DaedTech

DaedTech Digest: Do You Worry about an Unoccupied House?

In past DaedTech digests, I’ve talked about the topic of whether we miss our stuff and about packing.  This kind of naturally gives rise to something that people ask me here and there.

Do you worry about leaving your house unoccupied for long periods of time?

The simple answer to that is no, we don’t.

But that wouldn’t make for much of a mini-blog-post, so let me elaborate a bit.  There is a set of circumstances that apply to us, but may not apply to others.

First, as I mentioned once before, our primary residence is something we purchased originally as a lake house.  We don’t exactly think of it (or anything) as a primary residence, and that informs our lack of concern.  In short, this is a house that we have a lot of practice leaving unoccupied for long stretches.

Also because this is a lake house, it doesn’t exactly make for a rich target for thieves, particularly during the winter.  The house exists in a sleepy little town with the sort of crime rate you’d expect in such a place.  Plus, most of the houses on these lakes around here are vacation properties or rentals, meaning slim pickins when it comes to things of value.  People tend not to stash their bearer bonds and family heirlooms at summer homes.  So, between that and our ADT alarm system and Nest cam, we’re not overly worried about break-ins.

And the final point is that my wife and I have lived life in transit for quite a while now, which creates an existence that necessarily deemphasizes material stuff.  So even if a break-in or Biblical flood or something happened, we’d just be out a bunch of stuff we hadn’t seen for a while anyway.  An insurance check, and we’d be all set.

If you decide to go the slow travel route, it might feel nerve-wracking at first to leave your place.  But practice makes perfect.

And so, without hesitation, we pack up the car, assign one of the cats as navigator, and hit the road.

Picks

• This is kind of a strange pick because it’s not a service that I’ve used myself, but rather one that someone recommended to me today.  It’s called wealthfront, and it’s apparently a savings/investment tool that lets you specify your risk level, including a “never let this go below my original investment” setting.  So you can get a nicely higher return than a savings account, but without risk.
• This is sort of a weird pick, because it’s more like a tiny hack.  But if you have a card or a board open in Trello, and you delete the URL information after its basic identifier and add “json”, you can see all of its API details.  This post describes it.

The Digest

• On the freelancers show, we recently discussed picking a specialty.  This is in line with all of the posting I’ve been doing lately about niching and value props.

And, that’s it.  Kind of a thin content production week for me, obviously.  I’ll have to try to step up my game on various other blogs.  As always, have a good weekend!

DaedTech Digest: Our Decision to Leaf-Peep

Each Friday (Thursday night, really), I publish a digest post.  And these posts are about the slow travel life.  For instance, last week, I talked about how we pick where to go.

Today, I’m going to diverge from the normal practice answering questions people ask me about slow travel.  Instead, I’m going to announce our next expedition.  We’ve made the decision to leaf peep.

Specifically, we’re going to be heading to Vermont for the entire month of October.  The last weekend of September, we’re going to pack up all of the boats, water-things, and general lake toys.  We’re going to store everything, and then we’re going to blast out of the area, heading for the very northern part of Vermont, near the Canadian border.

As I understand it, we’ve got an AirBNB that’s both remote and scenic.  This is the perfect location from which to take in the changing leaf colors of the season.  And we’ll probably do a couple of weekend excursions to locations like Boston and Montreal.

This is the perfect instance of what I was talking about last week.  Amanda and I just started talking about fall in northern New England kind of out of nowhere.  And then we pulled the trigger.

This, “screw it, let’s go to a place,” is the essence of what I love about the remote, slow travel life.

Picks

• I’m in San Francisco (actually, San Mateo) this week, and had a style of dinner called Mongolian Hot Pot at the Little Sheep.  This is good stuff!
• If you’re in the market for sunglasses, check out SunCloud.  I’m a convert.  Historically, I used to buy really expensive polarized glasses in the vein of Oakley or Rayban.  Sun Clouds are less expensive and every bit as effective, if not more so.

The Digest

• For Hit Subscribe, we’re starting a blog as a lab of sorts.  It’s aimed at people thinking of getting into programming as a career.  I wrote a post about whether or not programmers should blog.  Spoiler alert, yes.
• For Gurock, I wrote about getting regression defects under control.
• And, finally, for NDepend, I wrote about how you should favor software products that include support in the price.

As always, everyone, enjoy your weekend.

DaedTech Digest: Picking Your Next Temporary Home

At one point of the week, I forgot what day it was.  Probably due to the US holiday last week.  But fear not.  I’ve recovered my equilibrium in time for yet another digest Friday.

Moving on from last week’s discussion of how we started slow traveling, let’s talk about perhaps the next logical subject.

How do you pick your destinations?

I wish I had a satisfying answer for this question.  I’d love to pro forma lifestyle blogger thing and lay out some complex evaluation matrix.  This would probably cross reference cost of living, seasonal trends, and a handful of other metrics that attempt to quantify happiness.  And then it would spit out, “yep, Charleston, South Carolina!”

But honestly, it doesn’t go like that at all for Amanda and me.

I’d compare our decision making process more to how we decide where to go for dinner.  There’s no conversation at all about it, and then, bam, out of nowhere “hey, do you feel like Thai food?”  When that impulse strikes, all the reasoned consideration in the world doesn’t deter you from gut feel.

So it goes with our slow travel ventures.  We’ll idly think of different places with a kind of “that might be interesting someday.”  Or, perhaps it’s destinations that would be really interesting right now, but won’t work logistically.  But there’s always one that sticks in the metaphorical craw, in a good way.

Like the Thai food, it’s out there, and you can’t send the idea back from whence it spontaneously emerged and embedded itself in your head.  It started out innocuously enough as “hey, I’ve never been to New Orleans” or “the leaves are really pretty in New England in the fall,” but it was destined for whim fulfillment.

And, that’s really it.  The only exception I can think of was a decision to spend time in Phoenix to see Cubs Spring training.  And that was because there was an obvious mission with an objective.

Picks

• We had our wedding anniversary on Wednesday, and my wife got me this awesome present: a super durable leather wallet that’s nice to the touch.
• Speaking of which, if you’re celebrating the leather anniversary with someone who doesn’t really like leather, you might be interested to know that leather roses are a thing.
• A few weeks ago, I used NordVPN to get around a series of mlb.com blackout restrictions (boo!) and it was pretty seamless to setup and use.  That type of tool has come a long way.

The Digest

As it turns out, Hit Subscribe’s growth has left me in a position where I’m writing ever-fewer blog posts myself (at least publicly, I do also handle some ghostwriting for the business).  So this week, I’ve got nothing but podcast appearances.

• An episode of the Freelancers show where we talk about making a good impression.
• Here’s another episode, where we discuss dealing with excessive communication (a subject about which I’ve also blogged).
• And, finally, an episode where we talk about working with recruiters as free agents.

As always, have a good weekend, everyone.