Time off August 2024

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I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to take 6 weeks off this summer! From when performance reviews finish to when the kids go back to school, it’ll be summer vacation.

It’s a special year since Zach will be going into high school, and Amelia into Grade 5!

To get the most out of my time off, I’m going to follow my best practice of pre-writing what I want to get done, and adjust it as I go. This is a combination of time off, and all the stuff for happiness, which I guess gets tangled up with half of my evergreen notes.

Topic

Divide and Conquer - By Person

Family time is great, but so is time together so I think I’ll split the time up,

  • A week with each kid, a week for myself, and a week for the family.
  • All in one place, or travel the world.

Bulk Discount - Stay at the same place the whole time

  • I thought about it, but honestly, why, variety is the spice of life

From 12 months to 6 weeks

Four years ago, I dreamed of taking a year off of work. A few things have changed, Meta doesn’t do unpaid leaves, and the software industry has gone through some employment turbulence (e.g. layoffs), so I’ve replanned and am taking 6 weeks of vacation

By Week

Week Dates - People Activities Notes
1) July 21 - Zach l1  
2) July 28 - Family l2  
3) August 4 - Alone l3 A at Farm; Z rowing
4) August 11 - Alone TBD A at Film Camp; Z Rowing
5) August 18 - Amelia TBD Z Rowing
6) August 25 - Family TBD  
DONE: Sept 4 - Back to Work Back to Work/School Starts  

  • l1
  • Astoria
    • Super nice beach town
    • LEARN: Didn’t get a hotel room, super busy Saturday night, spent 300$ for crappy motel 6, many hours away
  • Coast
    • Trees of Mystery
    • Long nature walk
    • Lighthouses
  • San Francisco
    • City Hall - Zach LOVED it.
    • ~Alcatraz~ - Sigh sold out
    • Fisherman’s Wharf - Mechano Museum
    • Ride Trolleys
    • Coit Tower
  • Foods of SF
    • Cioppino
    • Sourdough clam chowder bowl
  • MPK
    • Lunches at 4 different cafeterias
    • Crazy cool to see just how big it is
    • Describing the org change in feudal structures
    • E.g. Is VP of Messenger a Protectorate, or a Grand Duke
  • l2
  • Long Beach
    • Cheap Apartment like hotel, get 2 or 3 bedroom suite - Coastal Inn
      • LEARN: Hotels can be better than AirBNB
      • LEARN: Long Beach has car chargers at Adrift Hotel
    • Beach Kettlebells
      • Sad messed up adjustable mechanism
      • Needed to dig ditches for my feet so they wouldn’t slide off
  • l3
  • Work - Give back Review
    • Folks want to know if they got Promos
    • BUT: I don’t find out till today. So coming in to give back results

Stuff happening

Candidates

  • Medieval Fair -
    • Knights, July 19
    • Pirates, July 26
    • Heroes and Villains, Aug 2
    • Warriors (Vikings?), Aug 9
    • Fantasy, Aug 16 (Best One?)
  • Tesla car camping
  • Mid week camping
  • Hang with Baltasar and Family
    • Aug 20th to 23 (Whistler)
    • Aug 24th (Seattle)

Lighthouse passport

I found a lighthouse passport thing! I assumed it was a stamp book (A book with all listed lighthouses, and you needed to collect all the stamps), however it was just a passport (blank pages), but turns out there are lots I can collect, and I will!

My top priorities

I have memories that last a lifetime

  • Photos, documentation
  • Peak End Rule
  • Moments

Back to generating artifacts

  • Bang out a daily blog post
  • Write 4 family journal entries (!!)
  • Finish my talk on AI

Health and Habits

  • Diet - I should be pretty close to steady state goal (165 ish). I guess don’t go up more than 5 lbs

    • Go to grocery store and load up on healthy food
    • Bring my travel scale

  • Sleep - Up every day at 5.

    • When drifting cut caffeine
    • Bring earplugs and sleep mask
    • Nap while charging the Tesla

  • Exercise - This will probably be the hardest.

    • When out of town, bring a portable kit
    • Figure out an outdoor setup

Moments

Loading (/moments)

First night: - Arrived: Went to beach and did 30 minutes of meditation on the sunset. It was amazing - Maybe an hour today

Things to do:

  • Go to Seaside
  • Go to Cranberry museum

Success Stories

  • Bought lots of peas and healthy things at grocery store
  • Got dinner before unpacking

Top Learnings

Relationships

Friends

  • ☑ Walk with Bob

Tori

Zach

  • ☐ Take him somewhere to go for a bike ride on the car

Amelia

  • ☐ Take her somewhere to go for a bike ride on the car

Identity Health

Magic

  • ☐ Practice Daily
  • ☐ Find a place to practice card to ceiling
  • ☐ Find a place to work on Tamiriz

Biking

  • ☐ Repair my cargo bike computer
  • ☐ Look at bubble bike setup
  • ☑ Setup my Tesla bike carrier

Tech Guru (X/5)

Enabling Environment

  • ☐ STRETCH: See if I can connect typer to carapace
  • ☐ STRETCH: Consider caching the autocompletion commands in zsh
  • ☑ Manage issues in github via Octo
  • ☑ Quickly setup mason, need to review all those damn tools
  • ☑ Fixed my slow zsh thing (was pomodoro) /td/slow. Still didn’t get to the bottom of it, curious
  • ☑ Figured out uv (replaces pip), and pipxu (replaces global pip install)
  • ☑ Switch to Atuin from Mcly (no diff)
  • ☑ Add third and half to yabi
  • ☑ HOORAY - Got Caps-> mapping to alfred in iterm (OMG - this has been a huge paper cut for months)
  • ☑ Started using url shortner via tinyurl and web link
  • Figured out how to include pasting (Inspired by imgclip). Code

Demo the paste

Tony

  • ☐ Update toni to include memory/todo tracking
  • ☑ Implement Search via Perplexity
  • ☑ Callable on cli via bestie

Other AI

  • ☑ Retrained AmmontGPT on GPT-o mini, so far seems worse
  • ☑ Upgraded to newer langchain things (look up model)
  • ☑ Play with AI Coding helpers (aider) - crap!
  • ☐ CUT: Look at more Agent Tools (Crew, and AgentZero)

Per repo changes

Video publishing

  • Using Loom to Record Videos (FaceCam) and then edit via text (Super cool)

Using alfred and yabai:

OK, yabai is cool, I think aerospace will end up better, but I need to support resizing splits, which yabaio does very nicely as I like to switch from halfs to thirds.

Using think.py:

  • Using the desktop within VR

CUT

  • Outline my talk for GPT, likley based on on Langchain tools

Cognitive Health (X/5)

Blog posts

  • One per day!

Emotional Health (4/5)

Meditation

  • ☐ Daily meditation!

750 words/Gratefulness

  • ☐ Daily Gratefulness journal/750 words!

Motivation (X/5)

-

Physical Habits (4/5)

Statistics

Weight Start: 178 Weight End: Gym Days: -

Diet

  • Bring a cooler
  • I really like cauliflower rice
  • Feel free to skip meals
  • Be happy going to bakery and looking at the tasty things and not eating them.
  • Be happy throwing away junk food - nothing wrong with that.

Sleep

  • Hard to get up early doing long driving days, but recovering it.
  • Real key here is to get to bed early, and not get stuck on the phone.

Exercise

  • Tried bringing KBs in the car with me. Adjustable KB broke. Worried about them rolling around
  • Kettleback rack 1 sided squats feel good, and don’t need to flip into the goblet position
  • Got 5lbs indian clubs - super heavy
  • 1 arm swings work well
  • Need to be happy with partial work out.

Inner Peace (X/5)

General Inner Peace

  • Should be pretty high
  • Need to remember mood is a heuristic, and my subjective well being will be super strong

Work

  • I should be spending 0 time on this, except giving back reviews for 2 days

Family

  • Lets focus on compassion and the sublime states

House and goods

  • ☐ Move office to upstairs
  • ☐ Seal up AC to be more effective