DaedTech

DaedTech Digest: Living Our Life at the Isle of Palms Beach

The Charleston metro area is great, as I briefly described a couple of weeks ago.  And, since then, we’ve seen even more of the city, treating ourselves to some additional excursions and adventures in the city proper.

But today, I’d like to talk about where we’re actually staying, and what life there is like.

We’re in a town called Isle of Palms.  Not surprisingly, it exists on an island — a barrier island, to be exact.  And Isle of Palms is maybe a 15 minute drive from Charleston proper, and 2 towns over.

If you live in or around a major city, you might map this to a bustling suburb, but that’s really not the case.  Charleston is actually quite a small city, and these beach outlying areas really do not feel like suburbs.  They feel like, well, beach destinations.

So it’s like we’re staying in the kind of house you might have gone to with your family as a kid for a beach week during spring or summer vacation.

Living at the Beach

As I mentioned last week, we’re setting aside some time where we’re not going full tourist and not working.  We want to relax.  And, where better than the beach?

So our life here has settled into a nice, sustainable cadence.  We’re working as we normally work, whether at home base or vagabonding, but we’re enjoying more success in not over-doing it.  This, combined with not booking our free time with wall-to-wall excursions, has given us some enormously enjoyable downtime.

And we’re making the most of it.  This has included:

• (At the risk of living a cliche) a lot of long walks on the beach in pursuit of impressive streaks of 10,000 step days.
• Taking chairs down to the beach and reading.
• Having a beer or two at a few different breezy establishments along the coast, while we look out at the ocean.
• (For me only) jogging along the coast every day.

Now, before you think that we’re living the life described in that Beach Boys song that lists every Caribbean destination in existence, understand that it’s actually not super warm here.  Daytime highs have ranged from the mid-50s to the mid-70s.  So a lot of these beach excursions involve shoes, jeans, and a hoodie.

Also, understand that it is apparently “sand gnat” season here.  These things put mosquitoes to shame.  If I’m not careful to put on bug spray for night beach visits, my forearms wind up covered in itchy welts.

So, it’s not tropical vaction.  But it is warm-ish, peaceful, beautiful, quiet, and surprisingly private, for a beach destination at spring break.  We’re packing up to head to Atlanta in about a week.  But our time here at the scenic Isle of Palms beach has been restorative.

Picks

• Here’s a fun thing that happened to me: a mention from Tim Ferris regarding an article I wrote some time back.  It’s in reference to an article from his blog about learning to write code.
• I’ve been poking around and learning about dev.to, which I’m starting to like.  It’s a nice contributor-driven content community, but without the horrible people that such a thing usually attracts if it gets big enough.  In other words, it appears that the community actually enforces human decency.
• Finally, here’s a local spot if you’re ever in Isle of Palms, called the Windjammer.  I mentioned having a beer or two and watching the surf, and there’s no better place to do it.  They have tall chairs facing out of their back patio for exactly that purpose, and they even have a sand volleyball court on their ground floor.

The Digest

• Hey, look — I wrote stuff this week!  Not only did I get back to publishing stuff on the DaedTech blog, but I wrote a post for our entry level programmer site, sharing my opinion on what it takes to be a good software engineer.
• We also published another episode of the Freelancers Show this week, where Jonathan Stark and I discussed the idea of generating leverage with your business by creating systems and standard operation procedures.
• And I uploaded a new Youtube video for Hit Subscribe.  If you want to learn to tell how hard it is to rank for a given search keyword, check it out!

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.

DaedTech Digest: Keeping Ourselves Entertained

We’ve now been in Isle of Palms, near Charleston, South Carolina, for two weeks.  Last week I talked about our journey from Texas and settling in here.  This week, I’ll talk entertainment.

There’s a certain cadence and pattern to your entertainment as a slow traveler.  I wrote once about how I consider myself a perpetual tourist.

So the cadence usually involves settling in, picking the quintessential tourist things to do, and then scheduling those.  Then, once you’ve gone through all of that, you start to look for lesser traveled, but still unique, local stuff.

You tend to keep your foot on the gas because, almost by definition, your time everywhere is fairly limited.  I mean, we could always stay places longer if we felt like doing so.  But the point is to experience and then to move on.

The upside to this approach is clear: a lot of variety, a lot of experiences, and a lot of fun.  But the downside comes in various forms as well: little time to rest, a tendency to overspend, and the risk of feeling that you could always be finding more things to do.

The Decision to Relax

So on this trip, we’ve changed it up a bit.

In the first place, we’ve decided to take a day or so each week just to relax.  We’re at the beach after all.  In the second place, we’ve stopped worrying as much about “what are the local must-dos” and decided instead to feel no obligation.  We’re just doing as the spirit moves us.

And this has been a lot of fun.

This past weekend, we booked two different AirBNB experiences, neither of which cost very much and both of which involved adorable and interesting animals.  The first experience involved bottle feeding baby goats.  And the second one, as pictured below, involved taking an anteater for a walk and interacting with other exotic animals.

None of this was uniquely Charleston, per se.  And none of it was what people might consider iconic around here: sailing, visiting Hilton Head, or whatever.  It was just fun, unique, and what we felt like doing.

So here’s to a form of slow travel where we work in a feeling of “relax and take what comes.”

Picks

• Sylvia, one of Hit Subscribe’s authors, is going to be doing a webinar for Scalyr about containers as a service.  Sign up and check it out!
• As I’ve been adding music to the Youtube videos I create, I’ve been relying on Youtube’s official library.  There’s a song creator called the Mini Vandals whose stuff has been great for this purpose, so I wanted to extend some appreciation and suggest you look for their stuff.
• Amanda and I have been re-watching episodes of The Office on Netflix.  Man that was a good show.

The Digest

• On a recent episode of the Freelancers Show, we tackled the issue of nervousness about pricing.  Do you get nerves when quoting a price to a client, thinking they’ll balk?  Give a listen.
• Here’s a video I did for the Hit Subscribe Youtube channel.  Check it out if you want to learn how to plan posts for your blog that will bring in organic traffic.
• And, finally, here’s a video we did for the Hit Subscribe Facebook Live series on how we’ve grown personally as a result of owning/running the business.  Looks like it was a relatively chilly February day back in Austin.

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.

DaedTech Digest: Settling into Charleston

It was a big, fat whiff last Friday.  But let’s dust ourselves off and move on, picking up this week with the DaedTech digest.

Last week was a busy week, which was why I didn’t post at all.  We moved from Austin to Charleston, South Carolina, and we did so mid-week, without taking a break from work, exactly.  Amanda and I didn’t work during the car ride or anything, so it was more a question of making up the work from the Tuesday and Wednesday that we spent driving on Thursday though Saturday.

Needless to say, none of this was conducive to a digest post.

After a 1400-ish mile drive spread over 2 days, we settled in last week.  And, by Sunday and Monday, we got to go out and explore a bit.  We’re staying on an island called Isle of Palm, just outside of Charleston, and we’ve had a chance to explore the island itself, Charleston proper, and the nearby countryside (more on that below in the form of a gator pic).

It’s been great!  While tornadoes, bomb cyclones and polar vortexes have been enveloping the rest of the country, we’ve been enjoying very mild weather, ranging from the high-50s to mid-70s.  Life is slow paced and extremely quiet where we are, and we had a great time poking around sleepy Charleston.

But perhaps nothing holds a candle so far to our exploration of the grounds of a former plantation/current wildlife park.  We went out looking for creatures and we found all sorts, including this gator that I got a photo of from maybe 10 feet away.

It’s always fun and an adventure to settle into a new place.

Picks

• I’m not sure if I’ve ever thrown this one a pick before, but I’ll show some love for LastPass.  It’s been an easy-to-use, cross-platform mainstay of my life for the last bunch of years.  If you’re still a password manager hold out, give it a look.
• I picked this on a recording of the Freelancers Show, but I’ll also pick it here: AirBNB experiences.  It’s a really great way to take advantage of local knowledge and entrepreneurs offering interesting tours and experiences.  We booked our taco tour of Austin this way, and in Charleston, we’ve booked experiences walking anteaters and bottle-feeding baby goats (pictures to follow).  When you travel, if you want something interesting to do, give this a look.
• If you’re ever in the Charleston, SC area and you want to go find some gators, like the one above (as well as egrets, herons, peacocks, and more), check out where we went: Magnolia Plantation and Gardens.  A great way to spend an afternoon.

The Digest

• How do you get started freelancing later in your career?  I tackled this question with the other panelists in an episode of the Freelancers Show about getting started freelancing your 40s.  (I’m not 40 yet, but assume I am for that episode)
• I did a video for the Hit Subscribe Youtube channel about how to fix up old blog posts to improve how much traffic they bring to your site.  Give that a watch if you’ve got a blog and are interested in more passive traffic.
• Here’s a Facebook Live that Amanda and I did, where we answered questions about content marketing.

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.