she didn’t know anything when she first got there about products, hiring, etc. Nice to see Viget Labs new space. More wiki updates for pages the deal with accessibility, along with testing the updates to the QA Testing Tool. Managed to give the two new people at the office my talk on making websites more accessible so the release management person and the new front-end person can each understand what needs to be done and think about when doing their jobs.

Oct 23 – Driving to Frederick Maryland to stay overnight in preparation for my friends wedding Saturday evening. After checking in the hotel closer to
8:45 PM I want to family meal for dinner. I have the bird Tony spicy chicken wings and the cakes with pimento cheese and bacon. For my meal, I love having catfish over the top of beans tomatoes cabbage in a few other vegetables.

Oct 24 – Sitting at the dinner table at the Cedarville manner talking with friends at my friend Sarah and Mike’s wedding. Was waiting for the music is third so it wouldn’t get on the dance floor. Managed to sleep until only 7 AM realize they didn’t have my phone charger so I went out to my car use my catchers you’re going to read for an hour from 8 AM to 9 AM. The client went in to have breakfast with friends. Then we went to one of my buddies rooms had a little bit of wine they had some breakfast room. Once it got to be noon we went out to lunch and came back and nap for a short time. It’s 3 PM I left to go to Citizen Barber to have them clean up my beer to make sure it was Lacey shake for the wedding this evening.

Oct 25 – At Wegmans in the bakery department trying to get garlic bread sliced with the guy saying he just used a cleaning solution to clean it. He then explained that these little slice bread that late but I mentioned it done it many times after 9 PM. What I think you meant was we clean the slicer if you’re slicing bread for myself another customer. Went to bed about 3 o’clock this morning to the fact we have the after party for the wedding and the friends room drinking wine and talking and telling jokes. Then was up by 8:30 AM to be ready for breakfast with others froM the wedding party and friends. Left Frederick, MD, around 11 AM and headed back to DC and stopped at Golden Market” in the Eden Center to pick up some pork and take me. Period got home written to about 120 and then took a nap. You couldn’t care called maps, so I slept for over 5 1/2 hours. Around 730. Then headed to Wegmans to grab some dinner and do a bit of grocery shopping.

Oct 26 – Sitting in Granville Moore’s eating frites with a few buddies while we waited for Toki Underground to text us that our seats were ready. A friend from out of town that used to live in DC that had never been to Toki wanted to go so we did, and he loved it. Afterward, we walked down to Maketto to show both of them around. Once done there, we stopped into Dangerously Delicious Pies to grab a pie to go.

Oct 27 – Working on cleaning up my e-mail that had over 500 e-mails that I needed to deal with. Most of them were read and then filed away, and others need a bit more work. I didn’t get through them all but dealt with 150, which is a good start.

Oct 28 – Sitting in a conference room at Blackboard listening to Megan Zlock talk about accessibility in her talk “Building A More Beautiful and Accessible Web”. Wish more of the people that signed up and let a little rain discourage them from not showing up to hear this great talk. We had a nice discussion afterward about other accessibility issues not covered in the talk. Spent most of the day reviewing PDFs in an iPhone application that were too small to read, along with helping with some CSS issues and reviewing a few documents.

Oct 29 – ENTERED 11/16/2015 – This what you get to write when you didn’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.

Oct 30 – ENTERED 11/02/2015 – Getting settled in at Ron’s house for a bit of music. Only stayed there for about an hour because I was tired and not many people were there when I left, and that was after taking an hour nap after work before heading over. Found out on Saturday a bunch of people I know showed up a short time after I left.

Oct 31 – ENTERED 11/02/2015 – Talking to neighbors that have been out of the country for the last three years while their kids hand out candy for Halloween. It was nice to get some time to talk to them a bit and see what they had been up too. Spent time earlier talking with the upstairs neighbors about their trip to Italy in the next few weeks. They are headed to Tuscany while in Italy to wander the country sides and see what they can and eat and drink local wine.

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) – September 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, 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.

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.